Bowles: “The Era of Deficit Denial Is Over”

We can tell the era of deficit denial is over by the 3.7 trillion dollars the two parties are about to add to the deficit for tax cuts.

Mean while Billions are down the drain in Iraq and Afghanistan. Billions! But keep choking that chicken.

They must think everyone is as stupid as members of the media, who keep spreading this propaganda.

It’s December Fool’s Day eve.

But the era of deficit denial is still strong; the proposition is to slam poor and elderly with a sledgehammer while giving more money to rich people through tax cuts. If that’s not complete denial then I don’t know what is.

Cutting deep in programs such as social security just to cut that tax and then cut the tax even more is fiscal irresponsibility in its highest order.

What do we want? Do we want a strong middle class that can buy the stuff companies make so people can get rich or do we want to go the way of the Roman Empire, concentrate all our riches amongst the upper crust so no one can afford to buy anything anymore and p!ss our resources away ‘defending’ whats left of our nation?

Are we really that stupid? When did tax in order to reinvest into our country to make it strong become some kind of socialist tool? And when did we reinvent deficit fundamentals to say that the only way we can prosper and dig ourself out of the economy is to destroy the middle that can actually do it.

Michael, dude, it’s ERSKINE Bowles, not Irskine. Ain’t it obvious? You must NOT be from the South. You northerners / east coasters sure spell names funny.

“But Bowles said that, whatever happens, the commission will have achieved “victory” by starting a national conversation about the federal debt. “The era of deficit denial in Washington is over,” the North Carolinian and former Clinton White House chief of staff drawled.”
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What an idiot. “Washington” has been obsessed over deficits since its founding (including the original Washington, George). I’ve personally witnessed deficit politics both sublime and ridiculous, through at least eight administrations – all of the ones I’ve observed, in fact. Only the Republicans have been in denial about deficits and always while they’re driving them to unsustainable levels for no good reason.

whoopsie — how… erksome! thanks

Deficit? What deficit? So long as the wealthy get tax cuts, the deficit is of no consequence. Worry over excessive spending only occurs when it is time to take care of the poor and middle class.
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Bush gave the wealthy some of the largest tax cuts in history and it led us into a financial meltdown. Now the right-wingers would have us believe that tax cuts help to stimulate the economy. But extend unemployment benefits to those people out of work through no fault of their own? Only if those benefits are paid for with cuts somewhere else.

“I’ve personally witnessed deficit politics both sublime and ridiculous, through at least eight administrations – all of the ones I’ve observed, in fact”
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Dude, where you sentient during Nixon?
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He was president when I was born but…

“Dude, where you sentient during Nixon?
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He was president when I was born but…”
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I actually started paying attention during the Johnson Administration – seemed like there were some big goings on. I may have been a little precocious then but am definitely too old for “Dude” now.

Well said.
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How Republicans can insist they want to lower the deficit while advocating more of the taxcut-fairy nonsense that created most of the current deficit is beyond me. I guess I don’t spend enough time watching Republican Pravda over at Fox News.

Of course tax cuts for the rich stimulate the economy.
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You just have to ignore all the empirical evidence from when Republicans tried it in the mid-1920s and brought on the Great Depression, or when the Republicans tried it in the early 1980s and spiked unemployment to 10%, or when the Republicans tried it in the 2000s and brought on the Great Recession.
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And once you’ve turned a blind eye to the cold, hard evidence that shows that tax cuts for the rich are a disastrous policy for the economy as a whole, then you just need to be told that Arthur Laffer drew a line on a cocktail napkin that makes everything all right.
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It really makes a lot of sense if you don’t think about it.

What is even more amazing is how the MSM let them get away with it, without ever questioning the premise. Does reality not have any impact on journalism these days? One might be able to justify the tax cut extensions, if they were accompanied by a rational fiscal policy. But fiscal policy is now considered equivalent to communism. Obviously, the tax cuts are in effect right now. How is that working out with respect to job creation? The really depressing thing is watching the spineless Democratic Party capitulate to the stupidity.

For me, awakening came during the Carter admin. And if it worked for Lebowski (Bridges b. ’49), it can work for you brah

isn’t there some space somewhere in this story to point out that the Commission has utterly failed? It was supposed to deliver, by December 1, the essence of a bill that could be presented to the Senate, and then House, for an up or down vote.
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As atrios, among others have noted, it’s easy to throw together a bunch of deficit reduction ideas. What’s hard is to produce a collection of legislative measures that will receive enough support to pass both Houses of Congress, and get signed by the president.
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The idea of these commissions, as with military base closure commissions, is to take the politics out of the process and to focus on policy matters–to end bad policy (close useless bases) that only exist to serve a narrow constituency, to the detriment of the country.
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This Catfood Commission has operated in exactly the opposite way–going well beyond its deficit cutting brief–to make the process of deficit cuts even more politicized than it was before they started meeting.
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Chalk up another policy, and management, failure to the Oval Office. This is, after all, Obama’s commission.

A honcho from the Heritage Foundation was interviewed on our local NPR station today. He justifies the over-250 tax cuts on the grounds that rich people will create jobs, which will increase payroll taxes and income taxes, which will balance the amount “lost” to the budget from the tax cuts, and make for a more vibrant economy.
He also said that business leaders are not hiring now, even though they’re sitting on piles of money, because they’re afraid of what the health care regs will do to the payroll taxes they’ll have to pay. Plus they need the tax cut money to continue so they can afford to hire more people.
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Makes sense, right?

There has been an empirical experiment going on for the last decade, where the rich have had those tax cuts, including a long period of time before health reform. In that time, the economy never reached Bill Clinton’s worst month of job creation, even though 2 or 3 of the largest tax cuts in history were enacted. Those are the facts, that is reality and the rest are lies, unquestioned lies. The media’s approach to the lies is analogous to all those stupid ghost shows that pollute the TV. They never question whether ghosts exist, they only wonder how many will show up. They can keep digging through the manure looking for the pony, for the next decade, and it will not create jobs. I don’t doubt that they will, so we need to brace ourselves for massive unemployment for a very long time.