Remember that “pulling pigs out of the trough causes a lot of squealing.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/03/adventures_in_federal_budget_c.html

Contrary to Joe Biden’s “Paying taxes is patriotic!” I agree with you, that it is every patriotic American’s duty to cut off the blood supply to the gargantuan govt leech by legally paying the least amt in taxes. Judge Learned Hand said that there was nothing wrong is arranging one’s affairs so as to pay the least amount of tax possible. This has never been more true that it is today.

Starve the beast!

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/03/30/rep_ben_quayle_politico_is_worst_media_outlet_in_history.html

I’m not only not going to support such a govt, but i’ll work my ass off to make sure it gets thrown into the dustbin of history along with every other ideology driven lunatic regime that immoral human beings seem to not be able to help themselves from inventing.

DC has somewhere (its hard to compute the exact figure) around 100 trillion in unfunded obligations coming due in the next 20-30 years in addition to the annual deficits it has been piling up year after year. Meanwhile the Fed Reserve is trying to re-inflate the real estate bubble and the credit bubble it created. BUT the real poison pill is that in the next 10 or so years interest on the federal debt will eat up somewhere between 25% (rosy forecast) and 50% of all federal revenues. This is the burden that we are passing on to our children & grandchildren.

Additionally, I’m cranky and impatient tonight because today I listened as a 12 year old girl sobbed and confided to me about her pain when she learned yesterday that her parents were not her ‘real parents’. She was devastated to discover she was adopted. All I could do was listen and try to comfort and reassure her that her adoptive parents where the only parents she will ever know. When I listen to the pain of a 12 year old I lose my patience with the MDLs that infest our society like fleas infested with the bubonic plague.

Note: The following is a quote from “The Welfare of Pigs During Transport and Slaughter. Note especially point 5 below:

The first step in maintaining high animal welfare standards is correct operation and maintenance of equipment. A numerical scoring system can help management maintain high standards (Grandin 2000a). It enables management to determine whether or not their handling and stunning practices are improving or deteriorating and it is less subjective. The variables that should be measured are: 1) the percentage of pigs stunned correctly on the first attempt, 2) percentage of pigs that remained insensible, 3) percentage of pigs that fall down during handling, 4) percentage of pigs prodded with an electric goad and 5) percentage that vocalized (squealed) in the conveyor restrainer (Grandin, 1998).

See:

http://www.grandin.com/references/pig.welfare.during.transport.slaughter.html

Also, for training in squeal recognition, become familiar with the following:

http://www.soundamerica.com/sa/summary/play.cfm/sound_iid.323116

I’ve read stuff like that from some journalists, but I have no idea where you get this stuff. Is it Krugman and DeLong?

Meanwhile, here’s what I see:

A good proxy for regulatory “services” is the Federal Register. It averaged close to 73,000 pages a year during the Carter Presidency. Then it dipped to 54,000 pages per year in the Reagan era, and finally exploded up again to 59,000 under Bush I, 71,000 under Clinton, and 75,000 under Bush II.

And that, again, is just regulation.

There’s more. Between 1980 and 2007, the full-time federal workforce increased 63% (the population increased only 33%).

Spending on regulation increased 35%:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v30n6/cpr30n6-1.html

Veronique De Rugy updates the numbers here:

http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/publication/Regulators-Budget-Report-Final-Version-October-29.pdf

Total spending, most of which goes to services, doesn’t look any “smaller” than in the past:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.html

As a percentage of the budget, transfer payments were 38.9% in 1978, 39.1% in 1988, and 53.5% in 2008. As well, federal grants-in-aid to states have increased 37% in the last three years alone:

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/131472.html

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104655.html

Will raising taxes solve the spending and deficit problems? Prof. Richard Vedder has doubts:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704648604575620502560925156.html

Now, I didn’t put academic stuff in there (I’d have to give JSTOR links, and I don’t even know if that’s possible – such, such are the joys of grad school). But you get the point. This is not a close question. No matter how you cut and slice and dice the numbers, you’re not going to get the 53.5% of the budget that goes to transfer payments to get below the 1978 proportion of 38.9% or the 1988 proportion of 39.1%. I’m trying to keep this somewhat short – these are just the basics, Budget 101.

In sum: Homeland security full-time employment has gone up. HHS full-time employment has gone up. Grants-in-aid have skyrocketed. The Federal register is bigger than in the 1970’s and hugely bigger than in the 1980’s. It has been shown time and again that for every 1$ the federal government receives in revenue, it spends around 3$ – so even if you raised taxes and got a revenue addition of X, you’d just be increasing spending by another 3X.

You can disagree with that, but you can’t pretend that very serious economists and analysts don’t hold these views. Consequently, you can’t pretend that for us to lean toward that view is somehow thoughtless or irrational or rooted in vapors.

Honestly, I can’t find a single area which might fall under “services” that is smaller today than it was in the ’70’s and ’80’s, unless you mean airline regulations. If so, you need to define your terms better. On the other hand, if you did that, you’d have no case.

In sum, OB was absolutely right when he said “…destroying the conditions and attitudes which make America successful.” He wasn’t just talking about economic conditions. “Attitudes” matter, perhaps above all else, and that means non-quantifiable things like manners and morals. You might demur, but asserting that OB was talking nonsense is disingenuous. You knew what he meant.

2) You mention social security a lot, but when you add medicare and medicaid to that – as you must – you’re no longer talking about a bit of a hike in payroll taxes. You can’t finance all of that with taxes. If you could, then Europe would be liquid right now.

Also, to say it once more, you’re ignoring the crucial point of dispute, which is that more revenues would equal greater promises, thereby not solving the problem. It’s a matter of how we perceive human nature and the trends it manifests when obtaining a certain amount of power. Gunnar Myrdal saw it (arguing that social security systems were destined to be the doom of liberal democratic societies). Mancur Olson saw it, in “The Rise and Decline of Nations.” These are not conservatives, nor lightweights. Try to understand before you mock.

3) Do you really think businesses and “the rich” do not pay their “fair share” of taxes?

What would be a fair share? And if there’s no way for even extortionate taxes on business and “the rich” to cover what needs to be covered systemically (not just for SS), would you be willing to tax the middle and lower-middle classes? What’s their “fair share”? .

My view is that the problem is systemic and much bigger than SS alone, and that feeding the beast, with “fair shares” or not, and aside from adverse effects w/r/t economic liberty, is a recipe for exacerbation, not alleviation. You want to tinker, while I want to go more in the direction of Walter Russell Mead, who you should really try reading.

It bears mentioning that the cancerous pension problem in the states is also exacerbated by the systemic spending problems and promises made by the Feds. It streaks and subtends the whole shebang, and your only thought is to extort businesses and rich people, and slash military spending? That’s it?

4) Clearly, the difference here is that you don’t think there truly is a problem, whereas I – and presumably many others here – do (and that lets me know that you are not Brad, because he does think there is a crisis).

I don’t know why you would waste your time coming here to establish that you are a liberal and we are conservatives.

Believe me, we get it.

I know, I know… you hear fine, honest men of integrity, like Harry Reid, saying “The Social Security Trust Fund has $2.5 trillion in it! It won’t run out for decades!”

Of course, he fails to mention that he’s not talking about $2.5 trillion dollars of money; he’s talking about $2.5 trillion dollars of bonds; that is, $2.5 trillion dollars of federal-government debt.

Social Security is broke right now. The federal government is going to have to borrow at least $45 billion this year to meet SS obligations over and above what taxes bring in; they have to borrow that much to redeem that much out of the trust fund, because the trust fund doesn’t have any money in it, only bonds that have to be redeemed. And there is no end in sight to the shortfall.

Here’s a translation to remember: when you hear or read somebody say “the Social Security Trust Fund has $2.5 trillion in it”, what they really mean is “the U.S. Treasury owes $2.5 trillion dollars to the Trust Fund, and it’ll pay up as needed by borrowing more money”.