The Deficit! It’s All About Earmarks and Tort Reform!
This is kind of fun, although obviously the most interesting decisions would fall outside or in between many of the presented choices. It would also be nice to have some options that allowed maintenance of a near-term deficit in return for closure of the long term. Here’s my plan, which manages to maintain the Air Force and Navy by returning America to the growth-killing, might-as-well-just-call-it-slavery taxation levels of the Bill Clinton’s tyrannical regime.
Agreed. It is kind of fun. It makes me feel like a dictator!
Anyway, I see you didn’t reduce the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 60,000 by 2015. I always knew you were a neo-con!
More seriously, I do think it’s a bad idea to cut Social Security benefits for those with high incomes. Social Security’s beauty, in part, is its equality, and I think cutting benefits like that might push it toward becoming another (despised) means-tested program targeted mainly at the poor. Or at least, that’s my knee-jerk response. I could be convinced otherwise, I suppose.
That’s because I picked the “drop to 30000 by 2013″ choice.
Re: social security, I’m thinking that since I’m a dictator anyway, I don’t have to worry about issues like violating the sanctity of social security, or providing fodder for enemies of the program; domestic opposition doesn’t seem to matter, so I can just construct the program as I please.
Yes, I know. For the record, I was engaging in a too-clever-by-half meta-commentary on the poor reading skills of those who continue to assert that you supported the Iraq war.
I believe Professor Farley opposed the Iraq War but did so in the wrong way, and therefore supported it.
but I thought the serious way to oppose the Iraq war was to support the war. I guess I picked a bad day to give up logic
Yes, Rob could have had Paul Berman’s reputation if he had learned to oppose the war while supporting the war.
It’s broken! I cut taxes across the board, increased defense spending and cut a few small domestic programs and it didn’t eliminate the deficit. Typical liberal reality bias.
FTW
Why was there no Reduce number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to zero by 2012?*
Why was there no Close unnecessary overseas bases?
* Save for Kagan, Bolton, Cheney, O’Hanlon and other selected family members.
“Reduce military to pre-Iraq War size and further reduce troops in Asia and Europe” reduces troops in Europe and Asia, i.e., it closes unnecessary bases overseas.
I don’t think that eliminating the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan will close all the bases or even a lot of them. According to Andrew Bacevich, there are about 800 military installations outside the US. I’d bring that down to like 100.
Would eliminating overseas bases actually save that much money? I mean, you’ll still (presumably) have the same number of troops; they’ll just be sitting in a base in CONUS rather than overseas. And it might actually be cheaper to keep them overseas – lower service charges.
“Lower service charges” might be true if services were performed directly by local contractors, rather than rip-off outfits like Halliburton.
I’ve had a lot of friends link this to me over the past day or so, and it turns out that just about everybody coming at it from the left or left-ish side of spectrum ends up somewhere in the 70/30 split for tax/spending. This, of course, means that we’re likely to end up with the exact opposite (depending on if we get sweeping deficit reform as the defining cause of the next two years, which I hope like hell we don’t.)
Some of the choices could use some fleshing out. For example; when I did my own, I picked the ‘Reduce Contractors’ option, as I operated under the assumption that it meant ‘hire actual government employees, who can simply be paid wages and salaries, rather than contracting it out to firms that need to pay those things AND make a profit.’ I know several people who DIDN’T pick that option based on the assumption it simply means ‘a quarter of a million less people dong shit that needs to be done.’
Yes, mine was something along the lines of 62/38 tax increases vs spending cuts. I basically raised taxes as much as I could, cut the military as much as I could and threw in a couple other spending cuts that matched up with my general biases (Ag subsidies? Dead!).
There was still a hundred billion or so in the red by 2030, but I figure that will be chump change at that point.
This is how you move the Overton Window. Get everyone talking about the deficit when it’s pretty much the last thing we should be talking about in the midst of our current economic woes.
There’s a pretty simple answer: instead of blogging (and reblogging) the question “What should we do about the deficit?” every time a Village institution repeats, we should start listing more important issues facing this nation.
Here are three from a very, very long list:
1) How do we reduce the unemployment rate?
2) How do we get all our troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq ASAP?
3) How do we devise a system for choosing baseball’s Gold Glove winners that at least assures that all of them are above average?
I’m sure we can all think of literally dozens of other issues that are more pressing than the federal deficit.
Actually, I think there’s considerable value in demonstrating how easy it is to solve the DEFICIT PROBLEM GAH HORRORS by advocating policies that were consensus common sense ten years ago.
On the broader question of the Overton Window, I do think we need a more sophisticated theory of how it moves than appears to be extant in the blogosphere.
It follows the money; don’t we all?
I have to say I think IB’s criticism of the likes of Prof. Farley et al for failing to use their awesome powers of bloggitude to shift that damn window leftward is somewhat wide of the mark. As fun as progressive blogistan a place is to hang out, its not that ‘influential’ in terms of actual American voters who aren’t already broadly in tune with the sentiments it shares. And frankly the NY Times employs a freaking Nobel Laureate to essentially scream ‘ITS ABOUT EMPLOYMENT YOU MORONS!’ at the nation on a regular basis without much success. Until you can get a tee-vee news channel with very serious men in toupees and ties to talk this way, that window is staying put.
The term “Overton Window” in some ways gets at everything that’s annoying about Left Blogistan.
While the notion that our thought is constrained by our social locations is hardly completely novel, by far the best articulations of the notion in modern writing have been from Marxian writers. Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of the space of the possibles and the habitus are, in many ways, nothing more than sophisticated sociological tools for talking about the “Overton Window.”
But for some ungodly reason, Left Blogistan has named the term after some loser libertarian, and as such has been left with no tools whatsoever to analyze or apply the concept. (Q: What asshole names a concept that’s been around in philosophy, sociology, and anthropology for at least a century, after himself? A: A Libertarian, obviously.)
“Theory” may have its problems – the name being perhaps foremost – but if you want to talk about how we’re constrained by social location and arrangements of power in a society, you do actually want Bourdieu and Foucault.
Why? it’s not like they just stopped Sarkozy putting up the French retirement-age. If you think saying habitus in a French accent is going to get you anywhere with the American public, where have you been living lately?
Your response reads as a non sequitur to me.
We’re not talking about selling the American people on the concept of the “Overton Window” or habitus or episteme or whatever.
What Rob was rightly complaining about, as I read him, was the lack of coherent or robust understandings of how the space of the possibles moves and changes over time, among Left Blogistan commenters. I was saying that this was in part because instead of drawing on the Marxist and Marxian literature which develops theories about the space of the possibles in interesting, complex, and robust ways, people instead use the category of the “Overton Window” which inexplicably names a concept after a libertarian who was dumb enough to think he came up with the idea, and which has no surrounding literature or discussion to help us understand exactly what constitutes an “Overton Window” or how it moves.
I think the real story here is how much of the deficit ‘crisis’ goes away if you repeal Bush’s tax cuts on high income earners, capital gains, and the estate tax. Once you do that, the rest is quibbling over the details.
There is still a one trillion dollar shortfall in 2030 if you let all of Bush’s tax cuts expire.
Which means that fully one third of the problem is Bush’s tax policy.
above was me.
1. In fairness, the tax cuts are set to expire, so blame would be shared by those extending the cuts. The actual portion of the 2030 deficit that would be attributable to the Bush tax cuts would be much smaller.
2. Bush’s massive increase in spending (much of which served to increase after-tax income of the very wealthy or our killing capability) is a much bigger part of the problem.
I didn’t see the marginal federal income tax rate of 95 percent for all income over a million dollars.
Nor did I see a 100 percent estate tax over 5 million dollars.
Unfortunately, it appears we aren’t that serious about turning this train around. Those Obama solutions cited weren’t even half of the Clinton rates.
I have to agree with others that I was quite disappointed not to see several of my preferred choices there, such as re-instating the Eisenhower era income tax rates for individuals and corporations, treating all income (including capital gains and inheritances) the same, closing all but a handful of overseas military bases, canceling most Cold War Defense Department programs, and slashing the Defense budget by 50%-66%.
Not even something as radical as two or three new top tax brackets, so that the tax code can observe the not particularly challenging notion that there’s a difference between an income of $250,000 a year (rich, but not that rich), $2,000,000 a year (really rich, but, you know, maybe not Up Against The Wall rich), and $25,000,000 a year (99% tax bracket, and First Against The Wall When The Revolution Comes).
There’s one for over $1million:
Millionaire’s tax on income above $1 million
Currently, the top tax brackets starts at about $375,000. In past decades, it started at much higher income level, after inflation is taken into account. This option – which the House passed last year but the Senate did not – would create a new 5.4 percent surtax on income above $1 million.
Though yeah, a couple higher ones would keep millionaire’s from rage-blogging about how they’re not really all that rich like those other guys.
Though yeah, a couple higher ones would keep millionaire’s from rage-blogging about how they’re not really all that rich like those other guys.
That’s exactly why we don’t have those brackets any more.
Mine came out 54% spending cuts and 46% tax increases.
Just for fun I tried it as a Tea Party candidate, “solving” it with just spending cuts while leaving the military and Medicare alone. Even hammering Social Security (I guess I’ll be a one-term despot) and with the spreadsheet cheating by double counting things like a 5% wage cut for the federal workers I’d already eliminated and counting eliminating the employer-provided health insurance tax deduction as a spending cut, it only gets rid of about half of the deficit. In fact, even adding all of the possible military cuts, it still comes out a bit short.
I note that it doesn’t provide an analysis or tax bracketing based on Rand Paul’s ‘Image Atlas Shrugged’ speech (‘No rich.. no poor… all connected in the economy.’) Nor does it calculate the benefits of reducing the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels by converting the homeless into biodiesel. The sneering of the liberal elite at common-sense conservatives is truly astonishing.
I believe the Soylent Green solution is a much more elegant way of dealing with the homeless (not to mention the aged) while feeding the hungry at the same time.
[...] – This tool is just awesome. Using a combination of immediate troop reductions in Iraq and Afghanistan (to 30,000 by 2013), drawdowns in Asia and Europe, reduced spending on nuclear weapons, returning most taxes to Clinton-era levels, increasing Medicare and retirement ages to 68, and the elimination of farm subsidies, I managed to balance the budget not just by 2030, but by 2013, with a healthy surplus of $200 billion. And we get to keep the Navy and the Air Force (via Lawyers, Guns & Money). [...]
“by returning America to the growth-killing, might-as-well-just-call-it-slavery taxation levels of the Bill Clinton’s tyrannical regime. ”
This is false; you add nearly a trillion dollars (over 20 years) in taxes on top of roughly 1/2 trillion dollars from going back to Clinton Levels. Thats a lot in new taxes. Good plan or Bad, its not Clinton taxation.
I would prefer adding several upper division tax brackets, starting at 250K per taxpayer, 300K for joint returns, that move up to 50% for incomes over 3MM. Tough shit; pay the cost of being the boss.
I am certain there are many billions that we could to save if we could actually know what is in the Defense and Homeland Security budgets.
Oh yeah, I would also add a 0.25% financial transaction tax.
No options to zero out the Homeland Security or CIA budgets. Sigh.
Easy as pie:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?choices=hcxmn6m8
$600B surplus by 2030.
Its all about defense spending, tax reform and health care reform.
A major broadening of the tax base, combined with a slight lessening of marginal income tax rates would probably provide a little more strength to the economy while increasing revenue.
The spending side could be handled very easily by making an actual commitment to control defense and medicare spending. That’s a pipe dream, however.
[...] Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns, and Money balances the budget by cutting military spending, means-testing Social Security (!), and raising taxes. [...]