Posted on 02/26/2013 5:39:35 AM PST by FatMax
In 2011 as various Republicans competed for the nomination to oppose Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson (Fla.) in the 2012 election, contender Connie Mack promoted the concept of The Penny Plan.
The Penny Plan was conceived by Georgia businessman Bruce Cook. Sen. Rand Paul resurrected the idea during his response on behalf of the Tea Party to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. There’s a lot to be said for the plan, but unfortunately, the messaging was skewed by...
The idea was simple:
The One Cent Solution is beautifully simple: If the government cuts one cent out of every dollar of its total spending (excluding interest payments) each year for five years, and then caps overall federal spending at 18 percent of national income from then on, we can: Reduce federal spending by $7.5 trillion over 10 years [and] Balance the budget by 2019.
Would it work? The math is sound, according to the fact check wonks at The Miami Herald. The checkers questioned the legislative approach—do you cut all programs or spare mandated taxpayer investment programs like Medicare and Social Security?
Cook’s plan, however, made allowances for such programs:
Under the One Cent Solution or “Penny Plan”, not all programs must be cut by one percent. Congress may determine that some programs are too critical to cut, but that would require that other programs be reduced more so that the total amount cut is equal to one cent for every dollar each year for six years.
The fact checkers deemed Mack’s claims about balancing the budget via the Penny Plan as “half-true,” but if you read the argument carefully, it’s obvious the claims were...
(Excerpt) Read more at theusreport.com ...
Nearly every American citizen has learned to do with significantly less than what we had last year, the year before that, and so on. Why is it those in Washington can't do with two measly percent less, which is what the sequester (which was Obama's plan to start with) would carve out of the federal budget?
We did need any more smoke and mirrors from Washington with the drip drip of continuous “crisis” situations that get ginned up to justify phony meaningless cuts and or harmful tax increase deals.
The RINO’s and Democrats have bailed out businesses and labor unions with their games in the past five years driving the country trillions more into the hole.
WE NEED AN IMMEDIATE BALANCED BUDGET AND WE NEED IT NOW.
This will work.
Every single American - even libs - understand and know that a 1 cent per dollar reduction is reasonable. We ALL understand that.
This will cut-off at the knees any language/demagoguery of “massive cuts” and will knock-down the paradigm now of base-line budgeting.
It’s brilliant. And it balances the budget.
Do you know if Congress has done anything on the Penny Plan?
In a similar vein, if you cut spending back to less insane levels (say, 2006 or 2008 budget year) and capped an increase in spending to 2% per year, the budget would eventually balance and turn to surplus as long as economic growth outpaces that 2% on average (and historical, it does).
This is still an increase, yet to even suggest such a plan would lead to derision as “draconian cuts”.
nothing really so far. It was talked about during the debt limit “crisis” two limit increases ago.
It needs to be offered up. 75% of us think spending is a problem. This will address it. And as I said will avoid the language/low-info voter demagoguery.
Best of all, it will work. We’ve ALL had to cut at least 1 cent per dollar... and we ALL think it’s reasonable the gov’t do it too.
Now is a good time to bring this up again. I hope they’ve been planning to bring it back. But I’m afraid they’re just kind of clueless.
I think it was Aristotle who said something like “those who refrain from getting involved in politics are doomed to be ruled by lesser men.”
With the pain in the ass it is to be in politics, I’m afraid we have almost 95% dolts in office.
It's NOT 2% less. It is a 2% DECREASE of the "scheduled" INCREASE- IT IS STILL AN INCREASE!
We need to move away from anything that was proposed by Connie Mack! I am a resident of Florida and I still cannot believe how we let Nelson so easily win the Senate seat by putting forth such a troubled candidate as Connie Mack. Where was the GOP leadership, they knew Mack would have trouble with the election due to his background, such as failing to pay child support, missing more votes than any member of the house, bar room brawls....etc...I still scratch my head on why the GOP did not push for a stronger candidate in Florida, Nelson was ready to be beat.
Mack was an awful candidate, but the Penny Plan is a good one. Voters were on our side from 2009-2010 when we presented logical, fair solutions to our problems. In 2012, we stopped doing that for some reason. Why Mack wasn’t pushing this plan during his campaign is beyond my understanding. Why Romney and Mack didn’t champion it together in FL is also foolish. As usual some idiot consultants were against it, so they both ran listless campaigns.
The Penny plan is a fair solution. For the sake of this sequestration, proposing it only on discretionary would even be sufficient. Our financial woes will not be solved in one bill considering a Reid Senate and Obama White House.
Karl Rove comes to mind. Why anyone listens to consultants like him is beyond me. Republicans would be better off taking political advice from a telemarketer.
I am anti-Rove as much as the next guy. I think much of his value is past. I will give Rove credit for understanding campaign management and strategy. He ran far superior campaigns in 2000 and 2004 to what we have seen in ‘08 and ‘12. He understood how to run a conservative campaign and still micro-target to attracts needed voting blocks. He has tremendous understanding of running a national campaign. Beyond that, like most of these consultants, is not a reliable person to advance our ideas. He has goals that are different than those of principled voters. He’d rather have Mike Castle in the Senate than Ted Cruz. He’s been with us on many of these Tea Party candidates...he is vocally supportive of Rand Paul and others.
I have major issues when he cut Angle and O’Donnell at the knees moments after the primary was decided. He has as much to blame as anyone on those when he did that. He and the Bush family did the same to Kathleen Harris in the FL Senate race 10 years ago. They cut off good people during or after the primary, and then are first to crow how they ‘couldn’t win’ afterwards. It is despicable. I wish he’d just go away at this point.
Oh, he’s shrewd when it comes to politicking - I’ll give him that. But his principles are not what our republic needs to survive. As you mentioned, Rove would rather hand the election to the Democrats than see the Republicans advance a candidate that he doesn’t support.
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