I have found that most small business people will be more likely to spend money for equipment and wages to AVOID going into the upper income bracket.

Federal Funds vs. Unified Budget. WRL uses "federal funds" rather than the "unified budget" figures that the government prefers. Federal funds exclude trust fund money (e.g., social security), which is raised separately (e.g., the FICA and Medicare deductions in paychecks) and is specifically ear-marked for particular programs. By combining trust funds with federal funds, the percentage of spending on the military appears smaller, a deceptive practice first used by the government in the late 1960s as the Vietnam War became more and more unpopular.

Although I don't agree with the mechanism of the earned income tax credit, it is in reality a negative income tax and could be increased.

I agree that taxes on small businesses should be as light as possible, but if their owners extract a salary which puts them in higher income tax brackets, then I see no reason to cut their personal tax rates.

Bush also championed the Do Not Call List. So, although I could compare it to Reagan's middle class tax cut which his budget director, David Stockman described as the Trojan Horse for the tax cut on the top bracket, I'll just count it as 2 things that Bush did right.

sure, if you include state and local spending the 20%-25% for defense spending is correct

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2009_0.html

Entitlements are 60-70%, to be over 90% by the end of the decade. By 2030, entitlements will consume the entire budget. I guess we could just double taxes, but then y'all wouldn't be very happy with the pitiful job and low wages that you were being paid as a result.

And frank, you can't really cut income taxes for lower income workers. They already don't pay any. They get money back from the government in the form of earned income credit. Lots of those wealthy earners whose tax cuts you detest are small business owners who own sub-chapter S corporations. THOSE are the tax cuts that create jobs, along with investors, which is why capital gains taxes SHOULD be low.

Btw, under Bush, middle class workers paid less taxes than they did under Clinton, so Bush did what you prescribed.

I say SS is overfunded because it takes in more than it pays out, as it has for well over 25 years. Is there any other definition? Our dispute over SS is whether the surplus accumulated and used to purchase T bills is real. You claim that T bills are worthless, which is belied by the fact that they are still bought and sold. I say that if (and they may one day) they become worthless then not only will SS be insolvent, it will be a small part of the much larger crisis of government default. However, if you still think T bills are worthless, please connect me with anyone giving them away. You were wrong when I gave up trying to convince you and you are still wrong about SS.

Defense spending may be second to other entitlements, but at 44% of expenditures, it is not a very distant second. It is roughly where it was when we faced the very real and existential threat during the Cold War. Where is the existential threat today? The closest is China, and they are being underwritten by our insane trade policies. Our enemy du jour, Al Qaeda, was able to penetrate our Trillion dollar defense system with 8 men armed with boxcutters who even trained to carry out their mission in this country. Despite our expenditures, we cannot be sure of who or what enters our country and obvious targets for terror remain unprotected. One might ask if there were any social program that spent so much and failed so miserably, but the truth is that the entitlement called Defense has little to do with the defense of the country and its people. That would not require the crippling amounts we spend. The major portion of what we call defense expenditures is really better understood as empire maintenance. History shows that these costs eventually become untenable, causing the downfall of all empires. It is happening to us.

And I'm just going to pretend I didn't hear you say SS is overfunded. We've already been through that. SS is beyond broke. It's actually trillions of dollars in debt. Also broke are Medicare, the Post Office, Amtrak, the entire federal government, most state governments, etc. I think the main difference between you and I is that you believe in government much more than I do. In my opinion, most (but not all) of what's wrong with this country is due to an overdependence on the government. Even the current recession can be traced directly to a series of moves by the federal government over the last three decades. It isn't strictly a case of deregulation. It's more of a CHANGE in regulation, from intelligent to political. It started with Carter and never stopped. It still hasn't stopped, though the Obama admin is making some gestures toward it now. I hope they follow through with some smart regulation. We'll see. I'm not confident.

Also, entitlements are still the lion's share of the budget. Defense is second. When the size of government doubles so quickly, it IS the overall size of it that is ruining America. You know, if we were in the situation we were in in the early 20th century, like in 1915, I'd be calling myself a progressive. But things have now swung in the opposite direction. We need to reduce the size of government or our country is not sustainable. If we keep going in the direction we're going, all but a very few of us will ultimately be broke, and will stay that way for a very, very long time. We'll be left begging for scraps from the government table, and the scraps on that table will be ever more diminishing, with ever shrinking wealth from the citizenry to support it. We have mustered up a recipe for certain disaster.

But you seem to have moved on to the Bush as a "fiscal progressive" meme. I've never heard of that term, but you seem to equate it with deficit spending. In the past thirty years, the only time I've heard deficit spending proposed as anything other than a temporary expedient, was when the experiment known as the "Laffer curve" was proposed by conservatives and implemented under Reagan. Also, if you knew anything about progressives, you would know that they are more concerned about where the government spends our money than the size of government. Most progressives I know would actually rather shrink defense spending and our world policeman role in order to free up capital for domestic spending than adding to government's size. So your made up term,"fiscal progressive" is nothing but a straw man.

As to the unfunded entitlements you blame on progressives. Social Security is actually overfunded with a huge surplus borrowed by the federal government conveniently masking the true size of deficit spending. The only way Medicare was passed was only by limiting its scope and cost to near ineffectiveness as LBJ tried to answer to question Guns or Butter by saying both. The competition between domestic and defense priorities plagued Nixon, who created the first bubble by eliminating the gold standard, and Carter when the costs of the Vietnam war came due and OPEC exercised its muscle. But by the end of the Cold War, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned of had become so large and impacted so many congressional districts, that any politician trying to cut defense spending would have been committing political suicide. Accordingly defense spending has become as pervasive an entitlement as any proposed by progressives. Spending on weapons is a jobs program, and by providing other nations with our latest technology weapons we constantly need to improve and spend even more on the next generation of weapons. Military service has replaced good paying jobs and is the only way many can get technical training as well as a college education.

I used to consider myself a libertarian conservative during the late 60's. But I have since realized that despite what people espouse or even believe, once in power, they rely on that power to achieve what they want. That's why it is just as unrealistic to expect a conservative to cut the size of government as expecting Obama to willingly cede the powers that Bush claimed. So given the reality of the dynamics of power and politics, the question is not the amount the government spends but where it spends it.

We are in complete agreement about the unsustainability of our situation. The reality is that our country is falling apart. But Eisenhower had it right. Every dollar spent on the military industrial complex is a dollar unavailable for productive domestic purposes. Given that we spend more than the rest of the world combined on defense while being unable to pay for our self appointed role, the solution is obvious.

No, with the supporting examples I pointed out of Bush's big government policies, I believe what I said is called the truth. People just don't recognize what Bush was because of that 'R' next to his name. Bush was the most progressive President since LBJ when it came to government spending, which is the true measure. His tax cuts (taxes incurred but not paid for) were just misdirection. Clinton was much more conservative than Bush (after the HillaryCare debacle), even though his Republican majority Congress forced him to be that way. That did result in some theoretical balanced budgets (even though they weren't really balanced even then), thus proving that even a minimum of actual conservatism works.

Progressives are responsible for the lion's share of federal spending, nearly all the massive unfunded entitlements (Bush the progressive added to that as well), and are therefore responsible for those committments. There is no dishonesty at all in that statement. It's pretty obvious, actually, and it's why I'm not a progressive. If we don't reverse course, we will be ruined. As you say, we don't have the money to pay our current committments, and then here comes Obama, adding even more. Sometimes I think this country has gone completely insane. The day of reckoning is very near.

You say that you would like the people responsible for the spending to pay down the debt. Two problems with that. First, the ones responsible for the spending are our government officials. I know that most in a position to control spending are millionaires, but even their pockets are not deep enough to dent the debt. Second, there hasn't been a progressive administration in the last thirty years, and aside from Clinton, none have even submitted anything close to a balanced budget. If anything, the most fiscally irresponsible times have occurred under presidents who self identified as conservative. So, blaming progressives for the debt is both intellectually and historically dishonest. If the debt were the result of progressives spending on the poor, why have wages of the poor and middle class been at best stagnant, while the income and percentage of the nation's wealth held by those at the top skyrocketted?

The reasons for our debt aren't that difficult to see. Massive tax cuts, coupled with huge increases in military spending, plus foolish deregulation and suicidal trade policies. Separately, they violate all the tenets of fiscal conservatism and common sense. Together, they have been a disaster of epic proportions. So which party is going to undo these things? The "progressive" Democrats or the "conservative" Republicans? We all know the answer is neither.

But if we are talking about who should pay down the debt, the practical and moral thing is for those who benefitted to pay. It makes no difference whether they are Democrat or Republican, progressive or conservative. Their common denominator is wealth.

The company my wife works for closed 2 plants this spring. Because of the stimulus and the energy tax credits the remaining plants are now booked.

Is the company I work for going to put anybody on…..no, the owner is building a cushion and paying down the company's debt. His thought is that since a second stimulus is out of the picture and there is no recovery of the economy in sight things are going to get slow again. Same for the company my wife works for.

How about my buddy who owns the transmission shop. The stimulus hasn't reached him at all. He has to deal with unemployment/underemployment. He also figures the people that are working are cutting back, trying to build a cushion and paying down debt. That's why we are still losing jobs

Is a huge deficit bad….absolutly…..but when the economy is upside down and in the mud at the bottom of the ocean you gotta do something.

All the business people I have talked to say that if they got a tax cut what they would do is pay down debt and use it, not to expand but to try to hold on till the economy recovers

There is only one way I know of to eliminate the difference between wealthy and poor, and I hope you're not advocating that.

On the debt, I was just thinking that those who propose all the spending (liberals) should be the ones who volunteer to pay. Seems straightforward to me.

I tried to explain who has and continues to benefit from the political and economic consensus over the last thirty years, but you folks wish to view things as an ideological struggle between two diametrically opposed parties, with different visions of what our country can and should be. The struggle is between the haves and the have nots, with both parties doing their best to placate their contributors while selling themselves as champions of the common folk. The real prize for the politicians is incumbency.

So, if you expect me to defend Gore or any other wealthy Democrat vs. wealthy Republicans, you have the wrong guy (and a problem with reading comprehension). But if you are serious about paying down the debt, the moral imperative would be to target those who profitted from our country's fiscal decline, regardless of party. This isn't a matter of ideology. It is a matter of history. History and the debt show that both parties have failed. Arguing which party caused it and which failed to prevent it is simply a distraction from solving the problem.