Former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, co-chairs of Obama’s deficit commission, have done all the math and are coming out with their big report soon, and it turns out they do not think highly of our old chum the deficit. Bowles said it is “like a cancer,” which is not nice, because the deficit can hear you, Erskine. It has spent a lot of money on military technology to give itself senses such as hearing and touch, Alvin Greene’s favorite. Bowles also said it “will destroy the country from within.” Saying the United States is destroying itself and is nearing the end of its empire usually gets a politician in trouble, but Bowles has a plan to cut spending and raise taxes, so Congress will love him and certainly pass it.
The commission leaders said that, at present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans — the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries,” Simpson said.
Yep.
“We can’t grow our way out of this,” Bowles said. “We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can’t tax our way out. . . . The reality is we’ve got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We’ve got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that.”
Right.
It is nice that Obama spent money to let these guys speak the truth about what everyone sort of knows about the deficit doom. But Congress tends not to like to cut spending by huge amounts and raising taxes. Especially in an election year, yes, but really all the time.
Still, it is cool to think about! Perhaps Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson can write some fan fic about a Congress slashing the budget permanently and taking out chunks of entitlement programs and defense budgets and such. No, budget-slashing slash fiction. Even better. [WP]
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Obligatory Clinton-era deficit reference here (which really was more creative accounting, but whatevs).
Maybe if we quit fighting these two wars we might have a little change left over?
From CrooksandLiars:
So here, Erskine. Here’s a crying towel. Because I notice you’re not talking about letting the massive Bush tax cuts ($1.8 trillion) for the wealthy expire, nor are you suggesting that the Medicare Part B benefits ($1.2 trillion) that Big Pharma loves so much be renegotiated. You’re definitely not talking about single-payer health care.
Nor are you suggesting that maybe, just maybe, we could cut back on spending for that “policeman to the world” thing.
Nope. It’s only Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that has you in a tizzy. You know how we see that, Erskine? It’s a declaration of class war.
“We’ve got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that.”
These guys, they’re so cute with their “numbers-are-fun” approach! This Commission-created-to-tell-federal-government-economics-thing-everyone-already-knows-and-studiously-no-stupidly-ignores = FEMA under Brownie.
[re=615528]chascates[/re]: Too right, chascates.
[re=615528]chascates[/re]: Now, Social Security is a problem – namely, the part where Social Security taxes are capped, so that the upper middle class and obscenely wealthy all pay the exact same amount, in dollars. Dump that cap, make the rich pay their fair share and the deficit woes get a lot smaller.
What? We can’t stop fighting the wars because China is paying us to fight?
No more gold-plated warplanes with diamond-tipped missiles.
Wingnuts are jizzing all over their tricorns.
What did W’s deficit task force say about the deficits?
Why is Obama handing the poorz-hating movement conservatives the knife they can now use to fucking stab the working peoples and browns? Maybe next he should appoint an independant prosecutor, hey, Ken Starr isn’t too busy there at Pepperdine Training School for mainstreamed conservative retards who want to go into law, maybe he could appoint Ken Starr, to investigate his treasonous commie socialism? Wouldn’t that be a great idea?
My grandmother left me an erskine coat when she died, but I never wear it anywhere, because I’m afraid of PETA activists.
[re=615534]JMP[/re]: Also correct. We used to have tax rates that actually taxed people as they made more money. Then we suffered Friedman-Reagan-Laffer-Norquist-etc., and now China can send its leg-breakers around anytime we get behind on the vig. Great domestic and foreign policy.
[re=615528]chascates[/re]: Second that. From this smug-looking jerk there’s no mention of repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, reinstating the inheritance tax, raising the capital gains tax to previous rates. So if Obamer takes his advice, and reduces the deficit on the backs of the most vulnerable, he can then hand over a nice surplus just like the one Clinton handed over to Dubya, and our next Repub President Chimp can again go on a massive spending spree. Then repeat the entire cycle all over again.
[re=615528]chascates[/re]: Erskine is just following the lead of worms like John Kyl [R-Mezcal].
Erskine Caldwell, on the other hand, was a Commie pinko po’-folks and union-lovin’ mofo. Plus there were some good secksytimes scenes written by him in God’s Little Acre.
Whaddya mean Congress doesn’t like to cut spending? They talk about it all the time.
There is only one solution. We cannot have a decent life on this planet until we accept the truth. We must eat the poor. Just as Jeebus taught us to do.
[re=615528]chascates[/re]:Like palin hookworms, just some more sick, infested Bowles.
What kind of gun do you use to kill the deficit?
A really, Really, REALLY expensive one!
[re=615551]Baldar T Flagass[/re]: Don’t forget Tobacco Road.
Why would any God-fearing American listen to Erskine Bowles? The man is a known homoscedastic!
Surely when they want to start cutting spending, the military is the first budget they’ll trim, right?
Or they could try selling Alvin Greene figurines; that might work.
Christ, why don’t they all just come out and say, “Dear Poors, Olds, and Pretenders-to-the-Middle-Class, you are hereby put on notice that you will be starved out if it is the last thing we have to do. There are only so many resources left to go around and, well, we would prefer that those who have already proven themselves to be effective in the methods of greedily acquiring and hording more of the same have dibs on those resources. It really does make us look better in the eyes of our overlords.”
I look forward to blowing bubbles with all of you as this fucking ship sinks, sinks, sinks.
[re=615528]chascates[/re]: Where do I go to enlist? I am sick of this crap. It’s along the lines of “No you can’t have extended unemployment benefits because we gave all the money to Goldman Sachs to pay million dollar bonuses to the people who crashed the economy.” How can 1% of the population so screw the other 99%?
Oh I remember. They’re in charge because they’re keeping the nigars down (nigars=any person of whom “you must be terrified” e.g. brown people, homosexuals, women needing abortions because they can’t afford to have kids because they don’t have any health care at their shitty jobs, etc. etc.)
Why are these guys who don’t like the deficit on the deficit commission? That’s like making a U.N.-Hater the Ambassador to the U.N. Ridiculous!
They should load up the deficit commission with suburbanites who live in no-money-down McMansions, drive new-every-two years massive leased SUV’s, and pay the minimum payments on their humongous Visa bills with their Mastercard. These are people who know and love deficits.
Let loaves and oxen and fowl and good and pure things fall to the ka of the justified Djoser!
May heaven rain fresh myrrh! May it drip incense!
Look around you!
We must create a commission to study the creation of commissions. It should have Darwinians and creationists on it. Just for, you know, balance. Also.
not until the ruin collapses can the rubble be cleared away. in the meantime, paper fires can be used for warming cans of hobo beans.
[re=615559]Neilist[/re]: /OT Someone pinched four Glocks from the checked baggage of the bodyguards for PM Bibi Netanyahu. Did you recently get a job at TSA?
It’s interesting that they didn’t bring up that the military consumes 52% of the entire budget.
When he who does not speak speaks to black people, we all speak to black people.
Alvin Greene to give a speech the the NAACP on Sunday.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/12/alvin-green-to-make-first-speech-since-upset-win/?fbid=EMDYAv09gFG
Krugman says zombies killed the deficit commission and/or ate Alan Simpson’s brain. http://tinyurl.com/2euqamc
[re=615568]nappyduggs[/re]: I think they just said that, don’t you? Actually, they say it every time they howl, “cut the deficit” when they don’t mean cut the “defense” (read: offense) budget.
[re=615569]Ducksworthy[/re]: The GOP is against funding unemployment benefits because it causes people to be lazy although a study by Moody’s Analytics recently found that every dollar spent by the government on benefits for the unemployed produces an overall return of $1.61 for the economy.
They are for continuing the tax cuts even though it will greatly increase the deficit with no benefit to the general economy.
It’s not logical but they call it ‘common sense.’
[re=615586]chascates[/re]: Correction. They call it “common sense conservatism,” not common sense, I think. That makes it an illogical statement wrapped inside bullshit, so that no one with a brain can make it logical.
[re=615586]chascates[/re]: Sweet baby sky jeebus–Dylan Ratigan was just chewing some hapless rep’s ass so hard about this, it actually killed my television.
Providing for the needy is socialisms, taxes is slavery. All political dfiscourse has been taken over by the coded southern racism, as explained by Lee Atwater, and for realz, this is something Lee Atwater said (someone posted this here last year): “You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
So here we are, confederate yahoo anti-intellectual racist fuckwads control the dialogue and the policy agenda, and they are driving us off a cliff with shit ideas and shit lying evil policies that aren’t even good for them, they are good for nothing and nobody, all of it, every fucking bit of it, all stemming from the fear on the part of the white pigfuckers that someone might give some of the money they pay in taxes to a brown person.
[re=615593]Katydid[/re]: You must remember, conservative logic does not make sense, because its all lies. Conservatism is a belief system in which all that is openly said and written is just a false facade, a lie, a con, meant to conceal the real beliefs of conservatism, which are “I got mine and I’k keeing it all, and I hate browns and queers and furriners, and fuck you and everyone.” Thats conservative philosophy, but they can’t say that, so they make up convoluted lies, which of course don’t make sense, they can’t make sense, they are horseshit.
I’m pretty sure that Alan Greenspan is the physical manifestation of the deficit.
I am just happy that Erskine Bowles has stopped running for US Senate in our state. I actually had to vote for that fucker because his opponent was the unspeakably retarded and mean Lizzie Dole.
Lots of ice floes in Alaska. Seward was way ahead of his time.
I wish they would just come right out and tell America that Raygunomics is an Epic Failure. Tax cuts while increasing the “killing brown people” budget, cannot work.
Dude’s name is Erskine. What the hell is that?
[re=615586]chascates[/re]: Not troo! Cutting taxes ALWAYS raises revenue. Everyone knows that, and if you disagree you will be banned from commenting on redstate!
So when they say “tax cuts” they are really trying to reduce the deficit.
I’m sure there’s a similar logic for increasing military spending but my last vestige of sanity prevents me from reaching it.
[re=615584]Katydid[/re]:
O sure, we know that. But the lessers who depend on the power-that-be for validation and guidance will keep on swearin’ that a spponful of bullshit with sugar sprinkled on top is the same kind of eclair that the Rockerfellers are a eatin’. I iz ascared of blindly stupid poors much more than I am of self-assured wealthies.
Duzzittayu?
Cutting medicare/medicad/social security benefits is a big thing to do politically because it sounds tough and allows people to say “tighten belts” and “be thrifty” and those are proud American values. As is fighting wars in the Middle East and blowing shit up so there goes slashing the military budget. And raising taxes, while probably the most politically tough and correct thing to do, doesn’t sound tough as it does not involve saying things like “being thrifty” and “learning to leave within your means.” Instead, it means “if you want all this shit, you’re going to have to pay for it” and that doesn’t sound tough at all.
Interesting chart on the effects of Bush’s tax cuts & wars on the future:
http://www.offthechartsblog.org/whose-deficit-is-it-anyway/
…key policies enacted in the Bush Administration will continue to harm the budget outlook throughout the next decade. For instance, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for nearly $7 trillion in deficits in 2009-2019.
Small change compared to the $30 billion for unemployment benefits the GOP won’t even allow a vote on.
Erskine Bowles is one of those guys who couldn’t win an election against Alvin Greene, even if Greene chose Allan Keyes as his campaign manager. And yet Bowles will inexorably climb to become the most powerful man in the US. Ugh.
Well thank god congress will able to ignore any really good ideas and enact the really bad ones. Thank sweet baby jeebus that its against the fucking law to just negotiate for lower drug prices for medicare and medicaid. We proud socialism hating Merikans are just fine subsidizing private drug companies to allow us to pay the highest prescription drug prices on the planet. Apparently rule no.1 of capitalism is to pay the highest cost prices you can.
Thank god we live in a country that lets us pay for TWO wars at once by paying less in taxes, now thats American genius. Why pay for shit as you go when you can pay cost PLUS interest to the Chinese and Saudis. Where would the military be without a great example of capitalism like Haliburton to supply them with 45 dollar a case soda. I get goosebumps feeling the U-S-A freedom to charge the taxpayer like that. It would be Un-American to not support any increase in military spending to the point that we have 11 aircraft carriers to the Chinese/Russians and their combined 1 carrier. Or to not only be the country with the largest Air Force in the world but to also be the country with the second largest Air Force—the United States Navy. Were number 1 AND 2!!!! I love knowing we never leave countries after wars. It makes such sense to have tens of thousand of troops in Germany, Japan, Korea and for decades to come Iraq and Afghanistan.
You put 10 Wonkette commenters in a room for an hour and you could get the deficit to near zero, the US congress—NEVER. God we are fucked.
Hey, doesn’t Erskin know that it’s bad to speak badly of Cancer. Positive talk = positive energy, dude. Chemo popsicles for everyone!
Poor dear, he says, “We can’t tax our way out.” Oh sweetheart, you beady-eyed little liar, sure we can, we just let all those tax cuts for your greedy little elite base expire, and you’ll be amazed how quickly that pesky deficit will be wiped out.
Never heard a peep about the deficit in the Oughts (as in, “Ought to stop these nutz”), but it doesn’t matter, because we’re going to do every stupid thing possible, but this time, with Democratz!
If they extend the tax-cuts-for-the-rich, like Sen. John Kyl wants them to, I’m done. Cuz WE NEED THAT MONEY!!!
[re=615748]Veritas78[/re]: yeaz, but teh rich need that money too, for freedom!
(or their off shore account, another whore diamond mistress, pay offs for the lobbyists representing them, etc, etc.
In other words, job creation!
I’m down with the deficit crushing the empire as long as we can keep India.
Indian food is just so good.
[re=615803]Poochie[/re]: Time to google overseas bases and pick one to move to. I’m sure Romans did the same thing.
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[re=615866]skintreatment[/re]: Is that you, Alvin Greene?
If we keep spending all our money on the military, there won’t be any left to research Palin Hookworms, which Erskine apparently has already contracted.
Chicago School economics are bullshit. Also.
Shit, Looks like our future economic health is dependent on going back to the 19th century. Sometimes you gotta devolve to keep the IMF happy.
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