Is Bush going to eliminate the IRS?

A better title to this might be..."Is Bush going to eliminate all reasonable thought in Washington...."
ps: Drudge REALLY wants you to but his friends book...

No they don't, they go after a tiny slice of it and scream and yell to cover that fact. HHS includes everything you might reasonably put under its obvious designation. The FDA, the CDC, the NIH, bioterorrism prevention, most hard science grant funds. Moverover the single largest line item is Medicaid which is funded not by the general revenues but a trust derived for a dedicated levy. In other words its not part of the budget any more than Social Security is. Its also where the administration has chosen to hide its social agenda. A quarter billion for marriage incentives, half a billion for faith based initiatives and so on. If you break out the real numbers, the entitlements portion its runs about 160 billion. That, for those of you playing at home, is what it costs to provide food and medicine to people who can't afford it. In a progressive tax scheme, it adds up to a nice dinner for two with drinks per taxpayer.

chomsky has suggested a tax on international banking transactions,
he says at one percent the entire earths population could have clean
water,food and basic health services, when countries divest and transfer
the otherwise invested funds it can cause an economic and social meltdown,
as this is a serious problem with ecconomies mostly depenent now on the" free market" it would be fair to peoples so affected by global capitalism.......

I'm not sure how facetious you're being, s5, but NOT paying the debt (or servicing it) would be potentially calamitous. Or even actually calamitous.

The sovereign government of the world's largest economy defaulting on its debts would be .... *shudders*

I think Neal Stephenson wrote a book with that premiss.

[Edited on Aug 02, 2004 by TheFuckOffKid]

Oh!!!! You're saying get debt servicing costs down by paying it down faster! I didn't get that.

Well that's fine, I guess, but you have to get yourself into a budget surplus position first. Otherwise, while youre paying down old debt, you're running up new debt to finance a continuing deficit. And all that new debt will have to be serviced, in place of the old debt.

That's the point I was making to Helter a few weeks ago in some old thread, and I got into a squabble that I still don't quite understand with Sadistic Bastard as a result so I'm a bit leery of talking too much about governmental budget constraints.

But basically, you can't target debt servicing costs themselves until you've targeted other parts of the spending/revenue mismatch, taken the aggregate budget into surplus so you're no longer borrowing, then started paying down old debts and reducing the servicing burden.

Wasn't this essentially what Al Gore was proposing to do with the "budget surplus" in the 2000 election? To reduce the national debt, and thus free up a nice chunk of the annual budget for... anything? Nothing? Tax refunds? That approach would require long term thinking though... not an area where Wall street (and teh Republican party, by proxy) excels. That, and my gut feeling was that the ridiculous budget surplus predicted in '99 and '00 was based on projections that were unrealistic, as they depended upon sustaining the economic growth rate seen in '98 and '99 for the next ten years.

People who know more about this than I do have said that it's not as easy as paying off one's credit card bill with extra money though. Since a lot of the national debt is tied into things like long term bonds and t-bills and other investments that pay over a long period of time. The best you could do is to continue making payments while not issuing any new debt, but it would take a while to do.

Well, when I explained to Helter that budget surpluses actually had a use (in providing funds to pay off debt) I got several responses to the effect that "Oh yeah, like the Democrats ever did that..."

So I checked, and it turned out they did. In the surplus years of Clinton's presidency, payments were made towards reducing the debt.

What this frees up though, on a recurring basis, is simply the money that would otherwise service the debt. You're saving (on an annual budget basis) the amount you'd otherwise pay in interest.

exactly. ALWAYS pay on your principle, kids. and, like leg said, it requires something resembling long-term thought, which is something this aboministration CLEARLY has no training in.

well, unless you count the PFANAC.

s5, it's cool, with you now. You had me scratching my head because I was thinking you were advocating just NOT SERVICING THE DEBT at all anymore and I thought that was way too wild and irresponsible coming from you. But I see it all just fine now.

That's nothing. The forecasts that are being indulged in now are mendacious beyond belief.

Quelle surprise ...

TFOK, s5, reprobate, et al.,

I have no problem with paying off the debt. The question as always is how do we get there? For every $1000 toilet seat, there is a welfare millionaire, a spotted owl, and a research grant for snail speed testing to go along with it. Let's drop the party names and stipulate that conservatives prefer defense spending and progressives prefer social spending while both want good roads, bridges, etc..

The questions still remains: how do we get there? Tax hikes? Spending reductions? Both? Tax hikes on who and how much? Spending cuts where and how much? The problem is that no one can agree on anything, so rather than cut what is needed, they simply agree to spend more. That isn't a political phenomena, it's a governmental one.

When you have politicians defining reductions in the rate of growth as a "budget cut" someone, somewhere is going to have to come up with more money than last year. When the government becomes it's own advocate for growth, the only amount is wants is 'more'.

According to the CBO, not including the off-budget items, the US took in $1.258 billion in FY2003, but spent $1.795 billion, leaving a deficit of $536 billion. That's roughly 30% more spent than we actually should have spent. Why the large disparity? War, recession, tax cuts, spending increases, yadayadayada...

Unless everyone is willing to accept cuts in the budget areas that are nearest and dearest to them, or the government is required to balance the budget, we are stuck with this crap. I don't like it anymore than anyone else, but until people are willing to put the politics aside and focus on this one issue, protesters and Presidents alike, the best you can do is fight for the stuff important to you.

For me personally, both Kerry and Bush suck on this issue. Bring back Slick Willy and the Newt, please.

Like it's not important to know how fast snails can go? Psh.

Awe yes, the Newt. Now that mother fucker new how to make some cuts.