Which is more important right now- a balanced budget, or low unemployment?
 

And is it really possible to achieve both at the same time considering our current situation? Everyone in DC seems to think that it's not only possible, but absolutely necessary as if one cannot be done without the other.

I'm certainly no economist, but it seems to me that doing a lot of the things that are being proposed to balance the budget are going to make the economic situation worse, not better. Cutting something like defense spending and bringing a large quantity of overseas troops and contractors home would save some big money and sounds good to many including myself, but what will those people do once they get back? Cutting government spending usually means cutting government jobs, money taken out of the economy (even if that money is all borrowed), and more people filing for unemployment. How is private enterprise supposed to absorb those workers when there aren't enough jobs for the people who are already looking for them? More tax cuts and free trade agreements?

These problems have been brewing for decades but people insanely expect the solutions and results to come NOW. And when the results don't come overnight all anybody wants to do is point fingers and excuse themselves from any responsibility to try to make themselves feel better or look re-electable. I fear that the instant gratification that comes with blaming all your problems on the people you disagree with, through any means necessary, has put us in a position where if a good middle of the road solution to our problems were to be proposed, it wouldn't be politically viable as at some point everyone would probably have to admit that the other guy actually had a good idea.

I fear that a crisis is no longer a problem to be solved, but a tool with which to leverage an agenda. Am I being pessimistic?

The ONLY reason we can't solve this problem quickly is because of party bickering. These people are holding America hostage while they fight for what THEY want.

Cutting spending, removing the tax cuts for the wealthy, and eliminating wasteful government programs is profoundly easy. But it gets hard when the government gets in its own way. The American people deserve better.

We are seeing the ultimate manifestation of bullshit partisan politics. Politicians are only concerned with getting elected and I don't believe they can see clearly beyond that. Even if some republicans know the right thing to do, they got elected on no raising taxes platform and if they go against it, they will be called out in the next election and most likely lose. I believe we should elect people who are smarter than us and trust them to make the right decisions. Unfortunately, this country elects people they "want to have a beer with" or who tell stupid jokes about hockey moms.

cut spending, increase taxes on the WEALTHY (not this $250k crap, move to NYC and tell me that is wealthy) and most importantly revamp the corporate tax structure so that a) the overall tax rate is not one of the highest in the world and b)to remove loopholes that have companies paying very little taxes. Hopefully this leads to increased corporate tax collections and the lower rate encourages more companies to grow within the US.

There are plenty of jobs to be had for those who are currently unemployed and those who would be cut from military expansionism. Remember during the 50's era when everyone had a dependable job with benefits and the rich were taxed accordingly, therefor regulating the national wealth ratio? We are still manufacturing consumer products for a consumer base so the demand has not decreased.

What happened was corporations outsourced all those millions of jobs to first Mexico, Taiwan, Singapore, and then China - So that they could greatly increase their profit margins. 95% of the shit you buy from a big-box store should have been made by an American but wasn't, and therefor the person that should have made it is now unemployed.

People like to tote "Post-Industrial Restructuring" as an excuse, which says basically jobs in post-industrial societies all switch to information technology, engineering, marketing, service, etc... while manufacturing takes place almost solely in industrial or pre-industrial societies. In a globalized economy is this possible? Yes, but is it a good idea?

No, because it makes entire countries into a niche product. So long as Country A and Country B and Country C provide each other's role, things move relatively smoothly. But when Country B stops, Country A and Country C lose vital cogs in their machines, ones they cannot replicate domestically because they have outsourced entire industries to Country B to penny-pinch.

The fact of the matter is that the money saved by outsourcing has gone no where else but the corporations pockets, and has in turn grossly imbalanced the national wealth ratio and caused a lot of what we are now experiencing. It is why over the past 20 years the top 5% make something like [400] times the salary of someone in the middle-class.

If you ask me, we need a strong government that is going to stand up to Corporate America and make them bring their jobs back to the States. No one should be making such grossly imbalanced amounts of money, and in order for things to get better the money is going to have to be redistributed and the super-wealthy are going to have to live with lower profits as a result of domestic stability.

kill the rich and eat their children.

Will we gain their powers?

Sorry, you can only be born with nobility; it's non-transferable. Kind of like an airline ticket.

if you do, you're next.

John Boehner disagrees with you. Regarding the Cut, Cap, & Balance bill the house just passed- "It provides President Obama with the debt limit increase he's requested while making real spending cuts now and restraining future government spending and debt that are hurting job growth."

I've heard it argued that government debt is directly hurting the private job market, but nobody who has made the argument has ever bothered to explain why or how. Can anyone connect the dots on how all these born again budget hawks are supporting that claim?

Maybe it would be more accurate to say that we're being held hostage while they fight to make their corporate masters happy, which all politicians have to do to get re-elected. We are certainly hostages, but it's not like being a normal hostage. Our captors have us tied to chairs with paper bags over our heads while they scream their demands to negotiators, but at the same time they're also telling us how smart we are and that we all really agree with what they're doing. I don't know how many times I've heard somebody say that "The American people understand that the way to recovery isn't continued spending", or "The American people aren't fooled by the rhetoric from the other side of the aisle" but it makes me gag every time I hear it. I'm pretty sure it's some sort of Stockholm Syndrome jedi mind trick.

I'm going to draw this conclusion purely from what you've just said, so if my answer is way out of context that's why (could also be because i'm way of track anyway though ;).
This is one example of a classical economists response to recovering from a recession. By cutting government spending, they assume that the money the government would originally have borrowed will be loaned to the private sector, instead of to the government, where there will be a greater profit made from the same money based on the assumption that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. It's a similiar tactic to what George Osborne plans to implement in the UK's economy.