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What do you think of this Analysis of the public debt?
What do you think of this Analysis of the public debt?
According to this analysis, the bush tax cuts account for far more of our national debt than Obamas supposed "out of control spending". Why do more people not realize this? Wouldnt most people rather see tax increases on the wealthy than cutting programs for disadvantaged youth?
http://www.offthechartsblog.org/what%E2%%E2%80%A6
This is not a partisan source.
1 Answer
- HokiePaulLv 61 decade agoFavorite Answer
The analysis misses the point. The debt doesn't come from tax cuts; it doesn't necessarily come from spending either. It comes from only one thing--spending more money than you are given to spend. The Bush administration was a major contributor to the debt and he deserves plenty of blame. But it is not the tax cuts; it was his failure to keep spending in control that caused debt to increase.
Take this analogy -- Consider the government as your employee (not too much of a stretch when you consider that the government is supposed to work for the people, not the other way around). A tax cut would be like you reducing your employees salary. This could be for any reason. Maybe the employee is doing a bad job (I would argue that congress has done a terrible job). Whatever the reason doesn't matter though; the analogy is that the the people decided that the government was overpaid and decided reduce its salary via a tax cut.
So what does the person who's salary was cut do? They change their lifestyle to spend less or they go into debt. The Bush tax cuts basically reduced the government's salary.
Now what should have happened is that Congress should have realized this and adjusted their lifestyle accordingly. They didn't and the debt grew. When Obama came in, instead of encoraging Congress to adjust its lifestyle to spend less like should have happened under Bush, he encouraged Congress to spend even more money they didn't have promising them a raise in the future.
So from that perspective, you can see why it is the spending, not the tax cuts that are the problem. This isn't to say that raising taxes isn't also a solution to the debt problem. If you increase a person's salary they might be able to pay off some of their debts. However, there are two issues that scare people away from this solution. First is that the government has been a terrible employee. They waste a ton of money on programs that don't work. Bottom line is that they don't deserve a raise. The other is that the government has a spending problem (an addiction of sorts). A reasonable person might be able to reduce their debt with a higher salary. But a shopaholic would just buy more stuff. History has shown the government to be more of a shopaholic than a reasonable person. Because of that, it is clear (to me anyway) what might work (forcing congress to cut spending) and what will never work (raising taxes and giving congress more money).