Posted on 03/28/2011 7:11:06 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The following is a presidential
address to the nation — to be
delivered in March 2026.
MY fellow Americans, I come to you today with a heavy heart. We have a crisis on our hands. It is one of our own making. And it is one that leaves us with no good choices.
For many years, our nation’s government has lived beyond its means. We have promised ourselves both low taxes and a generous social safety net. But we have not faced the hard reality of budget arithmetic.
The seeds of this crisis were planted long ago, by previous generations. Our parents and grandparents had noble aims. They saw poverty among the elderly and created Social Security. They saw sickness and created Medicare and Medicaid. They saw Americans struggle to afford health insurance and embraced health care reform with subsidies for middle-class families.
But this expansion in government did not come cheap. Government spending has taken up an increasing share of our national income.
Today, most of the large baby-boom generation is retired. They are no longer working and paying taxes, but they are eligible for the many government benefits we offer the elderly.
Our efforts to control health care costs have failed. We must now acknowledge that rising costs are driven largely by technological advances in saving lives. These advances are welcome, but they are expensive nonetheless.
If we had chosen to tax ourselves to pay for this spending, our current problems could have been avoided. But no one likes paying taxes.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“If we had chosen to tax ourselves to pay for this spending, our current problems could have been avoided. But no one likes paying taxes.”
Yes, even MORE economy killing taxes will help.
How can these people be THIS STUPID?!?!!!
At this point, every penny, every square inch of land, every ounce of gold and silver and every first born child will not pay off our debt. We are beyond screwed!
2012 seems more likely to me but then I am factoring in a major Oil price spike once Obama’s AQ mates own all the oil and another major down turn in property prices!
Ahh, so the dumb article says we need to raise taxes. Of course, the suggestion that we should cut spending to meet existing tax revenues is never even considered.
It seems like much of the critique is just arguing that we don't really need to borrow money, we can just print it for spending. If you believe that, I have a 1920s German money wheelbarrow for you to buy... gold only please.
The problem is that we are consuming more than we produce and eventually there will come a day when we will have to either produce more than we consume to pay back our debts, or else default on those debts either directly or through inflation and from then on consume only what we produce. The days of overspending will end soon either through rational reductions or else a major economic crash which will make the recent recession look like a picnic.
If raising taxes solved the problem, we would have been having budget surpluses at all levels of government for the past twenty years.
There are some fallacies in Mankiw’s letter, to be sure, but Warren Mosler goes off into la-la land pretty quickly in his analysis.
All of Mosler’s rationalizations about the bookkeeping of the Fed do not change the fundamental situation. In addition, foolish entitlement spending, like OASDHI, has exhausted real, physical, resources. It just takes time for the Fed’s bookkeeping to catch up with real resource allocation.
We are screwed. Curse those tyrants who spat on the Constitution while they were handing out goodies they didn’t own so they could get re-elected by people who couldn’t be trusted with freedom.
The rest of us are just slaves now.
In November 2006, Mankiw became an official economic adviser to then-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s political action committee, Commonwealth PAC.[6] In 2007, he signed on as an economic advisor to Romney’s presidential campaign.[7]
[edit]
bkmk
Observation and rhetorical opining:
By now, instead of being mired in stupefying debt, the federal government should be financially independent. It takes a normal adult about 30 years to reach that state. A well-off parent makes sure the kids are solvent as well. A perpetual government with no serious restrictions on taxation & minting and having vast land holdings should have no trouble setting up investments to generate suitable income in perpetuity. It’s not just a nutty theory, there are several governments which do not tax their citizens (give them refunds instead).
Is Mankiw supposed to be someone intelligent? I don’t see it.
“Yes, even MORE economy killing taxes will help.
How can these people be THIS STUPID?!?!!!”
Considering that at least of the FREEPERS here, over 50 years old, will not ANYONE touch their Social Security money - what is your suggestion to balancing the budget?
Cutting spend is OUT, if half of the FREEPERS are not even willing to sacrifice...just think about the other 98% of the population.
We either raise taxes, BIG TIME, or watch the dollar crash (and soon).
If we “raise taxes BIG TIME,” the economy tanks and fedgov revenues go DOWN. How does that help?
Or do you believe the leftist meme that higher taxes = higher revenues? It doesn’t. Quite the opposite, in fact. See Kennedy and Reagan. (Revenues went UP under Reagan. A lot. But so did the deficit, but due to spending not his tax cuts.)
“Or do you believe the leftist meme that higher taxes = higher revenues? It doesn’t. Quite the opposite, in fact. See Kennedy and Reagan. (Revenues went UP under Reagan. A lot. But so did the deficit, but due to spending not his tax cuts.)”
It depends which taxes go up. There’s plenty of revenue to be collected if we impose a VAT and raise the gasoline tax by $5.00 per gallon. We can also raise a lot of revenue by increasing taxes on the Middle Class. But if you increase taxes on “the rich”, it won’t net a dime for the government, which is one reason that even Obama and the Dems kept the Bush income tax cuts, in their entirety.
But the bottom line is that we either raise taxes on the Middle Class, and BIG TIME - or we crash the dollar and become Third World overnight, because we SURE AS HELL are not permitted to touch anyone’s PRECIOUS Social Security check - even by half of the FREEPERS, who should know better.
p.s., we could cut tax rates on ‘the rich’ and actually raise some revenue (due to economic growth)...but not nearly enough to get even close to saving the dollar.
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