Interesting. Thanks

Why are "handouts" like medicare called mandatory and things like national defense called discretionary?



Here's a fucking idea: stop spending more than we make. If the Dems would just agree to a balanced budget, the Republicans would raise the cieling.

Moving this video to NetRunner's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

>> ^MarineGunrock:

Why are "handouts" like medicare called mandatory and things like national defense called discretionary?

Medicare and Social Security aren't "handouts", they're benefits you pay for all your life via payroll taxes explicitly earmarked for that purpose (look at your pay stub sometime if you don't believe me). The reason they're mandatory is because they're essentially debts owed to the American people, real people, not just bond-holders. That's actually why they're called "entitlements" -- people are entitled to receive them, because they've already paid for them!

Defense is "discretionary" because Congress gets to decide how much money to spend on it each year. It's not like Social Security or Medicare where people have been promised a fixed benefit in return for the taxes they've paid.

>> ^MarineGunrock:

Here's a fucking idea: stop spending more than we make. If the Dems would just agree to a balanced budget, the Republicans would raise the cieling.


Dems have been bending over backwards here, MG. They've even offered to break the promises made to seniors for Social Security and Medicare, and drastically cut all kinds of important programs. All Dems are saying is that there needs to be some additional revenues in the plan.

Most sane people agree that closing the deficit should include both spending cuts and tax increases, but not the Republicans. They've long since rejected a plan that would've been 83% cuts, and 17% revenue (mostly from closing loopholes), because they insist it be 100% cuts, and not a penny of revenue.

Not to mention, the debt we're facing now is essentially entirely created by Republcians. Look at this chart of the debt since 1950: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Debt_Trend.svg

Notice that post WW2, both parties ran surpluses to pay down the debt accrued during the war. Then look at 1980, when Ronald Reagan took office. Debt explodes! Until Clinton comes into office, then the trend reverses. Then Bush reverses it back. Obama hasn't reversed the trend Bush started yet, but he also inherited the worst recession we've had since the Great Depression, and Republicans are pretty much refusing any proposal, even one highly skewed towards their policy preferences.

Oh @netruner, how I love thee.(seriously, no sarcasm. I think you're one of the most valuable members of the sift.) Yes, I realize that both parties are to blame. Some more than others. I made my earlier comment based on an article I read the other day that discussed the dems turning down a bill that would amount to a balanced budget by 2050 (and even be pulling in several billion more than we'd be spending, from what I remember) because republicans didn't want to raise taxes, though now that I think about it, those taxes were probably on large businesses and loopholes.



What we really need is a law that says no member of congress shall be allowed to receive any money from any lobbying firm, business or individual who is a high-level employee (board member type guys) of any large company worth over "x" amount of dollars. Loopholes need to be closed, but social programs also need to be cut or seriously re-vamped. What REALLY needs to happen is to close behemoth and redundant federal offices that are better left to states or that sates already have.

To be clear, I support raising the ceiling ONLY if there's a workable plan to reduce a LOT of spending and closing loopholes that let fatcats make millions and pay little to no taxes.

>> ^MarineGunrock:

What we really need is a law that says no member of congress shall be allowed to receive any money from any lobbying firm, business or individual who is a high-level employee (board member type guys) of any large company worth over "x" amount of dollars. Loopholes need to be closed, but social programs also need to be cut or seriously re-vamped. What REALLY needs to happen is to close behemoth and redundant federal offices that are better left to states or that sates already have.


Well, I'd definitely love to see some sort of reform aimed at the outright bribery we see going on in government. I'm not sure how we get that to happen, though.

As far as the debt goes, my opinion is that all the Congress can do in 2011 is set the budget for 2011 and 2012. Come 2013, it'll be a new Congress, and possibly a new President. There will be another new Congress in 2015, and another in 2017, plus a definite non-Obama President in the White House.

A little mentioned fact about this debt "crisis" is that all we need to do to balance the budget is for Congress to do nothing. No more Doc fixes, no more AMT patches, no more extension of the Bush tax cuts, etc. If we just let current law play out as it was written, the budget problem will no longer be an issue.

Even if congress doesn't do that, fixing our health care system has always been the real problem with the long-term budget. If we could get our medical costs down to just the level of the second-most expensive country in the world (Germany), then we'd be seeing big budget surpluses year after year. Maybe the HCR bill passed will do that once it's all in effect (in 2017!), but it's way too early to be putting those into the budget estimates. Maybe by 2020 we'll find out that we've actually put ourselves on track to be cheaper than Germany, and our budget picture will look really awesome.

I say we just focus on getting people back to work right now, and worry about the long-term debt in the long-term, especially since it might not actually be a problem in the long-term.

Are you kidding? The republicans should raise the debt ceiling at once, so that our country keeps it's credit rating and pays its obligations.

Unfuckingbelievable that they want to put my 401k, my bond savings, and my spending dollars at risk so they can score stupid political points. Fuck Republicans.

The right way to lower the deficit is to pass a budget that does so. Since the republicans control congress, it's up to them to make the hard choices next year. Congress, not the president, holds the purse strings, and has the responsibility to lower the debt and the deficit. For this year that means the republicans.


>> ^MarineGunrock:
Why are "handouts" like medicare called mandatory and things like national defense called discretionary?
Here's a fucking idea: stop spending more than we make. If the Dems would just agree to a balanced budget, the Republicans would raise the cieling.

I don't mean to pick on you mgr, but you don't mean that. You don't want our economy and our international prestige to take a serious unrecoverable blow. Unlike the gov't shutdown stunts, every ordinary american will suffer if they don't raise the debt ceiling.

Who needs Osama and our international rivals, when you got Boner and Can'tor ready to deliver a major self inflicted wound?>> ^MarineGunrock:
To be clear, I support raising the ceiling ONLY if there's a workable plan to reduce a LOT of spending and closing loopholes that let fatcats make millions and pay little to no taxes.

Actually, the Dems control the Senate.>> ^longde:

Since the republicans control congress, it's up to them to make the hard choices next year.

Sorry, I meant the house, where all budget bills must originate. The point still stands.>> ^MarineGunrock:
Actually, the Dems control the Senate.>> ^longde:
Since the republicans control congress, it's up to them to make the hard choices next year.

In the end, I generally agree with you, but I don't think it's accurate that the debt crisis is resolved by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. Tax increase would obviously help, but it won't solve it alone.

The debt crisis was born of a few factors:

-Stimulus package (temp, self-correcting since it's ending)
-Massive increase in federal spending in the 2000's bread by two wars, homeland security, senior drug benefit, medicare, medicaid
-Tax revenue declines due to Bush tax cuts
-Sudden sharp declines in income and capital gains tax revenues due to economic collapse

We can't solve the whole thing by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. In fact, I would argue the first step in resolving it is get the economy back on track to increase income tax revenues naturally as the unemployment rate would fall, and pay would increase. I would also argue that we're gonna have to massively cut defense spending at some point. This could be done many different ways, such as pulling out of Iraq and/or Afghanistan, etc. But it's gonna have to be done at some point, although it maybe difficult to do in the short run. That leaves us with what is currently being debated by Congress and the President. I'm actually pretty perplexed that they're prioritizing the debt issue without first remedying the economy. I think the debt is a very important issue, but I also don't believe it will be resolved until unemployment returns to more normal rates, unless we're refusing to acknowledge what leaders may already know - it ain't gonna get better for a long long time regardless of what the gov't does, so we might as well stop adding to the debt.

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^MarineGunrock:
What we really need is a law that says no member of congress shall be allowed to receive any money from any lobbying firm, business or individual who is a high-level employee (board member type guys) of any large company worth over "x" amount of dollars. Loopholes need to be closed, but social programs also need to be cut or seriously re-vamped. What REALLY needs to happen is to close behemoth and redundant federal offices that are better left to states or that sates already have.

Well, I'd definitely love to see some sort of reform aimed at the outright bribery we see going on in government. I'm not sure how we get that to happen, though.
As far as the debt goes, my opinion is that all the Congress can do in 2011 is set the budget for 2011 and 2012. Come 2013, it'll be a new Congress, and possibly a new President. There will be another new Congress in 2015, and another in 2017, plus a definite non-Obama President in the White House.
A little mentioned fact about this debt "crisis" is that all we need to do to balance the budget is for Congress to do nothing. No more Doc fixes, no more AMT patches, no more extension of the Bush tax cuts, etc. If we just let current law play out as it was written, the budget problem will no longer be an issue.
Even if congress doesn't do that, fixing our health care system has always been the real problem with the long-term budget. If we could get our medical costs down to just the level of the second-most expensive country in the world (Germany), then we'd be seeing big budget surpluses year after year. Maybe the HCR bill passed will do that once it's all in effect (in 2017!), but it's way too early to be putting those into the budget estimates. Maybe by 2020 we'll find out that we've actually put ourselves on track to be cheaper than Germany, and our budget picture will look really awesome.
I say we just focus on getting people back to work right now, and worry about the long-term debt in the long-term, especially since it might not actually be a problem in the long-term.

@heropsycho, I wasn't saying the Bush Tax Cuts alone would do it, I was saying just letting existing law play out would:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/22/a-do-nothing-congress-could-solve-deficit-woes-cbo/

That includes spending cuts, and more taxes going up than just the Bush tax cuts disappearing.

None of that is pretty, but it's just one more layer of things I'm annoyed about with this whole debt ceiling hullabaloo. The budget isn't really unbalanced.

People struck "grand bargains" in the past that would raise taxes, cut spending, and balanced the budget. Why hasn't that happened? Because future Congresses kept passing laws to delay or reverse those elements of the balanced budget agreements of the past each year.

That's why I think all this BS about "shared sacrifice" is going nowhere. They didn't do entitlement cuts in the past because they're political suicide. They still are today. The reason they haven't raised taxes is because wealthy people grease an awful lot of palms in Washington, not because raising taxes on millionaires is unpopular, even amongst Republican voters. You'd have to permanently change those things for a mix of entitlement cuts and tax increases to be the way we balance the budget over the long haul.

Health care reform is the real solution, and like I mentioned before, we already did that.