{"id":18007,"date":"2012-12-02T10:54:04","date_gmt":"2012-12-02T15:54:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=18007"},"modified":"2012-12-02T10:54:04","modified_gmt":"2012-12-02T15:54:04","slug":"define-or-be-defined-fiscal-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/12\/02\/define-or-be-defined-fiscal-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Define or be defined: fiscal edition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ocregister.com\/opinion\/trillion-378859-spending-fiscal.html\" target=\"_blank\">Ron Hart<\/a> talks about the distant past where congress passed budgets and those budgets were actually in surplus:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Most Americans expect politicians to work out a back-room deal to avoid embarrassing themselves again. The politicians feel these deals are too ugly for us to watch, so they are compelled to spare us the indignity of the &#8220;most transparent president&#8221; ever. Political deals are like sausage; it is best not to watch the product being made. The difference is, sausage as an end product is actually good.<\/p>\n<p>In the Democratic vernacular, taxes have changed to &#8220;revenues.&#8221; Long ago they replaced the word &#8220;spending&#8221; with &#8220;investments,&#8221; especially when wasting money on Solyndra and the like. They think we are stupid.<\/p>\n<p>When Bill Clinton so famously &#8220;balanced the budget&#8221; with the Internet boom and all the taxes from those stock sales, the GOP and Newt Gingrich passed a budget (yes, Congress used to do that) of $1.7 trillion in expenditures. Adjusted for inflation, our federal government would be spending $2.3 trillion today and collecting $2.5 trillion in &#8220;revenues,&#8221; resulting in a $200 billion surplus. But instead of increasing government spending in line with normal inflation, under Bush and Obama we are spending $3.8 trillion today. Democrats, who believe we have a &#8220;revenue&#8221; problem instead of a &#8220;spending&#8221; problem, must also think they have a bartender problem, not a drinking problem.<\/p>\n<p>Those Republican neocons who have never seen a country they do not want to bomb because it looked at us wrong, have to give on defense. We spend $1.19 trillion a year on defense &mdash; more than the other top 10-countries combined and more than six times what second-place China spends.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ron Hart talks about the distant past where congress passed budgets and those budgets were actually in surplus: Most Americans expect politicians to work out a back-room deal to avoid embarrassing themselves again. The politicians feel these deals are too ugly for us to watch, so they are compelled to spare us the indignity of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,7,53,13],"tags":[669,697,698,118],"class_list":["post-18007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-politics","category-usa","tag-billclinton","tag-budget","tag-congress","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4Gr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18007"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18008,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18007\/revisions\/18008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}