A stand-alone newsbite of Michael Tanner's latest column carried by National Review:
Twenty-three point nine trillion dollars. ($23,900,000,000,000.00)
That will be our national debt in 2022 under the
fiscal-cliff bill that just passed Congress.
That’s nearly $4 trillion more than the current-law
baseline...
* YES, FOLKS... AS I'VE BEEN NOTING... THEY'VE ACTUALLY
MADE THINGS WORSE!
...and while most of that comes from making the Bush tax
cuts permanent...
* YEP. THE BUSH TAX CUTS. YOU KNOW... THE BUSH TAX CUTS
THAT THE DEMOCRATS HAVE CAMPAIGNED AGAINST FOR THE PAST DECADE...
* YES, FOLKS... THOSE BUSH TAX CUTS... THE TAX CUTS NOT
"ENSHRINED" INTO "PERMANENT LAW" WITH THE ENTHUSIASTIC
BACKING OF BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, HARRY REID, NANCY PELOSI, AND MOST DEMOCRATS.
* CUT TAXS... INCREASE SPENDING... YEP... THAT'S THE
DEMOCRATIC POLICY THE AMERICAN PEOPLE APPARENTLY VOTED FOR IN NOVEMBER.
...for most Americans without offsetting the loss of
revenue through spending cuts, at least $330 billion of the new debt results
from the increased spending that was part of the deal.
* $330 BILLION IN INCREASED SPENDING... YES... YOU JUST
READ THAT CORRECTLY...
Our government debt will amount to more than 118% of GDP.
* WE'RE GREECE WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS. WHOO-HOO!
So the deal not only fails to cut spending, it also
simply tosses more money on top of the spending increases that were already
built into future budgets.
* YEP.
Now the federal government will spend $5.5 trillion in
2022, compared with $3.5 trillion this year.
* YEP.
We will be spending $2 trillion more per year and facing
$1.5 trillion more in debt than if federal spending were to rise commensurate
with population growth plus inflation over the next ten years.
* YEP.
And this is only going to get worse after 2022, as
entitlements, still unreformed after the cliff deal, explode. By 2050, our
national debt will top $58 trillion in today’s dollars. That’s more than double
what it would be if the increase in federal spending were limited to inflation
plus population growth.
* FOLKS... THERE'S NO WAY IN HELL THIS NATION EXISTS IN
ANYTHING RESEMBLING IT'S PRESENT FORM AND CONFIGURATION IN 2050.
* CARL... HOW OLD WILL VICTORIA BE IN 2050? IRINA...? HEY
"HE WHOSE NAME DARE NOT BE MENTIONED," HOW OLD WILL YOUR KIDS EACH BE
IN 2050?
* AND THEIR KIDS...???
* THINK ABOUT IT, GUYS... THINK ABOUT WHAT WE'VE ALLOWED
TO BE THE PROBABLE FUTURE OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN FACE.
How did we end up with this epic failure? In part, it was
because Republicans’ fixation on cutting taxes blinded them to the real threat
to economic growth and freedom — the growing size of the federal government.
* NOT JUST BLINDNESS! NO! REPUBLICANS LIKE BIG GOVERNMENT
WHEN THEY'RE IN CHARGE OF IT! REAGAN TRIED. GINGRICH TRIED. REAGAN DIED.
GINGRICH'S CHARACTER WAS ASSASINATED. THE SAD FACT IS THAT MOST
"REPUBLICANS" ARE RINOs.
I would be among the first to agree that raising taxes is
bad. Tax hikes take more money out of the productive sector of the economy and
redistribute it to the non-productive governmental sector, slowing economic
growth. The distortions in economic decision-making brought about by those
taxes will slow growth and reduce prosperity even further. But even more important,
taxes appropriate the property that an individual has justly earned through his
labor or ingenuity. Every dollar that the government takes from an individual
is one less dollar that he or she can save, invest, or spend as he or she sees
fit.
But simply paying for big government through debt rather
than taxes is not an appreciable improvement.
* AGREED...!!!
As Harvard’s Robert Barro points out, there is a
“significantly negative relation between the growth of real GDP and the growth
of the government share of GDP.” And, of course, our liberty is further
constrained as a growing government takes up more and more space that once
belonged to individuals and their choices.
(*NOD*)
Yet during the fiscal-cliff negotiations, Republicans
were all too willing to forgo spending cuts as long as they were able to retain
some additional tax cuts.
* MOST... REPUBLICANS... ARE... SCUM...
(*SHRUG*)
Republicans claim that, having disposed of the tax issue,
they will now devote all their attention to securing spending reductions as
part of the continuing-resolution and debt-ceiling negotiations to come. But
President Obama is already laying the political groundwork for this debate,
warning that Republicans will risk throwing the country into default over the
debt ceiling in order to cut Social Security and Medicare. Will the GOP have
the courage to insist on making the deep and painful cuts that will be required
to restore us to fiscal sanity?
* NOPE! NO WAY IN HELL!
Forgive me for being skeptical, but not only did the last
debt-ceiling agreement fail to actually cut spending (federal spending rose by
$61.5 billion in the twelve months following that deal), the fiscal-cliff
agreement undid two months’ worth, or $24 billion, of the sequestration cuts
resulting from the debt-ceiling compromise.
* YEP...
Indeed, congressional negotiators will spend the next two
months looking for ways to undo the rest of the sequester.
* YEP...
Unless Republicans are willing to see that spending is
every bit as big a threat to liberty and prosperity as taxes are, America is
well on its way to becoming Greece.
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