Do you think the tax money enters a black hole where any potential productivity or wealth associated with it is lost? What if the government takes that yacht money and builds a road or a school which spurs on greater economic activity? Then the purchase of the yacht is actually a net loss economically relative to the other options.
Technically they don’t call it a black hole - they tend to call it things like red tape, pork, waste. But no, do not call it a black hole. :rolleyes:
First the yacht would have to be purchased. If the taxes are too high then no economic activity happens at all. Then where does the Government get their money?
So if one decides not to buy a yacht, does he not buy anything else? Where does the money go?
If people like the ones you seem to represent have their way, the government wouldn’t get any money at all. People like the ones you seem to represent want all of the benefits of things the government provides, but they feel ill-used if they are asked to pay their fair share.
If your intention in this comment is a rebuttal, it fails sadly, and merely illustrates your profound ignorance of things European.
Now, of course, my response was once again, to your comment about no country ‘taxing itself to prosperity’- a comment so poorly constructed as to allow virtually any counter example to succeed in disproving it. I note that I am quite favourable to modest levels of taxation favourable to business, and am no fan of the Continental system, or perhaps better, the Latin Continental system with its very high and inefficient tax rates and systems.
But Ireland is a Low Tax model (and remains so), so citing it rather doesn’t help your point at all.
Greece as an example also on closer inspection refutes your point, as it is a country of not particularly high rates (nor low for that matter, although it has high spending), but it is a country that does not tax itself- they evade all kinds of taxation quite famously in Greece, and in the most flagrant fashions possible. They did not use their tax revenues to invest, but to fund frivolities and an overly generous social system. Unlike Spain, which while I think it could be rather more liberal economically - that is free market - at least invested.
However, you skip over the UK, Germany and the Nordic countries. They are wealthy and for the Nordics, have higher standards of living than you by many measures. And they taxed themselves.
Any of the Middling set of African countries. Ghana, Sierre Leone, Senegal, Mali, CdI, Liberia.
Punishing tax rates on a few narrow items, but no taxation at all on the vast network of informal enterprise. And mostly depending on aide subsidies. The worst of all worlds.
Zim is one bloody country in a continent.
How unsurprising you’re coming out with just about every superficial stereotype I expected…
No they don’t. I wager you have never been to RSA and frankly know fuck all about it. I go to Joburg on quite a regular basis and can attest the crime rates of the late 1990s are a thing of the past (although crime does remain a nasty problem in many areas).
No here again a better tax system would help RSA, and past under-investment in Black education is holding back economic growth.
The fact you put those two countries in one sentence tells me rather clearly you have not the slightest fucking clue as to what you’re on about.
CdI is a quite developed country, with a damned good basic level of infrastructure, an economic capitol with near European standards, and once their spot of problem passes, great potential. It’s banks and basic industry could be globally competitive, and it has a well-trained bureaucracy overall.
Somalia is wasteland and hasn’t had even the remotest hint of modern government in decades. They are not comparable.
Now, in the case of CdI, this is precisely a country that a better tax system - lower rates, but better overall collection with less untaxed parts of the economy - could truly blossom.
Thanks for making my point once again (that is that lower taxes are not an absolute value, but a relative thing - in this French reference system, they’d do well for lower but inclusive taxation).
You wouldn’t be since you know fuck all about either.
So you think that it’s impossible for government to spend money in a way that generates positive economic activity? Do you think, for example, the national highway system has been a net drain on the economy?
Ah, yes, if the top marginal tax rate goes from 33% to 36%, no economic activity would happen at all. There’s some number between 33% and 36% where it goes from prosperous economy to utter stagnation with nothing generated.
The guy who’s going to buy the yacht obviously generated economic activity and wealth to be in the position to buy that yacht. Your point doesn’t make much sense, so I don’t know how to answer your question.
It rather escapes how this in any substantive way responds to:
What I suppose you do not realize is that economic analysis is not best done through limited anecdote. Your very narrow micro-economic anectdote isn’t responsive to either the question of demand or other drivers.
No, it’s fun house mirror economics.
Some goods actually become more desirable as the price rises, as an aside, but again the marginal contribution of the tax to the cost of a good may (or may not) be substantially off set by gains arising from a service or investment provided. Simply asserting it is a cost without looking at the return is not economics, it’s politics.
Sometimes you can. Sometimes there is not enough direct return to a private owner to support it.
News flash, anecdote is not data.
Canada.
Because at 34% he could decide to buy it from some other country which produces and taxes it less?
And our unemployment rate is lower than the US as well. We also have universal health care. And according to Le Jacamacallit US jobs are flooding into Canada thanks to NAFTA.
QED
Produces it less and taxes it less are two different factors to consider.
If you were about to set up a production facility, and all you did was sort countries by tax rate you’d end up in a very weird place that is not the optimum location.
It’s a bit like saying the best car is the cheapest. The point you’d missed throughout this entire thread that it’s more than just the tax rate, but the value you get from that rate.
Canada has a high tax rate, but also a very high quality of life.
There are countries with higher tax rates, that have lower quality of life.
And countries with lower tax rates that have higher quality of life.
Would you rather: Live in a shit hole and pay 0% or live in Eden and pay 30%?
The problem with your theory is that Canada actually has lower taxes than the U.S. when you consider the deficit as a form of deferred taxation, and even straight up Canada’s taxes are roughly the same as the U.S.'s.
In addition, Canada’s economy was a basket case for a long time, and didn’t start taking off until we started cutting taxes and the size of government.
Canada’s government expenditure is now lower than the U.S’s, our tax system is less progressive, and in some provinces overall taxes are lower than many states in the U.S. when you add in state and local tax. Alberta has the lowest taxes overall than any place in North America.
Canada’s economic health declined after Trudeau regulated industry, raised taxes and grew the size of government to 53% of GDP. Our dollar dropped to less than 70 cents American, our structural unemployment rate remained two percentage points higher than the U.S. on average, and our long-term interest rates were higher. And those high taxes didn’t save us from deficits and debt, either. Both were higher in terms of GDP than were the U.S.'s
We remained that way for 20 years, draining our best and brightest doctors, scientists, and engineers to the U.S. where taxes were lower and more opportunities existed. At the start of the Trudeau years our standard of living was about the same as the U.S’s - twenty years after the grand liberal experiment of big government, high taxes, big social programs and big deficits, our real standard of living lagged the U.S. by some 30%.
Starting with the Chretien government, we started cutting the size of government dramatically - from 53% of GDP to 33%. Once we got spending under control and turned the deficits into surpluses, we started cutting taxes. We also privatized a lot of infrastructure and deregulated many industries. The result is that we now have the healthiest economy in the G8, our dollar is back to par, our interest rates are as low as they are in the U.S., and our government is smaller and our taxes lower.
Canada has no inheritance tax. Our capital gains and dividend taxes are lower than in the U.S. On Jan 1, our corporate tax rate was cut to 16.5%. Our top federal marginal rate is 29%. If we didn’t have the GST, our overall tax burden would be significantly lower than the U.S’s, and the GST is a regressive tax.
Canada is not the poster child for taxing your way to prosperity. It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when you let the size of government get out of hand, and a reassuring tale of how it’s possible to cut government spending and restore fiscal sanity, and how cutting government spending dramatically can be done without major societal damage.
It’s also a case study for questioning the validity of Keynesian economics, because Canada cut spending and raised taxes at the start of the transformation (7-1 spending cuts to tax increases), both of which Keynesians will tell you are contractionary changes. And yet, our economy responded positively.
I should add that if you look at tables of total tax rates from the OECD or other sources, you’ll generally see the U.S. being shown as having slightly lower overall taxes (for example, the OECD estimate was 24% of GDP for the U.S., vs 31% for Canada). However, estimates vary all over the map, and in Canada they are skewed dramatically by some high-tax provinces, since provinces in Canada consume a bigger share of overall tax revenue than do U.S. States.
However, you also have to add in the various state and federal deficits, since they are an implied tax. And when you do that, the U.S. jumps ahead of Canada. And Canada is still on a trend for further tax reduction - our corporate tax is scheduled to be reduced to 12.5 by the end of 2012, for example.
It could also be possible that U.S. taxes wind up lower as a percentage of GDP if the U.S. economy continues to under-perform. And it’s certainly true that U.S. taxes would have been higher had the Bush tax cuts been allowed to expire.
Canada also ranks higher than the U.S. in Overall Economic Freedom.
I was previously unaware of this “index of economic freedom”. Upon Googling, it appears that no one else is aware of it either, unless they were advised of its importance by the Heritage Foundation,which seems to have an exclusive understanding of its significance.
Are there other academic reports on the crucial significance of this index, perhaps one or another from some organization that does not have such a public reputation as a consistent mouthpiece for conservative politics?
An apt description of right-wing “think” tanks, is that they don’t actually need to think because they already know the answers!
Here at SDMB you’ll find people linking to such sites and claiming that they don’t actually support thinking of that ilk but that the result showed up in a Google search. Many searches, unfortunately, are self-fulfilling. Here, for example, the Google search term might have been “Prove to some left-wing dummy that U.S. taxes are too high.” 
I would concede the need for a more objective source. After all I wouldn’t want leftists to be justified coming back at me with Workers Daily or whatever counter-rag they’d like to refer to.
You do realize the ‘index of freedom’ was an offhand reference that had nothing to do with the original point, right? The point is that in Canada taxes aren’t particularly high, and that our economic performance has improved as we have cut taxes and spending.
I guess that is an argument for American exceptionalism then, because our economy doesn’t work like that.GDP fell after the Bush tax cuts were passed, and GDP fell when the Reagan tax cuts were passed. And GDP grew after Clinton raised taxes. But other than that, I am sure there is an iron-clad correlation between reducing tax rates and growing the economy.
American employers are currently sitting on two plus trillion dollars of money that they can’t find anything useful to invest in with. This money has been building up since 1980 when Ronald Reagan started redistributing wealth upwards, leaving an enriched upper class with a comparatively impoverished middle and lower class who didn’t have as much money to spend as before, meaning less consumer demand and thus less opportunities for the wealthy to invest their extra dough to cater for said demand. You’ll have also noticed corporate America reporting record profits recently under the socialist rulke of Obama. A shortage of money is not something corporate America is suffering from.
George W Bush cut taxes to their lowest level ever in America and proceeded to have the worst job creation record of any President. Why is that?
Ah, so if you add on a bunch of stuff that nobody else does then America has higher tax rates than Canada.
Here’s another take on the Canadian economic miracle which paints a slightly different picture :
http://www.newdeal20.org/2010/06/09/the-united-kingdom-draws-the-wrong-lessons-from-canada-12009/
tax cuts that are not accompanied by spending cuts are simply another form of stimulus being directed at folks whose taxes are being cut.