There is no longer enough wealth in this country to support the size of State that the Democrats want. The inevitable end result would be what’s happening in Europe: The “blue model” hitting the wall everyone should have seen many years ago. The great dream of “democratic socialism” – the idea that an entire nation can live off the taxpayer – is dead.

Your party has to be voted out of power. They are not capable of learning.

- 2000, a year of economic plenty, surpluses and anticipated future surpluses, was not the time to cut government spending.

- 2011, with three trillion-plus deficits in a row (so far), and a budget $1.3 trillion larger than in 2000, is not the time to cut government spending, either.

- If you borrow and print money and hand it out to people, it will help the deficit because all those people and the people they pay will put 20 percent of that stimulus money back into the Treasury. Math is hard.

- If we put another $48 billion a year in taxes on the rich, everything will work.

- Cutting government spending is not the answer, despite that fact that this is what is being done to fix things all over Europe and in many state governments. (“Every economist” is obviously a slight exaggeration.)

This is approaching dementia. One more year…

The “New Deal” had us at over 20 percent unemployment for ten solid years. I doubt this result would be considered a success in our modern day. We have indeed been over this before and I wish the records were still available.

WWII took us to government deficits as high as 30 percent of GDP, which would be $4.2 trillion now. But by 1947 they were all paid back, and we should find out more about how that worked.

“It’s been done many times successfully so any claims it has not are wrong.”

Name two. And before you pop up with FDR, be careful. I have more information than you do.

Stimulus programs can create an artificial appearance of an uptick, like paying people taxpayer money we don’t have to buy cars. But it’s not a real stimulus. When the funny money dries up, so does the economic activity. Look around. What happened with the last “stimulus?”

The current “infrastructure” flap is, to put it politely, exaggerated. For example, the percentage of structurally-deficient bridges in the U.S. has been falling steadily since 1996. The real objective of all this is to funnel millions of taxpayer dollars to the union shock troops of the Democratic Party before the upcoming election. A very nice chunk of that taxpayer money will get kicked back to the Democrats for political campaigns.

You’ve always had a good grasp of Economics but it looks to me that keeping government employees on the payroll simply amounts to nothing more than sustaining government spending. How much will be enough?

Obama tried to add another 400 billion with his jobs bill to the 800 million dollars already spent on the stimulus. At what point do we stop printing money to string the economy along? And why should federal employees be exempt from the effects of the recession?

Granted, proposed federal layoffs of 221,000 employees won’t amount to much in the way of deficit reduction. Probably less than 2 billion per year. But Paul also wants to eliminate 6 cabinet level agencies. Housing And Urban Development is one of them. HUD was the primer for the sub-prime mortgage mess and should be sharing the wrath of the Wall Street Occupiers.

I haven’t seen it yet but Paul needs to put out a detailed itemized list of cuts. He mentions pulling back our military from around the world (as well as eliminating foreign aid) but I don’t know of other government contracts where private sector jobs would suffer other than the military. The depth of the budget cuts he is proposing must mean the end of other government contracts.

You, like me, are afraid of shocks to a fragile economy. The Tea Party had no business holding the country hostage with the debt ceiling fiasco. Obama had no business ‘introducing’ ObamaCare , an economic mistake magnitudes above the Tea Party tantrum. Obama’s EPA is enacting regulations that are dubious in nature and are putting a stranglehold on US industries. You can’t help but wonder if Obama is completely blind to the economic consequences of his policies.

So what do we do Buck, look the other way and continue to prop up a floundering economy and maybe manage to muddle along while watching our standard of living nosedive? That’s the most comfortable option. Or do we face our problems head on an quit postponing the inevitable.

An infrastructure bill would not only create jobs it would do something we have to do anyway. There was a time when republicans actually did sensible things like that even when not controlling the white house.

“Demand” is not a worship word.

The arithmetic counts for everything in economics, unless you’re trying to pull a fast one. Give a new government employee $10,000 tax dollars. Assume he pays 10 percent in taxes (just to keep the math easy). That’s $1,000 back to the Treasury. Now he spends $1,000 of the rest on a new stereo. Let’s say the private store he buys it from makes a $500 profit, and pays 30 percent tax. That’s $150. The people the stereo company buy parts from will pay taxes too out of the $500 expensed, but it will still be less than the $500. You can do this for every nickel this government employee spends, and at the end the total tax return will still be less than the amount the government spent in the first place, the amount that came from the taxpayers.

When a private entity creates wealth, and earns $10,000 that did NOT have to come from the Treasury and pays taxes on it, the government comes out ahead. See?

There’s a certain amount of government spending that is necessary, and that a society can afford, and if this remains low enough, the burden on the private sector is tolerable and balanced budgets possible. We passed that point a long time ago.

Dumping billions of tax dollars into the system to “create” jobs that would not otherwise be created by the private sector is lost money. No matter how many private vendors you funnel that money through afterwards, the tax return will always be less than the original amount spent unless you start taxing at 100 percent down the line. If you suck that money out of the private sector to start with, the lunacy is compounded. If you just print the money out of nothing, the lunacy goes off the charts.

Business is paralyzed now because the people in power have declared all-out war on it. God help you if you’re a major industry, part of the financial industry, a large corporation, a conventional energy industry, or pretty much anyone with more than fifty employees or that makes more than $250,000 a year.

This is all, of course, assuming the goal is economic growth, not power.

But my main point was that NOW is not the time to cut government when consumers are not spending, corporate America has trillions sitting on the sidelines not being invested in the economy, and banks have even more they are not loaning.

Yeah there’s never an easy time to cut government spending, but the time to do it is when the economy is booming, not busting.

Every Wall St. economist knows that in a recession the government is the buyer of last resort. Read my response to Tom.