Here's what I consider to be a really good idea for those of you civic-minded enough to continue voting: If a candidate for office categorically tells you that he or she will not raise your taxes, don't vote for him or her. This is because that candidate is either lying, stupid or insane.This moronic trend was started in the 1980s by a dickhead named Grover Norquist and his deranged lobby, Americans for Tax Reform. ATR started circulate "no tax increases" pledges to Republican presidential candidates during the 1988 primaries. Bob Dole wisely refused to sign it. George Herbert Walker Bush, sadly, did not.
It just so happened that the Reagan administration has produced so truly impressive budget deficits during its eight years. Then the Savings and Loan industry collapsed, costing about $160 billion (which was a lot of money in those days) to bail out. Then the economy went into recession and President Bush found it necessary to fight a war against Saddam Hussein.
"Read my lips, no new taxes" wasn't long for this world, officially dying toward the end of Bush 41's second year in the White House. It turns out that shutting down the government over a silly promise isn't feasible when you have half a million troops in the Saudi desert.
Bush, as you might remember, lost his bid for re-election in 1992. Politicians everywhere learned the lesson that you never break a promise like that, lest you get crushed.
Unfortunately, that's not the lesson they should have learned. If they were smart and truly responsive to the public interest, they would have learned not to make the promise in the first place. You never know what's going to happen with the economy, and leaders need to retain some flexibility of movement in responding to it.
Some of you might remember that during the 2008 election, I repeatedly said that Barack Obama was lying about everything. That was particularly true of his pledge not to raise taxes on people making less than $250,000 year. I knew that he was lying because there was virtually no way for him to keep that promise.
As president, Obama's learning that now.
President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.It was stupid, dishonest promise, and one he never should have made.
Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said in the interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”
Obama repeatedly vowed during the 2008 presidential election campaign that he would not raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 and households earning less than $250,000 a year. When senior White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner suggested in August that the administration might be open to going back on that pledge, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs quickly reiterated the president’s promise.
In the interview, Obama said that putting preconditions on the agenda of a bipartisan advisory commission, which he said he would soon establish, would just undermine its purpose.
“What I can’t do is to set the thing up where a whole bunch of things are off the table,” Obama said. “Some would say we can’t look at entitlements. There are going to be some that say we can’t look at taxes, and pretty soon, you just can’t solve the problem.”
Here are the facts. When Obama was running America was fighting two wars, was given a hugely expensive new entitlement program by the GOP, and was faced with deficits over a half trillion dollars and a debt that was over ten trillion. Furthermore, the costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - almost 40% of the federal budget - are expected to skyrocket in the very near future.
Yes, you can increase taxes on "the rich," and letting Bush's insane tax cuts expire is a good place to start. But you can only tax them so much before investment and job creation suffers. Besides, the rich don't benefit from entitlement spending to anywhere near the degree that the middle class does. If the middle class insists on moaning about paying the cost of welfare for the poor, they can't really expect the rich to pay for their welfare, now can they? It might be time for the middle class to really understand what all the goodies they've voted for themselves actually cost.
The Republican argument of cutting spending is ridiculous and dishonest at best. There simply isn't trillions of dollars in spending to cut that will balance the budget, cover entitlements and defense, make the interest payments on the debt and start to pay it down somewhat. Even if you abolished Social Security and Medicare for everyone under 55 tomorrow, you'd still be tens of trillions of dollars in the hole.
Nor are you going to "grow the economy" at rate fast enough to pay for the structural costs of modern government. I suppose that it's possible, but it's never actually happened before. The government is growing at a far faster rate than the economy and has been for a long time.
Please spare me the nonsense of "cutting pork," as well. That amounts to approximately $50 billion a year, which doesn't even begin to address the problem. Besides, pork doesn't tend to be pork when it's a useless military base or a water system in your congressional district. Everybody wants a free football stadium, but no one wants to pay for it.
One of the most spectacular things I heard at those insipid health care town hall meetings last summer was people shouting to "keep the government away from my Medicare." And it happened a lot.
People generally, and Americans in particular, are understandably upset if they don't know what their taxes are paying for and what it actually costs. "Your" Medicare costs the government a fortune, which you would have to pay, were it not for your insistence that your kids pay for it, with interest.
The two most popular programs in the United States - Social Security and Medicare - have unfunded liabilities of $77 trillion over the next thirty years or so. Countries don't tend to invade themselves and foreigners don't commit suicide at a rate consistent with U.S foreign policy, military spending equal to the combined total of the rest of the world is necessary. By all means, support the troops, but don't think that they aren't costing you hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Providing medical care and educational benefits to the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone will cost hundreds of billions more over the course of their lifetimes.
If people voted for politicians who supported programs and wars without understanding what they would cost, they really have no one do blame but themselves. That they resent having to pay for their mistakes is really immaterial.
In the very near future, as lenders begin to doubt the ability of the U.S government to pay back its debt, the cost of borrowing is going to be prohibitive. People can start paying for their government now, or they can see it collapse entirely.
You can blame "the politicians" all you want, but Presidents Roosevelt, Johnson, Reagan, Bush 43, and Obama - the biggest of the big spenders - didn't come to power as the result of coups. They were all elected by the American people, often more than once, and in the first three cases, with vast electoral landslides. None were elected by the rich or the corporations. They were all elected by the middle class.
Canada currently has budget problems, although they aren't anywhere near as bad. But I refuse to vote for either the Liberals or the Conservatives because neither is willing to admit what addressing it is going to require. They're as addicted to lying as their American cousins are. And the voters are as addicted to the lies.
You can't run a country that way, and certainly not a country that dresses itself up as a representative democracy. If you build such a democracy around lies, it isn't long before the democracy itself becomes a lie. And that's exactly what will happen once that country's policies and priorities are decided by it's creditors, both foreign and domestic.
All the Tea Parties in the world aren't going to change the fact that things cost what they cost. Given the things that people have voted themselves over the last century, you are not "taxed enough already." The fact is that you're not taxed nearly enough.
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