CBO: US likely to fall off 'fiscal cliff' if Bush-era tax cuts allowed to expire

I'm not sure what the point you were trying to make with the link was. Honest.

What was it meant to demonstrate?

 

I missed that. I thought there was another point.

Even so, Keynes would cringe at the way his name is invoked today. His prescription wasn't never-ending debt and deficit spending to try to stoke endless growth, and when that leads to a fiscal problem, more deficit spending to try to respark growth -- until your house of cards collapses on you.

Keynes was the guy who thought people are too stupid to figure out how to manage their money in productive ways, so we needed a cabal of Keyneses to manage our economy for us. It was incredibly arrogant. But even with that, by "managing" he meant pumping money into the economy to try to temper slow downs, as well as pumping it OUT of the economy to balance things out when the economy is growing. His idea was that he could create more even cycles.

The problem with his ideas are myriad. 1) It just never works. You can't manage the economy with the kind of precision Keynes or others pretend they can. It's like trying to dribble a football. 2) Fiscal policy, which is the tool of Keynes, is done politically, and politicians want the spending and growth. They don't want the cutbacks when growth is achieved, the way Keynes advocated. 3) Because it is political, fiscal spending is unproductive and corrupt -- by its very nature. In practice, it encourages a corrupt system of kickbacks in which our government provides "stimulus" to unproductive areas of the economy -- but the areas that have bought off our politicians for government favors. And then once those areas have their hand in the cookie jar, as history has proven, good luck getting it out. So our government just grows and grows and we get huge budgets filled with more money being passed around to special interests than anyone can even keep track of anymore. Which is how we have gotten to where we are today. Nearly $4 trillion of government goodies given out as part of a system of favors for government cash. And the number never shrinks, just gets bigger every year.

On the flip side, they have a narrow band of taxation that people seem willing to accept, so while those budgets growth, we don't do the responsible thing and raise corresponding revenues to match the spending.

And they show no will to change it. Which means it won't change until we are facing a European style crisis. That was my point. We can put it off. But we have already created the mess. The question is now how bad we allow it to get before facing it.

 

First, those CBO numbers are never accurate. And they are based on false assumptions. But even if they did have a handle on future economic growth. ... To me that is gobblygook. If our GDP -- our economic growth -- is predicated on our government putting itself in more and more debt, in an endless cycle, then our economy has bigger problems than this conversation.

The whole thing also ignores the point we are already at. We are $15.5 trillion in debt and growing that number by more than a trillion a year. It's fairy tale land. The idea that we need to keep doing that to put off a recession is just doing more of the same and creating worse economic problems down the line.

That thinking has already failed us in a big way. We shouldn't be doubling down.