Word: debts
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...that the cost of a major stimulus package and the continued effort to bail out the financial system could result in years of "trillion-dollar deficits." Deficit spending is needed to help revive the economy from recession, but trillion-dollar deficits for years to come would sink us in debt and risk a collapse of the currency. We need a sensible strategy that deals with the present crisis while preparing for the future. We need more government, and to pay for it we'll need to raise taxes relative to GDP over time...
President-elect Obama inherits the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression: the financial sector is in ruins; the budget is hemorrhaging red ink; debt-ridden households have clamped down on spending, thereby pulling the rug out from under the economy; unemployment is soaring; the country is in two wars; and the unmet social and environmental needs are vast. These conditions demand a fundamental realignment in strategy that ultimately comes back to taxation: Will we pay for the government we need? Obama's big domestic program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, proposes doubling renewable-energy production and making public...
...even floating a two-year, $300 billion tax cut (roughly 1% of GDP per year). Even worse, our federal revenues are nearly exhausted by just four areas of spending: Social Security and other retirement programs, health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, defense, and interest payments on the public debt. Almost all the rest of our expenditures - from education and infrastructure to international diplomacy and much more - have to be funded by borrowing. We are racking up trillions of dollars in debt, to be paid in the future through taxation or inflation, in order to carry the year-in, year...
...Congress first started looking at an economic stimulus package last year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was quick to lay out three important guiding principles: that the provisions be "timely, temporary and targeted." "If we heap too much on top of the package, it will then take us deeply into debt," she warned in a speech on the House floor on Jan. 29, 2008. But now, as Congress gears up to craft a mammoth stimulus package that will dwarf last year's $170 billion bill, those requirements don't seem to be all that binding. (See a bailout report card...
...qualms about the debt take a backseat to worries about a depression, the scope of the stimulus plan has grown to include everything from expanding Pell grants for college students and health care for the unemployed to investment in renewable energy. Instead of temporary measures meant to prop up the sagging economy over the next two years, much of what has been proposed looks like a laundry list of Obama campaign promises. If the plan is passed, Obama will get, in one fell swoop, a running start on large swaths of his long-term agenda, the ultimate cost of which...