Poll of Obama voters show split on deficit

[TheWalrus]

Fair? Who determines what is fair? What's the standard?

Everybody has their opinion. Then there's debate. Then policy is set. I'm fighting for what I believe is fair in principle.

[Statler Waldorf]

Everybody has their opinion. Then there's debate. Then policy is set. I'm fighting for what I believe is fair in principle.

So it’s completely arbitrary? So a person who thinks the wealthy in this country pay more than their “fair share” as it is now are just as correct as you are? Do you think it is immoral for someone who doesn’t pay any share to be determining how much someone else must give up of their own share?

[TheWalrus]

So it’s completely arbitrary? So a person who thinks the wealthy in this country pay more than their “fair share” as it is now are just as correct as you are? Do you think it is immoral for someone who doesn’t pay any share to be determining how much someone else must give up of their own share?

You consistently use the word arbitrary wrong. It's not a random choice, made for no reason. I have my reasons. Someone else can have theirs.

As for your last point: that's what democracies do. The population as a whole by vote or by choice of leaders sets policy that might only affect a portion of the population.

[Dolphins9954]

This is all a circus. Obama ISN"T going to cut military spending on any significant level at all. He's proposed cuts to projected spending increases. Which Romney like a tool used as an example of Obama "gutting" the military. But the fact is base line budgets for the military will still go up. 4 years of Obama has seen the biggest military budgets since WW2. It will be 4 years of the same bloated budgets no matter what. Especially with Obama and Hillary using the WMD card yesterday on Syria. And the always possible war with Iran. Mark my words more wars are coming.

[Dolphins9954]

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[Dogbone34]

Obama retired last month.

You didn't really think he had any more game other than debt spending and taxes.

[cbreeden]

Just repealing the Bush tax cuts is worth $100 billion a year, which is only the beginning of the argument on where tax rates should be, imo. Corporate taxes and capital gains taxes also need to increase. Even if you subscribe to the notion of the Laffer Curve, it's clear we passed the point of maximized revenues quite a ways back.

The biggest driver of the debt is health care costs. The fact that Medicare covers health care is secondary to the root of the problem. Hopefully the provisions of Obamacare will work as intended and help reduce the cost of health care, though I believe a single payer system would have been far better. As Crazy685 has posted, health insurance companies engage in outright fraud and fee manipulation and make just absurd amounts of money in the process, ripping off their customers and doctors alike.

Reigning them in is the best way to solve the problem in a non single payer environment, imo. Cutting people from the Medicare rolls or reducing their coverage is not.

It's actually only $80B and has nothing to do with deficit reduction. The House is seeking to keep the tax cuts but they are so minimal it will do nothing to stimulate the economy. So as 9954 has said it is status quo and not much, if anything will change. Even the National Governors Association who met with Obama agreed that "something has to be done". Are you ****ing kidding me?!? Ya think??? This is the perfect example of a lack of leadership at every major level of government. It's sickening.

[TheWalrus]

It's actually only $80B and has nothing to do with deficit reduction.

Upon further reading the numbers are more complicated that what I indicated, but why do you believe raising taxes would not have an impact on the deficit?

The House is seeking to keep the tax cuts but they are so minimal it will do nothing to stimulate the economy. So as 9954 has said it is status quo and not much, if anything will change.

9954 always says that. In fact, he says nothing else, which is why I have him on ignore. Yet he also seems to bemoan the loss of some past America where things didn't used to be this way, which sets up sort of an odd paradox. If nothing changes, then why are things so different from how they used to be?

Now, here's a good blog post (written last year) which talks about some of the mechanics of taxes and debt from a "Research Fellow at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics" (at least, that's what his bio says).

How big are the Bush Tax cuts? There is some confusion about these numbers. The right uses wildly overstated supply-side arguments to claim that Bush tax cuts didn’t cost anything while the left uses accounting tricks to inflate numbers and to claims that the tax cuts are the main cause of the deficit.

There are two tricks to be aware of.

1. Don’t confuse the “Bush Tax Cuts” with “Bush Tax Cuts For The Rich”. Obama’s plan to repeal the Bush Tax Cuts only for those making $250.000 per year will raise one quarter as much revenue as the entire tax cut.

2. Don’t accept analyses which add the AMT-fix to the Bush-tax cuts. This is an accounting trick. Every modern administration, including Obama, passes an AMT-fix. The Alternative Minimum Tax was designed not to allow the rich to use too many deductions, but wasn’t inflation indexed. Therefore in order to prevent it from hurting the middle class each administration has to pass a law postponing it.

Over the next
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, the Total Bush tax cuts reduce revenue by about 1.7% of GDP per year (0.4% of which represents tax cuts for the rich). During this period the deficit is expected to average about 6.7% of GDP.

Over ten years, the deficit is expected by the
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to be about $13 trillion dollars. Repealing the Bush tax cuts on the rich as President Obama proposes will raise $0.7 trillion. Repealing *all* Bush tax cuts would raise $3.3 trillion. In addition, if all tax cuts are repealed, the U.S will save $0.7 trillion in interests on debt.

The Bush tax cuts on the rich (the part Obama wants to repeal) barely makes a dent on the deficit. If you include the cuts for the middle class the Bush tax cuts is a non-negligible cause of the deficit, but even then not the main cause.

Yet the left often inflates the role of the tax cuts, I suppose in order to give the impression that easy choices can fix the deficit. CNN;s
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for instance claimed recently that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire would:

“provide the federal government with $3.9 trillion in revenues over the next decade and basically solve the deficit problem.”

Fareed Zakaria’s revenue numbers are somewhat incorrect. I think he is mixing increased revenue with reduced deficits (which is not a major error, since he is concerned with the deficit, not revenue, though he writes "revenues").

Another example of exaggerated numbers is Obama former car szar
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who claimed yesterday that tax cuts represented $400 billion of the current deficit. The figure for 2011 is less than half of that. My guess is that he includes the AMT fix, the Obama payroll tax cuts and some other accounting tricks to arrive at this inflated figure.

Zakaria’s claim - common among the left - that the Bush tax cuts would “basically solve the deficit problem” is an exaggeration, seventy percent of the ten year deficit and an even larger part of the long term deficit would remain even should all Bush tax cuts be repealed, since the main cause of the fiscal imbalance is expanding expenditure as a share of GDP.

For the long term deficit the Bush tax cuts are even less important. The tax cuts represent about 1.7% of GDP in increased revenue per year, while the federal deficit on its current path is projected to explode to above 10% of GDP by 2026.

Let me finish by citing the Congressional Research Service:

“The Obama Administration has proposed allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for high income taxpayers and permanently extending the tax cuts for middle class taxpayers….this proposal is projected to increase tax revenues by … $678 billion over 10 years, but still leaves federal debt on an unsustainable path.”

The link:
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Not being an economist myself it's hard to check on the veracity of all these claims, but taken as a whole this does have the proverbial stink of truth.

One thing I think needs to be kept in perspective relative to the debt is that we are still only just coming out of a severe economic depression. That kind of downturn -- which reduces tax receipts -- combined with more than 60 or maybe even 70% of the budget already allocated to fixed costs, is always going to lead to a ballooning debt.

The upside is that as the economy improves, which everyone thinks it will, a portion of this problem will fix itself.

[GoFins!]

You could tax rich people into oblivion....until the idiots we seat in washington reign in spending, we will never fix our problems.

This.

[GoFins!]

Indeed. Too bad there isn't a way to change the tax code to make it more fair.

Anything other than a flat tax, by definition, is unfair.

Thirty years of low taxes for the rich haven't stopped factories from closing up and jobs from being shipped overseas, so what the hell are you talking about?

Paying a higher percentage than everyone else is not a good definition of "low" taxes. Using that way of thinking we could bump up the tax on the rich to 100% for a few years and then "lower" it 99% and tell them all what a great deal they're getting.

As well as being one of the more regulated countries in the world, our taxes on business are among the highest in the world too. Our labor costs are very high compared to many other countries as well.