Deficit spending: the elephant in the political room

[tagryn]

From this Sunday's Washington Post, some straight talk about the budget deficit and how neither candidate is really talking about it. Frankly, I think this is one of the most disappointing things about the current Administration; at least in the past you could count on the GOP to be for cutting budgets and fiscal responsibility. Having a POTUS who was willing to expand spending a lot + a Congress who rubber-stamped everything (and vice-versa) got us where we are today. If Obama gets in it may get substantially worse than if McCain gets in, since the former will have a heavily Democratic Congress to work with, while McCain will likely have to compromise with the opposite party to get anything through, which in the past has been an arrangement which curtailed the worst abuses.

Comments

[erikred.livejournal.com]

>.<

Your last statement implies that the best we can hope for is to prevent whichever candidate gets elected from spending too much money. I think the better thing to hope for is a candidate who practices a certain frugality; cutting the tax cuts pushed through by Bush and pulling our troops out of Iraq would go a long way toward that.

I think the most important thing to note here is that neither candidate is a tax-and-spend tool of Halliburton and the oil companies. Once we get that monkey off our back (and out of office), I think you'll see a marked improvement.

[tagryn]

Hope is good, but as the saying goes, "hope is not a plan." I fully expect the money to just get transferred from Republican special interests to Democratic special interests, rather than any actual spending reform being practiced.

I actually trust Obama's integrity (his hangers-on less so), but I think he's severely underestimating how much work reforming Washington will involve, and the experienced hands he'll be facing will run circles around him while he's figuring out how exactly to wield what influence he does have. As I said in the post, I think having a Congress which signed off on a lot of stuff from POTUS which they should have done more oversight over was a prescription for disaster, and flipping the axis to get another situation with a President and Congress dominated by the same party is just asking for more of the same.

Not surprisingly, I think McCain can actually work out more balanced legislation with Congress because of his history of working across the aisle & simply because he'll be forced to work with the other party if he wants to get anything done, since the Democrats should have a commanding lead in both houses of Congress after this election. The split-government worked fairly well for Clinton and the Gingrich Congress once they actually grew up and figure out how to work together.

It'll be "interesting" either way, since we're going to be getting a sitting Senator as POTUS for the first time in a long time (since JFK?) rather than the succession of state governors that have dominated the executive office in modern times.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Deficit spending is not the problem; the size of the deficit is, and the things the spending has purchased.

[tagryn]

Agreed, though when the deficit is this large, more deficit spending probably isn't the best way to dig out of the hole.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Well, nothing we can do at this point will NOT be deficit spending, sadly. We now owe something more than one year's GNP for the USA. It'll be a couple decades digging out from under this one, just as it was with Vietnam, but without the benefit of the surge of productivity and growth from the baby boom.

I think it'll be more a question of focussed, careful spending that will fix things. We've had about 30 years of a (mostly)( Republican-dominated Congress who all swallowed the voodoo economics kool-ade, and they still seem to be swigging the stuff down.