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Here is a “parfait chart” showing that the vast majority of our national debt, both now and going forward, is due to the Bush wars, the Bush tax cuts, and the Bush economic crisis. Here is another showing that those factors account for about half of this year’s deficit. Per the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP):
Congress should either let these tax cuts lapse when they are scheduled to expire — for everybody, not just for people with incomes over $200,000 for an individual or $250,000 for a couple — or pay for those portions it wishes to extend. (It would, in fact, be desirable to continue some elements of the tax cuts, while offsetting their cost.) The economy should have recovered sufficiently by the end of 2012 to absorb the reduction in purchasing power. By that one simple step, Congress would put deficits and debt on a sustainable path for the next decade, as Figure 2 shows.
The additional revenue would amount to $402 billion in 2013, $493 billion in 2014, and $692 billion by 2019. The remaining deficit would be roughly equal to GDP growth, so that the debt-to-GDP ratio would stop growing.
So, to take care of the deficit problem, all Obama has to do is NOTHING. That’s all. Just stop bargaining. Stop. Stop. Stop. There’s no need to cut SS and/or Medicare. Keep you hand off the knife, Barack.
This guy is a monomaniac about his willingness to grand-bargain away the New Deal and the Great Society. He has a goddamn fetish about it.
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And if he’s worried about votes, all he has to do is just shut the hell up about it. Nothing actually happens until it’s time to do your 2013 taxes, ie. tax time in April of 2014.
Exactly. Thanks for pointing that out.
wigwam–
Thank you. So obvious, as you and RaggMopp point out.
But, of course, the objective is not primarily to lower the deficit. It is to eviscerate the Social Safety Net.
Recommended.
Blue
I was just now watching Al Sharpton interview “Republican Strategist” Steve Schmidt, who was saying that Paul Ryan has to go out there tonight and talk about how to deal with “hard issues” like our “out-of-control sixteen-trillion dollar national debt.”
What a crock of shit. If you look at Figure 2 of the CBPP report, the instant we let the Bush tax cuts expire, the national debt flat-lines; it stops growing relative to GDP. It’s no longer “out-of-control.”
The only reason that the national debt continues to be an issue is to give conservatives, like Barack Obama, an excuse for cutting SS and Medicare. He could have let those tax cuts expire two years ago and the national debt would no longer be growing.
Fixed that for you. I think that the $250,000 “middle tax” tax cut threshhold is a bit much.