While the prediction is that the next two months will be filled with “debt ceiling cliff” news ad nauseum, some pundits say that it is better to give up the whole notion of debt ceilings and to rate the debt to GNP.  What say the economists on this?  Would our national debt look less formidable than the present 20 trillion (l6 existing + 4 new) if it is calculated in relation to our gross national production?  How do other countries figure their national debts?

Sure, but the CBO is.

Why don’t these economists get it that “promoting the general welfare” including “entitlements” helps the economy?

looking at the market, it is crazy for short minded investors to celebrate this event. 

there are many, many things that were not resolved, especially the spending limit or the debt ceiling. Many of the spending cuts were absolutely not resolved. these issues were kicked again for later. 

i know most americans would avoid paying higher taxes, but it is at the expense of the US DOLLAR!!!

I love how Republicans keep saying the President didn’t present plan with spending cuts when the plan he was pressing for, the one they refused, included more than a trillion dollars in cuts, double what the Republicans proposed. He even agreed to changes in entitlements which his party was not at all pleased with.  I don’t get it. 

Class war it is. “Redistributing the wealth,” anyone? That’s been going on for ages … to the 99%!

The time for means testing is now, when the majority of Americans voted for a President that said he was going to raise taxes on the top 2%, as Americans get economic fairness. Darrell Issa (R-CA), on Bill Maher’s “Real Time”, said that he should be put off the roles from receiving entitlements because he’s able to support himself.  This is in contrast to many, like Ayn Rand, who was wealthy in her senior years, yet thought since she paid in she was going to get her fair share; never mind that people [like her] get back many times what they ever put into it and withing a few short years, and they don’t need it.

labour cost… that is the key. i believe we will see labour cost going up fairly soon. with labour cost not moving in sync with inflation recently, consumer confidence and consumer spending are getting hurt.

however, once labour cost goes up… watch out… inflation cost will go up… forget about the skewed inflation number we get from the consumer price index which stripped out two very important inflation indicators already, namely energy and food.. we will see very very high inflation due to cheap borrowing and cheap currency.

i just don’t see high growth… i just don’t… it is like pulling a rabbit out of a hat…

The private sector is exceptionally efficient at trickling wealth up. That’s a huge lesson from the recent and distant past that conservatives refuse to acknowledge. Look out for a third world America.

Do we the people, as on July 4, 1776, still “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed?”  If so then good economics means that government affords all of its citizens in union to feed, clothe, shelter and enjoy a bit of leisure and that this is the basis ensuring in ever changing times and circumstance that this is so. 

In this regard we will need to understand that the means of keeping body and soul happily together has repeatedly and progressively changed down trough time.  This from early food gathering and hunting; to camping, tilling and domestication; to growth of trade in market centers, to expanding this reach by caravans that prompted colonial mercantilism, that in the New World broke with lingering feudalism via independence accompanying craft and agrarian production; and this augmented and much replaced industrial capitalism and corporate ownership that is 70% dependent upon mass consumption that is being bled to death by moneychanger profiteering of buy-low-sell-high and ad the bottom line with box store good made in low standard of living countries to be sold on credit card for disposable income could not cover the cancerous growth even if the playing field were lever.  And this as we rapidly go deeper into an era of automation and robotization in which the measure of good is efficiency that more righty squeeze all in favor of a bottom line that will make the planet much more efficient by doing away with consuming mankind—no need to go to lifeless Mars when it is coming here.

Short of this and anew, any economic system to be developed that is going to serve and not do away with mankind will need to afford all of us Created-equal people to share in and profit from the declining amount of work that manually needs to get done in our land.  With automation and robotization we increasingly do not have a shortage of workers, we have an increasing shortage of manual labor jobs that need to get done.  Thus we should cut the work week to 30 hrs and raise the minimum wage so that this great nation can continue to do as and be as it was founded and has been preserved.

I heard the last 25 minutes, and obviously missed some good stuff.  I think I’ll listen to the podcast later.  I did hear one thing that I always bristle at, when Rob Arnott was saying the poor will always be with us, quoting the Bible, and then continuing to say, “We’ll let them keep 70 cents of every additional dollar they make, and they’ll be steadily climbing,” pretty close to those exact words. �
    A couple of points.  If they’re paying 30 cents on a dollar to the government, they’d better have a super lobby on K Street to make sure that 30 percent is the best rate those at the very bottom of the ladder can get.  Those at the very top have wrangled with the House,  the Senate, and the Executive for the last two years to maneuver against another percent, somewhere between 34 and 39 percent, but not that much above that 30 percent that Arnott proposes.  And they’re saying they’re not willing to work as hard as they do, up in the top 1 percent, without those couple percent tax reductions.  And for what they pay, they want to be sure they have the whole legislature under their thumb, “or else” this or that legislator will be “primaried,” and make sure that is possible by gerrymandering, little by little, over the decades to guarantee that option.
    So back to our “poor,” who should be “allowed to keep 70 cents of each additional dollar they earn,” which should be plenty motivation to keep on the up-and-up.
    For one thing, there enough of these 30 percent payers to feel like Atlas carrying the government on their shoulders, so don’t say the 47 percent don’t count because they are moochers.  And you know who I’m talking about.  These are the people who the better they do the more the government peels off their hide, without giving them any credit, apparently, for this.
    Well, I do understand Arnott is talking about little by little removing the benefits the government might deploy safety-net-wise.  The devil is in this detail.  If someone is building a business, one wants to live in a garret and enjoy the very minimum in benefits in order to get fast footing on the ladder, and it’s crucial to make those first steps a LOT easier than the top 1 percent of earners puts out to the national treasury.  And it’s also crucial to recognize the 30 percent that the very bottom is contributing.  Oh, that 30 percent reduction in benefits?  Let’s have some language or some tax code that actually lets those people see their part as contribution rather than mooching.  Let that be a reality as much as possible.  Why?  They vote, sillies.  Or they would vote, if they thought their taxes were part of the social fabric.

Holy
Cow! I have often loved the moderate reasonableness of this show but I think I am now listening to (almost) to “Rush Limbaugh Lite”! Tom is merely parroting the sky-is-falling right-wing line about “spending obviously without debate must be cut now” when in fact there are lots of reasonable people who do not buy that narrative.

Deficits cannot be forgotten but it is just plain foolish to cut spending in hard times. I cannot believe that in addition to only two right-wing voices, two voices that are concerned only about big money are being interviewed. Tom is so thrilled and impressed by their billions, it sounds silly. i am sorry for my sarcasm but I am dismayed, truly dismayed. Where is the moderate/center or even mild center left point of view. These are two Big Money voices! What about the average person? What about the sociologists? The historians? The non-multimillionaire (important: thus non-self-serving) economists?

THEY also (we) have a valid point of view. Why on earth on you interviewing as representative a Wall Street Journal endorsee and a Libertarian financial analyst? Good grief, I am so shocked and saddened by this rightward, unquestioning point of view.

It is NOT the centrist American view. Spending for one thing does not and should NOT be cut right now. This is merely a subversion of the narrative by Republicans and other financial operatives, even if Pres Obama has endorsed some of it for political reasons.

Please find a balance. If this slightly weird right-ward strong bias continues I cannot listen to it. I am not a political ideologue but I really think Tom has been swallowed up. Although I hear many journalists, who feel they only have to accurately repeat what others are saying (by canny spinners) they are merely moving cattle-like in the same play-by-play non-reflectiveness; to hear this shallow echo on NPR is profoundly disappointing.

Middle American (midwest)2 hours ago · Like · 1

You know, if we can cut the government enough, we can go back to living as our ancestors did. They didn’t have to worry about health care; there wasn’t any. They didn’t worry about high food costs; they grew their own. They didn’t have to worry about education for their children; it was only available to the children of the wealthy. They didn’t have to worry about the high cost of housing; they built their own. They didn’t have to worry about the high cost of utilities; the water supply was a spring behind the house, and there weren’t any bathrooms. You didn’t have to worry about paved roads; you didn’t have a car anyway. And so it goes.

What I’m driving at is that our modern lifestyles cost LOTS of money. If you don’t want to pay for it, you just won’t have it.

Who do your guests work for? The Koch Brothers?  Mr. Arnott sounds like a tool of the 1%? With his insistence on cutting “entitlements” (I prefer to consider them as earned benefits) Mr. Arnott doesn’t seem to understand that Social Security DOESN’T contribute ONE dime to the deficit (its at $2 trillion surplus) and changes that the Administration made to medicare by cutting payments to providers that the programs has been extended for about 20 years. Oh yes, does either of your guests seem to realize that government spending is at its lowest point for over 40 years. If you really are serious about the deficit then you can cut defense spending (we outspend our nearest rival (China) by about 5 to 1. Or you could enact a 1% securities transaction fee like they have in Great Britain. Or you could the tax loophole for all assets held in overseas banks which the wealthy like Mitt Romney have been abusing for years. We have a jobs problem, not a spending problem! Both your guests seem to be elitist and seem to be repeating the same old supply side crap that has never worked!

In response to Pete 18 below, who wrote:
“I hate to repeat myself, but… ‘These Bush tax cuts did not explode the deficit, as Obama and his  echo chamber have alleged.  By 2007, the deficit was down to $160 billion, less than 15% of Obama’s deficits today.’”

Bush left a deficit for 2008 of $454.8 billion- and a broken economy and TARP program guaranteed to cause it to increase further.He also left 10 trillion national debt- more than all previous admins combined.

And very poor job growth

That’s part of the legacy of the W tax cuts.

Another excellent show.  I must say I was taken aback by Arnott’s predictions/speculations, yet they all sounded quite reasonable.  Of course it is important to point out that projections are always based on current trends, and that things could come up that effect those trends for better or for worse.

I do disagree with the people writing in who would like to blame all this on the corporations or right-wing zealots.  I am not an economist and have not studied the numbers closely, but from everything I hear, it does seem like our debt problems are real, and that steps need to be taken to shore up faults in the system!