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xssve -> RE: So what's your plan? (5/26/2011 6:26:28 AM)
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We paid down the on budget debt once before, not that long as I recall, but taxes had to be raised (on the top quintile) to do it - that's the one solution that nobody wants to say.
It would take longer this time, in the Nineties we had the benefit of public investment paying off in productivity increases in ways that supply side monetary policy had very little to do with - Bush tanked most of the public investment, funneled surplus payroll taxes into surveillance (requiring an entire new bureaucracy due to a pissing contest with the FBI), armaments (from firms like Carlyle, in which pretty much the entire administration held stock), and bribery (remember those stacks of $100 bills?), while cutting general revenues, and gutting financial regulation - if he hadn't done anything but keep things on track, we'd be in pretty good shape right now.
But Clinton-Gore balanced general revenues with on budget expenditures in large part by cutting down on the perks - it was replacing glass ashtrays with plastic ones, Bics instead of Mont Blanc's, millions of tiny cuts, but they add up to real money, and that is an ongoing thing, you can't just do it once and it's done, it creeps right back in, everybody loves their perks.
At the same time, they invested in a whole host of energy related research projects, that had they remained funded, would be starting to pay off about now in technological spillover being leveraged by private industry into new generations of product lines, product lines with excellent export potential, instead of betting the house on gaining control of Iranian oil fields, which was never anything more than a long shot at best.
We were in a good position in 2000, the NASDAQ crash was a minor bump, didn't even affect the Brick and Mortar economy, now we've got crumbling infrastructure, nothing in the pipeline w/regard to energy, or anything else, biotech, etc, spooky stock markets, and an unstable labor market - there's not much of a Brick and Mortar economy left to build on. You need a 20 year plan, based on solid economic foundations, and supporting growth, like we had in 2000 - not a 4 year plan based on the election cycle and paying off your campaign contributors.
Rewind to 2000, and stick to it this time, pay down the debt, balance the budget, get back to funding basic research, especially in energy, boost the alternative energy market, because that's the market that's going to spawn jobs and export industries, quit fucking around with the Middle East - if BP wants their Oil back, let them go get it.
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