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Originally Posted by OneSickPsycho
Unrealistic, but a step in the right direction.
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That's like saying that shooting your dog is a step in the right direction for controlling unwanted pet breeding. Now it may well screw you all on debt servicing costs, since there's talk of downgrading your Federal government from AAA.
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Originally Posted by goof2
That, no. On the other hand I will spread some blame to Obama for refusing to discuss any changes to that law passed 3 years ago that we now know delivers significantly less than promised, at a significantly higher cost than promised, and has been pretty much a complete disaster in implementation so far. I'll also spread some blame for refusing to discuss any potential cuts, Obamacare related or not, before a budget or debt ceiling increase is passed.
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Two points on that. The first is what EponXero said: How can you know the ultimate real costs or effectiveness of a programme when it hasn't even started?
The second is who will you blame for it not providing the promised services, when it was cut off at the knees by the opposition? A crippled programme will not have a hope in hell of providing anything close to what the original proposals promised.
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Originally Posted by goof2
Inflation? America has increased our national debt by more than 70% over the last six years. That isn't inflation.
I haven't heard anyone say they refuse to raise the debt ceiling. What I have heard consistently though is people saying they want spending reductions to get the rate at which debt is growing under control before they will increase the debt ceiling.
We can make some cuts, sequestration pretty much proved that. Despite the post-apocalyptic vision the Obama administration and their lackeys in the media desperately tried to sell about sequestration the end result has ultimately been relatively painless. I fail to see the harm in trying to hammer out some additional cuts before we write another blank check for the next year or two.
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And I recall the first pass of this idiocy, in which the Tea Party adherents were saying 'not a penny more.' It's rather immaterial, though, as you currently have a political hostage crisis.
The spending that increased the debt started under Bush. It was necessitated by a lack of controls on fiscal institutions that started decades back and hasn't been corrected by successive governments; both Republican and Democrat. Take a look at a graph of debt vs. year, corrected for the value of the dollar of any given year, and note when the majority of that debt took a big upswing. Odd how conservatives simply have different ways to waste your money, isn't it?
The Province of Ontario went through a microcosm of what you're experiencing, back in the '90s. The then-Premier started by spending his way out of a recession and then changed horses in mid stream, deciding to go for fiscal restraint and cut-backs. Either strategy has been proven to ultimately work but, unfortunately, only if you stick to your guns. His actions screwed our economy for a decade and it could have been even worse.