Anyone's thoughts.

i wouldnt mind if instead of reducing the mortgage interest rate deduction from 35 to 28% they left it the same for mortages under say, 500K and then reduced the deduction for over 500K no matter what income level. interesting article in the WSJ today about the affluent (52% of whom counter-intuitively supported obama) will now have to put their money where there vote was. not like obama didnt warn us....

does anyone remember when interest on credit cards was deductable? that went away around 86 during the reganomic years....

"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under
the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist
program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without
knowing how it happened."

Norman Thomas Mattoon 1948 Presidential Candidate[/QUOTE]

Fantastic quote. Disturbingly prescient.

It's Norman Mattoon Thomas. He was a socialist candidate for more than just 1948. Helped set up the aclu. Probably spinning in his grave at the idea of being quoted by you.

The deficit will now be 1.75 Trillion Dollars that is roughly 12% of GDP. We have not had that level of deficit since WWII.

The Deficit is projected to decline but it rests on a couple of assumptions which are even now not viable. First is that GDP will only decline by 1.2 percent in 2008. Since GDP declined by an annualized rate of six percent in the last quarter of last year that number is most certainly wrong. GDP is expected to increase by 1.2 percent this year but that is also wrong.

Obama's own Treasury secretary and his Fed Chairman have both predicted that the economy will be in bad shape for the rest of the year. So again another faulty assumption.

2010 we are expected to see an increase of 3.2 in GDP. That may be possible but because their earlier numbers are off the total GDP will still be below what they claim. After that they are claiming GDP increases of roughly four percent per year. That will be hard to do.

You have to wonder also about their tax projections I think they are using 2006 as their basis. Obviously we have a lot less people making 250K per year in this country than we did in 2006 not to mention those who are are probably making less than they where.

So, yes it looks like the deficit as a percentage of GDP will go up at least for the next couple of years.

That quote is actually more disturbing when you realize it came from an avowed socialist because it reveals one of the more dangerous attitudes of the left - they acknowledge that people openly reject socialist dogma, but they refuse to accept that decision and instead imply that "the people don't know what's good for them" so we must continue to push our agenda under different guises.

On the left are the figures the Obama administration is using in its budget forecasts and on the right are forecasts from private economists.

2009: -1.2% -1.9%
2010: +3.2% +2.1%
2011: +4.0% +2.9%
2012: +4.6% +2.9%
2013: +4.2% +2.8%

Accumulating the difference, you find that Team Obama projects about 6 percent higher GDP in 2013 than do private forecasters.

A six percent difference in GDP will be roughly 900B by 2013. Assuming that the government will collect say 15% of that amount that will automatically increase the deficit by 100B in 2013 so at the least we will be looking at a 700B deficit by 2013 not 550B that Obama has forecast.

So we would be looking at deficits at 5% of GDP by 2013.