Now is the time to deal with the Fiscal Cliff

[Hazir]

wiggin, I really don't understand your logic. Is it your contention that we should wait until ~2014 (when the economy should hopefully grow at a decent rate) to lower the deficit? Beyond the fact that this will add $2 trillion to the deficit (and thus at least $40 billion in yearly interest payments), A) what are you going to do in 2014, and B) what are you going to do when the inevitable recession strikes in 2016 or 2017? My bet is you refuse to cut the deficit by more than $200-300 billion a year in 2014 and 2015 because that would hurt growth! And then you'd call for higher spending in response to the recession, which means back to 10% deficits. How you think this is a sustainable policy is beyond me.

Same question I have really even though I can follow the logic somewhat; countercyclical and all that, it just seems to me that what Wiggin is proposing, is tantamount to doing nothing because the economy isn't growing. That seems a bit old school to me; hoping that growth alone will take care of the problem. We already know that that's not really going to happen. And do we really want just another lost decade like in Japan only on a bigger scale?

BTW, am I right in thinking that the current deficit stands at close to 100% of discretionary spending?

[Loki]

Same question I have really even though I can follow the logic somewhat; countercyclical and all that, it just seems to me that what Wiggin is proposing, is tantamount to doing nothing because the economy isn't growing. That seems a bit old school to me; hoping that growth alone will take care of the problem. We already know that that's not really going to happen. And do we really want just another lost decade like in Japan only on a bigger scale?

BTW, am I right in thinking that the current deficit stands at close to 100% of discretionary spending?

If you exclude military spending (which ironically enough currently stands at $666 billion ).