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Allowing people to keep the money they earn is not a giveaway.
What IS a giveaway is people who get money back at the end and pay zero taxes. People actually take out money. THOSE are giveaways.
And the debt is big because of spending not allowing people to keep their own money.
No, the debt is not big because of spending, because spending has been slashed multiple times since Reagan. This was explained in the early part of the thread. Entire agencies have been cut loose from the federal budget, others have seen their budgets cut several times over decades, and in spite of large cuts under the now-disgraced President, the debt soared due to the size of his tax cuts for corporations and for individuals who didn't need the tax cuts. https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump
Quote:
Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) That It’ll Weigh Down the Economy for Years
This, from Wiki, on the 2018 budget proposal:
Quote:
The Trump administration proposed its 2018 budget on February 27, 2017, ahead of his address to Congress, outlining $54 billion in cuts to federal agencies and an increase in defense spending. On March 16, 2017, President Trump sent his budget proposal to Congress, remaining largely unchanged from the initial proposal. The OMB estimated FY2018 would involve outlays of $4.094 trillion and revenues of $3.654 trillion, a $440 billion deficit.
How do you cut $54 billion from the budget and end up with a $440 billion deficit? You cut revenues as well. You cut corporate taxes from 35% to 21%, cut taxes on investment income (again), on the estate tax, and so on. If you keep cutting revenues, you're going to come up short, again and again, in spite of cutting the overall budget. And of course, you increase spending for that all-time favorite sector: the military.
As our resident bookkeeper/tax preparer said earlier in the thread, your revenues and your spending total need to match (I paraphrase). If your expenses are higher, you need to raise revenues.
Last edited by Ruth4Truth; 02-23-2021 at 05:20 PM..
No, the debt is not big because of spending, because spending has been slashed multiple times since Reagan. This was explained in the early part of the thread. Entire agencies have been cut loose from the federal budget, others have seen their budgets cut several times over decades, and in spite of large cuts under the now-disgraced President, the debt soared due to the size of his tax cuts for corporations and for individuals who didn't need the tax cuts. https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump
This, from Wiki, on the 2018 budget proposal:
How do you cut $54 billion from the budget and end up with a $440 billion deficit? You cut revenues as well. You cut corporate taxes from 35% to 21%, cut taxes on investment income (again), on the estate tax, and so on. If you keep cutting revenues, you're going to come up short, again and again, in spite of cutting the overall budget. And of course, you increase spending for that all-time favorite sector: the military.
As our resident bookkeeper/tax preparer said earlier in the thread, your revenues and your spending total need to match (I paraphrase). If your expenses are higher, you need to raise revenues.
No one believes your post Reagan spending thesis because it's flatly not true, as has been pointed out to you numerous times. Saying/writing something over and over and over and over does not make it so.
Net federal outlays when RR took office totaled roughly 21% of GDP and were roughly 20.7% of GDP in '19 and about 31% in '20. There is no way to get from those St. Louis Federal Reserve numbers to your bogus claim that spending has been slashed since RR it hasn't, so please stop making that claim.
And before you make another mistake US debt service as a percentage of GDP is down markedly over that span as well.
And a third error would be to claim that military spending is crowding out other spending. As a percentage of GDP military spending is almost exactly half 1980 figures vs. GDP.
As a kicker, social welfare spending both governmental and private is up a lot since 1980.
No, the debt is not big because of spending, because spending has been slashed multiple times since Reagan. This was explained in the early part of the thread. Entire agencies have been cut loose from the federal budget, others have seen their budgets cut several times over decades, and in spite of large cuts under the now-disgraced President, the debt soared due to the size of his tax cuts for corporations and for individuals who didn't need the tax cuts. https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump
This, from Wiki, on the 2018 budget proposal:
How do you cut $54 billion from the budget and end up with a $440 billion deficit? You cut revenues as well. You cut corporate taxes from 35% to 21%, cut taxes on investment income (again), on the estate tax, and so on. If you keep cutting revenues, you're going to come up short, again and again, in spite of cutting the overall budget. And of course, you increase spending for that all-time favorite sector: the military.
As our resident bookkeeper/tax preparer said earlier in the thread, your revenues and your spending total need to match (I paraphrase). If your expenses are higher, you need to raise revenues.
I don't know why you keep insisting on showing just how little you know and understand about the federal budget, but you keep doing so in post after post and thread after thread. Apparently, you don't understand that in Washington, D.C. a "budget cut" doesn't mean the same thing that ordinary citizens think a "budget cut" means. In DC, the government can spend more and more every year and still call it a "cut" because they spend less than the Government Budget Office "projects" that will be spent under current law. Here's an example:
"A classic example of how Washington speaks differently than the world back home. So a couple of things about Medicaid. OK? There are no Medicaid cuts in the terms of what ordinary human beings would refer to as a cut. We are not spending less money one year than we spent before.
What we are doing is growing Medicaid more slowly over the 10-year budget window than the Congressional Budget Office says that we should or says that we will under current law. "
Let's take a look at some actual numbers to illustrate my point. In 1982, President Reagan proposed a federal budget of $695 Billion dollars.https://www.nytimes.com/1981/03/11/u...r-mandate.html That was a whopping amount in '82. In 2019, Trump's budget was over $4 TRILLION dollars. That's nearly SIX TIMES the Reagan budget. And it wasn't just Trump who was a big spender. It was all the presidents before him who kept increasing the federal budget year after year.
So please, get off your high-horse about "budget cuts" because they are just a fantasy term dreamed up by politicians in Washington DC to try to disguise the budget INCREASES that are actually happening every year.
I don't know why you keep insisting on showing just how little you know and understand about the federal budget, but you keep doing so in post after post and thread after thread.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Essentially, low ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. The combination of poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability leads them to overestimate their own capabilities.
No, they can't. You know why? Because foreign aid was already slashed to the bone in the mid-90's, during the Gingrich Contress! ALL the government foreign aid agencies were cut loose, and told to fend for themselves. They are now non-profit organizations, going begging annually for their operating budgets!
The implications of that are rather intriguing. Since they're no longer government agencies, they could in theory, wage their own foreign policy; they're no longer beholden to the government, so they could pursue policies that are contrary to the government's interests. They could undermine the government's efforts abroad, if they wanted. They no longer have to share intelligence with the CIA, either. (They were a major source of intel back when they were on the gov't payroll.)
This really shows how little you and most other people know about foreign aid.
Anyway, there's no more "waste". There's nothing left to cut. And that news piece about "foreign aid" going to make payments to non-citizens was fake news. That was covered in another concurrent thread. Look it up; there was a whole thread devoted to that topic.
We still send out lots of money under guise of foreign aid. Whether that is NGOs begging Govt for funding or Govt doing themselves matters not. We likely created money from nothing debasing what we have to promote transgenderism in Pakistan
Oh, great; so we've now moved "forward" (a relative term on this thread) from Redear's Digest as our authoritative source, to a failing 3rd World newspaper with clearly no understanding of how US foreign aid works, nor of its purpose/s.
Wiki is your friend:
BTW, isn't India the country where women bus passengers get raped by the drivers? And you're surprised their business editors are ruffled over the thought, that the US would strike very close to their borders with education and empowerment programs for women? Now operated apparently by one Uday Kosak. Catchy name. I wonder if he was named after Sadam Hussein's son, Uday. Maybe not. How ironic he refers to his newspaper as "BS". Maybe that's his real opinion of it.
The US has been funding education and grass roots economic development in developing countries for decades, for women, Indigenous people, and other marginalized groups, and toward democratization, among other projects. This money does not pass through any foreign governments. The US isn't that dumb, but clearly, many of its citizens are dumb enough to think the money goes abroad in the form of checks to corrupt foreign bureaucrats.
The reason the US does this is that a) it finally caught on to the fact, that it was losing the ideology battle in parts of the 3rd World to Cuba and the USSR (back prior to 1990), who had been offering university educations to the poor, and gaining their undying loyalty in the process. (This influence is still huge in Latin America, btw, and Russia & Cuba are still at it.) Way back then, the US had only been offering education to elites. Do you see the problem there? No? Well, you should.
Supporting education and economic development on a grassroots level, by lifting people up and creating jobs and boosting people into the middle class, not only creates more political stability (along with goodwill toward the US), it also combats problems like like we've seen Saudi Arabia take advantage of: massive unemployment among the young, who are easily recruited to radical fundamentalist movements hostile to the US. It's in this type of arena that foreign aid plays a crucial role. Or perhaps you'd prefer to keep more people unhappy, so they become terrorists and take out more US citizens?
IDK why you'd have a problem with democratization programs, either. I guess you like dictatorships, which generally tend to oppose the US, though not always.
You really fell for the BS' tactics, though; they meant to play on people's ignorance, by referring to "gender programs", and clearly it worked. That's not a club I'd want to belong to, but...suit yourself.
And P.S. Foreign aid really isn't the sector to blame for the fact that the gov't doesn't have the money to to help people who lost jobs due to the pandemic. Blame cuts to unemployment benefits for that, cuts to food stamps, and so much more. That money was given away to people who were/are already very, very well off.
So we have to send them our money for their own political stability. They cant do that on their own? South Asia with huge universities, and giant STEM talent pool that USA companies love to tap.
How long do you think it will take for women to stop getting raped on Indian buses with the money we sent over?
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