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Welcome to the official home and wonderful world of Pulitzer Prize Winning Political Cartoonist Michael P. Ramirez, daily editorial cartoonist for the Las Vegas Review Journal |
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Happy Halloween! National debt climbs to $22 trillion thanks to record-spending Congress.
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The Deficit Is a Popularity Problem
The Editors National Review•. October 28, 2019 It does not take great leadership — or great skill at deal-making — to do things that already are popular. There is nothing easier than giving people what they want when it does not cost you anything. That is one of the basic problems of American politics. The news that the budget deficit has returned to a point just a hair shy of the trillion-dollar mark is dispiriting. The Trump administration is rightly proud of its economic record of modest but steady growth accompanied by strong employment and very good growth in wages. But if we cannot get government spending under control during the good times, what hope do we have for the more challenging times? And there will be more challenging times. Congressional Republicans did make some real progress on spending controls during the Obama years, but it is very difficult to resist revenue-hungry special interests — especially when those interest groups represent big blocs of voters. And budget reform without presidential leadership is more difficult still. The major drivers of federal spending are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid (along with other health-care subsidies), and national security. President Trump has ruled out pursuing Social Security and Medicare reform out-of-hand. These are very popular entitlements, and particularly popular among some sensitive Republican constituencies. Likewise, military spending is very popular among Republicans, and some conservatives argue, not without reason, that we are not spending enough on the armed services. We are all for negotiating an extra nickel off every case of pencils the federal bureaucracies order, but the U.S. government is not going to be able to put its fiscal situation on solid footing without addressing the major drivers of spending — meaning entitlement reform. Even if Republicans were willing to countenance the radical tax increases put forward by some leading Democrats, these almost certainly would prove insufficient to cover spending if it continues on its current trajectory. We would need to roughly double federal taxes to make that happen. read more at National Review |
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Two Takes on Republican Debt Hypocrisy
Yuval Rosenberg. The Fiscal Times. October 29, 2019 The federal deficit for fiscal 2019 was nearly $1 trillion, and the national debt is going to hit $23 trillion within a matter of days. President Trump once said he would eliminate the national debt within eight years, but it has continued to grow during his time in office and is now $3 trillion higher than when he first entered the White House. “In nearly three years, it rose 15% — from $19.9 trillion to $22.9 trillion, according to the latest numbers from the Treasury Department,” Caroline Cournoyer of CBS News said Tuesday. Yet, as economist Paul Krugman notes in his latest New York Times column, the reaction to the dramatic rise in the deficit, on the whole, has been decidedly undramatic: “Were there fiery speeches in Congress, denouncing fiscal irresponsibility? No. Was there intense media coverage? No — the story was tucked deep inside major newspapers. Was there severe market reaction? No — interest rates are substantially lower than they were before the deficit surge.” So how big a threat is the rapidly rising deficit? Two pieces in Tuesday’s New York Times lay out very different answers — though the one thing they agree on is the sad state of fiscal conservatives. Here’s a quick summary. From the Left: Krugman has long argued that the deficit wasn’t a crisis in the aftermath of the financial crisis and it isn’t one now. “In fact,” he writes in his latest column, “leading economists are now telling us that concerns about government debt have been greatly exaggerated all along. The Very Serious People were completely wrong, and those who opposed austerity have been vindicated.” But the conspicuous current silence of many Republicans who emphatically warned about the dangers of the deficit several years ago — and then proceeded to inflate the deficit in order to pass their tax cuts — highlights a media double standard.... read more |
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