[darkwing104]

Besides raising taxes, what is the rats budget plan?

[Personal Responsibility]

“We think that obviously there are some Democrats who don’t feel as strongly about deficit reduction as (President Obama) does,”

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Which is to say he cares that the deficit may cost him a vote or two and the other Democrats don’t care about it at all.

[appleharvey]

Bless his little pointed head, Eugene Robinson is the textbook definition of a brain stem.

[FlingWingFlyer]

I can’t believe how much this loon loves writing this crap everyday and embarrassing the hell out of himself for the white boys down at the DNC and in the state run “media”. Eugene really needs to grow up and start thinking on his own.

[Vendome]

If prgressively worse, sure.

And I don’t feel like spel chicken...

[Vendome]

If prgressively worse, sure.

And I don’t feel like spel chicken...

[HiTech RedNeck]

The golden goose is hacking, coughing, sputtering, and well nigh to shuffling off this mortal coil altogether. And these IDIOTS suggest this?

[Yardstick]

The drivers of out-of-control federal spending are medical costs and the Pentagon budget. Leave aside health care for the moment and reflect on the fact that military spending has roughly doubled since 2002. Are we twice as safe? Can we really afford to spend two-thirds of a trillion dollars on defense every year?

Naturally he fingers defense as a spending driver. It's his duty as a liberal columnist to do so (he gets an A for effort in trying to associate the word "trillion" with defense spending even though it's only in the hundreds of billions.) The problem is that defense spending is at near historic lows as a percentage of GDP and the overall trend is downward. He knows this good and well but hopes his readers don't. If he were honest he would acknowledge that the real drivers are social programs -- social security and that sort of thing. But he's an ideological hack, so we get the Big Lie.

[GeronL]

What is the effective tax rate in greece? Something like 80% with all of the taxes combined? Somehow high taxes did not save them from debt.

It’s the spending, duh

[andyk]

Clearly, the federal government cannot continue spending at a rate of 25% of GDP while taking in revenues that equal less than 15% of GDP

Considering that historically, tax revenue as a percent of GDP hovers around 18% regardless of the level of taxation (an interesting statistic, no doubt), it is clearly the spending level that is the problem.

[Oceander]

But it is not necessary — nor is it wise — to heap a disproportionate share of the burden onto the backs of the poor, the elderly and the battered middle class.

Funny thing that, most of them don't bear any sort of a burden now anyways, considering that most of them get net transfers from the government when all transfers are taken into account.