— Donald”

A Rate Cut does not equal ‘decreasing what you take in’.

Please google on the words ‘Laffer Curve’ for more clarification.

The important point is that if you cannot justify the expenditures to the politicions, and they in turn cannot justify it to their constituancies, you will not get the resources you want. The choice presented (elderly vs. space) may in fact be a false choice, but in politics this may be irrelevant, as it is often the emotional rather than the logical argument that wins.

The proposal by Alistair is a step in the right direction, but I would propose an even more far reaching campaign, composed of the website, TV/radio ads, and enlistment of celebrities to the cause. An initial “blitz” followed by a “got milk” or “the power of cheese” style ad campaign would be expensive, but would have a good chance of suceeding.

The elderly vote. They support programs, and vote for politicians, that are in their self-interest – as does everyone else.

The space community has long suffered from willful ignorance of this fact. It doesn’t matter if we care about a comet probe or a mars lander – if the average *voting* american doesn’t, that budget is open to being cut.

Or rather, willful denial. I don’t think that the man is that stupid.

Rand Simberg: Sorry, Greg, but no one, including the CBO, knows what revenues would have been in the absence of those rate cuts (we can’t do controlled experiments), so no one knows their actual effect on revenues.

CBO methodology certainly is subject to experiment and they have a perfectly respectable track record. Their what-if-we-don’t’s are therefore just as credible as their what-if-we-do’s. So your assertion that no one has any idea how it would have been otherwise is counterfactual, but in any case it doesn’t matter. If you look at what is actually happening with the tax policies that we have, the question is, do you want spending rates to match tax rates or don’t you? If you do, the simplest solution is to eliminate non-defense discretionary spending. No NASA and no Meals on Wheels either; the whole slate of alternatives should just be thrown out.

— Donald

— Donald

And those of who look at the CBO’s fiscal projections have no reason to doubt them. It is true that the CBO projections can be off by $50 billion or so, sometimes even $100 billion. But the real future deficit may just as well be higher as lower. There is no reason to believe that the CBO is suddenly unusually stupid in the face of tax policies that are now four years old.

(Note that the corresponding White House department, OMB, has made rather less accurate and more confusing “predictions” in the past few years.)

But it is true that if you don’t know or don’t care about these authoritative references, then you may well not know how much money we’re talking about.

Anyway, as I said, if we are really to take Bush’s tax policies seriously, it is time to wipe the non-defense, discretionary slate clean.

That leaves non-defense discretionary spending. In order to match tax cuts with spending cuts — or to use Rand’s terminology, tax rate cuts with spending rate cuts — we should eliminate non-defense discretionary spending. No NASA, no NIH, no transportation bill, no “meals on wheels” either. If we are going to take the Bush tax cut (or tax “rate” cut) seriously, it’s time to wipe the slate clean.