[jeffkrol]

More then one way to do it.........
Liberal Deficit Plan – The New Silent Majority Speaks | GoozNews

Before consigning it to the dustbin of history though, it’s worth considering simply because it raises three important questions that need to be forthrightly answered during any adult conversation – a phrase much in vogue in Washington these days – about a long-term plan to bring deficits under control.

1. Do we want to preserve the federal government’s ability to act as a spender of last resort during economic downturns?
2. Are there some things that the nation needs for long-term prosperity that only the public sector can provide?
3. Should the tax code be used to redress income inequality?

The liberal alternative, authored by Demos, the Century Foundation and the Economic Policy Institute, all left-leaning think tanks, answers those questions with a resounding yes. “There should be no consideration of overall spending reductions until unemployment has fallen to 6 percent and remained at or below that level for six months,” the report said. Fiscal commission chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson in their deficit reduction plan offered earlier this month would set a rigid limit on federal spending at 21 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), which would sharply curtail the federal government’s ability to spend during downturns.

The liberal plan also offers a long-term target for deficit stabilization – 90 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2025. That is significantly higher than the 60-percent-by-2024 target offered Erskine-Bowles.

Where does the public stand in this debate? We’ve had two elections in the last two years that gave two very different answers to that question. Right now, conservatives are ascendant. But many liberals are wondering if they’re the new silent majority. It will probably take another election to find out.

[jeffkrol]

Anybody in the gov really know economics???????

As the Center for American Progress's Michael Linden notes, the freeze would be a blunt instrument "for reducing the deficit that [doesn't] reduce the deficit very much." "In the context of the deficit, Obama will get chump change from freezing federal pay," writes Economic Policy Institute president Larry Mishel. Additionally, the New York Times reports that the pay freeze will "reduce the amount of money that federal employees have to spend by $2 billion in 2011 and by $5 billion in 2012." Using this data, Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Dean Baker uses the Romer-Bernstein Obama transition team paper's economic model to predict the loss of 7,000 private sector jobs in 2011 and 18,000 jobs in 2012 as a direct result of the freeze.

[Nesster]

2 bill and 5 bill, chump change? By this argument, we might as well give $1mill bonuses to each government employee - that should add hundreds of thousands of jobs.

In an ordinary political world, this move would remove some weapons from the opposition; in this bizarro world we're currently in it does no such thing.