No one said I am particularly praising Obama for doing this. I think it is a wise move politically. I mean yeah we need to clean up our mess in Afghanistan, but frankly I wouldn't mind if we didn't do it to save the money. I mean all the Republicans are yelling about how broke we are as a country.

But Obama said he was going to do it, and I voted for him, so it isn't really fair for me to complain about it when he said he was going to do it. It'd be like me complaining that a Republican appointed a conservative justice to the Supreme Court if I voted Republican.

You are wrong sir.  Al-Qaeda is on the rise with help from the resurgent Taliban and their Spring Offensives.  They are incresingly rash and utilize the farmers to raise $$ by poppy at the point of an AK.  We are not wanting to rule them but stamp out the insurgents and curb the tactics they force on the civilian population.  It is like some gangster coming to your house and saying "You will work for me or I will kill your family and your clan and then make you work for me nonetheless.  Either way, get started with the poppy fields."  In any case, if they were on the run, why would Obama need to surge ground forces?  Think on that for a while.

I cannot speak for Akuma, but I have no problem giving credit where credit is due.

I sing praises for Bush when he came out with the "donotcall.gov" site where you can put yourself on the do-not-call lists of telemarketers.

Also, I was glad that he forced the cell companies to give up their cell numbers (meaning that say, you can keep your cell number if you switched from ATT to Verizon, for example).

So if he did something I agreed with, I am not so petty that I will ignore the good things he did.

As for the 5 day signing thing, yes, Obama did already break that promise when he first came into office. It was a couple small things that he signed during the first day; according to his campaign, he would have had to wait until his 5th day before he actually signed anything to allow the PUBLIC to comment on it.

The stimulus bill had weeks upon weeks for congress to look over it and debate it. It wasn't like Obama dropped a 1200 page bill on their desks the night before and forced them to sign it.

Additionally, his promise was to allow the PUBLIC to look it over and comment on it before he signed it. I'm not sure when the bill was voted on, but I think it was a Thursday Night/Friday Morning and Obama didn't sign it until Tuesday (since it was president's day weekend). So there WAS a 4 or 5 day waiting period.

As for the mortgage thing, Obama is using money from last stimulus package (signed by your boy Bush). Half of it has already been spent, bailing out the banks, and apparently lining the pockets of the CEOs. Personally, I'd prefer that congress just cancel the first stimulus package and not spend the rest of the 700 billion that's been earmarked. However, given the choice between having the money being funneled to the CEOs without it being tracked, and having it being super transparent so we can see exactly which homes are being saved, I'd choose the latter any day of the week.

Also remember that like 40% of the stimulus bill that was just signed is tax cuts to help the middle class and the poor. I don't get why Republicans don't mention this so much. Probably because there weren't any tax cuts for the rich ^_^

I don't get why its "socialism" when we give tax cuts to the poor, whereas its a "supply side economy" when we give tax cuts to the rich.

How very true...you sure don't hear Republicans ever complain about a tax cut, well, unless the tax cut is going to the poor.

I push for tax cuts across the board.  Average americans and corporations to lead to more productivity and increases in sales for higher growth.  This is coming from the foremost VGC GOP member.

Frankly I really don't see how the GOP can keep advocating for tax cuts if they hope to balance the budget.  They've shown that even they can't control spending when they have control of the legislature and the Presidency.  Even The Gipper raised taxes when he needed to!  A knee jerk reaction to the word tax is irresponsible, and is one of the reasons why our country is in such dire straights.  What did people think would happen to the deficit when Bush W. was cutting taxes and raising spending.  Even his father knew that was voodoo economics!

Here is a great article about it:

http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/st_20090221_4101.php

Real Reaganites Raise Taxes

Conservatism may need to abandon the anti-tax dogma that it adheres to in Reagan's name.

by Jonathan Rauch

Saturday, Feb. 21, 2009

That heavy feeling in the pit of conservatives' stomachs this week was more than just indigestion brought on by the pork and fat in the Democrats' giant fiscal stimulus bill. Conservatives suspected that something irreversible was happening: that the sheer immensity of President Obama's fiscal and financial interventions may permanently change the size of government and the shape of post-Reagan conservatism.

One conservative who understands the potential implications is a curmudgeonly visionary named Bruce Bartlett. In today's Washington, he is something of a voice in the wilderness. Liberals mistrust him because in the 1970s, as an aide to then-Rep. Jack Kemp, R-N.Y., he helped fashion the original supply-side revolution. Conservatives mistrust him because in the 2000s he broke publicly with President Bush, in a book called Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.

Conservatives hope that Bartlett is wrong. But there is a good case that he is right. To reclaim President Reagan's legacy in the Obama era, conservatism may need to abandon the anti-tax dogma that it adheres to in Reagan's name.

Conservatives and liberals have spent the past 40 years arguing about the size of government. But the size of government has not, so to speak, been arguing about them. As a share of the economy (gross domestic product), federal spending has remained curiously stable. Wars ended and began, double-digit inflation came and went, defense was cut, entitlements swelled, and outlays fluctuated as a share of GDP. Yet, as the chart shows, spending always returned to about 21 percent, almost as if regulated by an internal thermostat.

Over the same period, meanwhile, revenues had a comparably strong homing instinct, but the set point was lower: a little above 18 percent.

This budgetary stability, or stalemate, or whatever you call it, has been the greatest policy surprise of the last quarter-century. No one foresaw it, and no one has fully explained it. But it proved convenient for both sides.

Liberals (and Bush, who expanded Medicare) discovered that, up to a point, a growing economy would let them grow government without destabilizing spending as a share of GDP. Conservatives discovered that, up to a point, a growing economy would let them dig in against tax increases, and periodically cut taxes, without destabilizing revenues as a share of GDP.

For decades, everyone pretended to have a profound ideological disagreement about the size of government, but the reality was a comfortable standoff between 21 percent liberalism and 18 percent conservatism. In the end, both sides got what they most wanted: 21 percent spending for liberals, 18 percent revenues for conservatives -- at the politically tolerable cost of a deficit averaging 2 to 3 percent of GDP. This result was handy for politicians and acceptable to the public.

In Washington now, the obvious question is: Has Obama ended the 21 percent era? In January, the Congressional Budget Office forecast outlays at 25 percent in fiscal 2009. That was before enactment of the latest stimulus, which increases outlays by more than $500 billion through 2012; and the forecast didn't account for further financial bailouts. Unofficial estimates take 2009 spending to 26 percent or higher.

And after 2009? CBO forecasts that spending, after popping up this year, will decline to (where else?) 21 percent of GDP in 2012. But CBO is required to make some unrealistic assumptions. The analysts I interviewed believe that spending is likely to be well above 21 percent in 2012.

"I'm going to say spending is never going to go below 21 percent again in this country," says Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. At the Brookings Institution, Isabel Sawhill, an economist and a former Clinton administration budget official, says, "My best guess would be 24 percent in 2012."

In the short run, of course, the stimulus increases spending. Not all of that spending will be temporary. ("At this point, these things are temporary," an administration spokesman told The Washington Post last week. Ah. Temporarily temporary.) Liberals have already broadcast their intention to extend some of the package's provisions, and federal beneficiaries have sticky fingers. Plus, there are those costly financial bailouts.

In the medium term, many economists expect a deep recession and a slow recovery. That would increase the spending-to-GDP ratio by suppressing growth in the denominator. In the longer term, intense upward pressure on spending will be generated by the combination of Baby Boom retirements -- which begin during the current administration and accumulate rapidly -- and soaring health care costs.

The Baby Boom fiscal shock would have arrived anyway, but the recession, the stimulus, and the bailout will have the effect of pulling it forward -- more or less to the present. In which case, the end of the 21 percent equilibrium may already have arrived.

In American politics, the dissolution of a 40-year equilibrium is likely to be a pretty momentous event. Liberals will have a practical problem. If they don't get serious about reforming and restraining Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other entitlements, many of the other programs they most care about will be squeezed out of the budget. With his promise of a fiscal responsibility summit and his warnings about the need to confront long-term entitlement spending, Obama seems to grasp what liberalism must try to do, though whether he can deliver is another matter.

Conservatives, however, will face a doctrinal crisis. Or so Bruce Bartlett's logic persuasively suggests.

Many conservatives insist that structural reforms of entitlement programs -- benefit cuts, means-testing, privatization, and so on -- could keep spending at or even below 21 percent of GDP going forward. Dream on, Bartlett says.

"We're looking at a massive expansion of government spending," he says. "I became convinced in November of 2003, when a Republican president and Congress instituted a massive expansion of Medicare, at a time when the program was already badly broken and needed to be fixed, that there was absolutely no hope of restraining the growth of spending on those programs."

How will we pay for, say, 24 percent government? Permanent deficits at 6 percent of GDP would be unsustainable, and the creaky, inefficient income tax is barely able to raise even today's inadequate revenues.

The only really workable option, Bartlett argues, is a value-added tax or its equivalent: a broad-based tax on consumption. "It's the only way of preserving incentives and keeping the economy alive." Because it taxes spending rather than saving or investment and is inhospitable to market-distorting loopholes, this kind of tax raises a lot of money at relatively low economic cost.

Reaganites hate the value-added tax precisely because it is such an efficient cash cow. But Reagan, Bartlett contends, would have known better. Reagan was a conservative who admired FDR, and what he conserved was FDR's welfare state. He understood that the most practical way to make government less economically burdensome was to grow the economy.

By taming inflation, restructuring the tax code, and thinning regulatory undergrowth, Reagan made the welfare state sustainable, something liberals had proved unable to do. He wooed middle-class voters away from liberalism by stabilizing the modern entitlement state, not shrinking it.

If the 21 percent era is over, then the challenge for conservatives today is to give up on 18 percent government, which the public doesn't want and which conservatives can't deliver. Instead, as Bartlett wrote recently in Politico, "Conservatives would better spend their diminished political capital figuring out how to finance the welfare state at the least cost to the economy and individual liberty." Just like Reagan.

Well I will go out on a limb here but Akuma what should we tax? We already have cig taxes for SCHIP and it promotes more smoking to increase money for the program. Gas taxes are a no go with people griping all the time. What should the gov't take. Taxes are a damned if you do, damned if you don't thing.

Why not tax gas? Or have a 1% national sales tax. Those taxes are geared towards consumption.  The more you use, the more of a share you are entitled to pay.  It is entirely fair.

Or raise the income tax by 1 to 2% across the board.  We are probably going to have to raise some of the payroll taxes too while ALSO cutting some funding to many of those programs.

Its going to have to come down to that one way or another. I'm for completely overhauling Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and other government programs as well. I've got the gusto to do what is necessary.

People will be getting more from the government soon when we reform the healthcare system. Prices will be more reasonable because the insurance companies won't be able to price gouge people like they have been anymore. So in turn, some of that money they would otherwise have to pay will need to go to the government. Frankly I would rather cut out the bureaucracy that is medical insurance (an organization you pay to pay your bills, if that is a middle man that is offering no real service I don't know what is) altogether and just move to a one-payer system.

So frankly, we have to raise taxes AND cut spending. I don't suggest doing either of those until the economy starts to stabilize though. But that is the ONLY way that you will see any real changes on the deficit. Cutting spending alone doesn't work, because politicians don't cut spending. They just cut spending in one place and raise spending in another.

I am glad that Obama is already being very forthright about fixing the deficit in the future, and a lot of Republicans in the last few days have also been happy about it. We have a serious problem. But the middle of a recession is not the time to fix it.

The thing is though if the recession lasts until say 2011 as most economists are saying until 2010 at least, then Obama would not want to risk political capital by raising taxes as his reelection would be a year away by then in Nov. 2012.  I could see him doing some reform but only if he is reelected as to not piss off the wrong hand and not bite the hand that feeds him, in this case American voters.

He ran his campaign on raising some taxes though. Its not like people are going to be surprised if he raises the taxes he said he would.