When This Is Over

Should taxes be raised to lower the deficit and pay for the stimulus? It’s possible that we will have $3trillion deficits this year.

Taxes were raised after the 2012 election and the deficit shrank massively, without affecting the job and GDP growth trends.

Is it important to pay for these deficits accruing right now, in the future via tax increases? Or, should there be spending cuts? (Noting that the vast majority of the budget is in social security, medicare and defense).

For reference, here is a historical deficit chart:

On the wealthy, sure. But I am a lib, I don’t give a crap about the deficit. (I care even less now that I’ve witnessed trillions get created out of thin air, twice)

Queue “Slowest Recovery in History”

Spending cuts. Cut our Defense budget in half. Focus defense spending on cyber and biological warfare.

But like I said above, none of my ideas would really reduce the deficit, I just want money spent elsewhere. Focus on the little guy and gal.

I wouldn’t worry about it - Trump said he’d have the national debt paid off in 8 years…

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We’ve pushed too far down the hole. If we were going to pay it off, the time to start it was 2017. It’s too late now we just have to keep borrowing money until we lose our world reserve currency status and then monetize the debt.

This is not the option I prefer. I wanted to pay off the debt but this is the option we get to have because we cut taxes when we should have cut spending/raised taxes in 2017.

Yep. It’s basic macroeconomics that fiscal policy and monetary policy should constrict as the economy strengthens. Unfortunately we decided on a beer bong instead

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I am curious what Republicans think we should do

2017? The Simpson and Bowles bipartisan committee to determine how to reign in the national debt was formed in 2010 by President Obama. They reported back that spending had to be drastically cut and taxes drastically raised to have any chance, the debt at that time was 13.5 trillion were almost at double that today not counting the new ■■■■ added there is no stopping it.

At best we will enter and stay in a period of stagnation like Japan did when the Nikkei bubble crashed in 1990 at 38,916 (Their version of our Dow) they called it the lost decade, they never recovered the Nikkei right now is 18,701 wages decline nothing really gets better and takes more to live. The best could easily behind now and the markets never make it back up to were they were. We really can’t afford to be out of work like this as a country from what I have been reading parts of Italy is falling into chaos.

This is so far from over the next collapse will be in massive amounts of people not being able to pay their rent and mortgage especially in more expensive areas.

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reduce taxes even more to fuel the economy

if you want to reduce deficits, control “kennedy center” spending

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Ahh yes, big bird cuts will save us

Defense budget?

How much would that reduce the deficit?

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Tax revenue growth slowed last time we did that

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Yeah, that’s the ticket. It works each and every time. :roll_eyes:

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Holy ■■■■■■■ ■■■■■ How many times do we have to do this to get through thick skulls that tax cuts never, ever, ■■■■■■■ EVER, pay for themselves?

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Assuming we’ll be trying to dig out of a recession, worrying about the deficit too heavily would be silly, imo. Our current economic system runs on debt, so the deficit/debt doesn’t really matter that much at the federal level.

As long as inflation isn’t out of control and Americans are productive, healthy and employed, the rest of that ■■■■ doesn’t really matter.

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Republican economic IQ

Economy good - cut taxes
Economy bad - cut taxes
Deficit low - cut taxes
Deficit high - cut taxes

Cutting taxes solves all problems in the Republican world.

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That and big bird

This. It’s going to take both cuts in spending and increasing taxes.

Agreed.