{"id":4562,"date":"2011-08-03T08:09:17","date_gmt":"2011-08-03T12:09:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=4562"},"modified":"2011-08-08T13:27:23","modified_gmt":"2011-08-08T17:27:23","slug":"heres-why-obama-and-the-tea-party-are-both-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2011\/08\/03\/heres-why-obama-and-the-tea-party-are-both-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Here’s why Obama and the Tea Party are both right"},"content":{"rendered":"

The horrible train wreck that just consumed America’s political system — and nearly devoured our economy — has been largely cast as a collision of two rigid ideologies.<\/p>\n

Republicans want to cut spending sharply, in an effort to bring the Federal deficit down to manageable levels.\u00a0 Democrats want to hike taxes and other forms of revenue, to curtail the dangerous debt gap while sustaining social programs.<\/p>\n

But the ugly reality, one that both parties are afraid to tell their constituents, is that to close this gulf we will have to take the most painful parts of both plans and merge them together.<\/p>\n

Currently, we spend nearly two dollars for every dollar taken in by the IRS and the Treasury.<\/p>\n

The most progressive economists will tell you that that disparity needs to be slashed pretty quickly, though some would argue that cuts shouldn’t begin until the recession is over.<\/p>\n

The most ambitious conservative plan — known broadly as “cut, cap and balance”<\/a> — would gradually phase spending back from current levels, which hover around 22.5% of America’s GDP.<\/p>\n

The goal would be to spend around 19.9% of GDP by 2021. That may not seem like a huge change, but it means that roughly ten percent of total Federal spending would be eliminated.<\/p>\n

When you’re talking about a government as big as ours, that’s huge.<\/p>\n

This has been characterized by some on the left as draconian, tea party driven crazy talk.\u00a0 And there is no doubt that cuts of this size will be painful.\u00a0 But in fact that 19.9% figure is about the norm for the post-World War 2 era.<\/p>\n

If it was good enough for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, surely our Federal government can live within those same means now?<\/p>\n

But if liberals need to accept the reality of some common-sense belt-tightening, conservatives need to face an even tougher reality when it comes to taxes.<\/p>\n

Currently, Federal taxes account for only about 15% of GDP.\u00a0 Which means that even if we hit the tea party’s goal for shrinking government, we would still be running enormous and unsustainable deficits into the future.<\/p>\n

Some on the right insist that taxes can’t be hiked, even to the levels we saw during the Clinton years.\u00a0 (The post-War average for Federal taxes is roughly 18% of GDP, well above current levels.)<\/p>\n

They pretend that we can close the gap simply by cutting government and supercharging the economy.\u00a0 But it’s exactly that kind of easy-answer fantasy that got America into this trouble in the first place.<\/p>\n

So here’s the simple, fiscal reality:\u00a0 In order to pay for the size of government that even tea party activists say they want (again, 19.9% of overall GDP) Federal revenues will have to rise at least as much as President Obama has requested.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The horrible train wreck that just consumed America’s political system — and nearly devoured our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4562"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}