Is the US heading for a Sovereign Debt Crisis?

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Why does the GOP think that a 1 cent tax rise is bad? Every other country facing austerity on the planet has had to do with a combination of tax rises and public services cut. So, What does the GOP know that the rest of the world doesn't or are the GOP certifiable now?

Here We Go Again!...

This is getting to be fucking ridiculous, I swear.

It's because The GOP want to makw the Bush-era Tax-cuts permanent.

They're out to destroy the middle/working classes, as a means to fix the economy. That's what it's always been about and this is proof of that!

We are heading for a very serious budget crisis, but not soveriegn debt. We arent Greece.

Greece started out as just a serious budget crisis.

Things are going to get worse before they get better... Financial capitalism is a plague, leeching resources off the worldwide working class...

The utter collapse of banking and finance is a sad necessity. Real productive capacity still exists. Once the fraud of finance gets cleaned up, things would improve.

By the way, who is your Working Class? How far does it go, because managers are getting squeezed too, and even High-Level management can end up without a job and on Benefits...

The trouble isn't that the "working class" is getting screwed — so are the Middle, the Upper Middle and no doubt some of those in the Upper Classes too (especially the Impoverished Patrician-types, who are cash-poor but asset rich*

It's the Super-Rich you're concerned about, not the merely Rich...

There are automatic cuts that will save us from defaulting this time actually. Wiki article on the Super Com

edited 21st Nov '11 8:49:27 AM by secretist

Secretist, the GOP want to shield the military from the cuts though.

That's establishment Republicans who want to defend the military! Prioritize your hypothetical spending cuts!

Things would be much easier if they just forced House Majority Leader Cantor to resign and replaced him with a more reasonable (read: moderate) person. Much of the debt crisis issues have been his fault due to his unreasonable demands and jerkish behavior.

It depends on what end of the spectrum you are on because that sounds half-truthy. I guess voters can decide in 2012 which side to vindicate?

Buscemi hit on it pretty well.

As for the Permanent tax cuts, Lost Anarchist got that right as well. The GOP offered 350 billion (over 10 years) in new revenue in exchange for making the tax cuts permanent. cutting the bush tax cuts would save, over 10 years, 5 trillion, or 500 billion every year.

Why do the GOP want to keep the Bush tax cuts?

Technically, they just negated the Clinton tax hikes. Also, they could enact all types of spending cuts:

• Davis-Bacon Act: Repeal the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 requiring prevailing wages on public work projects.
• Funding for the Arts: Eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts
• Amtrak: Privatize Amtrak and end rail subsidies.
• Energy Subsidies: Eliminate Department of Commerce ethanol and unproven energy technology subsidies.
• Federal Worker Compensation: Reduce federal employee pay by 10%.
• Department of Housing: Eliminate the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
• Legal Services: Eliminate the Legal Services Corporation.
• NASA: Cut NASA spending by 50%.
• Federal Building: Reduce unused or under-utilized federal building space by 10%.
• Farm Subsidies: End farm subsidies.
• Ethanol Tax Credit: End the ethanol tax credit subsidy.
• Social Security Benefits: Increase the number of work-years used to calculate a senior's benefit level at retirement.
• Social Security Disability: Tighten eligibility for Social Security Disability Insurance.
• V-22 Osprey Aircraft: Cancel all planned purchases of the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.
• Pentagon Supplies: End orders for obsolete and unnecessary military parts and supplies.
• Nuclear Arsenal: Reduce the United States nuclear arsenal to align with modern needs and threats.
• Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac: Break up the giant, taxpayer-backed housing banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
• Crop Insurance Subsidies: Reduce federal subsidies for farmers' crop insurance 60%.
• Trade Adjustment Assistance: Eliminate cash payments to individuals who lose jobs to foreign competition.
• Food Stamps: Convert the open-ended Food Stamps program into a capped block grant to the states.
• Discretionary Spending Level: Trim all discretionary spending programs across the board to 2008, pre-stimulus levels.
• Department of Commerce: Eliminate Commerce Department business and economic development subsidies.
• TARP: End the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which provides subsidies to failing financial firms.
• Flood Insurance: Eliminate national flood insurance for repeatedly flooded homes.
• Measuring Inflation: Identify and use more accurate measures of inflation for all government programs.
• Medicare Hospital Payments: Recalibrate Medicare reimbursement rates in high-cost regions of the country.
• Medicare Teaching Subsidies: Reduce Medicare subsidies to actual cost of hospitals' graduate medical education.
• Medical Malpractice Reform: Enact a federal statute reforming state medical malpractice laws.
• Medicaid Block Grant: Convert the open-ended Medicaid program into a capped block grant to the states.
• Foreign Aid: End all foreign aid programs.
• Air Traffic Control: Privatize air traffic control.
• Family Planning: Eliminate Title 10 family planning grants.
• F-35 Fighter Plane: Eliminate all planned purchases of F-35 Join Strike Fighter aircraft.
• Pentagon Savings Reform: Implement Defense Secretary Gates' proposed Pentagon savings, to reduce the deficit.

edited 21st Nov '11 11:26:49 AM by secretist

Why wouldn't they? They're the patsies of the rich and the corporations, and who do you think makes a fuckton off those tax cuts?

The tax cuts also left in a gaping big loophole that allowed capital gains to be taxed way below what it should be.

Oh, and just because it's profoundly irritating, "negating the Clinton tax hikes" is idiotic, because those balanced the fucking budget.

We had a 70% top tax bracket rate in the '50s and the economy was booming beyond anything any of us could imagine. Every fucking time we lower the taxes, things all go to shit, middle and lower class income stagnate, and the rich go wild fucking up the economy through the stock market until it crashes and we reign them in with the short fucking leash they should have.

That's correlative rather than casual. Actually, Nixon taking us off the gold standard caused all those things, and even if the taxes were still that high, they still would of happened.

The gold standard is pointless. Whether money is tied to a government promise or valueless metal, the end result is the same: it has value because people assign it value. This is Sociology 101, dammit.

And no, because the same thing happened during the '20s. They dropped the tax rate to 24% and the stock market went fucking insane while middle and lower class wages stagnated. Upper class income went through the roof, stock become hyper-overvalued, and then it all crashed and, ~gasp~, we had to put the rich back in their place and stop letting them run amok.

Every single time the government starts to just let business do whatever and the rich pay less taxes than the average person, things go terribly wrong. They did it in the '20s, and they did it in the '70s and '80s, and in the '30s and now today we're paying for their stupidity.

Secretist, getting off the Gold Standard was probably the best thing Nixon did domestically. But yeah, Secretist, how would you balance the budget because 100% public sector cuts is an insane platform.

Being surprised the "Super" Committee did not reach a deal is like being surprised fire burns you.

That's up for a history discussion of what really happened in the past, but that's not what actually happened back then. Actually:

• Calvin Coolidge
  • Pursued Unnecessary Monetary Expansion, Helping to Cause the Great Depression

• Herbert Hoover
  • Practiced Activist Government, Which Aggravated Economic Malaise
  • Deepened the Economic Downturn
  • Set Bad International Economic Policies

Coolidge didn't even regulate the stock market, leading to absurd overspeculation, and Hoover barely even did anything at all. That's why he was voted out.

Actually he did alot, but it only looks like a little relative to FDR. (Federal spneding tripled under Hoover.)

edited 21st Nov '11 11:17:44 AM by secretist