I want Obama to be a fiscally centrist President

There I said it.

Look this is about the next two generations of Americans. It is not about political retribution and diffentiation..

For the last 40 years, the GOP has attempted to use wedge issues to defines us the Dems as fiscally irresponsible and pro-tax, And while the reality ot it is very different, the imagery is still etched deeply.

There is nothing wrong with Balanced Budget and we should embrace it rather than whine about it.
There is tremendous wasts and Fraud in government programs and we should not automatically oppose sunsetting programs or pay-go stipulations
Earmarks are not evil, but there are abuses and inequities.
We should all be for low taxes.
The entitlement programs need to be fixed.

We should promote savings and investment and entrepreneurship
We should not be opposed to success merely because there are people who have less.

We can balance the budget again:

We need to end these costly and unnecessary misadventures overseas.
we need to let the Bush Tax cuts expire
We need a capital budget for building and improving our electricity, transportation and education grids.
We need to remove tax shelters and incent corporations to not move jobs offshore and penalize those who do.
We need to create an engine for job creation and a guest worker program and frame it as part of building a tax base necessary for government.

We can do all these things while protecting the poor and the elderly or gutting a regulatory fromework.


Strategically, if we embrace fiscal responsibility as part of our "genetic code", Democrats can run the table until 2040 by continually pointing back to this decade the way the GOP points back to the 1970s. We do this right, and we can marginalize the GOP as the party of obtuse morality and fiscal ineptitude.


Thoughts.

It's not that we can't spend, but we should spend wisely.

Clinton proved that we can create government programs that create jobs and encourage entrepeneurism (sp?) and as a result everyone wins.

There's so much waste to be cut out after the Bush years that I'm confident we can reduce spending without cutting much of importance.

Under Eisenhower, the tax rate reached 90%. Was that centrist?
Under Kennedy, the tax rate reached 70%. Was that centrist?

The fact is we've moved so far right in our economic policy that the word centrist means nothing.

Everyone considers themselves a "centrist" in the broad sense.

The devil is in the details. These days the political definition "Centrist" has been pushed real far to the right.

I think the opportunity exist to change the alignment in such a way that we are viewed as the fiscally responsible party on both spending priorities and tax policy while making the GOP look draconian, profligate and moralistic. We can do that without destroying entitlements (including Healthcare) and gutting a regulatory framework.

This "tax and spend liberal" crap is false and not borne out by any evidence.

Republicans will spend your money faster than it comes in and try to put the tax burden on the middle class (think Reagan payroll taxes, Bush's tax cuts to the wealthy).

The problem is that the GOP has created a meme that we are fiscally irresponsible. And historically we hace not done much to disuade the imageery. The point is that we have to do more than say they are "worse"

Do you mean Farm Subsidies to huge corporate farms, for example?

and the fovernemnet laske the manpower to keep it in check,

So you want to end Medicare? Please explain.

That virtually all the fraud which does afflict the Medicare system is conducted by health care providers, through various false billing schemes. This must be kept clear when the matter is discussed. It is not a question of persons scheming to get onto a program and receive benefits they are not entitled to; it is a question of providers billing the government for services they do not actually provide, or provide where there is no need for them, to persons who legitimately qualify for a program.

But it is important to state it explicitly, since the enemy has dominated this subject a good while, and most people hearing talk if 'Medicaid fraud' will accordingly conjure 'welfare queen' imagery in their minds, and be mobilized against the government providing services to people at all.

simply kowtowing to outdated garbage (ie: Reagan Voodoo Economics).

I do believe in fiscal responsibility, so I suppose that is 'centrist' in a way, but I also support good infrastructure, good social services, and smart government.

Use policies that work and have proven themselves in times of economic crisis. I get tired of "entitlement" programs getting the blame for a bloated military industrial complex budget and tax cut debt because it contains a certain level of deceit. Yes, I'm saying Reaganomics and it's democratic party blended methodology is ideological. It always contains a busting bubble at some point.

stopping the war will take time, and even that won't balance the budget . . . since it'a already running a huge deficit, finding money for new or expanded programs will be a challenge -- if not impossible . . .

The last president to try to balance the budget in the midst of a economic recession/depression was Herbert Hoover...

Economics 101...

We were in a mild recession as he started his tenure,

You run deficits in the form of tax cuts and/or increased federal spending during economic downturns and you run surpluses when the economy is growing...

That's just text book economics...

you know, that notion that the STATE can jump in and create demand during economic downturns when consumer demand no longer supports the economy.
The spending by the state stimulates production and thus creates jobs. This usually requires a period of deficit spending.

YES this DOES run against the grain of the FREE-MARKETEERS. Most people under 40 don't remember a time when the free-marketeers didn't dominate the economic media. I am sure that what I am saying looks strange to young people and older economic privateers as well. But look what those brainiacs have done to us.

This AIN'T communism, this is the way that post-FDR economics worked in this country until the stagflation of Nixon era. When you look at it, Eisenhower's "national defense" highway system helped overcome recessions in the 50's, Kennedy's space program and the post sputnik education initiatives did the same.

Federal spending on WARs, like VietNam and Iraq ruin the economy with non-productive spending that does little to create economic stimulus while pushing society forward.

We must End the War for Oil and invest the "Peace Dividend" in US infrastructure as a path to economic stimulus and societal advancement.

~

Of of these things are to the left but not extreme left. Obama is not a centrist but is slightly to the left of Clinton. That is fine with me. We should eventually balance our budget. Not right away as we can't afford it and the economic crisis has added the bailout to the deficit, hard to overcome that so quickly. But changes can be made to fix the budget. Under Clinton we had a balanced budget but he never got any healthcare reform done. Good thing is, if Obama does well for 4 years, we can reelect him for another 4.

it's the Republicans who have been spending our tax dollars like drunken sailors in a brothel.

What if anything in this do you disagree with?

I have no uise for the DLC at all.. They serve no [purpose and have not had a reason to exist in the last 16 years.

Trying to do so would be very poor economic policy at present. What is needed is a shift from running deficit owing to dead-end military expenditures to running deficit for capital improvements, which pay dividends in economic activity down the road.

The only way the budget is going to be balanced is by means of a growing economy, making available greater revenues while rendering government expenditures a smaller proportion of total economic activity.

Do not mistake this for any great disagreement with your general thrust and specific points, which are sound over-all, with a few exceptions. Only three of the latter seem worth going into in any detail.

The item "We should not be opposed to success merely because there are people who have less" accepts a nonsensical charge the enemy has been peddling for decades. No one opposes success, and progressive taxation, which you clearly do support, is not a punishment to success nor a bar to it. Persons who enjoy a greater degree of wealth benefit much more from the general activity of government, and the security and civil order it provides, and ought rightfully to bear a greater proportion of what it costs to provide them this benefit. A policy of 'levelling up' through measures like the Earned Income Credit and even welfare programs is an important contributor to maintaining civil order and the security of property; people who do not realize this are not fit to possess and direct wealth.

The item "We should promote savings and investment and entrepreneurship" sounds very well, but tends to bog down in details. The surest way to do all these things is to increase the amount of cash available to wage-earners and pensioners that they can spend on goods and services. The means usually proposed are a variety of subsidies to businesses and taxing income from investment at lower rates than income from wages. Both these things have pernicious effects. Subsidies to businesses come to flow to the largest players in any particular industry, and become entrenched expenses of government without serving any purpose but increasing profits of favored businessmen. Lower taxes on investment income do nothing whatever to stimulate investment in productive business, since only demand for products and services, ie., money people actually have to spend on them, provides any real stimulus for productive investment. Lower taxes on investment income do, however, encourage speculation and churning in financial markets, and contribute mightily to the sort of paper pyramids and bubbles reared atop the actual productive business of the national economy, which inevitably collapse with great harm done to the underlying structure of productive economic activity.

The item "a guest worker program" will invariably operate to depress the level of wages in the country. This is the dirty little secret of the entire question of immigrant labor, from whatever angle it is approached, and is both why no real enforcement of the existing regulations is undertaken, on the one hand, and why opposition to 'illegals' often bleeds into such virulent forms on the other. By now the number of persons here in violation of the regulations is so great that no real option exists but a regularization of their status, but it is important to maintain a focus on what the problem actually is, and attempt to rectify it in future. Enforcement has to be directed at employers, not employees, and maintenance of a steady wage rate, through combination of minimum wage regulations and unionization, and enforcement of labor and safety regulations by officials in sympathy with workers rather than employers, are the proper means to put this difficulty afflicting our economy on a course towards extinction.

I wish i had the patience and ability to respond like this. I saw Medicare under attack and couldn't believe it. So i opened another thread which i regret but is now entertaining :popcorn:.

Many people take issue when politicians run with one set of values and then switch to another once they are elected. People voted for him based on what he said he was going to do during the election. He needs to stick with that and all will be well in the end.

I don't think he has a choice.

An overlooked element of the neo-conservative ideology is that it is not a single, coherent ideology, rather a strange amalgamation of several, some of which aren't even compatible. Pertinent to this issue, we saw the practical expression of this in the launching of a two-front war coinciding with a massive tax cut. We look at this and call it the Grover Norquist style "shock doctrine," but it's not precisely that, or that is to say only one element of it is. The Cheney/Wolfowitz wing of the neo-conservatives have no particular issue with big government, and they don't want to kill it precisely. They simply want it used in a certain manner to the benefit of multi-national corporations and empire building. But in trying to guide themselves both by the Norquist school while at the same time presiding over the largest expansion of central government bureaucracy and expense since FDR (and with far less justification), they have left a tangled mess of catastrophic proportions that cannot be sustained on either end.

The Obama administration will have to spend, but they will have to spend wisely and carefully. There will be little room for experimentation.

In an optimum situation fiscal conservative administration would signal a better adminisration and reduction of debt will mean we are not imposing a tax on future generations.


We cannot use "fiscally conservative" policies to get out of the whole.


There is only one option - grow the economy so that we have a bigger base of revenue to tax and then pay off the debt.


The most 'fiscally conservative' thing to do now is to do whatever it takes to keep employment high and get the economy growing again. Once the economy has exapanded I would agree with you that deficit reduction is something that has to be attacked. It is the Republican legacy.

If an Obama administration duplicates Clinton's handling of the economy and starts reducing the deficit in his second term the Republicans will have lost forever their most important polemical weapon.

We need to invest in infrastructure (esp. green power).
We need to incent companies to hire here.
We need to use tariffs to protect American jobs.
We need to remove tax loopholes that allow corporations to pay little or no taxes.
We need to make it easier for workers to unionize.

And like Clinton, we need to balance the budget and begin paying off the debt. If businesses complain about taxes, they should remember the middle class is expanding, providing a larger market for goods and services.

We need to be fiscally liberal.