Deficits

Events occurring and how they relate/affect Anabaptist faith and culture.
Sudsy
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Re: Deficits

Post by Sudsy »

Bootstrap wrote:Do the deficits in the Trump budget concern you? Why or not? If they do, how much do they concern you? Are there particular spending increases that you would question?
Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.Then you will experience God's peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.
Nothing Trump or Trudeau (in our case) concerns me in the sense of disturbing my peace and making me anxious, IF I obey this text. Philippians 4:6,7.
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appleman2006
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Re: Deficits

Post by appleman2006 »

RZehr wrote:
appleman2006 wrote:I will always be against government debt. There is absolutely no upside to any government running a deficit. Our grandchildren will curse our generation sometime in the future. I hope to be remembered as one that spoke out against it loud and clear.
What is the difference in this and borrowing for business purposes?
Let me try and clarify. I would have no problem with government borrowing for capital infrastructure projects and the like. But these payments need to be made over a 10 or 20 year period just like a mortgage and they need to be included in the yearly budget. Many business also need an operating line of credit to offset times of the year when they do not have income coming in but have major expenses but since the government has a regular source of income spread relatively evenly throughout the year with it's ingenious tax collection system of using businesses as tax collectors I see no need for the government to have that.

In other words the government should be able to balance it's budget every year. Of course there will always be things that happen that will cause a government to go into the red on an occasional year but properly managed it should be just as possible to go into the black. In my opinion it should be illegal for government to loan money for anything other than capital projects. And I would say that if they run in the red more than two years in a row they should all be forced to resign their seats and not be eligible to run again for a minimum of 10 years. Doing this would actually encourage them to carry surpluses to cover the hard times. This method would add a tremendous amount of fiscal responsibility to the job and would quit encouraging governments to spend our grandchildren's money.
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appleman2006
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Re: Deficits

Post by appleman2006 »

Josh wrote:
appleman2006 wrote:I will always be against government debt. There is absolutely no upside to any government running a deficit. Our grandchildren will curse our generation sometime in the future. I hope to be remembered as one that spoke out against it loud and clear.
The other choices are high taxes or a lot less government spending, and there isn’t much will or desire for the latter.
The obvious choice is a lot less spending simply by cutting waste. And yes it could be done without sacrificing a single thing that we really need. In fact I am willing to guarantee that we could get everything the government now provides for us that we really need at 50 cents on the dollar quite easily. Then if you were to take away the amount that is spent to finance the immoral amount of debt that we have built up over the last 50 years on top of that you could also cut taxes as well. Of course the damage is already done on the last part for the next few generations.

And if anyone dares to question the fact that there is that much waste may I suggest you are not living in the world I see every day.
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Josh
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Re: Deficits

Post by Josh »

Cutting waste is hard tho.

Just look at the food stamps thread. We can’t even come to a consensus on MN how to cut waste in that programme.
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RZehr
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Re: Deficits

Post by RZehr »

appleman2006 wrote:
RZehr wrote:
appleman2006 wrote:I will always be against government debt. There is absolutely no upside to any government running a deficit. Our grandchildren will curse our generation sometime in the future. I hope to be remembered as one that spoke out against it loud and clear.
What is the difference in this and borrowing for business purposes?
Let me try and clarify. I would have no problem with government borrowing for capital infrastructure projects and the like. But these payments need to be made over a 10 or 20 year period just like a mortgage and they need to be included in the yearly budget. Many business also need an operating line of credit to offset times of the year when they do not have income coming in but have major expenses but since the government has a regular source of income spread relatively evenly throughout the year with it's ingenious tax collection system of using businesses as tax collectors I see no need for the government to have that.

In other words the government should be able to balance it's budget every year. Of course there will always be things that happen that will cause a government to go into the red on an occasional year but properly managed it should be just as possible to go into the black. In my opinion it should be illegal for government to loan money for anything other than capital projects. And I would say that if they run in the red more than two years in a row they should all be forced to resign their seats and not be eligible to run again for a minimum of 10 years. Doing this would actually encourage them to carry surpluses to cover the hard times. This method would add a tremendous amount of fiscal responsibility to the job and would quit encouraging governments to spend our grandchildren's money.
Makes sense. I might be open to more than that in theory, maybe not in practice.
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Bootstrap
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Re: Deficits

Post by Bootstrap »

Josh wrote:Cutting waste is hard tho.

Just look at the food stamps thread. We can’t even come to a consensus on MN how to cut waste in that programme.
I've seen several presidents produce budgets that promised to save N billion dollars by cutting waste and fraud. I've never seen that translate into actually cutting anything like that amount of waste and fraud. And yes, it does turn into a debate. For instance, in the Medicare thread, I agree with Donald Trump that the prices for services and drugs are just too high and need to be negotiated down. To me, that is a great example of waste and fraud. There are others who will disagree with me on that. I suspect there is a lot of waste and fraud in the military, but other people will say every dollar is well spent and necessary.

So yeah, to cut waste and fraud, you have to make really specific proposals.
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Josh
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Re: Deficits

Post by Josh »

Cuts to waste and fraud do have a eusocial effect in that nearly everyone feels good about it and more invested in the government, which is probably why politicians keep on promising to do it.
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JimFoxvog
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Re: Deficits

Post by JimFoxvog »

As we think about deficits, we should note that over half of discretionary spending goes to the military, and that portion keeps increasing.
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Bootstrap
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Re: Deficits

Post by Bootstrap »

JimFoxvog wrote:As we think about deficits, we should note that over half of discretionary spending goes to the military, and that portion keeps increasing.
And if you want to look for fraud and waste, this side of the budget is worth examining too.
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Bootstrap
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Re: Deficits

Post by Bootstrap »

Josh wrote:Cuts to waste and fraud do have a eusocial effect in that nearly everyone feels good about it and more invested in the government, which is probably why politicians keep on promising to do it.
But it's mostly feel-good promises unless you define specifically what you are looking for. For instance, we have been looking for ways to cut fraud and waste in social spending since the Reagan era, if it were easy to make more progress there, we would have done so by now. If there are significant ways we can do better, it involves more than mouthing the words "fraud and waste".
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