Cain Follow

Get a job.

No, the optimal number is +/- 0. Debt means you are losing taxpayer funds to outside investors/nation, and a surplus (beyond a certain level) means your taxes are too high for the services provided. You'd only want a high value of debt if you were planning on massive QE or if you had a planned insolvency to be used as diplomatic leverage, but that's a technique on the border between lunacy and genius. Then again, a similar situation happened naught but a few years ago, albeit on a non-governmental level.

It sounds like you're assuming that liberals always want to increase government spending.

If the economy were in great shape I'd like to see spending go down and taxes go up - that's how you actually deal with a deficit. But, you don't do that when (in your own words from another thread) the economy hasn't even begun to recover.

Always hitting 0 is foolish though, especially when the economy runs in ~5 year cycles. Deficit spending is fine if you're going to counterbalance it with a surplus when the economy picks back up. Unfortunately we never really had a recovery for the working class the last decade.



Edited, Jun 8th 2011 1:26pm by bsphil

The only way most liberals want to see spending go down is to decrease funds to intelligence & military organizations. On ineffective & inefficient social programs/wealth redistribution payments, the majority would like to see spending increase. The United States federal government only has a debt burden because it has taken on so much extra-constitutionally that it can't fund it all through tax revenue. I am not suggesting that it doesn't have the fortitude to try, but that it is impossible to fund all of the programs that the federal government embarks on through tax revenue. The only way to eliminate the burden is to normalize taxation, removing most if not all of the exemptions, exceptions & exclusions from the tax code, eliminate the large majority of the social programs that exists today, and decrease spending, and the size of government, by something on the order of 30-35%.

In some cases if it's a good social program the spending should automatically decrease in strong economic times because there would be less need for it. But we'd need an actual middle/working class recovery for that. Also, and this may just be a misinterpretation of what you mean, but you're looking at all social programs as "spending" or "costs". Putting money into education (for example) is an investment - there are benefits to having a better educated society/workforce/etc. Unfortunately, although I'd call it the most important investment overall, it takes the longest to see the benefits, making it so much easier to cut in the short term.

You and I start from opposing sides of the government coin, though. You believe that social programs (even education) are in the purview of the federal government, I believe they are not. There is no good reason to federalize education spending in a republic. There is no good reason to federalize any social spending in a republic. There are reasons, and they have been expanded upon at great length by people with a vested interest in the increase of spending on those programs, but none of them are good reasons. These things should all fall under the authority of the individual states. Once you return to that model, you can do whatever the hell you want in your state, just don't presume to require me and my state to do the same.

You're right, it's not equal. It's worse.

Obviously for a ******** congressional pizza party.

I haven't been getting my copy of the Herman Cain newsletter (it's with my PC Gamer magazines) so... are you serious?

He's tossing a strawman in there though. No one's arguing in favor of "high debt". The issue is small amounts of deficit versus small amounts of surplus. So, if you have a $15T GDP, and you think you're going to spend somewhere around 20% of that, but your combined accuracy in terms of predicting the real resulting spending and revenue is +/- 5%, you need to allow for up to a $300B dollar difference between spending and revenue. You'll want to aim for a $150B deficit, knowing that it might be lower than that, or it might be up to double that, but you wont have a surplus.

We're still talking about an amount that is just 0-2% of GDP. It's not the strawman "huge debt" he's talking about. It's relatively tiny amounts of debt. And at those levels, it is better to run a deficit than a surplus. Obviously, it's not good to run a deficit that's 8-10% of GDP (like we have for the last couple years). But no one's advocating that.



Education is one of the things which is mostly paid for at the state and local level though, so this is really an irrelevant argument. The bigger ticket items at the federal level are social security, medicare, medicaid, income security, disability, etc. Those are followed by a bunch of smaller discretionary stuff like education, infrastructure, subsidies, etc. It all adds up, of course. But if you want to argue for why the federal government is necessary to provide something, you should really talk about social security or medicare. Those are by far the biggest ticket items.



That's probably true (compared to me as well). I believe, and I'll got out on a limb and guess that Moe does as well, that the only collective benefits worth sacrificing any freedom for are those which are necessary for the protection of our freedoms in the first place. We don't need to provide retirement and health care for our citizens at the federal level. It's completely unnecessary. It might be a nice thing to do, but we don't have to do it at all.


We shouldn't give up freedom for "nice things" though.

That right there is a bit ambiguous. Sure, there shouldn't be any religious "law" in our government but a person's faith shouldn't be relevant. We've got Christians, Jews and whatnot; why not Muslims? Unless you're under the delusion that all Muslims are intent on infiltrating and breaking the West, though that already seems to be part of the GOP dogma.

That's got to be one of the stupidest things I've read. If any religion is creeping into our laws, it's Christianity.

Actually, making appointment based on religion is unconstitutional. So, yeah, there's that.