Obama lays out his budget. Budget fight to begin now.

[KrauserKrauser]

So you are all ignoring his argument that increased funding for the Department of Education has not resulted in corresponding increases in academic achievement because of why exactly?

If a 22% increase in spending for education will not produce a 22% increase in education's goals, why exactly is it so devilish to argue that the money could be more effective if used in other programs?

Oh, yeah, forgot to think about the children/old people eating cat food? More money towards the DoEducation, if they won't actually make any changes maybe we can just get all the kids into private schools.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Shep, their point is that no amount of shiny space stuff is more important than educating the youth, getting the homeless back onto their feet and petting kittens. Obviously, there are some cuts we could make so that we could have our cake and eat it too (Iraqistan), but directly proposing that we should dig into the education budget to fund rocketships makes you look like a sociopath.

On one hand, one could say he's taking the long, long view. Shiny space stuff spurs research, which eventually creates industries, and a demand for better-educated people to work the Factories of Tomorrow(tm). Better-educated people will need better education (forcing states to better-allocate their education monies to educate them,) and will tend to be paid more (because, of course, the free market will demand it,) so they won't be in a position to latch their parasite fangs onto the government's bleeding breast.

It's trickle-down economics. From high-orbit. It's the sort of economics conservatives love, because it justifies giving rich white dudes more money because you can write it off as an "investment" for the future of rich white dudes and the corporate establishment America.

But, while bashing Shep for his blatant lack of immediate concern for the poor, disadvantaged, not-rich, and not-white dudes parasites latched onto the bleeding breasts of America is both entertaining, and remarkably easy to do; we were talking about the steaming pile the current sitting President has deposited upon us. Already, the talking heads on that well-known right wing rag, NPR, are wondering why the President isn't going to touch "entitlement" spending. Yes, we need Medicare reform (not cuts, because goodness knows Medicare/Medicaid are a threadbare safety net as it is,) but they lump Social Security in there too.

The one good thing is that he's trying to preserve education funding and tie it to education reform. Since, contrary to what useful idiots for rich white dudes will tell you, forcing educators to make do with less simply means they end up having to focus more of their attentions to just getting students to pass standardized testing (which conspiracy theorists will tell you that's exactly what the ultra-rich want, because their children can afford to be lavishly educated in private schools, while the serfs need only know enough to tell the difference between a Big Mac and a Whopper; and to vote for whomever the establishment has fully vetted.) What's needed is top-to-bottom education reform, but nobody here will ever go for that because it'd be bloody expensive, it would equalize things between the grunts in the classrooms and the rich white dudes in administration, and the results will take a couple of decades to fully bear fruit.

[KrauserKrauser]

Good points Terwynn and I would be more for increased spending education if it required a massive overhaul of the current DoEducation. The problem is there is no stated plan for the 22% increase so it could just as eqsily be going to a department that has demonstrated that increased funding does not correlate to increased academic achievement in the country.

I have more faith in NASA being given the funds being able put them to effective use than the DoEducation if for no reason other than I have no faith in Obama when it comes to making hard decisions or sweeping changes that are not poorly hidden corporate giveaways. Increased funding for NASAq means we get something out of it as there is noneed for sweeping radical change to get positive reults, the DoE needs that sort of change and I don't see Obama being able to make it happen.

[Simon_Jester]

The flip side of that, Krauser, is that defunding an existing agency doesn't help solve problems of the form "we need to reform the agency." Taking away the money for something does not make people come up with a better way to do the job; we've already seen this. With NASA, no less- because that's exactly what Obama did with Constellation- take away the budget, close down the program, and tell them to start over with something more cost-effective. It was a disaster.

Social programs are no different; you don't get a better Department of Education by getting rid of funding for the existing one as an austerity measure, any more than you get a better heavy-lift booster by getting rid of funding for the existing one as an austerity measure.

There are austerity measures we could take as a society without shooting ourselves in the foot too badly, but they won't solve the problem, just delay it a little. That can't be a complete solution to our problem. Long-term, the solution to nearly every problem the US government has is "get rid of the structural deficit..." and the structural deficit was created by tax cuts for the rich, not by careless spending.

But nothing's going to get done as long as the antitax people can keep anyone from trying this. There aren't enough optional budget items left to cut; the cupboard is bare. All that's left is deciding who gets hurt by the budget cut- do we stop teaching kids how to read, or do we lett responsibility for spending X thousand dollars a year devolve from the state onto the shoulders of the average unemployed American worker in the middle of a recession?

[Big Phil]

This thread is a perfect example of why fixing the budget mess is so hard. Out of a $3.6 Trillion budget, people pick out and screech about $2.5 billion cuts, and then get into pissing matches about who cares more about poor black people and who wants old people to die of hypothermia, etc. etc. etc.

The only way the budget mess gets fixed is if:

a) We set priorities for what we want to fund.
b) Set about fixing inefficient programs like Medicare, and enable real reform (cutting funding isn't reform)
c) Get serious about defense. Do we really need 12 carriers, 500,000 soldiers and 200,000 Marines, and 5500 airplanes? Or can we make do with a smaller military?
d) Address questions like: Should Social Security still kick in at 65, or should we raise the age of retirement to 70?

In this magical fairy land in which Congress arrives at a consensus about our funding priorities, then they would figure out how to pay for everything (with taxes). Congress might even be forced to acknowledge that cutting taxes doesn't actually increase revenue, no matter what the Gipper said.

The reality is we're spending $3.6 trillion dollars while taking in $2 trillion in taxes, and no one actually wants to confront this reality, instead preferring to screech about gays in the military, subsidies for heating oil, Obama the Muslim/Kenyan/Communist/Fascist/Nazi, Shep hates the poor and loves rockets, etc.

[Eleas]

The reality is we're spending $3.6 trillion dollars while taking in $2 trillion in taxes, and no one actually wants to confront this reality, instead preferring to screech about gays in the military, subsidies for heating oil, Obama the Muslim/Kenyan/Communist/Fascist/Nazi, Shep hates the poor and loves rockets, etc.

It kinda makes me wonder how much of this stridency is really astroturfing.

[MKSheppard]

Already, the talking heads on that well-known right wing rag, NPR, are wondering why the President isn't going to touch "entitlement" spending.

Add in the Washington Post, which published this editorial today:

Link

President Obama's budget kicks the hard choices further down the road
Tuesday, February 15, 2011; 12:00 AM

THE PRESIDENT PUNTED. Having been given the chance, the cover and the push by the fiscal commission he created to take bold steps to raise revenue and curb entitlement spending, President Obama, in his fiscal 2012 budget proposal, chose instead to duck. To duck, and to mask some of the ducking with the sort of budgetary gimmicks he once derided. "The fiscal realities we face require hard choices," the president said in his budget message. "A decade of deficits, compounded by the effects of the recession and the steps we had to take to break it, as well as the chronic failure to confront difficult decisions, has put us on an unsustainable course." His budget would keep the country on that course.

Granted, the budget outlines cuts in discretionary spending, ranging from military procurement to heating assistance for the poor. A five-year freeze in nonsecurity discretionary spending - two years longer than the three-year freeze proposed in last year's budget - would save $400 billion during that period compared to what would have been spent otherwise to keep up with inflation.

But as Mr. Obama noted in his State of the Union address, discretionary spending represents a small slice of government outlays, so cuts in discretionary spending are simultaneously onerous and insufficient to reach fiscal balance. The administration proclaimed that its budget would save $1.1 trillion, two-thirds of it from spending cuts. It neglected to point out that, even if all those savings were implemented, the debt would increase by another $7.2 trillion over the decade. And that's accepting the administration's optimistic projections. From 2013 to 2016, the administration estimates the economy will grow at an average rate of nearly 3.9 percent per year, while the Congressional Budget Office projects a growth rate of just 3.4 percent. That could make an enormous difference in the amount of revenue generated and, consequently, the size of deficits. By 2021, the national debt will equal 77 percent of the total economy, even given the administration's rosy forecast - and, as the administration's chart reprinted here shows, the debt will then really explode.

Administration officials applauded themselves for having the discipline to offset the cost of two expensive items: avoiding punishing cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates for physicians and making sure the alternative minimum tax (AMT) does not hit a growing share of middle-class taxpayers. Not so fast. The patches are temporary - two years in the case of the so-called "doc fix," three years for the AMT. Meantime, the administration uses up a decade's worth of financing to pay for them - with no whisper of how to address the problems in the long term.

And that's not the only gimmickry. The budget assumes that the full cost of the doc fix will be paid for, and therefore not add to the deficit, but fails to explain how. It includes a $328 billion magic asterisk for transportation funding, identified only as "bipartisan financing for Transportation Trust Fund." Higher gasoline taxes? Don't ask. Meanwhile, the administration recommends paying for the AMT fix by reducing the value of charitable tax deductions for those in the two highest tax brackets. A smart idea, and one that the administration also proposed in its two previous budgets, originally as a way to pay for health-care reform. If it was a nonstarter then, what's the basis for thinking its prospects are better now?

The larger problem with the budget is the administration's refusal to confront the hard choices that Mr. Obama is so fond of saying must be faced. The president's debt commission concluded that more tax revenue will be needed in coming years to finance the costs of an aging society. Mr. Obama repeated his call to do away with the Bush tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers in two years - but maintained his tired and irrational insistence that the rest of the tax cuts, enacted in far different fiscal circumstances, be preserved.

If Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn could sign on to a deficit-reduction plan that included raising tax revenue, is it too much to ask for such bravery from Mr. Obama? And if Illinois Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin could sign on to a plan that included raising the Social Security retirement age, is it too much to ask for more from Mr. Obama than an airy set of "principles for reform"? Sadly, the answer appears to be yes.

They even had this nice GRAPH:

[MKSheppard]

This thread is a perfect example of why fixing the budget mess is so hard. Out of a $3.6 Trillion budget, people pick out and screech about $2.5 billion cuts, and then get into pissing matches about who cares more about poor black people and who wants old people to die of hypothermia, etc. etc. etc.

Or even the $61B to $100B cuts that the House Republicans want -- liberals are already decrying that as the "largest contraction of the government since WWII"



Obama's FY2012 budget is broken down as:

$2.6 Trillion in Revenue
$3.7 Trillion in Spending

$1.1 trillion deficit.

Of the spending; it breaks down according to WaPo as:

---------

Discretionary:
$730B Defense
$610B Non-Defense
$1.3 Trillion Total Discretionary

----------

$2.14 Trillion "Mandatory" Spending in Medicare/SS/etc

$242B Interest payments on Debt to creditors etc.

So you can see that even if we did what Duckie so stupidly proposed earlier; cutting our military down to Costa Rican levels of 8,400 men in the Civil Guard, eight patrol craft, and a few light aircraft and a few helicopters....

We would still have a $370B deficit.

The answer's obvious -- cut the military (down to about say $450B), and cut non defense discretionary down to about say $500B.

That saves us $390 billion. We can then take the remaining $710 billion out of the so called 'mandatory' spending accounts like entitlement programs.

Budget is balanced, we all go home.

Hell, we could even just call a $150B budget deficit "close enough" to give some extra money as a sop to the entitlement programs.

[Thanas]

Shep, you neglect the easiest way to fix the budget: Raise taxes. American tax lavels are ridiculously low compared to the rest of the western world, so why not raise them?

[Cecelia5578]

Shep, you neglect the easiest way to fix the budget: Raise taxes. American tax lavels are ridiculously low compared to the rest of the western world, so why not raise them?

You know why-the GOP has moved the Overton Window so ridiculously far to the right on taxes, that to even mention tax increases marks you out as unserious. I mean, how many upper middle class and up people who nominally id as liberals even support tax increases?

[Thanas]

And seriously cutting defence spending is in any way more acceptable to the majority of people? Heck, there was a lot of screaming when Gates just threatened to cancel the F-22, and you think a cutback in army size to one half will be more acceptable?

[Broomstick]

Among the cuts: Community development block grants would lose $300 million; low-income heating assistance would be sliced in half; a Great Lakes Restoration initiative would lose 25 percent of its funding; $1 billion would be cut from large airport grants and nearly $1 billion would be trimmed from a fund that finances water treatment plans and other infrastructure projects.

This is absolutely loathsome and offensive.

This is especially so given that about a half dozen people died during the recent blizzard in my area due simply to insufficient heat in their homes. At least one person just simply froze to death in an unheated home and several others died of carbon monoxide poisoning from jury-rigged heaters in a desparate attempt to stay warm in -25 C temperatures with 100 kph winds howling outside their door. Cutting heating subsidies will only drive up the annual death toll from cold.

But hey, it's more important to keep taxes low for the wealthy than to keep people from dying of cold.

[MKSheppard]

Shep, you neglect the easiest way to fix the budget: Raise taxes. American tax lavels are ridiculously low compared to the rest of the western world, so why not raise them?

Hmm.

Brookings / Urban Institute Study

It seems that the big difference in terms of revenue between the US and OECD countries is in Social Security and VAT taxes as a source of revenue.

One of the crucial differences I think you're not comprehending Thanas is that the US tax system is fundamentally different than Germany.

My admittedly crude research shows that 90+ percent of taxes in Germany are levied at the federal level, which then splits certain types of taxes back to the lower levels of government.

In the US however; it's different. Once you've paid the IRS Taxman, you then have to meet with the State Taxman, all the way down to the city level.

My dear LOINSTAR has to pay a tax on his car, a tax that does not exist here in the People's Republic of Maryland; while my father gets taxed twice on his vehicles -- first by the state of Virginia, and then by his local community, which gives him a sticker to place in the front of his vehicle's windshield allowing him to park/drive in the area without being ticketed.

Instead of one nice bill to the federal taxman like you Germanoids, the average Americanoid has to deal with maybe four bills to four different taxmen.

That I think drives the hate of taxes in the US.

PS (slight aside to you Germanoids, since you like BOOZE)

The People's Republic of Maryland has the some of the lowest alcohol excise taxes in the US -- only 9 cents per gallon for beer.

When LOINSTAR wants to get drunk, he has to pay the state of Virginia 26 cents per gallon of beer. Likewise, when Tevar and Nitram want to get drunk, they have to pay 18 cents a gallon to West Virginia.

If friends in Minnesota want to get drunk, they need to pay 15 cents a gallon.

If you REALLY want to get drunk with Vodka; it costs you $5.03 a gallon in Minnesota, $3.25 in Wisconsin, $2.50 in North Dakota and $1.50 in Maryland for spirits.

God Bless the People's Republic of Maryland -- last raising the tax on Beer and wine in 1972 and distilled spirits in 1955.

[MKSheppard]

Heck, there was a lot of screaming when Gates just threatened to cancel the F-22, and you think a cutback in army size to one half will be more acceptable?

The Army has only gotten to this size because of the Afghan/Iraq Wars. The Army's traditionally shrunk in between wars or threats.

[Broomstick]

Shep, you neglect the easiest way to fix the budget: Raise taxes. American tax lavels are ridiculously low compared to the rest of the western world, so why not raise them?

Because it would be unAmerican!

Really, Thanas, that was an easy one. Of course, it's heresy to suggest a little less Americanism is what is needed to fix some of our problems.

[Sea Skimmer]

The Army has only gotten to this size because of the Afghan/Iraq Wars. The Army's traditionally shrunk in between wars or threats.

The US Army is also inherently overmanned right now for the number of units it has, because of so many wounded and otherwise unemployable troops being in the mix. The Army actually disbanded three brigade on paper not long ago to ensure it could keep up the over manning. Without the need to sustain two wars, we could likely knock 75,000 men out of the active duty army before we even reduce the mass firepower it could actually field for a shorter duration conflict (any high intensity conflict will be short, as we will run out of ammo all else aside). Some reductions of this sort are already being put into effect.

[Thanas]

Heck, there was a lot of screaming when Gates just threatened to cancel the F-22, and you think a cutback in army size to one half will be more acceptable?

The Army has only gotten to this size because of the Afghan/Iraq Wars. The Army's traditionally shrunk in between wars or threats.

The problem is that the USA is not in between wars and of course the GOP will play the "weak on defence" card the instant anybody starts seriously arguing for a cutdown in numbers.

One of the crucial differences I think you're not comprehending Thanas is that the US tax system is fundamentally different than Germany.

My admittedly crude research shows that 90+ percent of taxes in Germany are levied at the federal level, which then splits certain types of taxes back to the lower levels of government.

In the US however; it's different. Once you've paid the IRS Taxman, you then have to meet with the State Taxman, all the way down to the city level.

My dear LOINSTAR has to pay a tax on his car, a tax that does not exist here in the People's Republic of Maryland; while my father gets taxed twice on his vehicles -- first by the state of Virginia, and then by his local community, which gives him a sticker to place in the front of his vehicle's windshield allowing him to park/drive in the area without being ticketed.

Instead of one nice bill to the federal taxman like you Germanoids, the average Americanoid has to deal with maybe four bills to four different taxmen.

Heh. Sorry, Shep, but we do have federal and state taxes (and even communal "taxes") just like the USA does. And our Tax Code is just as much as a huge monster (heck, even lawyers specializing in the tax code admit on camera on national TV they have no idea what they are doing) as the USA is.

If you REALLY want to get drunk with Vodka; it costs you $5.03 a gallon in Minnesota, $3.25 in Wisconsin, $2.50 in North Dakota and $1.50 in Maryland for spirits.

God Bless the People's Republic of Maryland -- last raising the tax on Beer and wine in 1972 and distilled spirits in 1955.

Wow, that is cheap. In Germany, you pay a tax of 3,65 € for 0.7l of Rum (and similar hard stuff) and that is just before the VAT, which adds another 19% of the total price to the tab.

So in Germany you would pay a whopping 19.24 € per gallon and that is before the 19% VAT.

[Broomstick]

Yet another illustration that Americans think they labor under the worst tax burden ever when in reality their taxes are significantly lower than almost anyone else's.

[Simon_Jester]

Shep: Consider that one of the reasons local taxes exist at all is that so much of the routine functions of government is done at the local level. It's the states, not the feds, that are responsible for enforcing traffic regulations, for a significant chunk of road upkeep, for making sure drivers are properly licensed and trained, even for doing shit like emissions inspections. Is it any wonder that to pay for all the stuff, stuff they have to do so that we can use our cars, they tax our cars?

Ditto, they're paying for the schoolteachers; is it any wonder they tax the community to pay for the schools? The county pays for police and fire departments; is it any wonder they tax the community to pay for those?

If you want to simplify the American tax structure, you could do it by folding the local governments into the federal government and folding the local tax collection into the IRS. Federal tax revenue as a share of GDP will go up accordingly, because the feds are now collecting the same property/vehicle/sales/whatever taxes the state used to collect. But hey, at least there won't be any damn bloodsucking state taxes.

Do you like that solution? Or were you just complaining about how many different organizations collect taxes in Virginia, without really wanting to solve the problem?

[slightly edited to take up less space]
Obama's FY2012 budget is broken down as:

$2.6 Trillion in Revenue
$3.7 Trillion in Spending

$1.1 trillion deficit.

Of the spending; it breaks down according to WaPo as:
______

Discretionary:
$730B Defense
$610B Non-Defense
$1.3 Trillion Total Discretionary
______

$2.14 Trillion "Mandatory" Spending in Medicare/SS/etc
$242B Interest payments on Debt to creditors etc.

So you can see that even if we did what Duckie so stupidly proposed earlier; cutting our military down to Costa Rican levels of 8,400 men in the Civil Guard, eight patrol craft, and a few light aircraft and a few helicopters.... We would still have a $370B deficit.

The answer's obvious -- cut the military (down to about say $450B), and cut non defense discretionary down to about say $500B. That saves us $390 billion. We can then take the remaining $710 billion out of the so called 'mandatory' spending accounts like entitlement programs. Budget is balanced, we all go home.

Hell, we could even just call a $150B budget deficit "close enough" to give some extra money as a sop to the entitlement programs.

Is there not an even more obvious answer: repeal the Bush tax cuts?

Those cuts did not work. They don't provide enough revenue to pay for the domestic programs we need, let alone the domestic programs we need and the military we need. How much would that do to pare down the deficit?

Why should we expect to balance the budget now, right this year, during a recession, when the last time we had a balanced budget was during economic boom times when we had a higher tax rate? Common sense suggests that this is going to be impossible. If you can't balance the budget when times were good (and post-Bush, we couldn't), you can't balance it when times are bad.

In my opinion, common sense also suggests that deficit hawk-ery as practiced by most American politicians, including Obama, is a red herring. Anyone who's serious enough about reducing the deficit to impose serious hardships on the nation*, or things that seriously compromise our long term interests**, should be serious enough to propose that we all tighten our belts by the expedient of accepting a tax increase. Tax increases are the one way we have to make sure that the burden of balancing the American budget doesn't wind up landing on any single group of people hard enough to make those people go 'splat.'

*(defunding infrastructure, defunding fuel for poor people's houses in winter)
**(cutting back the military to Costa Rican levels, getting rid of NASA)

[Vejut]

Thanes: I think some of the disconnect is he's talking tax, not total. That, or I really need to go to Montgomery county for my booze. I think it was $12 or so per 750mL for tequila last time I bought some. Vodka may be cheaper.

[Vejut]

Gah. I misunderstood. That is a lot of tax. Also misspelled Thanas. Sorry. Bloody IPod.

[KrauserKrauser]

The flip side of that, Krauser, is that defunding an existing agency doesn't help solve problems of the form "we need to reform the agency." Taking away the money for something does not make people come up with a better way to do the job; we've already seen this. With NASA, no less- because that's exactly what Obama did with Constellation- take away the budget, close down the program, and tell them to start over with something more cost-effective. It was a disaster.

Social programs are no different; you don't get a better Department of Education by getting rid of funding for the existing one as an austerity measure, any more than you get a better heavy-lift booster by getting rid of funding for the existing one as an austerity measure.

There are austerity measures we could take as a society without shooting ourselves in the foot too badly, but they won't solve the problem, just delay it a little. That can't be a complete solution to our problem. Long-term, the solution to nearly every problem the US government has is "get rid of the structural deficit..." and the structural deficit was created by tax cuts for the rich, not by careless spending.

But nothing's going to get done as long as the antitax people can keep anyone from trying this. There aren't enough optional budget items left to cut; the cupboard is bare. All that's left is deciding who gets hurt by the budget cut- do we stop teaching kids how to read, or do we lett responsibility for spending X thousand dollars a year devolve from the state onto the shoulders of the average unemployed American worker in the middle of a recession?

Not exactly the flip side of what I was saying as I was not advocating cutting anything to the Department of Education. I was simply responding to all of the "Think of the children" arguments that were being thrown around to justify the double digit percentage funding increase for the Department.

Neither I nor Shep argued for the cutting of education funds, just that a massive increase in spending might be better applied elsewhere.

Personally I think it would probably be better spent in revolutionizing the Fed, FDIC, SEC etc to actually defend against the crony capitalism that currently rules the marketplace. Only problem with that is I see the possibilty of that to be about as likely as Obama making the Department of Education change things enough to justify their massive increase in spending allocation. Read: Nil.

[D.Turtle]

Total government (federal, state, local) according to usgovernmentrevenue.com:


Total tax revenue in the EU according to Eurostat:


Gee, I wonder how the US cold start solving their budget deficit...

[Simon_Jester]

Total government (federal, state, local) according to usgovernmentrevenue.com:
Gee, I wonder how the US cold start solving their budget deficit...

Exactly. Revenues are in the toilet right now because of the recession, but you'll notice the sharp plummet from 2001-02; that's the Bush tax cuts taking effect when the taxes were collected for FY 2002. Though I must confess to some curiosity as to how taxes as a share of GDP increased from FY 2002-07; did state taxes increase?

[Broomstick]

Most likely yes. Also some things like cigarette and alcohol taxes might have gone up as well, those are handled on state and lower levels. If the Feds cut funding to the states to make up budget shortfalls then the states increase their taxes to pay the bills.