It is very amusing to watch people who typically spend a considerable portion of their day shrieking about inflation post a graph that has a discretionary spending rising at less than 2% per year in non-adjusted terms and then claim this doesn’t represent a cut in spending.
Inflation has a well known Liberal bias.
In the same way that Wall Street hoovering up a third of all corporate profits is the new normal. Or that 9% unemployment is the new normal. Or that obstruction, rather than legislation, is the new normal for Congress. Or that massive spending cuts during a recession is the new normal. Or that conducting three overseas wars at the same time is the new normal.
The new normal kind of sucks, doesn’t it?
We’re at 15 percent revenue, and historically it’s been closer to 20 percent. We’ve never had a war without a tax, and now we’ve got two. Absolute bullshit.
So when the GOP’s economic policy team sat down to make the strongest case they could for growth-inducing deficit reduction, they recommended a mix an 85:15 mix, not a 100:0 mix. And then, when the Obama administration agreed to an 83:17 mix, the Republican leadership walked out of the room and demanded that taxes be excluded from the deal altogether. How do you negotiate with that?
Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution is pretty simple. It says, ‘Raise an army.’ It says absolutely nothing about race, color, creed, sexual orientation.
You all joined for a reason: to serve. To protect our nation, right?
“Yes, sergeant major,” Marines replied.
How dare we, then, exclude a group of people who want to do the same thing you do right now, something that is honorable and noble?
[…]
Get over it. We’re magnificent, we’re going to continue to be. […] Let’s just move on, treat everybody with firmness, fairness, dignity, compassion and respect. Let’s be Marines.
Mitt Romney: We have all been distressed by the policies that this administration has put in place over the last two years. We have seen the most anti-investment, antigrowth, antijob strategy in America since Jimmy Carter. The result has been it’s harder and harder for people to find work.
Ezra Klein: By any measure, this is absurd. Taxes are at a 50-year low. The Dow has staged a roaring recovery. Business profits are near record levels. And the economy has gone from losing 780,000 jobs a month to gaining about 160,000 jobs a month. That is to say, it’s getting easier and easier for people to find work, even if it’s not nearly easy enough.
The fact that I’m in favor of going back to the Clinton tax structure is merely an indicator of how scared I am of this debt problem that has emerged and its order of magnitude.
Today’s seniors and near-seniors spent much of their working lives in that postwar world, with their incomes rising, investments gaining, their health increasingly secure, and their retirements predictable. Everyone 55 and younger spent his or her entire working life in an economy where all those trends had stalled or reversed […] The Ryan plan, in other words, delivers to the older generation exactly what they’ve had all their lives — secure and predictable benefits — and to the next generation, more of what they’ve known — insecurity and risk.
Tom Coburn: Any honest view of our debt, deficits, size of government and demographic challenges shows we must make major changes if we are going to pass on the American way of life to our children. Each week seems to bring new warning signs: slower-than-expected growth (already as much as 25 to 33 percent every year, some estimate), higher-than-expected unemployment numbers.
Dean Baker: Actually the current period of high unemployment and slow growth has nothing to do with the budget deficit. It is the result of the collapse of the $8 trillion housing bubble. Unfortunately, Federal Reserve Board chairs Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and other policymakers overlooked this enormous bubble as it was growing. Apparently, Mr. Coburn has not noticed the bubble even now that its collapse has wrecked the economy. […] the housing bubble was [also] probably the most predictable economic crisis in history. Unfortunately, almost no one in a policy position was able to predict it. Contrary to Mr. Coburn’s assertion at the beginning of his [article quoted above], any honest view of the debt, deficits, size of government and demographic challenges shows that we have to fix our health care system. If per person health care expenditures were comparable to what they are in Germany, Canada, or any other wealthy country with a longer life expectancy than the United States we would be looking at budget surpluses, not deficits.
Lemkin 