Deficit Issues

Discussion in 'Bill Archer's Guestbook' started by Bill Archer, Nov 30, 2004.

  1. Bill Archer

    Bill Archer BigSoccer Supporter

    Mar 19, 2002
    Washington, NC
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    So now the Democrats, who INVENTED deficit spending and crammed it down America's throat for 60 years ia now shocked SHOCKED that there's deficit spending going on around here.

    I'm the first one to agree that the Government spends too much, and that Bush needs to do more about it. And maybe the Democrats could have won my vote by discussing it rationally during the campaign instead of shrieking about the Texas ANG and Halliburton, but no matter.

    A good piece today:

    http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005942
     
  2. CUS

    CUS New Member

    Apr 20, 2000
    Another good piece on why Americans are rejecting Liberalism. Pete Du Pont.

    So it is the economy, stupid. Well, economics.
     
  3. ElJefe

    ElJefe Moderator
    Staff Member

    Feb 16, 1999
    Colorful Colorado
    Club:
    FC Dallas
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I'm sure that both of these had something to do with government support in the forms of exempting mortgage interest from taxable income, and exempting 401(k) contributions from taxable income, respectively.

    Which is another way of saying that Americans like liberalism a little bit more than you think they do.
     
  4. ElJefe

    ElJefe Moderator
    Staff Member

    Feb 16, 1999
    Colorful Colorado
    Club:
    FC Dallas
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Of course, this point of view is greatly dependent on where you draw the demarcation lines between "liberalism" and "conservatism." If you see "government giving nudges to people to encourage them to do The Right Thing on their own" as being part of liberalism, as I do, then yes, those things are liberal ideas. On the other hand, if you only see liberalism as "government uber alles," then I guess you won't see those things as liberal ideas.
     
  5. Hans Wvolner Fluerbach

    Apr 7, 2000
    germany

    Uh....how is it liberal to lower taxes? In fact I think you got it exactly the opposite. Anyway you ARE taxed on reverse premiums and chargeable premiums and those weren't Republicans pushing for that. Next you're going to tell me that dead Americans are resting in their caskets more comfortably thanks to Democrats because of the death tax.

    Anyway El Jefe have you taken a look at this site:
    http://www.taxfoundation.org/

    Anyway as to your second point, Americans don't like liberals. They do like Bill Clinton and centrist Democrats but they do not like actual liberals who say they want to take from X for the greater common good. I'm always confused by the pro-socialism cries of left wingers (people to the far left of the democrats) because it's quite the opposite of the principles of our founding fathers. Democrats=good, liberals=bad. Most democrats could run as conservatives in other countries.
     
  6. Anthony

    Anthony Member+

    Chelsea
    United States
    Aug 20, 1999
    Chicago
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    But that is liberalism in the classic sense. Things like 401(k)s are market based solutions to societal issues. They are not a government program. Outside of some oversight issues, the federal government stays out of it.

    A government based statist solution would be if there were no 401(k)s and instead the only retirement plan anyone was allwoed was Social Security.

    Which is why in dealing with the health care issues facing the country, I support the more market based solutions such as the HSA program.
     
  7. Ted Cikowski

    Ted Cikowski Red Card

    May 31, 2000

    this is what I was trying to say above (in sockpuppet mode). I fail to see how savings plans that divert taxes is a liberal issue.

    this is a good history on 401k's and you can decide for yourself if you think it's a liberal or conservative idealogy
    http://www.ebri.org/facts/1200fact.htm

    however things like the direct loan program could be argued that it's a socialist idea, and one that I sort of agree with.
     
  8. ElJefe

    ElJefe Moderator
    Staff Member

    Feb 16, 1999
    Colorful Colorado
    Club:
    FC Dallas
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    But that's the thing. I don't think you'll find too many liberals advocating a "Social Security and nothing else" approach to retirement savings. For anyone to say so is not dealing in reality. It is merely a baseline, a safety net.

    And for DuPont to say that liberals think that "the 1935 Social Security system is perfect and nothing about it may be changed" is slightly more defensible, but only slightly. Of course, things have to change -- it's going to go broke within my lifetime otherwise. However, the devil is in the details.

    DuPont and others of his ilk (which I would presume to include most of the readers of this forum) think that the details should include privatization of the Social Security system. However, as an employee of a company whose stock price has dropped 95% since 2000 and is currently under investigation by regulatory bodies in two different countries for cooking the books, and as someone whose inlaws know far too many former Enron employees, I'm not sure that that safety net is better off in the hands of "the market" than the federal government.

    We agree that Social Security needs to be fixed, but we differ in the implementation.
    HSAs have been around for several years and have had little effect on the number of uninsured Americans. They sound good in theory, but they've never moved into the "works well in practice" arena.

    Now, I guess that DuPont would immediately claim that I'm clamoring for socialized medicine, which would sound good in a column, but be about as accurate as his "liberals don't want to change anything about Social Security" thesis. I think that our market-based healthcare system is the best in the world in most cases, but more should be done to broaden the number of cases for which that is true, especially for working Americans. Right now, there are too many working Americans who have no health coverage. A good start would be to strengthen the tax incentives for employers to provide health coverage to their employees, especially part-time employees.
     
  9. ElJefe

    ElJefe Moderator
    Staff Member

    Feb 16, 1999
    Colorful Colorado
    Club:
    FC Dallas
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    But I'm arguing that government support of a program in the form of reduced taxes is in fact government's imposing its will on people (in this case, telling people "you should save for old age").

    In my admittedly liberal way of thinking, a conservative would argue that government's got no business encouraging or discouraging savings and investment.
     
  10. Bill Archer

    Bill Archer BigSoccer Supporter

    Mar 19, 2002
    Washington, NC
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I think you're confusing Libertarian with Conservative. It is not liberal style "social engineering" to acknowledge through the auspices of the tax code that home ownership creates a stronger society.

    Indeed at it's extremes liberal socilaism would decry individual home ownership since a) many people are unable to purchase homes and thus those who do have been given an advantage unavailable to all (people who rent get no tax break for their living expenses) and b) the Federal government ought to control living arrangements thus assuring that the rich didn't have nicer homes than the poor, which would be unfair.


    That aside, your assessment of the Social Security situation is rather narrowly defined and thus inaccurate.

    It's simply not a question of "either-or" any more. When SS was established there were 35 workers contributing for every recipient. In a few years when the bulk of baby-boomers have retired the ratio will be 2 - 1.

    It's simply not financially viable any more, and every single politician in Washington knows it. They demagogue the issue for political purposes, but if they themselves aren't willing to propose an alternate solution then they're simply playing politics with future elderly people's abiolity to feed themselves.

    Social Security is simply not viable much longer. There is no fund, there is no investment portfolio, there's only the law plucking money out of one person's paycheck and handing it to somebody else.

    Meanwhile, over the last 50 years the financial markets (including fixed return instruments) have consistently returned value. Many of us think it is unfair to force us to pay into a system which will simply never pay out any sort of return when that same money, conservatively and cautiously invested, would yield ten or twenty times the return.

    No one is suggesting the SS system be converted to cocoa futures or junk bonds. But I myself can do better than what SS will ever pay me, and let me remind you that the money the SS system takes out of my paycheck is MINE. Not Ted Kennedy's. MINE. I worked for it, I earned it, and if some of it is going to a mandatory retirement system then I'd like it please to go to a retirement system that makes sense, not some Ponzi scheme run for political gain by the same people in Washington who screw up everything else.
     
  11. ElJefe

    ElJefe Moderator
    Staff Member

    Feb 16, 1999
    Colorful Colorado
    Club:
    FC Dallas
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Now who's confusing political labels? The latter statement is something that socialists would spout, not liberals. To be fair, you did say "at its extremes," but c'mon, that no more represents mainstream liberalism than John Birchers represent mainstream conservatism. Let's make a deal: You don't try to stick me and my ilk with whatever crazy-ass socialist idea that was probably cooked up by some 30-year-old career college student that was on some website somewhere, and I won't lump you and your ilk in with whatever crazy-ass idea that the John Birch Society or David Duke or whoever comes up with.

    (As for your former statement, I've heard many people across the political spectrum decrying the lack of tax breaks for renters. But most of those people live in urban areas with high housing costs.)
    You've told me nothing new there. It's something that we all agree upon.
    My wife's grandfather was an avid investor. He wasn't rich, and he wasn't a daytrader, but he did by stocks. And he almost exclusively bought blue chips and utilities. Why? He was a safe, conservative, cautious investor. And when he died several years ago, my in-laws inherited his investments.

    One of his major holdings that they inherited was a utility known as Pacific Gas and Electric. He was from San Francisco and they were his power company, and hey, what could be safer than the power company? Everybody's always going to need electricity. They enjoyed consistent, safe, slow growth and they paid a nice dividend. Good, safe, conservative investment.

    By now, you're seeing where I'm going with this. Thanks to the idiotic implementation of electricity deregulation in California, PG&E became a very crappy investment in 2001. But my greater point is that "conservative and cautious" investments can go as badly as investing in a dot-com. And it's one thing if those investments (like in that one brokerage commercial) mean the difference between upper deck seats and box seats down at the local ballyard.

    The question is whether you want to subject the safety net of Social Security to those same forces. I don't. You could possibly convince me otherwise if you were to constrain the investment choices to those based on government bonds and if you were to have the federal government guarantee a minimum payout.

    Not exactly the privatization you might be hoping for, but hey, it would at least keep me from going around scaring old people that you were wanting to put their retirement money in the hands of Ken Lay.
    Well, you're not. But the number of people who are is a little bit (just a little bit) larger than "zero."
    You THINK you can do better. I THINK I can do better. Granted, it's a safe bet, but as The Wolf said, "Well, let's not start sucking each other's dicks just yet." ******** happens.
    First, an aside. What is the Right's fascination with the senior Senator from Massachusetts? I'd really like to know, since it's always puzzled me, and since it appears that he's passing the mantle of "Bete Noire of America's Right Wing" to the junior Senator from New York.

    And while you may not be enamored with entrusting part of your retirement savings to the assorted drunks in Washington, I'm not terribly enamored with entrusting old people's financial safety net to the assorted crooks and shysters on Wall Street.

    Never mind that that doesn't address how Social Security became a Ponzi scheme in the first place. But of course, that would require basing Social Security on an actuarial table from the present, rather than one from 1955 or 1935, and adjusting the retirement age accordingly. Which would of course cause AARP to fight such a proposal tooth-and-nail. Well, assuming that they can divert their attention from hustling old folks to buy their insurance plans long enough to do so.
     
  12. GringoTex

    GringoTex Member

    Aug 22, 2001
    1301 miles de Texas
    Club:
    Tottenham Hotspur FC
    Nat'l Team:
    Bolivia
    Home ownership has increased because the federal government insures every single mortgage. You do enjoy your federally-insured morthgage, don't you?
     
  13. Bill Archer

    Bill Archer BigSoccer Supporter

    Mar 19, 2002
    Washington, NC
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States

Share This Page