RSS Feed MenuRead Keith Hennessy. President Obama’s second budget puts the U.S. on a path to even higher taxing and spending than his first – a path that will continue long after this recession ends. Under the president’s budget, the U.S. will spend over 24% of national product by the end of the decade, as against a 30-year average of 21.1%. This higher spending path implies an equally radical higher taxing path. And note that this surge begins before very many of the baby boomers have entered their retirement years. When the baby boomer tsunami hits after 2020, spending will surge again. The U.S. is well launched toward European-size government: feds at maybe 30% of GDP, states an additional 10-15, total verging on the 50% crisis zone.
These numbers cast an ominous back-shadow on President Obama’s show of super reasonableness in his encounter with the House Republican caucus. President Obama is a reasonable man doing unreasonable things.
The Paul Ryan budget is a fascinating and important start of a Republican response to Obama’s step toward collectivization of the economy. Let me suggest more refinements to how Republicans should be thinking.
1) We face a short term and long term emergency: short term, the after-effects of the financial crisis, long-term, the baby boomer retirement for which the U.S. has so poorly prepared.
2) Emergencies allow for emergency responses: there is nothing wrong with a temporary spike in spending to respond to a recession, a flood, or a war. (That’s why Obama’s attacks on George Bush’s profligacy should ring hollow. Wars cost money – but if you win, they are worth the cost, even in financial terms. WWII repaid every penny and then some. Ditto the Marshall Plan.)
3) These emergencies cannot be allowed to become excuses for permanently higher baseline spending. To that end , it might even be helpful to find some separate line to count their costs – and some separate mechanism for financing them. (That’s the merit of war bonds. There’e only one borrower of course, the public fisc, but it helps the borrower to keep separate track of what he’s borrowing for.)
4) Goal: a U.S. government that is no bigger as a share of the economy in 2050 (after the departure of the last of us baby boomers) than it was in 2000, before the baby boomer claims began to arrive.
5) For sure health reform has to be part of this story. But so does real restraint everywhere else in the budget line – and a date certain for the termination of all stimulus spending.
WillyP // Feb 4, 2010 at 9:39 am
jakester:
“WillyP… All of Europe has a worse human rights record than the US? SO is obama going to shift the continental plates to force us to physically join Europe too?”
I think that comment speaks for itself, whatever it says. (????!)
GOProud // Feb 4, 2010 at 10:42 am
WillyP, you keep on truckin’ in this land of nattering netLeft nutjobs. Danny_K, BlankHead, TeaBagged and the rest have a single play from the Saul Alinsky manual: ridicule your opponent, dismiss their rightful invalidation of your best points, ridicule some more… hope they don’t rebutt.
It’s an old game played out by the worst of them and taught to them on the attack pages of DailyKos and HuffPo and the DemocratUnderground. Danny_K is still in pre-K with a simple game of arguing you’re so outlandish, you must be a parody. I think Danny_K is just another faked, alter-named troll on the threads… if it appears there are more of them and they can piggy-back on each other’s comments for support, they’ve “won” in their Epic Failed reality.
GOProud // Feb 4, 2010 at 10:50 am
jakester, I think you have me confused for someone else on this thread… I don’t want to do away with everything –as you claim. I don’t worship the police and military –as you claim. I really don’t follow Ron Paul or his Libertarian believers because they’re first loyalty is to Paul and the LP, not to the GOP.
Of course, I’d expect those conclusions from someone like you who gladly references BlankHead as his source of guiding inspiration and insight. Maybe a little less idol worship of BlankHead’s false mutterings would serve you better in understanding why your Party is getting shellac’t in race after race after race and Democrats are running away from Obama Messiah and his band of not-too-merry men these days.
WillyP // Feb 4, 2010 at 11:24 am
yes GOProud, i realize this forum is a waste of time. it’s a shameful addiction that i really should lose.
SteveinCH // Feb 4, 2010 at 5:22 pm
LFC,
There’s an important caveat in your link, it says “CBPP analysis of CBO figures”. Actually that’s quite different from “CBO figures”
The actual CBO projected deficit for the 2020 deficit is $686 billion. That number is pulled straight from the latest CBO report and is lower than the deficit projected in the President’s latest budget is $1003 billion, aka, $1 trillion. So, clearly and perhaps unsurprisingly, CBPP adjusted the figures before drawing the chart.
kevin47 // Feb 5, 2010 at 1:42 am
“Perhaps it’s 10% if in your head someone who is so severely discouraged that they stop looking altogether is no longer counted among the unemployed. To me, this is mendacity.”
They certainly count, and this is why a 10% figure is not simply twice as bad as a 5% figure. It’s sort of like the Richter scale for earthquakes. That said, the number is only meaningful insofar as we employ (no pun intended) the same system for determining the rate.
Seven years ago, opponents of the Bush administration were playing the same game with the numbers. We heard all about the jobless recovery et al… It was bologna. The unemployment rate improved because the economy improved.