Posts Tagged ‘ government debt ’

"Rather than come to grips with America’s fiscal crisis, President Obama gave a State of the Union address littered with costly giveaways, and full of false claims about outsourcing and corporate taxes. (Ironically, for all his denunciations of outsourcing, Obama has spent billions of dollars on foreign 'green energy' firms: '79 percent' of all green-jobs subsidies in the stimulus package 'went to companies based overseas,' noted the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University.)" [editor's note: I don't owe squat for those things. Neither do you unless you're a current or former congresscritter or president - TLK] (01/30/12)

"President Obama formally notified Congress on Thursday of his intent to raise the nation’s debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion. Congress will have 15 days to say no before the nation’s debt ceiling automatically is raised from $15.2 trillion to $16.4 trillion. The debt ceiling would not need to be raised to this level if Obama had simply lived up to his 2008 claim that he would cut spending if elected." (01/17/12)

"I seriously have a bunch of work I have been neglecting because of all this, so I must force myself to make this pledge: Unless a blogger of at least as much notoriety as Brad DeLong revisits this topic, I won’t do another post on it. I might do mopping up operations in the comments here or at other blogs, but read my lips: No New Debt Blog Posts. In closing, a few loose ends ..." (01/10/12)

"A lot of you keep saying, 'Deficits are functionally equivalent to taxation.' Yes, you're right, in the sense that I could come up with a complicated scheme with no deficits (involving redistributive taxation in periods 1 through 8 ) to mimic my second scenario above. But in the real world, it is not at all true that 'deficits are equivalent to tax-financed schemes.'" (01/07/12)

"There are many differences between my hypothetical here and real-world deficit financing -- perhaps most significantly being the fact that those persons whose labor (or bundle of fruits) is conscripted in the real-world for the benefit of other individuals are not themselves able to conscript their conscriptors. But I fancy that the above hypothetical might have some usefulness." (01/07/12)

"The government wants to spend a bunch of money today, giving goodies to older people. If it tried to raise taxes to finance it, there would be an outcry. So instead, the government says to some wealthy investors, 'OK, we are going to use our guns to extort money from some other people in 20 years. We’ll give you a cut of that loot, if you lend us some money right now to give to the older people so they vote us back into office.' This is quite clearly a crooked scheme, and if future generations end up holding those IOUs, it doesn’t change the nature of it." (01/04/12)

"Why -- on the 'public debt is no significant burden insofar as we owe it to ourselves' hypothesis -- should adherents of this hypothesis worry about any reduced ability of government to borrow in the future? Any money not loaned to government tomorrow is not loaned by us; we still have that money." (01/02/12)

"The European Union (EU) has a sovereign-debt problem. Greek government bonds have been downgraded to junk status, and there is talk of default. Italy, Spain, and Portugal appear to be next, as they face skyrocketing interest rates just when their governments must borrow more to service their debt. Should these countries default, some of Europe’s largest banks -- which are heavily exposed to EU sovereign debt -- could collapse." (12/05/11)