The tax cuts were 12 years ago.

A few years later we had unemployment under 5 percent, deficits dropping steadily, and constant-dollar revenues coming in higher than the maximum of the Clinton years with the Clinton rates. The stock market cracked 14,000. This was after an attack on the U.S. and the resulting economic hit and military buildup.

We hit the skids in 2008 because of a sub-prime mortgage breakdown that had nothing at all to do with tax rates. Nothing.

None of this is new information. It just doesn’t seem to stick.

Are those bars getting smaller, or larger? How much longer are deficits going to be a trillion a year?

An amazing number of things Obama said would happen when he got elected never did. Cutting the deficit in half was only one of them. Whether his failure was out of total ignorance, or he was just lying, why believe any of his economic predictions now?

I’m just curious: If Romney wins, how much slack will you give him on what he inherited?

Corrected for inflation AND population growth.

Fourth straight year of trillion-dollar deficits. The deficit was far smaller than that during most of the Bush years, and going down. With the same damn tax rates.

None of the tax proposals by Democrats will touch this level of deficit spending. I’ve done the numbers. Over and over again. The mythology can’t be penetrated.

And of course the ultimate myth: That $5 trillion in the hands of political hacks will do a nation more good than $5 trillion in the hands of those who earned it.

In other words, Republicans are not all as big of assholes as Romney.

Retired people are by far the largest part of the 47%. They paid taxes all their lives and have earned what they are getting. The first step in addressing this is leveling off spending, which Obama has done. Contrary to rightwing lies, government has expanded less under Obama than any president in modern history. The next step is to stop fucking cutting taxes! Republicans were handed a $400B surplus and turned it into a trillion deficit in 8 years. A big part of that was the Bush tax cuts. Now Romney wants to blow another $5T hole in the deficit before we even start to pay it back. And all to give even more breaks to people who don’t need it.

Romney’s got some “old hands” on his election team that badly need to be tossed out a window. I’m not wonk enough, believe it or not, to be able to name names, but this was a problem in the McCain-Palin campaign, too.

And people are ignoring an important point: Romney wasn’t right about the voting habits of the group he’s talking about, but he’s right about the rest.

This country has far too many of its citizens dependent on the taxpayer for one or more of its needs. I showed some numbers elsewhere. The 50 percent mark is being approached on several social spending fronts, and in entitlements for the elderly, demographics alone is killing us.

This has nothing to do with being nice, or arrogant or generous, or greedy, or “love for the needy” or any of the other simpleminded analyses.

There is a raw mathematical limit to how many people in a country can live off the taxpayer. We may already have passed it. Europe certainly has. In a democratically-elected government, there’s a turning point where the redistribution becomes a positive feedback system. We may have already reached that, too.

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”

- Author unknown