Category Archives: Debt

UPDATED: McCain’s Idea Of A Spending Cut

Britain, Conservatism, Debt, Foreign Policy, Government, John McCain

How serious are Republicans about revolutionary cuts in state spending? John McCain serious.

McCain’s idea of “spending cuts,” just articulated to Fox News’ Shepard Smith, is cutting National Public Radio loose, and doing away with earmarks. I doubt these will cover a day’s interest payment on the national debt.

McCain’s notion of heeding the voter: securing the borders and reforming, not repealing, ObamaCare. Remind me again why movement conservatives betrayed J. D. Hayworth, who ought to have beaten Senator John McCain in the Arizona GOP primary.

Contrast McCain’s worse-than-futile slashes to the state with the reductions the British have begun to make.

BBC News: “Chancellor George Osborne has unveiled the biggest UK spending cuts for decades, with welfare, councils and police budgets all hit.”

A “19% average cuts to departmental budgets,” as well cutting “higher education spending by 40%, flood defences by 15% and sport England and UK Sport by 30%”—this is better than increasing spending as we are. Of course, price controls, such as on rail fares, are being tinkered with, namely “allowed to increase by 3% above RPI inflation from 2012.”

No doubt, certain cuts in the UK are an illusion, to be replaced by other, slightly modified programs. But again: better to fire 500,000 state workers than to hire 1.4 million census stalkers.

Prick up your ears when you hear promises to dismantle the IRS, the Department of Education, and to recall ALL troops, and the installations erected to satisfy their needs, from the over 100 countries in which they are stationed. That’ll be a modest beginning.

UPDATED: As to “Fair Tax,” campaigned for by the likes of Mike Huckabee and liberventionist Neal Boortz. When these two are right, it is only by accident. So you’re safe opposing most of their pet issues. I don’t like the “Fair Tax.” Granted, a tax on consumption is only an indirect tax on income.

Here’s Ron Paul:

A: We have to cut spending. You can’t get rid of the income tax if you don’t get rid of some spending. But, you know, if you got rid of the income tax today you’d have about as much revenue as we had 10 years ago, and the size of government wasn’t all that bad 10 years ago. There are sources of revenues other than the income tax. You have tariff, excise taxes, user fees, highway fees. So, so there’s still a lot of money. But the real problem is spending. But, you know, we lived a long time in this country without an income tax. Up until 1913 we didn’t have it.

Q: But if you eliminate the income tax, do you know how much lost revenue that would be?

A: A lot.

Q: Over a trillion dollars.

A: That’s good.

But since I have been called a Pollyanna, let me say this: the 16th is “The Number of The Beast”; it needs to be abolished. Taxation is immoral and naturally illicit. But given that, realistically, the state will not so do, a a flat, low tax is a pragmatic solution. Let the poor set the rate. The Russians have a low flat tax. As Dan Mitchell reports, “The former communists running Russia apparently understand tax policy better than the buffoons in charge of U.S. tax policy. Not only does Russia have a 13 percent flat tax, but the government has just announced it will eliminate the capital gains taxA pure flat tax would preclude any capital gains tax.

The Fair Tax our local buffoons propose is prohibitive.

UPDATED: McCain's Idea Of A Spending Cut

Britain, Conservatism, Debt, Foreign Policy, Government, John McCain

How serious are Republicans about revolutionary cuts in state spending? John McCain serious.

McCain’s idea of “spending cuts,” just articulated to Fox News’ Shepard Smith, is cutting National Public Radio loose, and doing away with earmarks. I doubt these will cover a day’s interest payment on the national debt.

McCain’s notion of heeding the voter: securing the borders and reforming, not repealing, ObamaCare. Remind me again why movement conservatives betrayed J. D. Hayworth, who ought to have beaten Senator John McCain in the Arizona GOP primary.

Contrast McCain’s worse-than-futile slashes to the state with the reductions the British have begun to make.

BBC News: “Chancellor George Osborne has unveiled the biggest UK spending cuts for decades, with welfare, councils and police budgets all hit.”

A “19% average cuts to departmental budgets,” as well cutting “higher education spending by 40%, flood defences by 15% and sport England and UK Sport by 30%”—this is better than increasing spending as we are. Of course, price controls, such as on rail fares, are being tinkered with, namely “allowed to increase by 3% above RPI inflation from 2012.”

No doubt, certain cuts in the UK are an illusion, to be replaced by other, slightly modified programs. But again: better to fire 500,000 state workers than to hire 1.4 million census stalkers.

Prick up your ears when you hear promises to dismantle the IRS, the Department of Education, and to recall ALL troops, and the installations erected to satisfy their needs, from the over 100 countries in which they are stationed. That’ll be a modest beginning.

UPDATED: As to “Fair Tax,” campaigned for by the likes of Mike Huckabee and liberventionist Neal Boortz. When these two are right, it is only by accident. So you’re safe opposing most of their pet issues. I don’t like the “Fair Tax.” Granted, a tax on consumption is only an indirect tax on income.

Here’s Ron Paul:

A: We have to cut spending. You can’t get rid of the income tax if you don’t get rid of some spending. But, you know, if you got rid of the income tax today you’d have about as much revenue as we had 10 years ago, and the size of government wasn’t all that bad 10 years ago. There are sources of revenues other than the income tax. You have tariff, excise taxes, user fees, highway fees. So, so there’s still a lot of money. But the real problem is spending. But, you know, we lived a long time in this country without an income tax. Up until 1913 we didn’t have it.

Q: But if you eliminate the income tax, do you know how much lost revenue that would be?

A: A lot.

Q: Over a trillion dollars.

A: That’s good.

But since I have been called a Pollyanna, let me say this: the 16th is “The Number of The Beast”; it needs to be abolished. Taxation is immoral and naturally illicit. But given that, realistically, the state will not so do, a a flat, low tax is a pragmatic solution. Let the poor set the rate. The Russians have a low flat tax. As Dan Mitchell reports, “The former communists running Russia apparently understand tax policy better than the buffoons in charge of U.S. tax policy. Not only does Russia have a 13 percent flat tax, but the government has just announced it will eliminate the capital gains taxA pure flat tax would preclude any capital gains tax.

The Fair Tax our local buffoons propose is prohibitive.

The Craven Krugman

Debt, Economy, Political Economy, Pseudo-intellectualism

A reader has forwarded a recent editorial by Paul Krugman, “Mugged by the Moralizers.” Attached was the following incredulous note:

“[This editorial] is the perfect inversion of morality and logic, in the name of justifying taking money from people to give it to other people.
It is so calm and composed a statement of the credo of cave dweller-takers by force that I felt obliged to pass it along as a perfect exhibition piece. I’ve never seen anything so useful like this. Maybe he decided to let all the stops out in the days before the election.”

Leave aside the moral void, you can drive a 4X4 through Krugman’s logical lacunae:

For example: The idea that there is a spending “hole created by the debt overhang” that has to be filled, or else: this is merely a theoretical/political construct. That’s all. It is not necessarily true; it doesn’t necessarily comport with reality.

And: “If one group of people — those with excessive debts — is forced to cut spending to pay down its debts, one of two things must happen: either someone else must spend more, or world income will fall.”

That follows only if the fallacy upon which the Krugman fatuity is premised is true. And it isn’t. His assertions most certainly don’t exhaust the possibilities. Less spending could also mean more saving. More saving would translate into investment and, eventually, production—these are the wellspring of prosperity.

Obama's "Spendership" (Vs. British Stewardship?)

Barack Obama, Britain, Bush, Debt, The State

“Obama spending stimulates the national debt by $3,039,000,000,000,” blares Andrew Malcolm’s headline in the Los Angeles Times.

The information comes courtesy of “Mark Knoller of CBS News, who is the White House press corps’ chief cruncher of all things numbers.”

“national debt has increased by $3,039,000,000,000, as in, that much more than it was when he took the oath on Jan. 20, 2009, in front of millions of excited witnesses and Aretha Franklin’s huge hat.

“Obama prefers to lay the blame or credit for this gargantuan spending increase at the cowboy-booted feet of his Lone Star Republican predecessor,” writes Malcolm. “During George W. Bush’s Oval Office tenure, the national debt increased more — by $4.9 trillion, in fact.”

“However, Bush took 96 months to do that.”

“Obama has accomplished his spending feat in less than 21 months. Under his spendership the national debt has grown about $4.8 billion every day since he took the oath of office twice, just to be safe.”

[SNIP]

The problem is that no one who follows him will be able to reverse this. How do you turn this around? You can’t, given that the interest alone on such stratospheric debt is insurmountable. There is no returning America to a place of financial safety.

Putting up a pretense means, at the very least, doing what David Cameron is attempting in the UK.

Incidentally, can you imagine how apoplectic National Review (with the exception of the two non-neocons on staff) would become if BHO “announced plans to cut its military personnel by 10 percent, scrap 40 percent of the army’s artillery and tanks, withdraw all of its troops from Germany within 10 years, and cut 25,000 civilian jobs in its Defense Ministry”?

UPDATE (Oct. 20): British Stewardship? To listen to Daniel Hannan—English politician, commentator on all things American—the US is not as deep in trouble as the UK. Understandably, a rabid rah-rah for America comes with being a Fox News expert.

Yes we have fabulous founding documents and principles, but these have been flouted for at least a century. According to the facts mentioned in “Statism Starts With YOU!”, most Americans adore “Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — which combined, account for close to half of the federal government’s budget.” And “only 7 percent of the country will consider slashing the first two welfare programs; a mere eleven percent of those living in the ‘Land of the Free’ are prepared to pare down Medicaid.” (One Tea Party slogan read: “Keep the government out of my Medicare!”)

I cannot comment with any degree of authority whether there are differences in attitudes to entitlements between us and our cousins across the pond.

One thing is indisputable: Unlike in the UK, successive American governments—and the governing class—have been unique in working against the economic interests of their countrymen and their country. (Treason?)

BBC News: “Chancellor George Osborne has unveiled the biggest UK spending cuts for decades, with welfare, councils and police budgets all hit.”

A “19% average cuts to departmental budgets,” as well cutting “higher education spending by 40%, flood defences by 15% and sport England and UK Sport by 30%”—this is better than increasing spending as we are. Of course, price controls, such as on rail fares, are being tinkered with, namely “allowed to increase by 3% above RPI inflation from 2012.”

No doubt, certain cuts are an illusion, to be replaced by other, slightly modified programs. But again: better to fire 500,000 state workers than to hire 1.4 million census stalkers.