Budget talks: This is getting nasty

Long-time members of the board are aware of my right-leaning politics. So this is what it is ...

I've long held that they'll never come close to balancing the budget without cutting defense and entitlement programs. Defense, medicare/medicaid and social security are by far the biggest sections of the budget, and they're political hot potatoes. Nobody in Washington wants to be the one to tell all these retirees (my parents are right now at the cusp of the current retirement age) that they'll have to make do on smaller SS checks. Nobody in Washington wants less defense. For FY 2010, there was $860 billion in discretionary spending, but it was spread out across a whole bunch of departments. Even if you eliminated all of them, you wouldn't be in the same hemisphere as balanced budget.

It's not hard to figure out that you're not going to balance the budget by only cutting discretionary spending, because it's not even close to the majority of the budget. One thing that drives me nuts on this point is that they're spending a lot of time and energy focusing on the USDA and farm subsidies. A lot of people don't like them, but the truth of the matter is if the government simply lets all the farmers go out of business, people will starve. You think we're in trouble now? Wait until we have to have other countries provide food for us.

At any rate, the USDA accounts for less than 3 percent of all federal spending, which makes all the effort to cut it look like rearranging Titanic deck chairs.

Somewhere you'll have to generate more revenue if that's the approach you take. My response would be something akin to the guy that started the shooting spree that killed Malcolm X -- Get Yo Hands Outta My Pockets!!! -- because this is where it gets really scary for a lot of people. For instance, what happens to your tax bill if the mortgage interest deduction is removed? I'd begin seriously considering a strategic foreclosure at that point, and I think a lot of people would be in the same boat.

 

I suspect if a Democrat tried to eliminate the tax advantage of being married he'd be accused of trying to destroy traditional marriage.

 

Carlton, I think you would have a very difficult time showing that anybody put it in the either/or terms you and right-wing radio are portraying. Those were the projections used, yes. I don't know a ton of people who equate projections to iron-clad promises, and if we start digging up projection versus actual numbers there are very few initiatives that could ever be labeled a success from either side. The big question is did the stimulus keep things from getting worse, which is certainly debatable, but there was never any kind of promise that unemployment would not go above 8 percent.

 

A prediction (in an economic report) and a promise are not even close to being the same thing.

 

FWIW, no one in Canada wanted them at the time, either. But the important thing was that they stopped printing the damn bill at the same time they introduced them. We got used to them and eventually embraced them. Having a paper dollar makes only slightly more sense in 2011 than having a paper quarter.

 

Murdoch is on the AP board too. More of the corporatist conspiracy.

AP has been in the right-wing tank for years, especially when GOP stooge Ron Fournier was running their Washington coverage (May 2008-June 2010)

FOURNIER WAS AP WASHINGTON CHIEF IN 2009.

Even with Fournier gone, 80% of AP's Washington stories are neener-neener gotcha pieces wondering archly why Obama hasn't fixed the whole world yet.

 

Well, the CBO decided that without the stimulus, unemployment would have gone over 11 percent, so the difference between unemployment with the stimulus and without remained pretty close to the same (it went to 10.1 percent). The original estimates underestimated unemployment both with and without stimulus.

I'll link you to this USA Today story that gives you a link to a download of the CBO report if you want to read it:

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2010/02/cbo-unemployment-would-have-topped-11-without-stimulus/1

 

But you can't make it rain with coins! Won't someone please think of the strippers?

Seriously, the U.S. is about the only major country left in the world still using bills for its singular currency unit. Get rid of dollar bills, and you'll save money. That whole "putting everything on the table" thing? It includes things like this. And "waaaahhhhh! We don't like dollar coins!" isn't a good reason not to. The sooner things like "not using dollar coins is a sign of our American freedom!" are eliminated from the discourse, the better.

 

This just seems so nuts to me. If you have a 20-, 15- or 10-year mortgage, or if you have been in your home more than 4-5 years, there simply is no advantage to this deduction. Only people with 30-year loans just recently moving in --- and I know there are many of them, encouraged by this archaic deduction --- are benefiting.

Let's say you are paying $10,000 a year interest on your home.
You itemize, and add the $2,000 in property taxes and $500 in charity you paid.

Your itemized deductions are $12,500 ---- just barely over the standard deduction for a married couple. Your tax savings are a few hundred dollars at most. And in 2-3 years there will be none.

 

BTE, this is a classic case of "tell your facts to shut up" as far as the public is concerned. You are right, but over 90 percent of Americans want the mortgage interest deduction to remain in place. It's seen as "a break for me" not as the "relatively small break for me" it really is.

 

I couldn't care less if we eliminated the paper dollar and went to the dollar coin. It is stupid to hold on to things like the paper dollar bill if we can save significant money eliminating it. This is a perfect example of the kind of waste government can eliminate with virtually no impact...other than people having to walk around with coins in their pockets (which they rarely do anyway...who carries money anymore with debit cards and such?). Screw the paper dollar.