Fundamental Differences

[OldGaffer]

In his interview with the Wall Street Journal, Mitch McConnell finally mentioned a few sort-of specifics about what spending cuts the GOP wants: raising the Medicare age, charging higher premiums to affluent Medicare recipients, and changing the price indexing of Social Security. But how much does all this amount to?

I’ve already noted that the CBO has estimated the fiscal savings from raising the Medicare age at $113 billion over the next decade. A study of health care options (pdf) from a few years ago put the savings from expanded premiums at $20 billion (Option 91) – that number would be somewhat higher now, but still small.

I haven’t found a 10-year estimate of the Social Security indexing idea, but we can roll our own. The idea is to replace the CPI with a “chained” measure that typically rises about 0.3 percentage points less per year. Apply this to the CBO projections of Social Security spending under current policy and I get 10-year savings of $186 billion.

So, if we take all of McConnell’s ideas together, we get a bit more than $300 billion. Getting this would, by the way, impose substantial hardship – seniors would be forced into inferior private insurance, and there are good reasons to believe that the true inflation rate facing seniors is actually higher, not lower, than the CPI. Still, what we’re looking at overall is a saving equal to only about one-fifth of what Obama is proposing to raise by higher taxes.

And that’s it; has anyone heard even a peep from the GOP about what else they’d like to cut?

This is pathetic – and these people are definitely not serious.

From Krugman, the Nobel Winning Economist.

 

[degsme]

Degs, here is a hot tip for you, we are not interested in economic theory, we are interested in reality,

Economic theory is BASED IN REALITY.

Its simply a way of saying "ideas put together in a way that can be shown to actually predict what happens in the real world".

So let me ask it to you this wyay.


Under what REAL WORLD ECONOMIC PREDICTIONS does it make sense to balance a budget in the midst of a recovery from the worst fiscal crash in human history?

Under what REAL WORLD ECONOMIC PREDICTIONS do we have to "address the debt now? Particularly when we easily recovered from much deepere debt/GDP ratios in a mere 6 years?


WHAT REAL WORLD ECONOMICS is behind your claims?


Remember, nations don't have fixed life spans the way you do
Some nations (like the USA) can print their own money -which you cannot.

So then why do you believe that your PERSONAL finance mentaltiy applys at the Federal Level?

 

[degsme]

What in the hell are you talking about?

I predicted Obama would win.

You said "we shal see"...

How'd that work out for you?