On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 11:35:10 -0800 (PST), Damon Agretto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I agree but to be fair, I think one of the big > > reasons that Clinton > > had that fiscal responsibility was because he had a > > Republican > > controlled Congress. <overgeneralization> They > > wouldn't pass what > > he wanted and he'd veto anything they wanted. > > </overgeneralization> > > Hence, spending was down. I'm not convinced things > > would have been > > the same had Clinton a friendly Congress. > > This is reaching back to the hoary days my my High > School (Clinton was elected when I was in the 9th or > 10th grade), but wasn't his platform intially about > balancing the budget? Understandably, what a candidate > runs on isn't always what they can (or will) deliver, > but I was under the impression that Clinton's "thing" > was to pay down the national debt. > > Damon.
Clinton had to choose a priority the first two years and he made it a balanced budget and the economy. This is before the GOP had a majority. He himself complained that he didn't really want to govern like Ike but was persuaded to fix the budget and the economy and he could get healthcare later. On Social Security I see the talking points today in the media is how the Prez wants to cut benefits 25% relatively soon to set up the stock accounts. According to the same CBO report if the Prez does nothing benefits would possibly have to be cut 19% in 2052. Will they try to make the case that an additional 5-6% cut years sooner adds stock accounts to the Social Security mix? I also see that the projections pundits use have a 1.9% GDP growth but 5-8% stock market growth. Why would the stock valuations go up in this low-growth and insane government debt environment? To fully fund this 2052 shortfall would require additional revenue of 0.54 percent of GDP, less than we are currently spending in Iraq. Or, as Paul Krugman noted in The New York Times, about one quarter of the revenue lost each year by President Bush's tax cuts, "roughly equal to the fraction of those cuts that goes to people with incomes of $500,000 a year." Krugman's favorite example of their three-card-monte logic goes like this: First, they insist that the Social Security system's current surplus and the trust fund it has been accumulating with that surplus are meaningless. Social Security, they say, isn't really an independent entity â it's just part of the federal government. If the trust fund is meaningless, by the way, that Greenspan-sponsored tax increase in the 1980s was nothing but an exercise in class warfare: Taxes on working-class Americans went up, taxes on the affluent went down, and the workers have nothing to show for their sacrifice. But never mind: The same people who claim that Social Security isn't an independent entity when it runs surpluses also insist that late next decade, when the benefit payments start to exceed the payroll tax receipts, this will represent a crisis â you see, Social Security has its own dedicated financing, and therefore must stand on its own. There's no honest way anyone can hold both these positions, but very little about the privatizers' position is honest. They come to bury Social Security, not to save it. They aren't sincerely concerned about the possibility that the system will someday fail; they're disturbed by the system's historic success. http://elemming2.blogspot.com/2004_12_15_elemming2_archive.html Gary D. http://elemming2.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
