US Midterms - Predictions and Aftereffects

You know, if any canidate, GOP, Dem, or Tea-Partyer came flat out and said "I will balence the budget by cutting exactly X% of [Insert govt service] and I will do that by doing this, this, and this", I would seriously consider voting for them.

As would I. What's officially counted as pork and all the "waste, fraud, and abuse" makes up such a small portion of yearly outlays that it's akin to asking your average household to cut out one soft drink a week to balance their budget.

Those numbers (such as the $500 B in "waste, fraud, and abuse" that got tossed around before all the Democrats were attacked for cutting Medicare) are only that large because they're mutliplied over ten years. Fifty billion per year in a yearly budget topping three trillion isn't much.
 
Pretty much no one is willing to actually say what they will cut. Each side wants the other to take all the heat for any cuts. But in the current climate, I don't know that increasing the ceiling will go off without a lot of ugliness.



Lets see... Defense is sacred to the Republicans, we need F-22's for the dog fights over Afghanistan.

They don't have the balls to cut Social Security.

They won't screw around with the old people, so no cuts to medicare.

I'm guessing they will go after Medicaid, unemployment, and the little slivers not defense/old people related. Of course they will not be able to repeal anything, but budget bills for things they do not approve of will simply not go through, routine appointments will be filibustered, etc. Perhaps they will attach rider after rider on Defense appropriations(Riders you can guess the content of) and make it look like the President doesn't support the military if he doesn't sign it, when it is de facto quite the opposite.

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We will see some serious gridlock and a potential government shutdown. It is going to get ugly.
 
any results in? Where do I go to see live results?

Anyone know how the Reid/Angle race is going?
 
Sure, the one thing the GOPers always will cut is anything that hurts the poor. But if the Dems have done all they will on that score, then nothing happens.

There can be no budget controls without tax increases.
 
any results in? Where do I go to see live results?

Anyone know how the Reid/Angle race is going?

Yahoo, Washington Post, NYT, etc all have live results. Nevada's polls havn't closed yet have they?
 
yes always good to raise taxes in a recession. I think this shows how wrong the left is on economic issues. Let's just tax everyone into another great depression.
 
MSNBC has been particularly disgusting tonite

I'm no fan of the GOP but...

Matthews rambling on and on about Michele Bachman being "hypnotized" because she kept repeating the same line instead of answering his questions when it was clear she could barely hear him over the crowd noise. Ugh, and the incessant interrupting of Rep guests - they're sounding like the aholes over at Fox.
 
yes always good to raise taxes in a recession. I think this shows how wrong the left is on economic issues. Let's just tax everyone into another great depression.
Everyone that works for a living got a tax cut over the last two years. Even those that were banking on a large inheritance got a tax cut.
 
Sure, the one thing the GOPers always will cut is anything that hurts the poor. But if the Dems have done all they will on that score, then nothing happens.

There can be no budget controls without tax increases.

And/or letting the tax cuts expire, as the bill was purposefully meant to do when it was passed.

The hard choices have been put off for too long for tinkering on the edges to fix it. I'd rather it be more on the cutting side than the tax-raising side.

We could always say "okay" when someone states they want the government out of their Medicare.
 
yes always good to raise taxes in a recession. I think this shows how wrong the left is on economic issues. Let's just tax everyone into another great depression.
I didn't realise that "the Left" was a monolithic Hive Mind, or that "economic issues" came down to nothing more than whether or not taxation experiences and overall increase or decrease. Clearly, you're light-years ahead of the rest of us on this one. :rolleyes:
 
yes always good to raise taxes in a recession. I think this shows how wrong the left is on economic issues. Let's just tax everyone into another great depression.

No. The left spent our way out of the depression the right tried to put us into. Weren't you there?
 
Everyone that works for a living got a tax cut over the last two years. Even those that were banking on a large inheritance got a tax cut.

The downside to the cut, which was simply not taking out quite so much from the paycheck, was that nobody remembered that it happened.
 
No. The left spent our way out of the depression the right tried to put us into. Weren't you there?

We are still in a recession in Las Vegas (15% unemployment), and we are a democratically controlled city... Spending clearly has not worked.
 
The downside to the cut, which was simply not taking out quite so much from the paycheck, was that nobody remembered that it happened.

I don't actually remember LOL. But I do remember I had to pay $600 in taxes at the end of the year because they didn't take enough money out.
 
yes always good to raise taxes in a recession. I think this shows how wrong the left is on economic issues. Let's just tax everyone into another great depression.

Just about nobody on the left says that raising taxes is the thing to do. If I may be allowed to speak for this great 'The Left', higher taxes were what you should have had for the 18 years prior to the market crash.

We are still in a recession in Las Vegas (15% unemployment), and we are a democratically controlled city... Spending clearly has not worked.

Recessions are not measured by employment. That's how people feel it, but that's not how they are measured. And I find it tough to blame the government for the slow rate re-employment, unless you feel that the government should be directly hiring more people. What you have to blame is the way the economy of the West has shifted, and that the safest thing for corporations to do during a recession is simply to bunker down and weather the storm, since they no longer require large amounts of people to be profitable (as manufacturing does).
 
We are still in a recession in Las Vegas (15% unemployment), and we are a democratically controlled city... Spending clearly has not worked.

Las Vegas is in a recession still because of its enormous property bubble (highest foreclosure rate in the country) and entertainment driven economy that don't float too well in a downturn, afaik.
 
And/or letting the tax cuts expire, as the bill was purposefully meant to do when it was passed.

The hard choices have been put off for too long for tinkering on the edges to fix it. I'd rather it be more on the cutting side than the tax-raising side.

We could always say "okay" when someone states they want the government out of their Medicare.

Limits on what can be done on spending though. Social Security is a pretty easy and close to painless fix. But not Medicare. That's much harder without doing Universal Care. The rest of it just doesn't add up to that much that there is a possibility to cut at all.
 
I don't actually remember LOL. But I do remember I had to pay $600 in taxes at the end of the year because they didn't take enough money out.

I got about nine more dollars per week. Although, at the time, I was merely a part-time worker, so I'm not sure what the overall effect was now that I'm full-time overtime.
 
We are still in a recession in Las Vegas (15% unemployment), and we are a democratically controlled city... Spending clearly has not worked.

And pseudo-Libertarian aka Tea Party control would?
 
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