Do liberals care about the debt and deficit?

January 26, 2001

Greenspan declined to endorse President Bush's plan for a $1.6 trillion tax cut over 10 years, but he undercut objections to it by Democrats who have been arguing that budget surpluses won't be enough to cover both added spending sought by members of both political parties and such a large tax cut.


Greenspan's testimony didn't please some committee members. "It wouldn't be far off the mark for the press to carry the story 'Greenspan Takes Lid Off of Punch Bowl,' because your position in the past has consistently been that the surpluses should be devoted to reducing the debt," said


...Last January, the Congressional Budget Office projected a 10-year cumulative surplus of $3.15 trillion. In July it raised that to $4.56 trillion, and it is now expected to raise it yet again shortly, to more than $5.5 trillion.


The Clinton administration's Office of Management and Budget recently put the figure at $5 trillion for the fiscal years 2002 to 2011.

https://archive.ph/zYKYC#selection-791.0-799.287

 

the 2008 crash led even greenspan to doubt his "free market" fundamentalism. those 2001 tax cut hearings should have killed "conservatism,"

 

i don't remember "speaking for all liberals," but i guess these partisan hit threads do invite simplicity.

the only "collective mind" or "borg thing" that i experience is the wailing of the tiny trumpist minority.

"mao is a totalitarian! i refuse to unbind my wife's feet" conservative chinese during the cultural revolution.

 

yawn. the repubs are said to have restrained clinton's spending. how did those same repubs rubber stamp the massive w deficits? by the time dems took the house the tax cuts and wars, drivers of those deficits, were fait accompli.

 

I thought Dick "Shooter" Cheney said "deficits don't matter."

Kudlow Falsely Claims Deficit Is ‘Coming Down Rapidly’
Three sources of government data contradict Friday’s claim by the White House economic adviser, showing instead that the federal budget deficit is actually increasing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/us/politics/fact-check-kudlow-deficit-.html

 

EGTRRA was the problem? In the years immediately preceding EGTRRA you paid 15% tax on all income up to around $20k and then 27% or more as income increased. After EGTRRA you pain 10% on income up to around $6k, 15% on income up to around $23k and then brackets increased. EGTRRA actually saved lower income individuals and families quite a bit of tax. Upper brackets, over the course of three years, were reduced from 39.6% to 35%.

At the lower income ranges the taxpayer saved a little more than 8% tax as compared to before EGTRRA and at the higher end taxpayers saved roughly 10%.

 

He may have when he was VP under GWB administration, but Reagan is the one who coined the phrase first and Larry Kudlow who raved against the debt and deficits while at Fox did a complete 180 when he went to work for the Trump Administration.

 

We can look at the DoD budget two ways, in total budget with both discretionary and nondiscretionary spending, or in the discretionary spending category. In pure discretionary spending, it is 50% of that category and probably 25% in the total spending category. If we look at the DoD budget itself, we have several categories: operating forces, procurement, and pensions/retirement/other. The largest with the most fraud is the procurement category in which the DoD is spending lots of money to fix problems that the Military industrial complex says works or that we pretty much overspend on most things that are far less expensive in your normal hardware store. Pensions, retirement, and other is holding steady and the operating budget has fallen somewhat because the DoD as a whole cannot meet recruitment standards. The army is about 40k less, that is basically two whole divisions, of troops. The Navy is having longer deployments because it cannot meet the need of two crews on one ship. And the Air Force is reducing the number of squadrons in their air wings to meet demand.

 

When Trump was in office, conservatives forgot about the national debt.

 

Finally someone spoke the truth!

By the way, it’s not only politician but voter only care about debt and deficit when their party is in opposition party.

 

and they lined up and voted for him again after adding $6 trillion to US Debt. they will line up again and vote for him in 2024

 

Agreed

 

actually, we can not look at the dod expenditures at all ...

Defense Department fails another audit, but makes progress | The Hill

didn't trump promise an audit of dod _(my old dept).

"promises made, promises kept" trump

2022 was well unto trump's second term, wasn't it.

 

"no one knows more about debt than i do. i am the king of debt" trump

run america like a business? we deal with "businesses" every day. is that really what you want?

trump ran his businesses into several bankruptcies us that really what we want?

 

I don't remember dems wailing when Trump increased the debt as much as republicans are doing now.

 

That's called selective memory ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Why do people keep believing that borrowing more money will lower the debt? Taxing more will but not borrowing more.

 

Spending less will lower the debt. You could tax more, but that can have two outcomes. One, you tax and use the revenue to reduce the debt or cover more of the spending without borrowing more. Two, the tax increases are too high, and it dampens aggregate demand which decreases economic activity which lowers taxable income and tax receipts.

There was a time when tax increases were thought to be a way of controlling inflation. But the politicians don’t want to take responsibility for that so they say that everything has to be done by the Federal Reserve Bank via monetary policy. That way the politicians remain “blameless.”

 

Probably way way more than MAGA does. trump increased those things the most of any president in 4 yrs.

 

I'm not asking you what Dick Cheney once said I'm asking you how you said that liberals don't care about it and that they should just spend like there's no tomorrow

 

I know you don’t care about debt and deficit. After all you voted for every president who raised debt including Trump.

You tell me why you don’t care about debt and deficit.

 

Not sure what your point is. W's deficits were hardly "massive; in fact he scored one of the lowest in the 21st Century. Only Clinton, with GOP supervision, did better.

 

Not really. Spending less will lower the fiscal discretionary budget but not the debt overall.

 

Nope. Neither do republicans. They just both pretend to when it is convenient.

 

Translation: piss poor bookkeeping in which 61% of the DoD assets could not be adequately accounted for. However, none of that has to do with operating budgets which is not relied on where those assets are.

BTW, the DoD is the worst among all federal agencies and departments in which its civilian staff does not comply with federal tax laws. But that is a different argument for a different time for a different thread.