Paul: We dont have a revenue problem, we have spending problem

The revenue problem is completely due to VRWC/Repug:

unfunded Medicare Part D + Advantage

unfunded Iraq + Afganistan

unfunded tax cuts and tax expenditures for the UCA and 1%.

Repug regs disallowing "govt as single buyer" negotations with BigPharma and BigMedDefices

The rise is Medicare/Medicaid spending is due to the sick care industry charging exorbitant prices and raising prices many percent over inflation, for decades, "because they can" to everybody, not just Baby Boomers.

the annual deficit and national debt are all made worse by the above.

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Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

Historical average is something like 18.3%. That cherry picked set of years was unusual growth for this nation.

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Pointed out and contextualized at the link. Do you read anything, WC?

The growth of health care spending and runaway debt make a reversion to the historical norm untenable, the argument goes, roughly.

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Originally Posted by boutons_deux

The revenue problem is completely due to VRWC/Repug:

unfunded Medicare Part D + Advantage

unfunded Iraq + Afganistan

unfunded tax cuts and tax expenditures for the UCA and 1%.

Repug regs disallowing "govt as single buyer" negotations with BigPharma and BigMedDefices

The rise is Medicare/Medicaid spending is due to the sick care industry charging exorbitant prices and raising prices many percent over inflation, for decades, "because they can" to everybody, not just Baby Boomers.

the annual deficit and national debt are all made worse by the above.

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LOL this is like saying my family's revenue problem is due to us buying the Ferrari last year. Who the fuck told you to buy a Ferrari?

This is what happens when you approve budgets knowing you will have a deficit and not giving a shit about it. None of these expenses (Iraq, medicaid) should have been approved with a responsible government.

BTW, Ron Paul is not talking about the recent 10 years or so. he is talking about the recent 60-50 years. He is saying we've had this problem for that long.

In that period we went from a prosperous state to a welfare/warfare state.

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In that period we went from a prosperous state to a welfare/warfare state.

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Murray Rothbard, who coined the term, died in 1995.

We've been a warfare-welfare state since WWII, tbh.

your grasp of history is notably weak, El Che

"we went from a prosperous state to a welfare/warfare state"

He's full of bullshit. America is extremely wealthy, but the wealth has been aggressively and continuously redistributed from the 99% to the 1%, so that the 99% are much poorer and declining, esp the 70%.

Paul's bullshit policies would do nothing to solve that problem and everything to worsen it (and he knows it).

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Originally Posted by boutons_deux

"we went from a prosperous state to a welfare/warfare state"

He's full of bullshit. America is extremely wealthy, but the wealth has been aggressively and continuously redistributed from the 99% to the 1%, so that the 99% are much poorer and decliing, esp the 70%.

Paul's bullshit policies would do nothing to solve that problem and everything to worsen it (and he knows it).

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you couldn't be more wrong.

No candidate is better at fighting redistribution of wealth than Ron Paul.

The banker bailouts is the biggest crime committed to the american people in recent years. that is flagrant redistribution of wealth. This would have never happened under Ron Paul's watch. Subsidies to foreign companies. Foreign aid. Wars. All this shit, Ron Paul would end on day 1.

[Crony capitalists are the ones] that benefit from contract from government, benefit from the Federal Reserve, benefit from all the bailouts. They don’t deserve compassion. They deserve taxation or they deserve to have all their benefits removed.

But crony capitalism isn’t when someone makes money and they produce a product …. That is very important. We need to distinguish the two. And unfortunately I think some people mix that. - Ron Paul

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“I do agree that there’s a mal-distribution in wealth in this country,” the Texas congressman told reporters at an event sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, where he served up some boilerplate libertarian philosophy about reigning in the Federal Reserve, allowing Greece to go bankrupt and making the free market drive down costs on medical care like it has driven down costs on TVs and cellphones.
Paul, who is in the midst of his third and most notable run for the presidency since 1988, said proposals such as president Obama’s to levy new taxes on the wealthy result because Americans don’t understand what causes that “mal-distribution.”
“We’ve consumed our wealth,” he said, pointing to the national debt and adding that the knee-jerk reaction is to “spend more, regulate more, print more money.”
“Entitlements,” he said, “end up going to the rich anyway.”
Paul isn’t even entirely against a little class war. “Some of them should be attacked,” he said of the rich. “The ones who rip us off, the ones who get bailed out.”
And he assailed the suggestion that the government should invest in infrastructure to help end the economic crisis. “The government and the people are supposed to spend more money when the problem is spending too much money,” he said.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics...tate-kucinich/

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Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

Historical average is something like 18.3%. That cherry picked set of years was unusual growth for this nation.

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It's not cherry-picked. He clearly identified it as years with a balanced budget.

lrn2read.

Oh, we DEFINITELY have a revenue problem now...

That problem, however, was created by our SPENDING problem.

All the medicare and SS money paid into the "trust fund" was thrown into the general revenue fund and pissed off years ago...

On top of this, we couldn't stay within our budgets even WITH stealing all the money from the "trust fund" and continued to borrow money from the private sector and abroad and run deficits.

It was great politics and horrible economics. Something for nothing. You never get a hangover if you never quit drinking.

Now that the time is coming to pay those baby boomers real dollars for real benefits all we have to pay these benefits are fucking IOU's we wrote to ourselves and mountains of additional outside debt.

exactly what I said. So silly to say we have both, so let's raise taxes and not cut a dime.

It's like me going to my boss and saying, dear boss, my wife has been maxing out my credit card every month for the last few years. So you see, I have a revenue problem. Can I get a raise? :rollin

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Originally Posted by CosmicCowboy

Oh, we DEFINITELY have a revenue problem now...

That problem, however, was created by our SPENDING problem.

All the medicare and SS money paid into the "trust fund" was thrown into the general revenue fund and pissed off years ago...

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*cough* Bush/Obama tax cuts *cough*

*cough* off the books funding for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan *cough*

healthcare = wife + credit card?

Metaphor fail.

the worst recession since the 1930's may also have something to do with the revenue problem

stealing all the money from the "trust fund"

it's not stealing, any more than SS is an entitlement. SS is obligated to loan its cash to the govt, buy bonds, which aren't IOUs, and won't be defaulted on anymore than the US govt will default bonds sold to other bond holders like wealthy Americans and foreign/sovereign govts (like China).

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Originally Posted by boutons_deux

stealing all the money from the "trust fund"

it's not stealing, any more than SS is an entitlement. SS is obligated to loan its cash to the govt, buy bonds, which aren't IOUs, and won't be defaulted on anymore than the US govt will default bonds sold to other bond holders like wealthy Americans and foreign/sovereign govts (like China).

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Hey dumbass...where does the money have to come from to pay those IOU's? There are only two ways...

REVENUE OR MORE IOU's.

In order to have the revenue to pay the bonds you not only have to eliminate annual deficits but RUN A CURRENT REVENUE SURPLUS...

Fat chance of THAT ever happening...

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Originally Posted by TeyshaBlue

healthcare = wife + credit card?

Metaphor fail.

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Today, the Real Economy Project of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released an assessment of the total cost to taxpayers of the Wall Street bailout. CMD concludes that multiple federal agencies have disbursed $4.6 trillion dollars in supporting the financial sector since the meltdown in 2007-2008. Of that, $2 trillion is still outstanding. Our tally shows that the Federal Reserve is the real source of the bailout funds.

http://www.prwatch.org/node/8987

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Originally Posted by El Che

So silly to say we have both, so let's raise taxes and not cut a dime.

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Board realists who say we have both are on record saying we we need to raise taxes and cut services. Raising taxes only addresses the revenue problem.

medicaid/medicare spending increases mirror the increases of all health spending, because the sick-care system is ripping off America with exorbitant prices, the rip-off being much more dominant factor than the Hitler's demographic bump of the baby boomers.

Anybody heard the docs scream blood murder when faced with a 27% cut in reimbursements, which has been postponed for the past several years?

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Originally Posted by Winehole23

Pointed out and contextualized at the link. Do you read anything, WC?

The growth of health care spending and runaway debt make a reversion to the historical norm untenable, the argument goes, roughly.

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I pointed it out for those who don't. It did say something like the average was below 20%. I forget the exact wording, but the part you quoted would imply to many readers the 20% average was sustainable.

"We dont have a revenue problem, we have spending problem"

babbling nothing but the VRWC/Repug sound bites for his ignorant sheeple bubba fucktards.

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Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

I pointed it out for those who don't. It did say something like the average was below 20%. I forget the exact wording, but the part you quoted would imply to many readers the 20% average was sustainable.

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That you jumped to conclusions doesn't make that a plausible inference. I posted the link, why didn't you follow it to see the context of the graph? That's on you, not me.

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Originally Posted by Winehole23

That you jumped to conclusions doesn't make that a plausible inference. I posted the link, why didn't you follow it to see the context of the graph? That's on you, not me.

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I did follow the link. What is said when read was right in my view. Like I said, the graph without context implies otherwise.

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9. Within the decade – if current policies stay in place – revenues will return to their historical levels, but not beyond. Even if the 2001, 2003, and 2010 tax cuts are extended, as they are in the AFS, revenues are projected to rise from 16.1 percent of GDP in 2012 to 18.0 percent in 2017, and then remain roughly at that level for the remainder of the decade. This approximates the average U.S. revenue level in the modern era. [Average of 18.3%]

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The four balanced budgets in recent times have come at revenue levels between 19.5 and 20.6 percent of GDP. We will need to at least enter that range if we hope to stabilize the debt, particularly with the demographic tidal wave that inevitably will add a heavy burden to the federal budget.

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And maintaining that range is not plausible.