CBO Budget Update out

[Ddrak]

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/97xx/doc9706 ... Tables.pdf

If the tax cuts are allowed to expire, the CBO is predicting deficits for the next 10 years, going to around $150b in 2018.

In the alternative scenario where the tax cuts are kept and the AMT is reformed, the deficits will continue to increase to around $1.1 trillion dollars in 2018.

Dd

[Partha]

/crickets

I'll merely paste something I stole from someone else:

All the same Wall Street wankers who believe in free markets and deregulation and the ineluctible wisdom of the Invisible Hand are now letting out a vast, shaky sigh of relief that the despised Government has come to save their asses now that their various lies and swindles and ponzi schemes have imploded on them. Nobody actually believes in, or cares about, limited government; they believe that the government shouldn’t be able to keep them from running any scam they can and that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes, but they also want the government—meaning taxpayers—to give them a metric shit-ton of cash when they've accidentally blown all theirs on the high-finance equivalent of Keno. They are actually not so different in their political ideology from the sneering teen anarchist who calls his dad a capitalist asswipe until he needs to borrow a couple hundred to pay for an abortion.

[Ddrak]

I think the CBO forecasts and the government bailouts of Wall Street are separate issues. The CBO is just saying "if you keep going the way things are then this is what will happen". Bailouts on Wall Street are a matter of weighing the cost to the taxpayer of large investment banks collapsing completely against the cost to the taxpayer of a bailout or assisted purchase. The golden parachutes offered to the failing fund managers are pretty poor form though.

Dd

[Partha]

I know, but I wanted to see if at least ONE of these 'responsible non-Republicans' would come out swinging. Pity.