Calling Them Frauds Is Accurate
Andrew Sullivan nails it.
First, let’s read Paul Ryan’s quote:
“We’re gonna be reducing all domestic discretionary spending. I can’t tell you by what amount and which program, but all of it is going to be going down, and the aggregate amount will be back to 2008 levels before the spending binge occurred.”
Okay, everybody got that? Take it away Andrew:
Before the spending binge occurred? You mean to say that the eight years of George “Deficits Don’t Matter” Bush did not include spending binges? You mean to say that emergency spending for the worst downturn since the 1930s was seriously in doubt under any president of either party?
What Ryan is doing is pretty obvious. He is trying to frame fiscal irresponsibility as somehow solely about 2008 – 2010. He’s lying about the Republican past and the recession. He has no serious plans to cut entitlements now (anyone only focusing on discretionary spending is a demonstrable fraud), no plans to cut defense, no plans to raise any taxes. And he has thrown away a chance to become a real fiscal conservative in Washington, able actually to tackle the problem rather than exploit it for partisan purposes.
He is the problem with Republicanism today, not its solution. If the debt is such a threat, why do you refuse to tackle it seriously now? Why reduce yourself to the tiniest sliver of the smallest part of the discretionary spending budget … when you could claim a serious mandate to end the debt for good? Why, after the last campaign, are the Republicans still unserious about cutting spending?
Because they’re frauds.
Exactly.
Add to this Boehner’s latest nonsense with Brian Williams.
WILLIAMS: Name a program right now that we could do without.
BOEHNER: I don’t think I have one off the top of my head.
You’d think he’d have a list. This was hardly a trick question. Congressional Republicans simply aren’t serious about anything. They’re frauds.
Tags: Debt, John Boehner, National Republicans, Paul Ryan
Yayyyyyy, Now Delaware Liberal can pick on a Republicans majority again
“He has no serious plans to cut entitlements now…”
Wny is he completely ignoring Paul Ryan’s comprehensive Roadmap, which addresses entitlement programs in great detail?
Sullivan has issues…
It is true. Ryan has the list, and is doing the thinking for Boehner.
Ryan’s plan has a system of capping categories of spending and imposing across the board cuts. It is designed not to name any specific programs.
There is nothing wrong with spending cuts per se. I think Democrats should offer to vote for some of the Republican spending cuts in exchange for tax increases on the rich, until the cuts are all clawed back, and cuts in military spending and corporate tax breaks. If that turns out to be a poison pill, so be it.
Ryan’s plan is rabidly counter-Keynesian: As revenues drop, his plan has triggers to cut spending to follow revenues downward in a death spiral.
Paul Ryan is one of the best intellectuals in Washington, bar none. He’s an idea man minus the conceit and hubris of a Gingrich. He’s adroit and full of self-immolation. He’s far from bombastic and because he has the temerity to speak the truth, ya’ll can handle it. You have an incessant need to perfunctorily cast dispersions onto Mr. Ryan.
Watch out Obama! The Wunderkind from Wisconsin is a comin’
“Ryan’s plan is rabidly counter-Keynesian: As revenues drop, his plan has triggers to cut spending to follow revenues downward in a death spiral.”
Keynes did not promote perpetual deficits. Rather, he promotoed surplus when there is growth, and deficit spending to increase AD in recessionary times.
You’re correct, though, that Ryan’s plans reduce spending to accommodate relatively lower revenue levels.
self-immolation? cast dispersions?
and you’re the one judging who’s intellectual? Ye-ah, right.
Dan: Some of us, who have been paying into those entitlement programs all our lives, would rather collect on them now that we’re nearing the age where we need them. You want to cut them, cut them when it’s your turn to collect.
Ryan is another fraudster, maybe slightly more clever.
His roadmap eliminates tax on capital gains and dividends, well, because they want to. No, actually he gave the phony rationalization of double taxation:
WTF? If you get capital gains, that is new income for you that has never been taxed before. Why should it be tax exempt?
Companies do not distribute profits as capital gains, so no double taxation there. Fraud or liar? you decide.
Ryan has half a point about dividends being taxed twice, once as corporate profits, then again as personal income. But notice that Ryan’s plan eliminates corporate taxes as well as personal taxes on dividends and capital gains. So Ryan is proposing going from double taxation to zero taxation – meaning nobody will get taxed for investment income at any level. Fucking fraud.
I would have no problem with eliminating corporate taxation in a revenue-neutral package that treats dividends as regular income. Long term capital gains should be taxed less than dividends but certainly not zero.
Talking about cutting programs wins elections. Cutting programs loses elections. You think that the GOP has not thought this out?
anon.. if you teach a hungry man to fish, he will learn to feed himself for a lifetime. if you beat a moron to death with your fishing rod, you will save the life of a fish from being wasted on an idiot.
You hit on one of those areas where the king of the idoits is addressing his daft deciples.
Dividends are given a special tax rate to offset that to a point. But yes it occurs.
This Ryan person needs a lesson in finance and economics. I would love to visit him with my finance book and beat him silly with it.
His confusion is that the watches way to much of the political entertainers.
His false assertion is that if you invest 1,000 into a hot dog stand, that if someone offers you 2,000 tomorrow for the stand, that you would pay tax on 2,000. That is the issue in what he is saying. You only get taxed on 1,000.
If you buy a stock and make money, you are not taxed on the intial investment.
Oh I just checked out his website. That site is a mess.
Cutting programs loses elections.
But for whom? If programs start getting cut and people are hurting in 2012, they will know two things:
1. I lost my services/benefits/check.
2. Obama is in the White House.
The incumbent loses. Nobody follows Congress closely enough to know that Republicans cut the services.
And certainly people won’t remember they were dumb enough to put Republicans in charge of Congress in the first place. All they will be hearing 24×7 is how the Democrat Senate and the evil Obama are obstructing the Republican legislation that would bring prosperity.
corporation where just granted another two year tax amnesty on overseas profits, is the tea party up in arms about that loss of revenue, no, in fact they support that revenue give away, some revolution by the people we have here, this is a plan to crush the poor and the needy by a bunch of heartless bullies, nothing more.
What do you think Obama is now discussing behind closed doors with Daley, Sperling and Goolsbee? His new plan to lower the corporate tax rate for businesses in the US. It’s one of the highest in the industrialized world.
Are you going to call Obama a ‘fraud’ or a ‘liar’ now? Be careful what you don’t wish for.
Goolsbee did not have the authority to discuss the ‘specifics’ of Obama’s plans for changing corporate tax rates (while making the cable news rounds today – Fox, CNBC, MSNBC, CNN) before the president meets with many of the top CEOs next week (with his new BFF Daley). Obama all but reiterated it during his speech at the MD window factory today where he introduced four of his new economic teammembers.
Looks like Return of the Clintons: Part Duex.
Our corporate tax rates are a fraud anyway, thanks to years of loop holes and deduction passed by politicians since forever, a survey was done by the government accountability office in 2005 and the average that is actually paid by corporations is less than 5%, last year GE and Exxon-Mobil paid no federal tax at all, so the base corporate tax rate is really not that important,
My problem is with Obama being a total free trader, free trade is not turning out to be fair trade for the average American, and it looks like no attention will be paid to it by this administration, some socialist agenda this is.
@Geezer
I understand that you’ve paid into Social Security and Medicare. You also built your savings with the understanding that you’d have an income stream from the federal government.
But understand a 21-yr-old’s perspective. With a $14 trillion debt, my tax burden will only grow over the course of my lifetime. My receipts from the federal government will only decline. The average tax burden of my generation will equal or exceed the tax burden of yours, and we will receive far less for our contribution.
I think you’d understand that burdening my generation with your generation’s excesses is most unfair.
I think you’d understand that burdening my generation with your generation’s excesses is most unfair.
Dan – the missing money is in the pockets of the rich, who drained Social Security like an ATM to fund their tax cuts. Or in the pockets of corporate officers and investors who chronically underfunded their pension funds, in the hopes they could wiggle out of accountability one day while they retired to their mansions. A hope which did in fact become reality (i.e., GM).
Go ask those people for your money – not us hardworking geezers.
@Anon
Public employees unions have bargained in Democratic states for excessive, mismanaged, and underfunded pensions. Not corporate officers. And, not to digress, but we should have allowed GM to fail. The pensions shouldn’t have been funded.
Additionally, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are far greater liabilities than tax cuts for the wealthy. For example, deficits as a percentage of GDP fell substantially in 2005 and 2006 under George Bush. Because of robust growth, that ratio declined to 1994 levels. What did we have in 1994? A more progressive tax structure, with higher rates on wealthy Americans. Increasing taxes will reduce incentives to earn, dampen economic performance, and reduce consumer spending. You can understand that from either a supply side or Keynesian perspective.
Maintaining a tax structure that is advantageous to businesses and producers ought to produce revenues (historically, tax revenues have averaged about 19% of GDP) that are substantial enough for a reasonably sized government.
But since you seem to be engaged in a type of class warfare, let’s agree on this: we can means test Social Security and Medicare and reduce benefits for the wealthiest Americans.
Boy Dan, you have all your guilty parties lined up like ducks in a row, it,s all the greedy workers fault, you mention corporate taxes a percent of GDP, but fail to mention that figure has been in a steady decline for 30 years thanks to loop holes and deductions granted be our politicians, You mention medicare but leave out the fact that corporations have stopped covering their employees causing overbilling of medicare to make up the difference, you also forgot to add that the richest one percent have increased their wealth by 7% while the rest of us have lost 7% of our real wealth, and did you mention that profits as a percentage of GDP are at record levels, these gaps in your intelligence are very advantages to the corporate world, that,s why they use Rush and Hannity to fill in the gaps in your knowledge, they know you are too lazy to crack a book, so they give you this simple dogma to repeat over and over, kind of like yoga for the slow witted.
Dan, generally unemployed people and people in poverty do not spend too much money.
And did you ever consider, just slightly give it a thought, that we have a revenue problem at the federal, state, and local level?
Also, did you ever wonder why corporations had record profits this year, yet there are so many people under and unemployed? ( forget the labor statistics, they actually do not count a good part of the population as unemployed ).
With ultra low inflation and interest rates there is no need for any tax deals for the rich to invest in anything.
The person here working on class warfare is Dan. Or he has no idea how to read a balance sheet.
Social Security and Medicare (except Medicare Part D) don’t add one red cent to the deficit — yet. Medicare may start doing that this year, but neither contributes to the current financial woes. BushCo never reached any year where the deficit as a % of GDP was negative — as it was for the last 2 years of the Clinton years. Once Bush started cutting taxes, doing dumb wars like Iraq and not paying for new Medicare entitlements, the deficit/GDP ratio started going up fast. And that deficit/ratio will stay high as long as we continue to not pay for tax cuts and wars.
Public pensions have the same problems as many private ones do. They are underfunded, they are mismanaged, they rely on over-optimistic projections. None of those things is the fault of the person taking the pension. No doubt that some pensions have massive loopholes that help to boost payouts, but that isn’t the major issue for most of them. Private pensions have been turned over to the government at a pretty alarming rate — and for big firms too. United, Delphi, GM, Chrysler and others have largely turned over (in varying states of health) their pension funds to this government agency in the last decade or more. This guarantee agency is projected to have an $11B hole — and that is assuming they take over no new funds. So you can count on taxpayers filling the gap here, too.
A better tax situation won’t produce a single new job. Business interests are already heavily subsidized — it is a rare thing to find a firm that actually pays its statutory tax rate. And if you have clever enough accountants and lawyers, you can pay no federal taxes, which is the case for our largest companies. But is somebody wants to make a deal where all of the business write offs and credits are wiped clean off of the books and replace that with a flat 15% corporate tax, that would be one heck of a deal.
I was arguing against wage disparity concerning women for decades and now I suffer a 600% thumb on my throat from CEOs and their ilk.
What’s this about class warfare? My tines are sharp and the rags set in pitch; and if any teabagger gets in my way, I’ll pin him to the first yacht I sink.
@Cassandra
“Once Bush started cutting taxes, doing dumb wars like Iraq and not paying for new Medicare entitlements, the deficit/GDP ratio started going up fast.”
That’s completely untrue. Deficits as a percentage of GDP declined substantially after the Wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq began, after Medicare Part D was passed, and after the Bush tax cuts were extended. They only began to increase as revenues declined because of poor economic performance.
Additionally, Social Security and Medicare are not at all financial sound. The Social Security trust fund is comprised of Treasury bonds, i.e. IOU’s from the federal government. Past surpluses from payroll taxes have been allocated to other programs. Also, for the first time in 2010, Social Security’s obligations exceeded its collection in revenue. It is and will continue to add substantially to our deficit. Medicare is a larger program than Social Security, and accordingly, needs more substantial reforms.
Ultimately, liberals will demand a centralized, bureaucratic health care system a la the NHS, and conservatives will support a defined benefit health care plan (i.e. a voucher system).
Finally, on pensions, you’re correct that the PBGC insures private pension funds. But the true crisis is in the public sector, where both unfunded and funded pensions are ultimately the responsibility of the taxpayer.
Dan you really need to do research into our health care system. And who pays for it and who actually can get care.
Medicare is not a discrete program; it is part of the larger issue with health care in the US. Our health care costs are subsidized by the federal and state programs. Private insurance does not fund our health care system.
You will find statistics addressing health insurance in the US, and they are intentionally misleading. My favorite is that over 90% of companies with more than 100 employees offer health insurance.
The problem is that they it does not mean they offer health insurance to all employees and whether the employer pays for any of it.
The political entertainers like hannity and rush make it about class warfare. They have equated health insurance with employment, and those who are uninsured should get jobs.
The fact is that uninsured have jobs. Medicaid is available to those who do not work, so you have to wonder who the uninsured are?
People with jobs. And people with medical conditions. (right how dare you get sick and expect your insurance company to cover you? ).
The other fault in everyone’s logic is that health insurance means you will get care.
Everyone points to the nationalized health systems and yell rationing. Fact is that we ration, and it is arbitrary and done by doctors. Try finding a new doctor without disclosing all of your insurance information before they will even tell you if they are accepting patients.
And all of these small businesses that are the job creators, yeah without any benefits. thanks.
As far as nationalized care, personally i think the easiest way is for the government to take over hospitals. That is where most of the creative billing occurs.
the running joke about our system is that we already pay for national health care for everyone, we just don’t get the benefit of it.
Another factor is that we allow insurance companies to insure only the people they want to cover. And the government gets stuck with the high cost patients. Yeah medicare would not be a mess if they could get the healthy people to kick in money that they would have paid blue cross.
Nationalized care would actually benefit all employers and the people. Companies would not have to deal with insurance costs.
It is funny that the best health care in the US is socialized big government VA care. and they do it for alot less.
“They have equated health insurance with employment, and those who are uninsured should get jobs.”
And rightly so. Since Truman set wage controls after WWII, employment and health care have been interlocked. The subsidization of employer provided care is part of the central flaw in the U.S. care system: 84% of cost decisions are made by third party providers.
Sorry Dan, just claiming it doesn’t make it so. This graph tracks deficits as a % of GDP over 2 centuries — and what you can see pretty clearly is that the structural deficits *built* by BushCo start pretty early in his administration and continue to this day. And structural deficits = all of the stuff they refused to pay for, like tax cuts, wars and Medicare Part D. That stuff STILL isn’t paid for and that is the majority of the growth you still see in the deficit.
But you’ll want to go back to conservative talk radio where data doesn’t mean much. And you can tell that you get your information from the talk radio/Fox Noise types — because if you are concerned about the US financial condition, you know that *deficits* aren’t even half of the picture.
And can I just point out how bloody stupid this is?
Additionally, Social Security and Medicare are not at all financial sound. The Social Security trust fund is comprised of Treasury bonds, i.e. IOU’s from the federal government.
Foreign governments (i.e., the Chinese) own approx 25% of “IOU’s from the federal government”. If the government defaults on those IOUs for Social Security, they’ll default on them for other investors too. This is quite unlikely,unless, of course, we put the budget-challenged GOP back in charge.
Social Security is basically OK now — payouts did exceed revenues recently, due to the BushCo recession where there are way fewer people paying into the system. But the Trust Fund — the “IOUs” still means that the system is in surplus. And it can stay in surplus for probably the rest of my life by wiping out the ceiling on contributions.
Medicare is a more immediate problem, with more complex solutions. But that doesn’t change the fact that Medicare has its own revenue stream (except for Part D)– a thing you can’t say for the DOD budget line item.
@cassandra
I didn’t really like the graph you provided, so I made a new one with CBO data. From it, we can understand that my two above points are true.
http://i.imgur.com/xpEwy.png
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10871/historicaltables.pdf
(1) Deficits as a percentage of GDP peaked in 2004 and declined in subsequent years until 2008. This is after the beginning of the Afghanistan & Iraq Wars and the Bush Tax Cuts.
(2) Deficits as a percentage of GDP under Bush were very similar to those from the Clinton Administration, except the economy bubbled in the late 1990’s and collapsed in the late 2000’s.
Finally, I’m glad we agree that funding Social Security requires finding additional sources of revenue.
Oh and to reiterate my initial point: Sullivan completely neglects Ryan’s Roadmap, which reforms entitlements. Ryan also admits that excessive spending was a bipartisan failure.
Seems like Sullivan’s the fraud- or at least he is too quick to the keyboard.
“And rightly so. Since Truman set wage controls after WWII, employment and health care have been interlocked. The subsidization of employer provided care is part of the central flaw in the U.S. care system: 84% of cost decisions are made by third party providers.”
But that is hardly the case any more, so rush and hannity making it about class and implying that the uninsured are sloths that don’t have jobs is insulting.
84% of what and who? The problem with using these nuggets of info from the crackpots is that they are pointless. So explain it to me. This is why I warned you in another post about the misleading numbers published by the medical industry.
You should be careful, if you post enough numbers about health care in the US, you will eventually make the case for nationalized care.
The flaw in our system is that health care is implicitly not a sector that benefits from competition. The medical industry advertises heavily, from drugs and insurance companies, to the new cancer wing at your local hospital. None of them are marketing that they will give you a better deal.
The other flaw is that the medical industry is not regulated, yet we grant them exemptions and give hospitals non-profit status they do not deserve nor earn.
Doctors can scare just about anyone into a treatment if they work on their death face long enough.
Which still doesn’t take away from my point of structural deficits. Your graph just focuses on the Bush years and doesn’t contain any new data. You will note that deficit spending came to an end during the Clinton years and went back up as the Bush people spent like drunken sailors and paid for none of it. Any decline in the deficit number is masked by the fact that those years were the housing bubble years — when there was a great deal of tax revenue generated around real estate activity. The bubble burst and you get to see the full effects of the structural deficits BushCo built.
The fraud here is you and Ryan — indulging in rewritten histories and data cherry-picking to get your your ideological points.
And for those following at home — do note that Dan leaves off FY 2009, which is still a BushCo budget — where the deficit as % of GDP went to about 9%.
I love the “I don’t like your linked chart so I made my own selective data chart that proves my point” response. Dan is going to need all the government security net programs he can get.
Wait.. So allowing private insurance to dump ill patients and forcing government insurance increases the cost of these government programs.
Wow. Sounds like nationalized health care to me. well except we allow insurance companies to profit by letting them cherry pick who they cover, and allowing them to drop sick people ( it really is hard to call it insurance. not when the insurance company can manipulate the risk pool ).
dan I warned you, the more you really look at factual numbers, the more you will make the case for nationalized care.
Oh and please throw out the doctors malpractice insurance as a reason.. I love that one.
@pandora
I didn’t make a “selective data chart”. I use the same data as Cassandra did, but made it easier to see annual changes.
@Cassandra
Why do you discount Bush’s economic management but not Clinton’s? You harp on the Clinton surpluses but fail to note that they occurred because of the dot-com bubble.
And, might I add, the decline in the deficit-to-gdp ratio in the Clinton years coincides nicely with the election of a Republican Congress.
What did the Democratic Congress do from 2006 to 2008 to reduce spending? And what did it do from 2008 to 2010?
During the Bush administration, Democrats demanded more spending on health care, education, infrastructure, etc. And once in office, they pass health care legislation that will increase net-spending by $540 billion from 2012 to 2021. And please, don’t obfuscate with manipulated CBO-calculated “savings”.
Oh and one last point:
The Democrats support nearly all of the Bush Tax Cuts. For example, extending the Bush tax cuts for two years costs approx $550 billion.
According to this article (http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/07/news/economy/tax_cut_deal_obama/index.htm):
“The bulk of that cost — $463 billion — is for the extension of cuts for families making less than $250,000, including two years of relief for 2010 and 2011 for the middle class from the Alternative Minimum Tax.”
“The rest — $81.5 billion — is attributable to the extension of cuts that apply to the highest income families.”
So at least accept that Democrats supported and continue to support an the Bush Tax Cuts. Remember too they were passed on a bipartisan basis.
How they were passed isn’t material to the fact that those tax cuts were not paid for then and they aren’t paid for now. It seems that if you care about structural deficits, you would do so no matter who created them. (But you should recognize when you are on the losing end of an argument when all you are left with is that Democrats Do It Too.)The dot-com bubble burst without utterly wiping out a huge portion of the economy — without unemployment close to 10% and without wiping out housing and other middle class assets. And once the bubble burst, there was still a surplus — not a structural deficit.
And if we follow your logic, it must have been the Democratic congress that took over in 2006 that is responsible for the lower deficit/GDP ratio, right?
And please, don’t obfuscate with manipulated CBO-calculated “savings”.
And here we see that you don’t get the actual workings of the economy — just the talking points your handlers have given you. The CBO data was just fine for you when you thought it made your point about BushCo deficit/GDP ratios. But NOW — when it doesn’t suit your argument — the CBO data doesn’t work. Your problem, Dan, is that you are speaking to a bunch of people who actually get the Math. So if the CBO is wrong — show your work demonstrating that. Otherwise you will be forever known by your silly talking points.
So at least accept that Democrats supported and continue to support an the Bush Tax Cuts.
He’s got you there, Cassandra. And you were doing so well…
Here is the reality of discretionary spending. You have defense, and hmm what else. Veterans programs. So if you take defense spending off the table, then it is veterans.
That is what they never say, and why republicans have a bad history with veterans, and liberals take care of veterans.
There are state disability programs not available to disabled veterans, because of this disparity in funding.
Delaware is a veteran friendly state, but only if your needs as a veteran are a smile. That is where the friendly stops.
And the slap in the face is that charities like easter seals give you the finger if you are a disabled vet. Again it is all tied to those in congress that talk about discretionary cuts.
oh, thanks for your support.
He’s got you there, Cassandra. And you were doing so well…
Actually, he doesn’t have me there. Especially since I’ve been against these tax cuts (without paying for them) since BushCo made them a centerpiece of a (failed)fiscal policy. But thanks for reminding me that you aren’t paying attention to anything anyone has to say that doesn’t exactly sync up with your preconceived notions. The point is still the same — no matter who votes for it — structural deficits are structural deficits and repubs don’t get to fearmonger about said deficits since they are part and parcel of their own policy.