It's as if free-market economics is now regarded as some kind of exotic niche taste, rather than the natural way human beings interact when government isn't interfering.What is driving the most debt? The issue where Republicans now agree with Democrats: socialized medicine. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is now bashing the Freedom Caucus for opposing the key element of Obamacare responsible for driving up the cost of insurance, thereby generating the massive spending and the monopoly created by the health care industry.Health care is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Federal spending on health care (not including state expenditures) is projected to be $17 trillion over the next 10 years, dwarfing the cost of Social Security and the military. By 2047, health care spending will be about 25 percent greater than the insolvent and crushing cost of Social Security. As such, health care in itself is the largest driver of the other great crisis, as noted: the mushrooming cost of the interest on the debt itself. Health care spending alone will be greater than all the revenue from payroll taxes and corporate income taxes combined and almost as large as individual income tax revenue.This is all going to the creation of a monopoly in a circuitous death spiral of price inflation and increased government spending. It’s no mystery why our national expenditures on health care have popped from $27 billion in 1960 to over $3.3 trillion today. Assuming health care would rise at the same rate as the rest of the economy, that number would be under $250 billion today. If we flushed $1.6 trillion down the toilet every year, we’d come out with a better result because we’d just waste money. Now, we are taking that wasted money and artificially inflating the cost of health care to the point that nobody can afford it without government continuing the death spiral of spending, monopolizing, and price inflation.Yet Republicans have acquiesced to every degree of this baseline and are only debating how much more socialized medicine they will countenance while fake-fighting the rest. Then they will say we have to agree to the new socialized medicine in order to fight the next plan. Rinse and repeat.Now, instead of looking to cut spending elsewhere, Republican senators met with Ivanka Trump to see how they can create a new entitlement of paid family leave like they have in Europe, but of course without adding to the deficit and distorting our job market! They will find a “conservative way” to agree to Democrats.With the deficits for FY 2019 skyrocketing just as much as the illegal immigration numbers, at some point conservatives need to asses their rate of return on the Republican Party.
Yes, I always vote Republican. What realistic options does one have? But I am starting to think about this rate of return thing.
Nary a word about Trump's revenue reductions, huh?
ReplyDeleteMaybe you missed this part of the linked piece:
ReplyDeleteLet it be known for all of time that dire predictions of revenue slumping as a result of the tax cuts were fake news. The entirety of the current deficit problem is due to increased spending. According to the latest monthly report released by the Treasury Department yesterday, spending was up 9.6 percent for the first three months of fiscal year 2019 relative to the first three months of FY 2018. What about revenues? They actually rose slightly by 0.2 percent, despite some declines in certain revenue categories. This is an important statistic, because it is the first clean metric we have comparing a period of time with the tax cuts in full implementation to a period before the tax cuts.
Moreover, some of the increased tax revenue from more payroll taxes likely would not have occurred without the job creation spawned by the tax cuts. If you isolate the revenue tallies for individual and corporate taxes, the government obviously did lose some revenue in certain categories, but it was made up by a $15 billion increase in payroll tax revenue (FICA, Social Security taxes), in addition to increased revenue from excise taxes.
Didn't read the linked article.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, it's not what I have been reading. I've read stuff like this:
ReplyDelete"But President Trump has quickened the rate at which the debt is growing by widening the deficit to finance his $1.5 trillion package of sweeping tax cuts, called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Congress passed in 2017.
Trump promised these tax cuts would pay for themselves by spurring on economic activity, but revenues have since stalled.
Moreover, the Bipartisan Budget Act 2018 lifted a number of spending caps on the government.
Federal spending by the Trump administration is around 6.6 percent higher than it was before he took office, equating to around $255 billion.
It is “largely owing to this massive fiscal stimulus” in both acts, Daco said, that the debt is growing at a faster rate again. In 2017, the national debt grew by 4 percent, according to CBO data, which excludes intragovernmental holdings. By the following year, Trump’s second in charge, this had accelerated to 7 percent.
It’s a similar story with the deficit. When Trump was elected in 2016, the size of the deficit measured as a portion of GDP was 3.2 percent. By the end of 2018 this had increased to 3.9 percent despite a period of strong economic growth.
Ashworth told Newsweek the deficit is expected to hit 4.2 percent in 2019. It is on course to reach a nominal value of $1 trillion by the end of the year.
“That increase comes despite the economy doing well and the unemployment rate declining. So, yes, it can be attributed largely to the tax cuts, which clearly aren’t paying for themselves, as most professional economists warned,” he said."
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-tax-cuts-deficit-debt-22-trillion-1331623
The idea that tax cuts need to "pay for themselves" is nothing short of obscene. I realize this is a reiteration of a point I make often, but it is no less true for the frequency of its assertion: government ought to have to puke all over itself to justify taking one red cent from any of us.
ReplyDelete44% of Americans already pay no federal income taxes at all. Amazon didn't pay any either.
ReplyDeleteWe were well on our way to reducing the deficit under Obama.
ReplyDeleteObama is a hardcore radical socialist who once said, "At some point, a person has made enough money."
ReplyDelete"The Republicans, supposedly the green-eyeshade party that Americans trust to handle the economy, are at best a pack of incompetents and at worst a gang of swindlers. Their landmark tax overhaul, supposedly the pinnacle of their efforts, is an incoherent and contradictory mess. And its results keep getting worse and worse."
ReplyDeletehttps://theweek.com/articles/822464/gops-tax-cut-just-keeps-getting-worse