Matt Levin –
Firstly, Anderson handled the facts on my military point – basically, there are far fewer “boots on the ground” now than under H.W. Bush, there is less equipment now than under H.W. Bush, and the equipment that is there is maintained less stringently than it was under H.W. Bush, and this is all due to Clinton. I was not inferring that we were weak, or that we would suffer a lot of casualties going after a tin-pot dictator like Hussein. What I did say was that we do not have the strength to engage in two major actions on two separate fronts simultaneously, which had been thought to be our minimum “safety” strength in post WWII times.
Now, to relate this to the original point of how it helped him balance the budget, I will refer to your post in that we agree the U.S. government spends large sums on the military. Clinton cut a large amount from those expenditures in order to achieve his balance without the pain of cutting social programs, especially the “third rails” of Social Security and Medicare. Add to those cuts the increased revenue from the stock market, which I mentioned above (and which Clinton had nothing to do with save perhaps being in charge of an SEC that was lax in enforcement), and you come out with your balanced budget. In other words, I can say what I said above, because Clinton’s “balanced budget” needs to be qualified by the circumstances surrounding it and how it was achieved. Basically, what he did was weaken our national defense while handing to his successor the problems he had inherited. (We can thank LBJ for starting those, and parcel out the blame as necessary amongst the successors for not having the guts to fix them).
You said: “Although im not to familiar with exactly tax cut your talking about I question wheter or not it is going to be effective.”
To clear up the tax cuts to which I am referring, I am talking about Bush’s proposed elimination of the double taxation of dividends via eliminating the tax on dividends at the investor level (I would have preferred to end them at the corporate level, as that would be more efficient, but so be it). I am also referring to his proposal to fully enact his previously passed reduction in marginal income tax rates, which are scheduled to be phased in over the next 9 years. Finally, I am talking about his proposal to create individual savings accounts that function as less-restricted IRAs, allowing people to save money and do away with a level of taxation (I don’t know if they would function as a traditional IRA or a Roth). From reading some of your above posts, I would think you would be all for those proposals, as they are pro-growth.
You said: “Bush’s last tax cut the amount of money I got was not significant. If anything lol I probably spent the money on biotest products.”
This is because of the phase in. If the rates had been completely reduced as proposed, and as Bush has currently re-proposed, you would have seen far more money. You didn’t see much money because your taxes were barely lowered, irrespective of all the hullabaloo in the press.
Finally, as we all seem to be citing credentials, one of my undergrad degrees from UCSD was a BS in management science, which is a bastardization of econ, finance and logistics. =-)
Now, I want to say that I too am enjoying this – and that it makes me feel at least somewhat better about being at the office on a Sunday (I’m here kind of “on call,” waiting to be handed things to do on a big, time-sensitive project. Ah, the joys of being a junior associate at a big corporate firm.).
