Uncle Sam: How dare you! Do you know who I am?
S&P: Yeah, just another bum living beyond your means...
But one could also loudly ask where the hell S&P gets off doing such a thing. This is the same ratings organization that gave the gold seal thumbs up to the financially toxic underwater shitbombs packaged and sold to an unsuspecting world by the Wall Street gangsters it was in cahoots with.
The Standard & Poor's Seal of Approval was all over those "toxic assets" President Bush explained were "clogging the system." Instead of taking a plunger and flushing the whole damned stinking mess down, he instead watched helplessly as Dirty Hank Paulson and his merry gang of Wall Street pirates blew a hole in the side of The Treasury. The congressional looters came in after and finished the job, with Boss Obama handing out checks to union cronies and rotten state and local governments.
So Now What?
Economics reporter extraordinaire James Pethokoukis laments the lack of a comprehensive plan for governmental and financial reform. Congress and the president applied a band-aid to the pinky, completely ignoring the sucking chest wound.
Progressives rightly point out that we cannot afford our government at current rates of revenue collection. We are spending close to 25% of GDP while collecting only around 17%, producing an annual gap of around $1.5 trillion, not including the growing bow wave of unfunded liabilities as the baby boomers retire. The Social Security lock box is full of intergovernmental IOUs which must be paid out of the general treasury, which means this “self-sustaining” program will have to be supported from the general budget, putting us deeper in the hole.
It’s time for a fundamental debate in this country about just what government should and should not be doing, and how we propose to pay for it.
Three Plans
* Simpson - Bowles: The presidential commission whose results the president ignored. I think he gave Alan Simpson the Dali Lama treatment and laughed from an upstairs window as Simpson stepped through a bag of stinky garbage on his way out.
* The People’s Budget - Aptly named, The moniker is reminiscent of the glory days of that communist workers’ paradise, The old Soviet Union. This is the Congressional Progressive Caucus's stab at destroying our nation by destroying the economy by driving every last job creator to China.
* The Ryan Roadmap - Paul Ryan's plan. Scored by the CBO and the only truly viable plan of the three.
All parties need to keep in mind that such plans can only take hard numbers so far. Since they project out into the future, the authors must make demographic and economic assumptions, and those are the details the devil wallows in, and that is where the fighting takes place.
As a public service to my fellow Blogistanis, I've collected some links that describe and discuss each of the three plans.
Ryan's Roadmap
Roadmap for America’s Future
Jed Babbin – Ryans Roadmap
Paul Ryan – Where’s Your Budget, Mr. President?
CBO Analysis of Roadmap
Misunderstanding the Ryan Roadmap
The People's Budget
The People’s Budget
Megan McArdle – The People’s Budget
CS Monitor – The People’s Budget
Simpson-Bowles
Simpson Bowles Report
Tax Policy Center – Simpson Bowles
Derek Thompson – Simpson Bowles Summary
