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"The budget deficit isn’t our biggest problem, by a long shot. Furthermore, it’s a problem that is already, to a large degree, solved. The medium-term budget outlook isn’t great, but it’s not terrible either — and the long-term outlook gets much more attention than it should."
Exactly. And Krugman also refers to a study by the non-partisan CBO budget office showing that:
"after taking into account the spending cuts agreed to in 2011, amounting to almost $1.5 trillion over the next decade; and the roughly $600 billion in tax increases on the affluent agreed to at the beginning of this year, it projects that the ratio of debt to G.D.P., the standard measure of America’s debt position, will be only modestly higher in 2022 than it is now.
The center calls for another $1.4 trillion in deficit reduction, which would completely stabilize the debt ratio; President Obama has called for roughly the same amount. Even without such actions, however, the budget outlook for the next 10 years doesn’t look at all alarming."
So, all we need to do is keep the interest rates artificially low and keep printing money and we are home free? Because if interest rates go up we will be paying $500 billion a year just in interest on the debt.
These are the same types of "expert" idiots Obama hired to in 2009, who said his stimulus would have us living the good life now, and everything is worse now then it was in 2009.
Its a budget reduction. We are still spending more than last year!
Why is that so hard to understand??
...and when we have a $4 trillion budget and $20 trillion in debt, these fools will still be signing the same tune, "Utopia is just around the corner, honest."
Cuts are needed to our federal spending. Democrats got their tax increases, now it's time to pay the piper on the other side of the aisle and stop the gravy train in DC.
While the Democrats look at this whole issue as a way to drum up support against the GOP citing polls and charts where blame would be cast, and posing wild and uninformed sensationalist end-of-world scenarios for sequestration effects, the GOP is (hopefully) standing firm regardless of what's popular and will see these cuts through.
Democrats, this is $85 billion out of $3+trillion in spending, quit complaining, quit whining, quit LYING, and grow up.
We need to stop republican tax cuts that created our deficits to start with.
So, $1,600 billion deficit was tax cuts, got it. We only collect about $1 trillion a year in income tax revenue, even if we doubled everyone's taxes, in Obama's first term, we would have created over $1.5 trillion in deficits. And that assumes the country would not have imploded under such high taxes.
I share your wish, but I have little hope. I agree that nothing we're seeing is constructive.
Rhetoric aside, given that the House has passed bills, the next step in the legislative process is for it to be taken up by the Senate. That has not happened. As determined by the legislative process, the ball is in the court of Senator Reid.
It is, and it isn't. The Senate rules regarding budget bills is slightly different than the House rules. It actually does take more than a simple majority in the Senate to make budget bills effective. This article from The Economist does a better job of explaining it than I can.
The republicans have sent more then a few bi-partisan proposals, i.e. budget bills, to the senate, where they sit collecting dust.
The agreement by the republicans was, we agree to this plan, Obama gets 18 months of his debt ceiling raised, and if the president refuses to get our spending under control, and the sequester goes thru, then no Obama cannot ask for tax increases as a substitute for Sequester cuts.
This sequester was Obama's plan, he did not prepare ahead of time for these cuts, he did not look for other cuts he could make, even though his GAO has identified some $200 billion worth of cuts.
Obama has been the one to kill talks, cause strife and create a hostile political environment. We know Obama agreed that he would not replace sequester cuts with tax increases, and yet he goes on TV vilifying Republicans for not giving in on new tax increases, and forcing the sequester cuts. Obama has no honor.
Well, the House and Senate together passed a budget bill on January 2nds of this year.
And I'm sorry, but to blame Obama alone for the hostile political environment is nonsense. Reid, Pelosi, Boehner, McCain, Cruz, et al, are all responsible for the hostile political environment. If you can't admit that responsibility for our economic problems is shared, then you are partly responsible for the hostile political environment. I get that you hate Obama, but hate is an emotion. It has no place in finding solutions.
I don't think either side is acting like grownups.
Both sides are responsible for this, both sides claim they aren't and blame the other completely.
Neither seems willing to work with each other.
It's a partisan game of chicken with the American people getting squashed in the middle.
All the scaremongering language, from both the GOP and the President (who I voted for, lesser of 2 evils) is absurd, reactionary, and a startlingly bad display of "leadership."
Well, the House and Senate together passed a budget bill on January 2nds of this year.
And I'm sorry, but to blame Obama alone for the hostile political environment is nonsense. Reid, Pelosi, Boehner, McCain, Cruz, et al, are all responsible for the hostile political environment. If you can't admit that responsibility for our economic problems is shared, then you are partly responsible for the hostile political environment. I get that you hate Obama, but hate is an emotion. It has no place in finding solutions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sporin
I don't think either side is acting like grownups.
Both sides are responsible for this, both sides claim they aren't and blame the other completely.
Neither seems willing to work with each other.
It's a partisan game of chicken with the American people getting squashed in the middle.
All the scaremongering language, from both the GOP and the President (who I voted for, lesser of 2 evils) is absurd, reactionary, and a startlingly bad display of "leadership."
Greg Sargent calls this the “centrist dodge” and wrote a good piece called The Morning Plum: The false equivalence pundits are part of the problem. It's the need to bend over backward to view this as a bipartisan failure when, "...the facts plainly reveal that Republicans are far more to blame than Obama and Democrats for the current crisis. The GOP’s explicit position is that no compromise solution of any kind is acceptable — this must be resolved only with 100% of the concessions being made by Democrats — which means any compromise Dems put forth is by definition a nonstarter at the outset."
Jonathan Chait comes to the same conclusion in his column, and calls this "The Fever Swamp of the Center." The centrists are unwinding as they try to reconcile their devotion to the idea that both parties are equally at fault with the distressing reality that Obama is actually advocates the policies they say they want -- a balanced approach of cuts and tax increases.
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Because if interest rates go up we will be paying $500 billion a year just in interest on the debt. 
