Quote:
Originally Posted by Danzig
but like i said, cuts need to be made. exactly where do you think they should occur? i would think if they could reduce each dept by, say, 5%, that would be beneficial, wouldn't it? we can't say cuts have to happen, but not actually cut anything.
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I could go with 3-5% across the board. We do need to get future spending under control.
But we need to raise income to help pay for what we took for free (charged and borrowed) in the 1990's. Because not only do we owe that, we owe the interest on it. That's what is killing us now.
(Charging stimulus during recession is a valid and advised financial move, always has been - so that doesn't bother me much).
I like eliminating alot of the tax loopholes and simplifying the tax code to raise revenue. But one of the biggest things that put us in the deep hole were the Bush tax cuts. That did it more than the unfunded Medicare Rx giveaway or the unpaid for wars.
I think Obama was dead wrong not to let them expire for the rich previously (due to the slow recession I can see holding them for lower incomes). Because at this point, he's going to have to let them expire for the rich, and also perhaps let them expire for lower incomes, and we're still in a slow recession recovery. So any changes to the tax code and gained revenues won't be extra, it will cover letting the lower incomes keep the tax cuts another 2 years.
Our revenues are too low, our GDP is too low.
We don't have a massive "spending" problem that put us in the hole. We have a "we spent billions and billions over years without paying for it" problem. Now the bill for that is here. And the GOP doesn't want to pay it.
Sure, we should rein in our spending. But that alone won't pay for the billions and billions we spend on the charge card in the past 10 years. We have to raise revenue to pay that down.
And I am very upset with the current Republican party plan that is literally trying to remove all regulation from business: EPA, FDA, etc. Those laws exist for a reason. The GOP has never seen such an opportunity to allow business free rein to rape this country for every remaining cent they can get, from privatizing Medicare via "vouchers" to Michigan removing voter rights and sending in "managers" to take over towns and sell land to private developer friends. And they are frantically trying to do.The Supreme Court and Citizens United has set the tone for what matters in this country. And that's scary for American citizens. Real wages haven't gone up in decades. Most of the wealth of this country is in the hands of a few. The middle class is being eliminated.
We are not going forward as a country, our riches are being stolen from us by a few in power, and the majority of the citizens of this country are literally being left on their own, with nobody giving a damn about them. I am not optimistic about the next 20 years, unless we have a massive, sudden turnaround. And I do think we are verging on a significant social upheaval comparable to what happened during the Vietnam war. And it will happen in concert with the next Presidential election, and it will be ugly.