thanks to republicans and especially those tea party terrorists, theyre ruining the country. i think thats what they want to do, they want to make things as bad as they can so they can blame Obama and they dont care how many peoples savings they ruin. honestly, they are probably laughing about it.....to people like this they see it as a perk I bet.

I am pretty sure that there is enough blame to go around. This whole mess didn't start in the past 2 years, or even in the past 20 years. Our government has been working for big business and banks for a long time, and they've been running up debt for over 30 years. Now, the oligarchs are running the country.

This current batch of representatives wasn't even born when congress sold our financial future to the big bankers. Furthermore, our trusted representatives have been borrowing from our "retirement trust fund" since it's inception back in 1939. If our government were run by the same laws governing private pensions plans, that would be illegal.

Don't be duped by the pundits, do some research and think for yourself. The US Government hasn't been working for the people of this country for a long, long time. It doesn't matter which side of the isle they were sitting on.

I always sort of stay out of politics but our Government has done this for years. This didn't happen overnight. 50 cents out of taxed dollar go to Social Security and Medicare. We have a huge bloated government that needs to be required to have a balanced budget amendment.

I like the trick. The Bankers passed their debt onto the governments, so now all their debt is public debt. Then they go and hold governments to ransom over it.

They're a shower of criminals.

The democrats like Nancy Pelosi, they were trying they were trying so hard. they wanted to save the world from this nazi Rethuglican budget. but the maniacal Tea Party freshmen are trying to burn down the House they were elected to serve in. Its what they want. Its a dictatorship. All those Tea Party fascists need to be removed from office and thrown in jail.

you know really when you think about it, this sick terrorist group the Tea Party is like a modern day Klu Klux Klan. honestly, probably a lot worse. just as racist but even more maniacle and the way they have those idiots in the GOP wrapped around their fingers must makes them dangerous. History will look back at them and put them in the same grouping as the Nazis, I know it. the Tea Party is just getting started and by the end they might just end up as worse than them. really we dont know what these sick screwheads are doing behind closed doors. maybe they are plotting or starting their own sick kind of racist cleansing. we all know they hate blacks and mexicans, how soon before they start acting in full force on thier hate??

Pie Peter,

You better check into a detox program. The Tea Party are the group of people who realize the trouble the country is in and are bold enough to stand up against the status quo to do something about it.

I quit following the "mainstream" media because I found that most of it was a propaganda bandwagon. What "everyone" reports often isn't the truth, mostly because the "mainstream" has money riding on it.

You forget your history; the original Tea Party was a group of terrorists. So were our Founding Fathers. They killed and overthrew a government (a King; one man with absolute power) that only wanted more taxes, spent recklessly, and dictated every aspect of life, religion and freedom of though (SOUND FAMILIAR???).

History DOES repeat itself because the greedy and corrupt keep forgetting the bloody lessons!

By the way, Pie Peter, I watched the video of the Tea Party gathering in Washington DC last summer; there sure as hell were a LOT of BLACK people holding up signs! In fact, Alveda King, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's neice, was a KEYNOTE speaker.

Pie Peter, you better go find some facts, because what you've written up to this point makes you come across as someone spewing a mouthful of bullshit.

I think you have got it all backwards. You are the fascist for wanting to jail the dissenting voices. Those representative were elected by the people, with a specific mandate. I'm not taking sides here, but they were doing their jobs as elected representatives. Only a fascist would want to take away their voice.

There is a world of difference between standing up against a class of hereditary elites who keep getting richer and richer while the little guy enjoys no gains and standing up for a class of hereditary elites who keep getting richer and richer while the little guy enjoys no gains. The Tea Party is the antithesis of the Founding Fathers for that and many other reasons.

The extent of the national debt, at a figure approaching 1 year of GDP, was no more severe than the problem faced by a man with a $50,000 salary and a $50,000 mortgage. It only seemed like there was a crisis because a bunch of truly horrible human beings got an even larger bunch of truly idiotic human beings to believe there was something "unsustainable" about daring to borrow almost as much as one's annual income. "You couldn't do that in the private sector," they would insist, utterly ignorant of the fact that all sorts of private sector entities dive into debts that are high multiples of their annual capacity to be productive.

If the Tea Party was driven by people with 1/10,000th of the integrity and decency men like Washington and Jefferson exemplified, their agenda would be keenly focused on American demilitarization, aggressive distribution of wealth, and rigorous environmental protection. The honest American worker is not at all getting the shaft in terms of being overtaxed. He or she is being overburdened by ever more demanding workplace obligations paired up with ever diminishing purchasing power. All the growth in our "ownership society" is sucked out by do-nothing investors.

It may be fair to argue that financing an enterprise is valuable activity that merits compensation. It is at least as fair to argue that doing actual work is a valuable activity that merits compensation. For over 30 years, U.S. policy has reflected a firm belief in the first sentence of this paragraph while also reflecting a lack of support for the second assertion. Universal health care, a robust national pension, mandatory paid vacations, etc. -- we as a people are not too stupid or weak to make these things part of the American way of life. Alas, a subset of us is so stupid and weak as to believe a better future for working Americans is simply impossible (or alternatively, magical "job creators" will shit opportunity if only further tax cuts will enable them to be sufficiently overfed.)

As a result, what has been entirely uncontroversial progress for dozens of nations with abundant prosperity and growth becomes a raging firestorm of controversy over here. Until the kind of imbeciles who believe the "debt crisis" of late was not entirely manufactured by the personal irresponsibility of the House Republican Caucus stop voting, their dangerous follies will continue to plague us all. While they boldly take a stand in favor of more elderly beggars and more workplace absenteeism due to lack of access to health care, they obstruct basic responses to those sorts of problems while also occupying institutions that ought to be addressing some of our non-basic problems. The Tea Party is a blight on the nation, and it has already done severe long term harm to the American economy for no better reason than sheer petulance.

Regards,
messydom

So, you believe that all of the money we make belongs to the government and they are nice enough to share some with us? I think you are oversimplifying the situation. Even our foreign investors are becoming concerned about our increasing debt. The interest is becoming a burden to our economy. For one thing, we need to keep borrowing more money to pay the interest on what we owe. I think anyone who was in a situation where they didn't have enough income to pay the interest on their current debt would be in financial straights. Furthermore, growth of the debt is outstripping economic growth, so the situation will continue to get worse.

As I have said before, I'm not taking sides, but the situation is much more complex and dire than you describe.

Part 2: Ok, this is so ridiculous I have to comment again. The federal government's annual income is nowhere near 14 trillion dollars. It's not even 5% of that. Every single dime the government takes in from individual taxes goes to pay interest on the debt. The government has to take money from FICA to pay it's bills, and it has to borrow more money every year to keep up with it's obligations.

So, what you are saying is that there is nothing wrong with someone who has a $50,000 annual income having non-discretionary spending obligations of $75,000 per year. If the interest they were paying was 5% annually, it would be the equivalent of owing $1,000,000 and having interest payments of $50,000, in addition to their other financial obligations.

The gross domestic product is NOT, by any stretch equivalent to the government's annual income. You're lucky I am more polite than you are, or I would surely have some choice labels for you, for perpetuating such ignorance and calling anyone who disagrees with you an idiot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGlVhss6Gr4

 We as a society do have ~$14 trillion in income. Great men fought and died to be sure it would be the people choosing how much of the nation's wealth flowed through our government. It is indeed idiotic to suggest that the Founding Fathers put their lives on the line for lower taxes. The issue was "taxation without representation." We as a nation are hobbled by the stupidity of political activists who have reduced that concern to mere "taxation." In fact, it is more often simply "taxes" because a whopping three syllables is a grunt too far for simpletons consumed by the politics of fear and anger. Neither fear nor anger ever produce optimally rational results, yet they are the only driving forces behind Tea Party nincompoopery.

 One can certainly argue that 100% taxation is unsustainable. Does this invalidate the mortgage analogy? It is also the case that dedicating 100% of personal income to mortgage payments is unsustainable. A person's gotta eat. Even if our politics was not dominated by sleazy corporate players, there would still be no serious advocates for 100% taxation. 35% taxation on income earned after the first $250,000 per year -- that is an entirely different matter. Yet that is precisely the line the Tea Party's struggle is determined to hold. How dare anyone take 3% more from people who are already independently wealthy? Let's apply downward pressure to schoolteachers' salaries and make it more difficult for elderly folks to get medical care or retire with some shred of dignity, and then we'll really be on the road to greatness as a nation, right?

 There are plenty of ways to approach the problem of sustainability in federal spending. Personally I favor a 66% cut in military procurement. Presently the United States government spends roughly 6x what our nearest rival, China, spends on buying fancy toys for use by armed forces. Personally, I'm enough of a patriot to think that we could merely double the Chinese budget and still maintain eminence as the greatest military power on Earth. Are we really too stupid and weak as a people to succeed with only double the money of our nearest rival? One must believe the answer to that question is "yes" in order to support continued outlays at present levels. This 66% cut in the procurement budget not require cuts in military pay or benefits, but it would still save us ~$400 billion next year, and more in the years to follow. If the goal is to get $4 trillion in cuts over a ten year period, there is a fine place to achieve all of that, while still giving the Pentagon mountains of money with which to pursue the least useless of their ongoing Cold War uberweapon fantasies.

 Of course, we could also consider higher taxation. A Dutch entrepreneur is still able to pursue his or her dreams. Top Swiss executives still live like a class of aristocratic elites. In Denmark, small businesses still grow when their product is successful in the marketplace. The idea that socialist tax policy crushes capitalism is every bit as stupid as the idea that the politics of North Vietnam were a threat to the well-being of American capitalist enterprises. Capitalism is not some fragile little orchid that must be sheltered from every ideological impurity here or abroad. Generation after generation of the most stupid policy blunders, both foreign and domestic, stem from this notion that capitalism must be defended from "threats" like the rise of Marxism in a remote region of Southeast Asia or the push to include fair trade provisions (i.e. international environmental regulations and workplace safety laws) in pacts like NAFTA. If the loudest champions of capitalism were to stop imagining it as this frail little flower and start recognizing it as a robust and versatile paradigm, we in the United States could easily enjoy Scandinavian quality social and economic policies while sustaining levels of economic growth that were once the norm for our union.

 Instead we starve domestic demand while continuing to heap all the benefits of economic growth on elites now demonstrated by decades of history to be much better at hoarding and accumulating wealth than driving any sort of "trickle down" process. In any other nation on Earth, this is not controversial -- working people actually deserve a share of economic progress, and government action is an acceptable means of delivering that share when the marketplace fails to do so. What we have in the United States is a clear and long-standing failure of the market to make life better for the honest hard-working men and women of this country. What we have in the push for spending cuts during an interval of high unemployment is an effort -- either the cunning scheme of leaders who actually desire sustained weakness in the economy or the blundering rage of followers who don't understand how choking off demand will impede long term growth and ultimately drive up the deficit and debt -- an effort to make things worse for everybody except the beneficiaries of high end tax cuts. Of course, one could argue it will actually be worse for them too, because they still must pay their lower taxes in a less productive, sicker, poorer, and sadder society than they would otherwise inhabit.

 It is true that I do not share the "special understanding" that dittoheads and Fox News fans and other rubes out there have cultivated about American economics. This is not because I am ignorant or a purveyor of ignorance. It is because any overlap between the facts on the ground and the party line as articulated by Messrs. Limbaugh and O'Reilly is purely coincidental. Voices like that don't care about reality. They care about tapping into the fear and anger of large audiences because dark emotions create a bond that promotes viewer/listener loyalty. They don't want confident fearless people thinking rationally about politics. Confident fearless people pay no mind to the claptrap of uneducated windbags. The media business models of menaces like those two are heavily opposed to the best practices of good politics and good citizenship. So long as there are millions of people weak-minded enough to be preyed upon through the emotional channels of fear and hatred, those buffoons will continue to deliver massive audiences to their sponsors. We as a nation will continue to suffer from fearful and angry political rhetoric that crowds thoughtful and earnest political discourse right off the stage. ~$1 trillion in domestic non-military spending cuts in the midst of a period of high unemployment and slow growth is proof enough that this is the case today.

Regards,
messydom

Thank goodness I didn't have to start this thread,lol. You think things are bad now? Including the unfunded liabilities of SS,medicare,and medicaid,the debt to GDP is 788.5%!!!!!!!!

We have made too many promises we cannot keep. If we tax 100% of GDP (yeah right), it wouldn't be enough to cover what's ahead. We need tax hikes,but we really need to cut spending.

The REAL problem is the fact that we have lost our manufacturing base. Blame all parties for not giving enough earmarks to big corporations to keep jobs here. Who am I kidding? This is a complete joke. The reason why jobs are going overseas is because China is on average willing to work for 90% less than an american.

No, we do not. GDP is not the same as income. It is GROSS, not NET, and it includes some government spending. Furthermore, each county and state must also collect taxes to cover their budgets. Even if I worked for the sole purpose of paying taxes, and I did not need to eat or pay for a home, I would still have to divide my money between county, state and federal taxes, license fees, FICA, unemployment tax, and sales and use tax. Furthermore, my business income is less than 20% of gross output, which means I never even see 100% of my gross product. That 14 trillion dollar amount is no more a measure of potential federal government income than some number you just pulled out of your ass. The potential government IRS tax revenues might be enough to pay the interest on our debt and have a little left over, but the federal government is current spending my retirement income to supplement the general fund.

Let's get something straight. I don't watch Fox News or listen to Rush Limbaugh (sp?). I have know a little something about economics and I've been running a successful business for 18 years. I'm also very good at math, and I know that if I'm borrowing more money each month to keep up with my bills, I'm in trouble. Sure the federal government could stop giving money away to rich corporations (which would result in higher prices for consumers in some cases, but I'm still all for tax reform), and they can definitely cut back on military spending (that may be the smartest thing you said), but you cannot tell me that the debt is not a problem. I'm all for cutting military spending and eliminating tax loop holes for everyone -- across the board.

The Social Security administration has made it quite clear to me, in writing, that they will not be able to pay my pension when I retire. However, I am compelled to pay into the program, anyway. Considering that only the first $80K of income (or whatever the number is, now) is subject to Social Security tax, that's just a tax on lower and middle income people that rich people don't have to pay.

Oh, and don't assume I'm taking the side of republicans or the tea party. I'm not happy with anything our federal government has done in the past 20 years. I could go on for days about the criminal shit they've done. However, as I stated earlier in this thread, the tea party hasn't been around long enough to take credit for this situation. Our representatives are no longer representing our interests. They are spending us into oblivion while the banks get rich, and, in the end, we'll be left holding the bill with nothing to show for it.

 While it is true that Social Security is a long way away from the robust national pension plans societies like Germany and Japan provide for their citizens, I am not aware that the Social Security Administration has suggested to anyone that promised payments will not be forthcoming. The only real risk in that department involved getting enough irresponsible know-nothings like Rick Santorum or Michelle Bachmann into positions of power that the government makes a choice not to honor previously incurred obligations. As with the debt ceiling, there are plenty of other ways right-wing extremists would like to see our government take on the role of a deadbeat. However, the idea that these people have identified a real problem and are responding appropriately too that problem is no more sensible than the idea that a guy who doesn't pay his cable and electricity bills is behaving responsibly because he's identified the "problem" of not being able to go on a costly ski weekend with his buddies and decided the solution is to shirk pre-existing obligations.

 I can agree that public debt is not desirable. Though I didn't really give up on George W. Bush until he started to talk of invading Iraq within days of the 9-11 attacks, I certainly did not get a good feeling about his "we have to give the budget surplus back to the people" nonsense when addressing one of the few opportunities for actual debt reduction in my lifetime. I would be surprised if more than 1% of Tea Party activists voted for Al Gore or if fewer than 90% of those who did vote in 2000 did not cast a vote for George W. Bush. Yet these very same citizens were remarkably untroubled by his initial desire to avoid even a small amount of debt reduction with the initial conditions he inherited, never mind the gargantuan debt expansion underwent in no small part due to a pointless war of aggression coupled with an unholy alliance between corrupt Defense Department officials and corrupt government contractors. Even his singular attempt at actually helping the American people, Medicare Part D, was 10% actual help and 90% a publicly-financed windfall for major pharmaceutical corporations (some of which aren't even American and none of which had real need for the extra income.)

 One major difference between spending under President Obama and spending under his predecessor is this bogus "sky is falling" attitude a certain subset of activists take when a man of mixed race is signing the budget legislation. Yet another major difference is that, since 2008, there has been a real problem in need of a solution here. I support American military strength, and I would have no problem if our response to 20 men with boxcutters involved 40 men with assault rifles. However, a sensible response to Al Qaeada would have at most cost $1 billion or perhaps $2 billion if some allowance is made for corruption. Instead declaring a "global war on terror" and spending a full $1 trillion while incurring another trillion or more in future costs was inexcusable. This is not because $1 trillion is a very big number and we should all be scared of it. Rather it is because that $1 trillion was directed at a "problem" that was entirely the fabrication of paranoid right-wing incompetents.

 Unemployment near 10% and growth alarmingly close to 0% is not a problem that exists only in the minds of ideological extremists and their ignorant admirers. It is a real problem that can and should be addressed by real action. Alas, still hamstrung by know-nothings with fantasies about tax cuts as the cure for everything from sagging capital markets to broken bones, even the much-maligned stimulus package we got was dominated by tax cuts. We can never know precisely what would have followed if the economy of early 2009 was pushed forward by demand-side stimulus spending of a scale proportionate to the problem at hand, but we can know that other nations facing low-growth high-unemployment scenarios that did implement appropriately large stimulus measures wound up bringing unemployment back down to traditional norms while growth rose up toward traditional norms. None of us who favor sensible economic policy can guarantee it would have worked in this instance, but I can say with absolute confidence that it would have been nice to have at least tried to fix the problem with real and serious efforts.

 Instead we see half the nation still suckered into believing that the real problem is that we didn't cut taxes enough or that the real problem is we don't compel the least shrewd investors amongst our senior citizens to get their meals by dumpster diving! Entitlements much grander than anything ever implemented on American shores can be sustained. In fact, they have been sustained by dozens of prosperous nations -- not just two or three of Europe's least well-managed economies, but also those economic dynamos responsible for bailing out Greece, Ireland, et al. If the American entrepreneur and America's largest enterprises could not possibly endure such horrors as an end to the tax credit for private jet ownership or a rise in the top marginal tax rate to 35%, what does that say about how profoundly inferior they are to German entrepreneurs or France's largest enterprises? At what point will we stop acting like our own business leaders are a bunch of incompetent morons and start looking to them to pull their weight in the national economy at least as well as their European counterparts do without complaint? What makes our business community suck so much more, both at creating jobs in the extremely low-tax high-profit conditions at present and at being responsible in the debate about possible tax increases, than their Old World counterparts?

 Again, I believe a large public debt is not desirable. However, I also believe America suffers much more greatly for the Chicken Little histrionics of ignorant activists than for the actual costs of the underlying debt. The only "crisis" we experienced this summer was a crisis of idiocy as the most irresponsible class of Representatives since the Secessionists arbitrarily manufactured a crisis that has since done real and serious harm to the entire American economy. To characterize those moral monsters as having identified a serious problem and stepped up with responsible solutions is to describe conditions precisely the opposite of reality. They took a legitimate concern and recast it as a source of imminent doom, then they childishly insisted that they would bring about this doom unless they got what they wanted in terms of an agenda that need never have been linked to (and never previously was linked to) debt ceiling legislation. In the end, paying down the debt will now be much more difficult, much more expensive, because of their abominable antics. It is downright treacherous to show even a little support for this kind of behavior on the national stage.

 I will grant that a long term approach to dealing with the debt deserves attention. Assuming the business cycle ever gets back around to something more boom-like in future, we would do well at that point to consider not keeping the base interest rate artificially on the floor, to cutting back on the least rewarding varieties of domestic spending, and to ending all subsidies and special tax breaks for profitable enterprises employing more than 50 people. While I think we could manage the latter even in a time of economic distress, right now would be the wrong time to strangle outfits like NASA or the National Park Service -- organizations that always take a kick in the teeth whenever discretionary non-defense spending is under attack -- both because that spending actually accomplishes meaningful good and because even more unemployment will only drive down revenues and ultimately expand the deficit and the debt.

 To the extent that we could not align spending and revenues by actually collecting more revenue from the unofficial modern aristocracy of our corporate elite, the time for deep painful cuts is certainly not while we are in the depths of a deeply painful recession. Even for that portion of Tea Party supporters who actually do harbor good intentions for this nation, their demands still produce horribly costly results for us all. It may be fair to criticize S&P as amateurs both for their recent decision and for their long-standing tendency to issue unrealistically high ratings on private sector securities while branding public sector securities with ratings far lower than actual historical data about repayment warrants. Yet it is also fair to criticize the House Republicans and the Tea Party Caucus in particular for behaving in a grossly irresponsible and thoroughly amateur fashion when they bore a special duty to rise above that garbage and do right by our nation. Through the quirks of our democratic process, their failure is now the failure of us all. I fear it is a failure we are likely to repeat whenever I hear kind words for their truly inexcusable conduct either as legislators or as public figures pouncing upon concerns, even sometimes legitimate concerns, to feed their supporters a steady diet of fear and hatred.

Regards,
messydom

I get a letter from the SS Administration every year or so that details my employment/payment history and the amount of benefits I would receive should I become disabled or retire. That letter clearly states that the SS Administration will not have enough funds to pay all scheduled payments after 2037, barring a change in the law.

As for the rest of your post, you win by default. I'm not going to go through it, point by point. I agree with you on many points, and I have issues with some of them, but we're not going to solve the world's economic problems, here, and I just don't have time to research and address the breadth of government programs, tax structures, etc. in this country and compare and contrast it with those of European countries.

I think we soundly agree that our government is not doing it's job.

Hmmm. Footnote:

I am a U.S resident. I live here legally and I pay taxes like anyone else living here.

However I can not vote.

Taxation without representation.


Today I bought myself a truck, tomorrow I am filling it with Coca Cola and driving to Boston to dump it in the harbor.


The quick sum up as far as I can see for the pickle the U.S is currently in is a lack of moderates having the time to get involved in politics because they have to go to work to pay the mortgage and bring up the kids... which I have a sneaking suspicion is actually the majority.

Even then, speaking as someone who hasn't grown up here, trying to gather information on any topic is frustrating. All the meaningless platitudes mixed with the hyperbole spouting out of the majority of politicians and media is almost impossible to penetrate. I really can't get through it to find the people making sense without a huge commitment of time.

SOCIALIST!!

i kid, i kid