But current projections are that out debt will top off at approximately the same level as our GDP.

These projections are useful how? And why? The last two budgets have represented extreme overspending(spend 4 or 5 for every 3 collected), and at this point in time we have NO idea when or whether these levels of overspending will be curtailed. Yet we should be cheered because someone made a guess using a model? How, for example, will these projections change if the next budget overspends at the same rate as the last 2? Or If inflation diminished the purchasing power of the dollar by 10 or 20 or 30 percent, or more? Or if inflation also messed up our GDP? Or if we measured it in a sounder currency than the dollar?

“3rd world nation’ was perhaps hyperbole, but it makes the point that our economic status in the world could very quickly diminish by a substantial amount. Further, we really could become just like many 3rd world nations in the sense of being required to meet onerous and invasive conditions in order to borrow capital from nations with sounder currencies.

JUSTIN: you’re wearing me out, brother. I have more trouble with this site than any other.

Show me where I’ve cheerleaded or crowed. Of course I hope our president succeeds. I always hope our president succeeds, whether I voted for him or not.

But all I’ve been doing is consistently warning that the government’s extremely high levels of deficit spending are both unsustainable and extremely risky to the future of all Americans. And you’ve gone to great pains to characterize this as kooky ranting while avoiding any attempt to refute my point.

On the contrary, I accept your point. Of course it’s awful and unsustainable. Yes, we’ve made quite a mess for ourselves. But Obama didn’t make the mess. He’s been president for less than 8 months. The recession started in 2007. The housing bubble started long before that when Obama was still in the Illinois legislature.

The pet projects in the stimulus bill are irrelevant. They’re like John McCain’s eternal list of pork projects. What’s the point? That government is messy and imperfect? Granted. So what? The pork isn’t the point, Social Security, Medicare, Defense, off-budget wars and debt service are the point. Everything else in the budget is chickenfeed.

We have an opposition party that will oppose everything, apparently including a presidential exhortation to students to stay in school. That same opposition party handed off a recession, a bank meltdown and two losing wars.

So setting aside your fanciful list, what do you propose we actually do to create a more rational budget?

we’re pulling out of this recession sooner than expected.

As previously described, you can call a deceleration of the rate of decline a rise all you want, but you’re logically and physically and mathematically wrong to do so. Period.

LIke I said: you’re on a free-associating rant. You don’t offer solutions, you offer dire warnings and imprecations. We’d all like to turn back time and undo the last 30 or 50 years of fiscal irresponsibility. We don’t have a time machine. We have what we have. And we’re doing what we can.

Your writing chops are sound Michael. That’s a great job of framing me as a kook and yourself as the voice of reason. But all I’ve been doing is consistently warning that the government’s extremely high levels of deficit spending are both unsustainable and extremely risky to the future of all Americans. And you’ve gone to great pains to characterize this as kooky ranting while avoiding any attempt to refute my point.

The rest of your post is illogical. You ask me to be useful by making a list of good ideas, and then you give your own list, apparently to one up me. Then you admit it’s politically unfeasible. Then you ask me for a “better plan” but don’t tell what it’s supposed to be better than.

Speaking to the past, a better plan would have been a smaller stimulus bill without wasteful pet projects. A better plan would have been to get more directly involved in more bad loans while letting more bad banks fail.

Going forward, here are a couple random and not comprehensive ideas some of which will suffer from the same flaws as your list, and many of which are tossed out just for fun., not seriously:

•Americans stop paying more for drugs than the average that other western industrial nations pay

•we transition away from employer based healthcare. People who lose their jobs and their families get temporary free healthcare by letting the government run a tab for them, and repayment may be partial based on future income. Everyone is required to pay for healthcare regularly on the expectation that everyone needs it sooner or later. People with kick-ass free employer-provided healthcare are taxed to even out current existing disparities.

•the vast majority of government departments are required to cut their budgets by 5%

• all credit cards are required to have your photo and a PIN number

• marijuana is legalized and taxed heavily, so that the cost of a legal joint is comparable to the cost of a good bottle of wine

• television content providers are required to provide reasonable cost-effective a la cart viewing alternatives

•every business which sells food or drinks is required to sell 12 oz bottles of water for 50 cents, including movie theaters, convenience stores, and sports concessions

•copyright laws are reformed so that a copyright last for 17 years, same as a patent

• seed money is provided, by the government if necessary, to establish a non profit organization to safely produce all drugs whose patents are expired and sell these AT COST to all Americans

•the government sells lottery tickets that you can buy to support your favorite government program. No ads allowed.

•for every federal election, 1/4 of the incumbents are required to randomly swap districts with other congresscritters

• we flip a coin on Roe v Wade.Heads its law forever, tails it’s overturned and goes back to the states. Meanwhile, we all begin work on a new amendment firmly establishing whatever it is that that we really want privacy to mean.

Here’s what Justin wrote:

The rise in unemployment is slowing down and we’re pulling out of this recession sooner than expected.

To which you respond:

Time for the update, Justin: unemployment to 26 year high on latest numbers. So much for the rebound.

In other words you attempted to rebut Justin with facts which directly supported what Justin said. The “rise in unemployment” is clearly “slowing down.” Right? Fact?

And I’m the one not thinking clearly?

LIke I said: you’re on a free-associating rant. You don’t offer solutions, you offer dire warnings and imprecations. We’d all like to turn back time and undo the last 30 or 50 years of fiscal irresponsibility. We don’t have a time machine. We have what we have. And we’re doing what we can.

In the real world this is how things tend to work: we muddle through with half-assed solutions, lurching from crisis to crisis. Right now we are playing the hand dealt, and trying to muddle through. And you crying woe is me is not really any more useful than the Obama support you accuse me of.

You want to be useful? Why don’t you do what neither party wants to do: tell the truth in specific terms. What do you want to cut? What taxes if any do you want to raise?

I’ll offer my quick version: 1) means-test social security. 2) Means-test medicare. 3) raise retirement age to 70. 4) Go to a single -payer health system. 5) Raise taxes on everyone making more than 100k a year, progressive so the highest earners pay up to 50%. 6) Bail on Iraq. 7) Bail on Afghanistan. 8) Open immigration to anyone with a clean record, an education and a 50k buy-in.

Now, could I get any of that through Congress? Of course not. No more than Obama can pull some magic plan out of his ass.

If you have a better plan, one you actually think could get past anti-tax Republicans and anti-cut Democrats, lay it on us.

But 200k jobs lost beats 700k jobs lost. So clearly things are better than they were.

Um, no. Actually they are clearly worse. Fewer folks have jobs. Not sure why you don’t get that. To be fair, I believe that what you mean to cheer is the fact that the pace of decline has slowed. I’ll wait until the decline has stopped and the number of folks employed actually starts, you know, growing in a meaningful way. In other words, substantial growth over the course of 3 to 6 months. That is what “getting better” looks like.

Sorry, but I’m not that encouraged yet by a one or two month period where the rate at which things are getting worse is less than the previous rate. I continue to believe that the economy is in a very tenuous spot. No bets until spring for me.

And if unemployment is your concern, how do you imagine things would be better if we had no stimulus?

I don’t imagine this, which is why I didn’t say anything like this. Aspects of the stimulus made sense, like extending unemployment benefits, subsidizing cobra, giving tax credits to first time home buyers. A whole host of other things will prove to be silly wish-list pork, crap that congresscritters larded on while the larding was good. I’m comfortable thinking that the stimulus could have achieved just as much good as it did at half the cost.

I think you’re just sort of ranting in free-association, not connecting things.

I think it’s WAY easier for you to toss out accusations like that than it is for you to address my actual concerns about the state of the economy and the federal budget. Conspicuously, you’ve yet to come up with anything resembling a cioherent argument for the sustainabilty of deficit spending at current levels.

And that’s a shame. I used to visit the Mighty Middle back in the day, so I know you can actually perform independent thought and deliver useful insight. Ever since you went in the tank for Obama, you’ve been a loveblind defender. You didn’t used to be such a reflexively partisan douche.

You’re just being silly now. No one said unemployment had stopped being a problem. But 200k jobs lost beats 700k jobs lost. So clearly things are better than they were. You’re arguing that a 100 degree temperature isn’t better than a 103 degree temperature because the patient is still sick.

And if unemployment is your concern, how do you imagine things would be better if we had no stimulus?

I think you’re just sort of ranting in free-association, not connecting things.

God forbid we wrote off the phony gains and unsustainable growth rates of the past and accepted moving forward slowly and solidly on a sound understanding. That’s just not tasty enough for most folks.

Clearly the only solution is to borrow and overspend as much as is necessary to reinflate the bubble economy. What could go wrong?

Sorry for the sarcasm. It’s all I can muster in response to rectally-extracted wishful opinions on how to get out of the current economic state. Patriotically spending borrowed money is not on my list of things to do this xmas season.

The point is, all of the indicators that Justin and the Democrats point to as a sign of a recovery now, were also touted as a sign of recovery from the Dot-Com bust.

Obama hasn’t changed the way unemployment has been measured, GDP still includes consumer consumption (as it has long before Bush), Inflation doesn’t include food and fuel prices, ect…Obama promised change. We are getting more of the same. The same wreckless stimulus and monetary policy of the Bush years except 10 times worse. Bernake was appointed by Bush for crying out loud, and someone please tell me what is the difference between Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner besides the hair?

But, to be fair to Obama, he was handed a far worse crisis than Bush ever saw–and Jimmy’s fantasy about a fast economic growth and low unemployment is only justified because in 2004, the Bush administration CHANGED THE FREAKING RULES on how unemployment was counted.
(look it up)

I will concede that Clinton handed Bush off a floundering economy, but the Bush team’s answer was pure idiocy. Obscene government spending and hiding the cost of a war, low interest rates (not really Bush’s fault, to be fair), and tax increases for the rich were disasterous policies only a Bush fan could love.

Clinton did one thing right–he began to try and reduce the federal budget, but most of his economic polices were pure Republican nonsense that only made things worse. Yes, Bush got handed that steaming pile of crap from Clinton, who got it from Bush, who got it Reagan.

And, by all appearances, I am afraid the Obama has surround himself with more Wall Street cronies who will simple try and recreate bubbles and enrich the wealthy and powerful.

If you want to fix things, you have to make things. Moving money around does not create wealth, it only redistributes it or creates the illusion.

If the US government were “bankrupt” in any sense like that, then the things Vast describes as things “worse” than bankruptcy would be likely to ensue. Serious inflation is among the things we’d see in a post-bankruptcy environment where the US was unable to get foreign credit.

People on fixed incomes would get wiped out. Social security would be useless. Civil unrest is putting it mildly.

The bailouts have been the equivalent of cardiac shock paddles. The stimuli have been the equivalent of band aids and pain relief medicine. Both of these actions try to prevent death and make the patient feel better, but they don’t get to the root of the problem. The patient must still either recover on his own or die.

The economy may well recover on its own. But we are not out of the woods- watch out when we have to start moving interest rates away from their historic lows. Watch out when deficit spending finally forces painful tax increases. Watch out when peak oil and/or climate change legislation drives up the cost of energy. And definitely watch out if we continue our deficit spending ways and suddenly find ourselves in a hyperinflationary scenario.

Remember, Bush had a recession dumped on him by the Clinton administration and responded with government spending and artificially low interest rates to boost lending and consumption. Subsequently, we saw the fastest economic growth and the lowest unemployment rates in history. We all know how that turned out in the end.

Funny I don’t recall Justin or Mike R. gushing about what a great Job the Bush administration did in stimulating our economy into recovery from 2002-2007.