I shockingly agree with Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle. Neither the Republicans or Democrats are serious about reducing the deficit. Democrats want to extend the Bush tax cuts for the middle class and poor. Republicans want to extend tax cuts with people making over $250,000-a-year.
Drezner: They basically say, 'We want to seriously cut the deficit. We don't want to touch entitlements and we're not going to touch defense spending. And we're not gonna raise taxes." Go!
The Senate voted against the deficit reduction committee. These same Democrat and Republican Senators whom claim to be concerned about the deficit panic when it comes time to take action. The House of Representatives reinstituted PAYGO in 2007. The House abandoned PAYGO less than a year later. The current PAYGO rule is the party in power (Democrats) can't declare an emergency exemption to get around making cuts in other parts of the budget to balance out the passage of a certain bill. Congress does not have the moral courage to balance the budget.
And it's a damn good thing, too: reducing the deficit would tank the economy, and there are esstentially no benefits to doing so, since the U.S. Government is a currency issuer with no financial limits on its ability to spend or issue debt. Virtually everyone who talks about this issue is stuck in a gold standard paradigm and doens't really understand the modern monetary system.
ReplyDeleteHere's one who does:
http://moslereconomics.com
Nixon killed the gold standard. (Who would have thought Nixon and John Maynard Keynes would agree on something.) It is a dead issue. Federal money does go into the sconomy. At some point we have to pay off the deficit. Neither party seems to want to have a serious discussion about the deficit.
ReplyDeleteWho cares about deficit reduction
ReplyDeletewhen most members of my family are
out of jobs? The people in congress
concern about deficit reduction have jobs we don't. Be serious