Quote from Max E. Pad:
Ok, sure lets compare major policies between the 2.....
Afghanistan is a wash cause both parties would have approved it....
Iraq is all Bush
Medicare part D cost 410 billion over 10 years, Obamacare is set to cost 1.5 trillion over 10 years...... Ill give you that as a wash like i did before
Bush - TARP, Obama Stimulus, once again ill give obama a freebie, most of TARP got paid back, none of the stimulus did.
Bush tax cuts - Obama extened with new added tax cuts....
Bush TSA - Obama Consumer protection agency....
Please Ricter explain to me where these big discrepancies are in Obamas spending vs. Bush, I have been more than lenient letting Obama off for both the stimulus (vs. TARP) and Obamacare (vs. Medicare part D) Those are both losers for Obama when compared to Bush's spending......
The only discrepancy now is the Iraq war.....I will fully concede the Iraq war was All Bush......
From my point of view all i see is a bunch of fucking bureaucrats, both Bush, and Obama, and a willing congress..... spending more and more money, with reckless abandon, there is no discernible difference between bush polices and Obama policies.....Both of them didnt think they had to pay for spending, and both of them didnt think they had to pay for tax cuts..... and that is exactly why we are running 1.3 trillion dollar deficits.....
I don't want to argue in detail, as you and Epik have been doing--budget analysis is a full-time job, clearly. ; )
My point of view on the entire issue is still basically the same, all these numbers have to be considered in context, and their real effects have to properly understood, not "we're all gonna die", which is too common here. For me, "in context" is a constant referral back to our level of debt, who owes who, what percentage of GDP it is, can it be serviced, is productivity growing, what are the effects of rapidly reducing it, and, this just in, how long can the debt be carried:
mainly macro
Comment on macroeconomic issues
Saturday, 26 May 2012
Government debt and the burden on future generations
Simon-Wren Lewis
" In an earlier post, I looked at how we might think about the âcostâ of additional public debt, if that debt financed public investment, and our concern was intergenerational equity. Here I want to examine the question of how great the burden of extra debt is on future generations, if that debt financed not investment, but consumption spending or tax cuts that had only current period benefits.
Our initial instinct would be that this burden is bound to be positive. The current generation gets the benefit of additional spending, or a tax cut, but future generations pay the cost in terms of finding the money to pay the interest on the debt. However, if the additional debt is never paid off, and remains a constant share of GDP, then there is a situation in which it is not a burden, which I discussed in that earlier post. Let the âgrowth corrected real interest rateâ be r-g.[1] Suppose r-g=0. In that case the interest on the outstanding debt each year could be entirely paid for by issuing new debt such that the total debt to GDP ratio remained unchanged. The debt is only a burden on the final generation, but there is no final generation.
Normally r>g, so taxes do have to rise (or government spending has to fall) to pay part of the interest on the debt. Debt is a burden on that account. There is a trap that we can fall into here, which is the following. Suppose all the debt is owned domestically. What the government does is raise taxes to pay interest on the debt, so this is a transfer from tax payers to debt owners. The government is just taking with one hand and giving back with the other. If society is just paying itself, how can debt be a burden?"
Article continues:
http://mainlymacro.blogspot.ca/2012/05/government-debt-and-burden-on-future.html
Edit: oh, the current account data and trends are also part of the context, productivity gains are just a part of the battle, my bad.
