In today's presser, CBS News' Chip Reid asked President Obama how he planned to convince the 69% of Americans who told a recent CBS poll that they do not support raising the debt ceiling to support the President's plan to do just that. Obama sniffed and condescendingly claimed the American people are not paying attention, nor should they pay attention to the national debt because they were paying him to pay attention:
Sir, someone needs to clue you into the fact that you are not emperor and the American people are not ignorant fools. You work for us.
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3 comments:
Logical fallacies endure because they are effective.
The false dilemma seems to work over and over.
So, our choices are to raise taxes and raise spending, OR default on our debts.
"But wait, couldn't we cut spending, and cut tax rates which have historically increased revenue?"
"No. Now go play while the grownups talk."
Sure, let's run the budget get run by polling. This is the same public that thinks 20% of our federal budget goes to foreign aid and the public broadcast corporation.
The tax take is at historic lows, lower even than the Reagan years. Government receipts are less than 15% of GDP, a number we haven't been at since the modern state started. We could cut our way out the deficit for a certainty, but that would require cutting the parts of the budget that are ACTUALLY expensive, viz. Social Security + Medicare (and maybe defense) and the Republicans don't have any guts to cut those (because, guess what, Republicans have a lot of support among older folks who get paid out through those programs).
Even the House Republicans, earlier this year, put out a document that indicated that an 85%-15% split between spending cuts and tax rises was the average for successful fiscal consolidations, according to historical evidence. The White House is offering an 83%-17% split (hardly a huge distance) and a promise that none of the revenue increase will come from higher marginal rates, only from eliminating loopholes.
The House leadership's NO TAX INCREASES EVAR line is well to the right of polling of Republican voters, so it's hard to say they're beholden to their electorate on this one.
The part that really rankles, especially since their abundant concern for no taxes is based on free-market small government principles, is their continued insistence on treating the removal of distortionary tax breaks as tax increases instead of spending cuts. This would be a spectacular opportunity for someone in favor of principled spending cuts (which I like to consider myself) to take an axe to the egregiously distorted tax code and all the little breaks and bonuses that have been snuck in over the years by both parties, but their principles apparently have stricter limits than that...
JMD:
Tax revenues have fallen off from their usual 18% of GDP because of the ongoing high unemployment, not because of a lack of taxes.
The problem with tax and spending cut compromises is that we always get the tax increases, the tax increase brings in half or less of the projected revenue because it slowed down economic growth, we never get any substantive spending cuts and the deficits keep stacking up. (See 1982, 1990 and 1993).
The only time we balanced the budget in my middle aged adult lifetime was with pure spending cuts in the late 90s.
I could agree to the following deal. FIRST cut spending until 85% of the deficit is gone, THEN the 15% of tax cuts can go into effect.
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