re: #168 Fozzie Bear

Except the situation is fixable by raising taxes to Clinton-era levels and reducing military expenditures to the same level. In other words, we need to pull out of the middle east, and raise taxes slightly. That’s it.

The situation only seems so intractable because the most effective methods to fix it have effectively been taken off the table. It’s like an obese man chopping off his leg to lose weight, instead of laying off the twinkies and going for a daily walk.

Telling people there’s plenty of gain with no pain gets you updings, but it doesn’t make you right.

Restoring the tax law, letter by letter, to what it was in 1998 might, on paper, yield the needed revenues. Assuming that projections for Obamacare work out as projected, which everyone knows they will not.

But that tax law was written when dollars were bigger than today’s dollars. Imposing the same percentage hit on what were then robust incomes, and are now modest, is not really a restoration of previous tax rates.

Reducing military expenditures to Clinton-era levels requires that our wars go away. This doesn’t seem to be in the offing, since Obama just added another one to the menu. Now I think he was right to act, but still, there it is.

In the Clinton era, social security tax receipts could be, and were, used to cover the day to day expenses of government. Now, either social security taxes have to be raised, or benefits have to be trimmed, or other tax revenue has to be diverted to covering the cost of social security benefits.

Medicare is blowing another hole in the budget, and the storm has just begun. We can no more get past this budget storm with incremental tweaks than we can manage AGW by each turning down the thermostat one degree in winter and up in summer, and properly inflating our tires.