Let me just start off here with this…. Its the spending stupid … Its how everyone should be looking at the “fiscal cliff” debate. But because we are allowing progressives who hate free markets and capitalism to define the debate, here goes.
MPR’s DFL talking point regurgitation series “Poligraph” is out with its latest volley to help the Democrats appear credible. In the latest installment, they bend over backwards to bail Amy Klobuchar out for her cut and paste progressive talking points / ambulance chaser approach to being a public official. MPR is bailing Klobuchar out on the Democrat talking point that just raising taxes on “the rich” will solve the budget mess.
In a recent interview on ABC’s This Week, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-MN, talked about the so-called fiscal cliff. She pointed out that the Senate had already passed a plan that would extend the Bush-era tax cuts for those making less than $250,000 and eliminate them for those making more than that.
The proposal would take a big chunk out of the nation’s deficit, she said.
Not true. We’re running trillion dollar deficits nationally. “Big dent”? More like tiny drop.
“As you know, if we go back to the Clinton levels for people making over $250,000 we literally save $1 trillion in 10 years,” she said.
One trillion is in the ballpark.
This ponzi scheme of a political debate is based on the Democrat’s secret weapon, the 10 year budgeting guidelines. Its the practice of taking a single year’s line item and assuming that you can bank it each and every year. It also is very handy in helping deflect factual analysis of the overall proposals. People get confused by large numbers. Wow, you can take “nearly a trillion dollars from the rich and it will cut one trillion off the deficit? Let’s just do it already!”
Sounds so lovely, doesn’t it? Wave your magic wand and the Trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see goes away. No more racking up debt, and wall of a sudden Amy Klobuchar grabs the wheel of the tour bus racing toward the fiscal cliff. jerks it hard left, averts the fiscal cliff entirely. Everything is good….
Its sad, but I bet many reporters in America see Klobuchar and Obama as some sort of socialist super heroes.
MPR even goes so far as to throw in a Democrat talking point that Klobuchar left out.
Still, the plan stands to lower the nation’s deficit, according to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan number-crunching arm of Congress.
They are using the Democrat logic that when Democrats want to increase a budget by 20% but them dang Republicans will only let it increase by 8% its a draconian cut to the bone.
Let’s be clear here. This tax increase Amy Klobuchar is pushing amounts to $82.4 billion a year in tax revenue. Let me do the math for you. MPR claims it will bring in $824 Billion over 10 years, so that is $82.4 Billion a year. Well if we are running Trillion dollar deficits and we cut 82.4 billion out of them, that’s an eight percent fix.
Meaning that over the next ten years, instead of adding $10 Trillion to the national debt, we’re only going to add $9.917 Trillion to the national debt if we just make them dangnamit rich people pay their fair share.
What was the Federal Deficit this year? Well over a trillion. You see, when playing with numbers as large as we are, a billion sounds huge, 82.4 sounds enormous, and 824 billion sounds like the solution, but…..
RF Flashbacks:
Since Amy Klobuchar was sworn in as a United States Senator, the Federal Budget has added almost $6 Trillion in deficit spending to the debt all by itself. This excludes all the unfunded liabilities and other things… ($5,951,974,000,000)
If her dream of a more progressive tax rate had come true and there was a return to the Clinton tax rates, and we would have booked the $82.4 Billion a year…… $82.4 Billion over six years = $494 Billion.
$5,951,974,000,000 – $494,000,000,000 = $5,457,974,000,000
We’d still have racked up $5.5 Trillion is federal deficit spending under Amy Klobuchar’s first term had the Bush tax cuts for “the Rich” been repealed as Amy Klobuchar had said she’d make happen way back in her 2006 campaign.
Why, yes, we still would have been running record deficits. Which is hard to believe if you pay attention to the Democrat talking points.
Oddly since Democrats took control of the US House & Senate in 2007 (AHEM same year that Amy Klobuchar was first elected), the deficits have skyrocketed. But revenue has been on a relatively steady pace, give or take a few hundred billion every year, but spending has increased exponentially after Clinton.
Its the spending stupid.
And yes, this spending happened under Bush, when he was trying to be compassionate and appeal to and work with Democrats. The key is, Spending is increasing at rates far greater than under any other President in modern times.
In 2001 the Federal Budget spent $1.86 Trillion.
In 2011 the Federal Budget spent $3.6 Trillion
If we as a nation are going to rely on Government spending, we are ALL going to have to pay. If you took every dime from “the Rich” you’d only solve the problem for a year, then what?
To avoid the Fiscal Cliff, we must stop adding to the debt. That means not just balancing the budget, but running a surplus to start paying off the debt. Klobuchar is talking about $82.4 billion solving a trillion dollar problem. That’s an 8% drop in the bucket. If we can just keep transferring the national debt balance from one credit card to the other, maybe in 200 more years, that 8% increase in revenue can pay off the debt or something.
All things aside4, let’s just get back tot he math of this whole ponzi scheme.
$17 Trillion National Debt / $82.4 Billion = 206 years for the added revenue to come close to paying off the current national debt.
The numbers don’t lie. What Amy Klobuchar is suggesting as the cure for the fiscal cliff would take 206 years to solve. I don’t think we can wait that long.
MPR accidently gives us the info to prove the only way to avert the fiscal cliff while avoiding any spending cuts is to raise taxes across the board.
If tax cuts are extended for everyone, it would cost about $4.5 trillion. [...]
Whoops, they accidently admitted that the Bush tax cuts did actually aid more than just the rich, and the lion’s share of the “lost federal revenue” went to people outside “the rich”. $3.7 Trillion of tax cuts went to people earning less than $250,000 a year. But you have had it drummed into your head the last 8 years how those Bush tax cuts only went to the rich. Klobuchar’s friends in Washington and allies in the media even went so far as to tell you that in order for the rich to get their tax cuts, the poor had to suffer.
Let’s look at the chart again. According to the White House, the lowest deficit in an Obama budget is $609 Billion. Meaning that even IF Klobuchar and he raised taxes on the rich, we’d still be running over a half a trillion in debt which is added to the national debt, which makes me wonder how a fact checking media outlet can say that this notion actually reduces debt. Oh wait, it reduces the expected increase…..
[...] But if they are extended for those falling in lower tax brackets, it would cost the government $3.7 trillion.
Let’s circle back to this here. If the Bush tax cuts which “cost” the federal government $4.5 Trillion would ever have happened, Bush would have run surpluses in almost every year. Of course this assumes lots of things, like these tax cuts not being responsible for ending the dot com 2001 recession among other things…..
In the 10 years of the Bush tax cuts, using Democrat and MPR verbiage, we’ve lost $450 Billion a year in revenue. If you go and add $450 Billion a year in revenue to the Bush years, we would have actually cut the debt. Again, this is odd, since we are being told by Amy Klobuchar that cutting taxes on “the rich” is what got us into this mess, yet if a deal isn’t reached, taxes on millions are going to be going up on January 1st.
They said that only the rich got tax cuts all through the Bush years. Amy Klobuchar made that the corner stone of her 2006 campaign. Yet, not only do we now see hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to all levels of wage earners, that “the rich” actually got a small portion of the tax cut compared to the lower and middle class. Amy I calling her a liar, well, the math supports that notion.
You cannot fool the math
This entire debate over the fiscal cliff, or the so-called facts of the debate over the fiscal cliff, are all being waged on the revenue side of the ledger sheet. We’re being hood winked into thinking the problem is simply a matter of taxes and marginal rates. Marginal rates, like the kind that affect only 1 or 2 % of the public, which no one really can relate to, and that are very easy to blame and create public angst toward. Its the classic communist revolution ploy of pitting the haves vs. the have nots. But the real problem with the fiscal cliff is that we are piling on debt with no end in sight. The only way to actually avert going over the cliff is to pay down the debt.
Do I need to go over the math again? How an 8% reduction in a trillion deficit will take 200 years to close?
America is approaching the fiscal cliff based on liabilities, not year to year budgetary line items (discretionary spending & pork) and political battles over marginal income tax rates. We owe as a nation than we are worth, and have bills coming due with no foreseeable way to pay. America is under water financially.
Remember that line from Obama about spreading the wealth around? This tax increase isn’t really about the fiscal cliff. Heck, like Minnesota Democrats, whether in surplus or deficit, they have always wanted to create a new 4th tier income tax on “the rich”. Each and every year, they want to do the same thing. Take away from some and give to others.
But we’re being told its to solve the fiscal cliff nightmare…..
Democrats want to adjust the deficit numbers by changing the digit in the far right of the numbers when we need to go from running deficits to running surpluses. The only true way to avoid the fiscal cliff is to turn the car around and drive away from the cliff.
I’ve heard one person say recent;y, what the compromise will look like is $100 Billion in new taxes, $100 billion in spending cuts, but they fail to address how we are still going to add $8 to 9 trillion to the debt over 10 years….
All Amy Klobuchar and MPR seem inclined to do is take the 1.1 Trillion pound brick off the accelerator and replace it with a 1.017.6 Trillion pound brick.
Marginal rates and tinkering on the wrong side of the ledger sheet is not going to fix anything.
Wake up America. We have a huge spending problem. Look at Europe. What Democrats have suggested has been tried before. Its failed there and it will fail here.
