The Bucknuts Hot Spot

Sryan,

Your posted article highlights the fact that there is absolutely no magic fix for this issue. Simply raising taxes will NOT fix the problem. However, I hope your realize, that the Conservative tagline of cutting spending will NOT fix the issue either. ESPECIALLY, if massive spending cuts are implemented at the same time as tax cuts.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, if the U.S. Government manages to produce a $500-billion surplus, every year, it would STILL take more than 30-years to pay-off the National Debt. Republican candidates do NOT have a solution to this issue.

Your article makes the assertion that retirement plans are not legally binding, but if you deny employees whose retirement planning includes the retirement fund that both they and the Government have been paying into for decades, then you face a serious ethical issue with dramatic economic consequences, depite the fact that eliminating/reducing said retirement systems makes fiscal sense.

If you take away or reduce the retirement that employees expect, then you essentially force workers to stay in the workforce when they would otherwise retire, which reduces the job availability of new workers entering the the workforce. So, you essentially increase unemployment numbers, unless the private industry is able to consistently creates enough jobs to employee new additions to the labor market.

Furthermore, even if employees DO retire, they will be left with less money to make ends meet, and probably be forced to take-on part-time and/or full-time work that would otherwise go to younger members of the workforce, which would put further pressure on unemployment, and under-employment rates. And all of these pressures do not even take into account the reduced ability of workers and citizens to actually drive the economy through consumer purchases.

The hard truth is that it the economic results promised by Neo-Conservative economic policies do not account for the fact that tax cuts stimulate the economy, but must be paid for. And if you pay for tax cuts with spending cuts, then you're likely shrinking the economy, which will result in even lower tax revenues 2+ years into the future.

My head is spinning just thinking about all of this. I'm digging into the details and consequences, and the sad truth remains that proposed Conservative policies contributed as much to the National Debt woes today as did Liberal policies. And the negative effects of BOTH of these policy sets were multiplied by the Great Recession. You might consider that conservative economic policies were implemented by Bush in advance of the Great Recession and calculate the results accordingly.

Now, the primary counters to the suggesting of putting some of the Blame on Bush policies is that he had to fight a war and deal with the .com bubble, well, I propose to you that the Obama administration had to contend with the war on Terror, the housing bubble, AND, the negative momentum of a nasty recession from the day they took office.

This is not a pass for the Obama administration, as the fact of the matter is that we are in a deep hole and nobody in the political mainstream, especially in a Presidential Election year, has a magic solution for this problem. The solutions presented by either party generally ignore the long term consequences of actions taken to fix the 30-year old problems in the span of 1-4 years.

I'm all for doing away with all the Bush tax cuts. Let EVERYBODY help fix our problem but the problem with that is the CBO just said this week if that were to happen we would fall back into a recession. How about fazing out the Bush tax cuts? Eliminate the rich tax cut for 2013, the middle class tax cut for 2014 and the poor tax cut for 2015?