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27 Nov 09

The Billion Dollar Gram | Information Is Beautiful

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21 Nov 09

Matthew Yglesias » Change in Debt-to-GDP Ratio

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13 Nov 09

We Can't Cut Spending - Forbes.com

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Direct presidential control over spending is extremely limited. By law, he must spend every dollar appropriated by Congress. And presidents have no control at all over three-fifths of the budget devoted to interest on the debt and entitlement programs--those like Medicare for which spending is automatic. Even Congress can't reduce spending for entitlements unless it changes the law governing eligibility and programmatic operations. In other words, Congress can't just appropriate less money to Medicare. It doesn't work that way.
Even if the president's party controls Congress by a wide margin--as is the case today--getting agreement even on popular measures, such as expanding health coverage, is very, very difficult, as we are seeing. One reason for this is that the Constitution gives the minority party influence disproportionate to its numbers in the Senate. Thus even though Republicans only have 40 seats, they have been very successful in blocking Obama's health care reform initiative.
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- At the end of the day, presidents may only propose, Congress must dispose.
- Many of those favoring budget cuts have ridiculous notions about how much of the budget can be cut without reducing services. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans generally believe that 50% of the budget is wasted. This suggests that they believe the federal budget could be cut in half without cutting anything important like Social Security benefits or national defense.
- How tax cuts would help people with no wages because they have no jobs or businesses with no profits to tax was never explained. But many right-wingers are convinced that tax cuts are the only appropriate governmental response no matter what the problem is.
- Looking at last year's budget, only 38% was classified as discretionary; that is, under Congress's control through the appropriations process.
- All the rest was mandatory: entitlements and interest on the debt. Within the discretionary category, 54% went to national defense. Just $37.5 billion, 3.3% of the discretionary budget, went for international affairs including foreign aid. Over the years I have encountered many conservatives who thought that abolishing foreign aid was just about the only thing needed to balance the budget. Obviously, that's nonsense.
- Domestic discretionary spending amounted to $485 billion last year. With a deficit last year of $459 billion, we would have had to abolish virtually every single domestic program to have achieved budget balance.
- That means every penny spent on housing, education, agriculture, highway construction and maintenance, border patrols, air traffic control, the FBI, and every other thing one can think of outside of national defense, Social Security and Medicare.
- Last year, we spent $456 billion on Medicare, and it is the fastest growing major government program. How likely is it that the people protesting Obama's Medicare cuts will stand with Republicans if they propose cutting that program even more to balance the budget?
- The elderly are the reason why we have a national debt.
- When I raised these facts with a prominent Republican recently, he countered that Reagan had cut spending. But he didn't. Spending rose from 21.7% of the gross domestic product in 1980 to 23.5% in 1983 before declining to 21.2% in 1988. And that improvement came about largely because favorable demographics caused entitlement spending to temporarily decline from 11.9% of GDP in 1983 to 10.1% in 1988. (Last year it was 12.5% of GDP.)

Obama, Deficit Hawk - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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The recession made deficit cutting in the here and now imprudent in his first year; but now addressing the long-term debt is itself necessary for stabilizing the economy - and reassuring independent voters that he, unlike his predecessor, gives a damn about fiscal health. Well: the good news is that he's going to do exactly that:

President Barack Obama plans to announce in next year's State of the Union address that he wants to focus extensively on cutting the federal deficit in 2010 – and will downplay other new domestic spending beyond jobs programs, according to top aides involved in the planning.
On the practical side, Obama has spent more money on new programs in nine months than Bill Clinton did in eight years, pushing the annual deficit to $1.4 trillion.
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- This classic Politico piece - in as much as it regurgitates almost comically process-oriented Beltway wisdom - fails to mention a few things about Obama's spending in his first year.
- Item one: the recession.
- To treat the stimulus package as if it were something he just felt like doing - because he's a big government maniac - is a lie
- Item two: The health insurance reform almost painfully tries to pay for itself -
- something that Bush's Medicare entitlement didn't even pretend to do.
- Item three: there's a big big difference between spending on green and infrastructure investment and slashing taxes or increasing Medicare entitlements.

09 Nov 09

Ezra Klein - Lieberman will filibuster health-care reform 'as a matter of conscience'

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What's the mechanism by which the public option increases the national deficit?
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a public option paying Medicare's rates would save the government more than $100 billion in the first 10 years, and more after that.

06 Nov 09

Matthew Yglesias » Stimulus and the Future

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those who claim fiscal restraint amidst a depression is a favor to young people don’t know what they’re talking about
Deficit hawks like to complain that today’s young people will end up having to pay higher taxes to service the debt we’re running up right now. But anyone who really cared about the prospects of young Americans would be pushing for much more job creation, since the burden of high unemployment falls disproportionately on young workers — and those who enter the work force in years of high unemployment suffer permanent career damage, never catching up with those who graduated in better times.
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- Even the claim that we’ll have to pay for stimulus spending now with higher taxes later is mostly wrong. Spending more on recovery will lead to a stronger economy, both now and in the future — and a stronger economy means more government revenue. Stimulus spending probably doesn’t pay for itself, but its true cost, even in a narrow fiscal sense, is only a fraction of the headline number.

05 Nov 09

Karl Rove Discovers Fiscal Conservatism, Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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According to the treasury department's Bureau of Public Debt, the federal deficit went from $5,728,195,796,181.57 on January 22, 2001 to $10,626,877,048,913.08 on January
20, 2009. Bear in mind that the allegedly fiscally conservative
Republican Party ran this government for six of those eight years.
Roughly two trillion of that debt was added after Democrats took over
Congress in 2007.

26 Aug 09

Matthew Yglesias » The Sources of the Budget Deficit

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24 May 09

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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17 May 09

Can we afford the Obama agenda? - How the World Works - Salon.com

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But left out of the analysis is what would happen if the Obama administration had chosen to impose a fiscal austerity regime at the current juncture. Suppose the new administration had decided not to stimulate the economy, and abandoned any effort to spur development of renewable energy, or fix the healthcare system? Our long-term predicament could be much, much worse. It's quite possible that without the stimulus money already coursing through the economy, along with the Federal Reserve's immense efforts to increase liquidity and keep interest rates low (by, in large part, purchasing more and more Treasury bonds), the economy would still be accelerating into an ever-worsening downturn, rather than apparently leveling off. And if we don't deal with healthcare costs or energy issues now, we could easily end up paying even more in the future.

24 Feb 09