I feel like the priority is getting elected, and wresting control of Congress/the White House. When you have the power, then you can form the agenda.

Look at Paul Ryan's and the House rather modest budget proposal....dead before it hit the senate....and if it did pass the senate, then you have to get it past the POTUS. Nothing can change unless you have control.

gut;1263446 wrote:They come a heck of a lot closer than Obama. I'd like to see what they do with the POTUS and control of the House and Senate.

Thing is, each president has "out-deficited" his predecessor, so no, nobody has created a greater deficit during his tenure, but the trend dictates that they will. If we were to ask this question in 5 years, and Romney would have won this election, I'd be interested in whether or not that several-decade-long trend would have been broken. Honestly, I doubt it. Track record doesn't indicate that it will happen, and history is what we have to go on.

gut;1263446 wrote:Ryan's budget is a start in the right direction.

Again, history is what I go on, and Ryan's history on a lot of fiscal issues mirrors Obama's pretty closely.

gut;1263446 wrote:We aren't going to balance the budget without taking on entitlements, and I get what you say about leadership but you can't get elected on that truth, Americans can't handle it.

I think they can. I think enough people are getting sick of the debt, and I think they can handle the idea that cutbacks will relieve the stress of the public having to write checks they can't cash for debt they're not incurring themselves. Look at the debt services industry. It's booming right now, because people know the pressure of personal debt, which can VERY easily translate to an understanding of national debt.

And as far as tearing into the deficit, I think we're gonna get a lot further reigning in the foreign occupations than we will with entitlements. Entitlements are like cocaine, and a lot of people in this country are addicted. Getting everyone sobered up and off the public syringe will be quite a challenge, and it will probably require far more involvement from Congress. Meanwhile, pulling troops home can be done by the Commander in Chief. Fewer hoops to jump through to get it done.

gut;1263446 wrote:I think 4 years would be an aggressive and optimistic target. The cultural change is really more than Washington, it's America.

Agreed. I think it's happening, too. It's not there yet, but it's happening.

Bruce
Bartlett (former economic adviser for Ronald Reagan; staffer for Ron Paul and Jack Kemp) weighs in: I sympathize with much of what he says. The write-up is in the financial times which you need a username to read.

I really don’t know who I will vote for this year – or if I will vote at all. This is why….
[INDENT]
The hypocrisy of the party dedicated to fiscal responsibility massively expanding Medicare at the very moment when its costs needed desperately to be controlled was too much for me. Within a few years, I abandoned my affiliation. My “coming out” was in 2006, when I voted in a Democratic primary for the first time. Although not a Democrat, I wanted to support Jim Webb for the Senate nomination in Virginia. He had served as secretary of the navy for Reagan and I saw in him a kindred spirit.
In 2008 I voted for Barack Obama. I might have voted for the old maverick John McCain, but his decision to put the grossly unqualified Sarah Palin on the ticket was final proof that any independence he might have had was long gone. Nothing he has said or done since has given me any reason to believe he would have been a better president than Mr Obama. Like many who voted for Mr Obama in 2008, however, my support was based more on hope and disgust with Republicans than certainty that he was up to the job. Unfortunately, I don’t think he has been; he has simply not provided the leadership the nation needed in a time of crisis….
He should have focused like a laser on the economy until it was clear that it was out of the woods. Had Mr Obama not been distracted by health, I think he would have done more to fix the housing industry, which continues to be an albatross around the economy’s neck, and paid more attention to what the Federal Reserve is and is not doing.
Mr Obama has given me no reason to think a second term will be better than the first. The only real case for him, as far as I am concerned, is that he is not a Republican.
[/INDENT]

Mitt Romney holds no more attraction for me than Mr McCain did. If his speech to the Republican convention on Thursday night were to display the same Romney who governed the state of Massachusetts moderately and competently, he would have my vote. But he too has sacrificed his independence to pander to the GOP’s conservative base…. Thus my dilemma: both candidates are unsatisfactory. The choice is between a continuation of policies that have not worked and different ones that almost certainly will not…

Shares a lot of the concerns O-Trap has.

HitsRus;1263457 wrote:Look at Paul Ryan's and the House rather modest budget proposal.....

:laugh:

Vote the Guy you disagree with?

This is kind of an interesting read; arguing that if you think austerity/balanced budgets is the right answer you should vote for Obama because Republicans will obstruct him but if you want Monetary and Fiscal stimulus because even though Republicans say they're for balanced budgets...they magically hate deficits a lot less and become less hawkish on monetary policy when a Republican is in power.

http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2012/09/theres-a-reasonable-case-to.html

There's a case to be made (and, in fact, it has been made) that, if what you think the U.S. economy needs is more fiscal and monetary stimulus, you should vote for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in November (or, if you're not a U.S. citizen, pray for a Romney/Ryan victory). This is despite the fact that Romney and Ryan say they're against fiscal stimulus, and the Republican Party platform calls for a return to the gold standard (the opposite of monetary stimulus). The reasoning is pretty simple: the likely Republican majority in the House and the possible Republican majority in the Senate will work against any attempt by President Obama to stimulate the economy — or do much of anything else, for that matter. Whereas if Romney moves into the White House, Republican lawmakers will cut him slack and the Democrats will too if he pushes policies that they wanted in the first place. A similar if less-stark dynamic could play out on the monetary-policy Federal Open Market Committee, where inflation hawks with Republican leanings would discover they weren't so hawkish after all.What I hadn't really thought of, until I read conservative scholar Nicholas Eberstadt's epic essay on entitlements, "A Nation of Takers" (it was excerpted in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, but you want to read the whole thing) is that you could just as easily make the opposite argument. If you think what the nation needs above all is austerity and entitlement reform — meaning entitlement cutbacks — you're likelier to get your way in a second Obama administration than under Romney/Ryan. Here's Eberstadt:
[INDENT][T]he growth of entitlement spending over the past half century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, to be sure, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential — but in any given calendar year, it was on the whole roughly 8 percent higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.[/INDENT]What's more, federal budget deficits have over the past century generally grown under Republican administrations and shrunk under Democrats. And for whatever it's worth, the stock market usually does better under Democrats than Republicans.
What is one to make of all this?
It could be random chance. As I've written before, presidents' impact on short-term economic performance is probably much less than it's usually made out to be.
It could also be the result of the strange political equations that the U.S. system of separating executive from legislative power sets up. Winning the presidency doesn't mean you get to set the agenda for your entire time in office; you may never have a legislative majority, and midterm elections often revitalize your opposition. So knowing which party occupies the White House often doesn't tell us all that much about where the power to make economic policy lies.
In the case of entitlement spending, there's also the interesting development that entitlement recipients in the U.S. now skew old and rural, and so does the Republican base. The convoluted campaign debate over who's going to cut Medicare, the medical-insurance program for the elderly, and who's going to save it, should give some indication that's there's no clear divide between Democrats supporting entitlements and Republicans opposing them.
Finally, there's the basic psychological and philosophical truth that, as economist John Kay puts it, "complex goals are best achieved indirectly." People have no idea what will actually make them happy, city planners build dull cities, and companies that focus on maximizing shareholder returnunderperform those with different goals. So voting for the candidate whose campaign statements you agree with may get you the opposite outcome of what you want.
I shouldn't overstate my case here. Sometimes presidents deliver what they promise on the campaign trail. Ronald Reagan said he'd cut taxes, and he did. Barack Obama said he'd expand health insurance coverage to all, and he's getting pretty close. Presidents, while often hamstrung on the domestic front, have a lot of leeway to arrange foreign policy as they choose.
Then again, in a big, complex world, the results of presidents' foreign policy choices are often wildly different from what they predicted and intended. Presidents don't always accomplish the opposite of what they commit to on the campaign trail — it would make voting much easier if they did. But the link between avowed priorities and eventual outcomes is a lot more tenuous than is generally acknowledged in our political discourse. And I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or a good thing.

We haven't had a budget since Obama has been president. Logic fail.

gut;1263782 wrote:We haven't had a budget since Obama has been president. Logic fail.

An irresponsible budget and no budget can very easily get you to the same place.

O-Trap;1263793 wrote:An irresponsible budget and no budget can very easily get you to the same place.

Agreed. But what's more irresponsible: 25% of GDP or 20% of GDP when revenues historically average 18.2%?

Even with the inevitable VAT, I don't see how that can close the gap with Obama's targets. A VAT is a non-starter right now, but if and when we start honestly addressing entitlements Americans will have to choose European-style socialism, and it's taxes (including @19% VAT on EVERYONE), or not.

Man I'd love to hear that question asked in the debates. All hell would break loose. It's a shame that a very respected Kotlikoff had his work hijacked by the FairTax nuts.

whatsmatter Boat...Ryan's budget to radical for you?

O-trap said there's not much difference.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2012/08/16/the-election-2012-prizefight-paul-ryans-budget-vs-barack-obamas/

HitsRus;1264115 wrote:whatsmatter Boat...Ryan's budget to radical for you?

O-trap said there's not much difference.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2012/08/16/the-election-2012-prizefight-paul-ryans-budget-vs-barack-obamas/

Wow. Both budgets are shitty.