Bookmark and Share

Thursday, April 14, 2011

US debt and the Republicrats.

The Great Man Zeus-Bama and his empty rhetoric on reducing the debt

by StFerdIII

With the US political parties we should be clear on one fact – the elite of both parties work together to promote their own interests. Hence the Republicrats. The Republican elite are statists. G.W. Bush was not a conservative. He was a 'compassionate' Conservative meaning he supported the 'compassion' of big government. The Republicrats under Bush doubled the US national debt. The Republicrats under Obama are in the process of doubling this debt yet again.

No one in the Republicrat elite cares a whit about the debt or its reduction. Republicrat and House Speaker John Boehner claims that $40 billion will be reduced from this year's spending. But the accounting and assumptions behind this claim make that statement a bold lie. There are next to no spending cuts in the US budget.

President O'Zeus is worse. His plan to stave off American bankruptcy is long on rhetoric [14 pages of hot air], but devoid of any real cuts, or any substantial effort to reduce the debt burden of debts on the balance sheet – soon to be $ 15 Trillion.

Specifically, Mr. Obama said he will try to squeeze an extra $360 billion by 2023 from automatic spending programs, which are based on formulas and not renewed by Congress each year; seek to grab an additional $480 billion from Medicare; and cut defense spending by $400 billion versus projected levels and another $200 billion in regular domestic spending.

The president also called for undoing the Bush tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers, and for canceling other tax cuts many of them receive such as the mortgage interest deduction — items that instead of labeling “tax increases” he called “spending reductions in the tax code.”

Fiddling at the margins with no details. The Americans need to cut spending by upwards of $ 1 Trillion per annum to take the Federal government to 19% of GDP – its historical average. This amount is 2.5 times what the Republicrats are proposing.

Notice the other curious aspect in trying to avoid bankruptcy and collapse the waste, inefficiency, and corruption inherent in big govenment. It does not take long for the Socialists to organize their talking points which will be parroted by the great and good. Avoiding bankruptcy and cutting out the cancer which is government, is of course in the words of the Great God Barack O'Zeus, an 'assault on the poor, the vulnerable and the old'. He forgot to mention that cutting government waste, fraud, corruption, inefficiency, duplication; not to mention the government created recession which cost the Americans 8 million jobs; would also be an 'assault' on the children's future, Mother Earth and minorities. But maybe those groups might be covered under the category of 'vulnerable'. The logical corrollary to the Great Man's 'thinking' is that ever more government, ever-expansive program spending and more socialism is moral, effective and mandatory.

Ergo if you support reducing government you are evil, especially if you advocate tax cuts which as everyone knows, are only for the rich [defined now as anyone with a job], or the powerful, or those God-awful White Christians. The reality is that the top 20% of all income earners pay 80% of income taxes. When you raise taxes, government revenues decline. You can only 'soak' about 8% of GDP from income taxes at the Federal level. That is it. So raising income taxes for instance does nothing to reduce the debt and spending problems that the Federal government staggers under. High income earners are also the ones who start businesses, employ people and pay a plethora of other regulations, taxes, fees and capital gains. So 'attacking' the 'rich' is little more than Marxist theology and misguided, ahistorical and counterproductive dogma.