Pres. Obama: I will not renegotiate raising debt ceiling

[JDPriestly]

70. The government cannot attack the debt by itself.

If the government cuts government spending, a lot of people lose their jobs and the overall economy shrinks. The debt, even if it remains the same as it is now in dollar amounts, becomes bigger in proportion to the dwindling economy. So just cutting government spending will not work.

The private sector has to invest in the American economy, in American jobs above all.

There is plenty of money in the private sector to do that. They prefer, however, to invest overseas and import cheap products here to sell for prices high enough to permit them to deposit their enormous gains in tax havens around the world.

My solution is to create jobs and find sources of revenue that we have not explored.

I think that import taxes would help bring jobs back here because it would make American products more competitive in price and they have always been of better quality than most of the imported stuff (especially the stuff imported from the third world).

Cuts will reduce demand and that is why they will further reduce employment and thus tax revenues.

If private industry would really start to invest, it would be great. But again, that won't happen unless people feel pretty certain that the government will not cut spending too much, will not lay people off too much.

Big business will disagree with me. The greedy CEOs and their boards of directors think about their immediate profits, not demand for their products. So they think that if only the government would take less out of the economy (which the government does not do; the government shifts money around), they could take more. That is not true. It never has been. They do not understand the government's role in the economy which is to provide social and infrastructure certainty. The job that is not properly being done is private investing in the US. Investing that creates jobs. And one of the reasons for that is that the wealthy do not want to work with employees of the high quality of the American workers. The wealthy look down on working people and think that one worker with no work ethics or good work habits can do the same job, produce the same quality and value as a worker who has no idea what he is doing or how to work.

The Clinton tax increases boosted the economy. Profits rose. The Bush tax cuts enriched the already rich, but the economy crashed. If you look at a chart of taxes over the 20th century to today, you see that the lower the tax rates, the more likely the economy is to crash.

Government spending is needed to keep the economy healthy. In particular, our economy is not doing well. It is as likely to worsen as to improve, and big cuts in government spending would be terrible for it.

We can't go on raising our national debt, but the government can't lower that debt unless private wealth is invested in businesses that make America self-sufficient and strong and create jobs.