Are the GOP rooting for total economic collapse?

[ElvisL1ves]

Oh, there are a number of the wealthy who’ve already told us publicly how they are taxed too little. Is that who you mean?

[Knorf]

This lingering anti-tax attitude from the GOP is just really, really stupid. It’s ruining the country for the majority of Americans.

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

@Omg_a_Black_Conservative

You mean people support raising taxes on someone else who aren’t themselves? Well, gee! Who would have ever thought?

…

Why don’t you ask those same people how much of a tax increase they’d be willing to personally shoulder?

Who, me? For the good of the country I’d take a tax hike equal to what gets imposed on the rich. First however, their tax rate needs to rise to be at least equal to mine (right now it is less). Then let’s talk increases.

[Inbred_Mm_domesticus]

Why do any of you think that there will be or ought to be a resolution to this issue before Aug1 (or the last possible minute)? There will definitely be an increase to the debt limit and considering the inability of all involved to find any sort of compromise it will probably be what Obama wanted in the first place: debt limit + nothing else.

As has been pointed out in dozens of articles and comments all over the internet, they are seeing what they can get out of the other side, but it’s not just that:
They know that neither side will budge. There is no flexibility on this. In the meantime, politicians get to make lots of speeches and cement their support. Every deal you have heard is nothing more than meaningless symbolic noise. This is best exemplified by the vote in the House the other day; there’s no point in passing hopeless legislation except that it appeals to your moronic base. Congress delights in this kind of debate and legislation, the more meaningless the better. I think Obama’s proposal is just him joining in the fun.

Not only will there be a debt limit increase but at no point through this entire farce where we ever in danger of it not happening.

[gonzomax]

It has been the plan all along. Nordquist foretold the results of a long economic collapse resulting in ending all social programs. This is no accident. Bush/Cheney knew damn well what would happen by waging 2 wars while cutting taxes. Even our rightys on this board can figure that out.
The wealthy have a different vision of America. they are setting up a plutocracy. All the power and money goes to the top. The rest will get what the rich decide. It wont be much.The top 400 wealth have the wealth equal to the bottom 150 million. That difference is getting bigger every day. It is the plan.

[yorick73]

@gonzomax

It has been the plan all along. Nordquist foretold the results of a long economic collapse resulting in ending all social programs. This is no accident. Bush/Cheney knew damn well what would happen by waging 2 wars while cutting taxes. Even our rightys on this board can figure that out.
The wealthy have a different vision of America. they are setting up a plutocracy. All the power and money goes to the top. The rest will get what the rich decide. It wont be much.The top 400 wealth have the wealth equal to the bottom 150 million. That difference is getting bigger every day. It is the plan.

Time to take off that tin-foil hat.

[yorick73]

@ElvisL1ves

Oh, there are a number of the wealthy who’ve already told us publicly how they are taxed too little. Is that who you mean?

And those people are free to write a check to the Treasury any time they wish. So are the rest of you who feel your taxes are too low.

[Robot_Arm]

@yorick73

What was that 95% of what we wanted? Some kind of potential reductions in growth of certain programs sometime in the future in exchange for tax increases now?

Incorrect.

(I posted this link in an earlier discussion on this same topic. Since then, the article has gone into the archives and the quoted portion is available only to subscribers.)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303812104576439793321939806.html

Mr. Obama said any tax increases that have been discussed as part of a deficit-reduction deal wouldn’t take effect until 2013. He said he has told Republicans he would work with them on a tax-reform plan that lowers all taxpayers’ rates and broadens the tax base.

yorick, when come back, bring facts.

[Happy_Fun_Ball]

@Omg_a_Black_Conservative

You mean people support raising taxes on someone else who aren’t themselves? Well, gee! Who would have ever thought?

…

Why don’t you ask those same people how much of a tax increase they’d be willing to personally shoulder?

I am worried. I am concerned about the costs of the two underfunded wars we have been fighting the last decade. I am concerned that the education and infrastructure in this country sucks and is going to contribute to our continued decline in competitiveness. I am concerned that our national deficit is out of control (and I agree with you we need major cuts in spending, but this will probably not enough). I am worried that government revenue as a function GDP is at a 70 year low due to both historically low tax rates at the current recession.

According to Wikipedia, my wife and I currently pay 28 percent of our income over $137 k and 33% of our income over $209k. I am personally willing to raise these two amounts by 2% in each category. This will result in us paying about $2,460 dollars more a year in taxes on our ~$260k we bring in annually. A small price to pay in my opinion to help to keep this country #1 and to ensure that none of my fellow citizens are dying in the streets due to starvation or simply-treated medical problems.

Of course, I will probably pay less due to the deductions that are available to me, especially the mortgage interest deduction. But regardless, $2,400 is not that much to us. I would vote for the tax increase.

[septimus]

@yorick73

And those people are free to write a check to the Treasury any time they wish. So are the rest of you who feel your taxes are too low.

One hears this fallacy ad nauseam, particularly from right-wingers. Does it have a name?

[Omg_a_Black_Conservative]

@ElvisL1ves

Oh, there are a number of the wealthy who’ve already told us publicly how they are taxed too little. Is that who you mean?

No. I mean seeing someone who tilts towards the left stating that they’d personally be willing to shoulder tax increases instead of wanting to tax the “rich”.

@Try2B_Comprehensive

Who, me? For the good of the country I’d take a tax hike equal to what gets imposed on the rich. First however, their tax rate needs to rise to be at least equal to mine (right now it is less). Then let’s talk increases.

Not true.

1.) Even when you take into account Federal, state and local taxes, the rich still have an effective tax rate higher than any other income group.

2.) The poor and middle class are getting a damn good deal in regards to taxes paid and money received in government spending (Federal, state and local).

Overall, we find that America’s lowest-earning one-fifth of households received roughly $8.21 in government spending for each dollar of taxes paid in 2004. Households with middle-incomes received $1.30 per tax dollar, and America’s highest-earning households received $0.41.

Link

So yes, let’s talk increases (or more importantly, spending cuts).

[foolsguinea]

@yorick73

Time to take off that tin-foil hat.

Starve the beast

A quick google:

Tax Cuts And 'Starving The Beast'

@Bruce Bartlett

The most pernicious fiscal doctrine in history.
…
Once upon a time Republicans thought that budget deficits were bad, that it was immoral to live for the present and pass the debt onto our children. Until the 1970s they were consistent in opposing both expansions of spending and tax cuts that were not financed with tax increases or spending cuts. Republicans also thought that deficits had a cost over and above the spending that they financed and that it was possible for this cost to be so high that tax increases were justified if spending could not be cut.
…
By 1977, however, Jack Kemp, Dave Stockman and a few other House Republicans concluded that the economy was desperately in need of a permanent tax rate reduction. Kemp believed that such a tax cut would so expand the economy that the revenue loss would be minimal. He also thought that much spending was driven by slow economic growth–welfare, unemployment benefits and so on–that would fall automatically if growth increased…

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10054/1037783-109.stm

@Paul Krugman

Ever since Ronald Reagan, the GOP has been run by people who want a much smaller government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?

The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed “starving the beast” during the Reagan years. The idea – propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol – was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait-and-switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government’s fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.
…
At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan – and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.

But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: In effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn’t enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-20/budget-calculations-slay-the-starve-the-beast-mythology-view.html (chart)

@Bloomberg editors

For more than 30 years, since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, some Republicans have pursued a theory called “Starve the Beast.”
STB holds that you don’t cut government spending in order to lower taxes; you lower taxes in order to cut government spending. The deprivation of revenue will force the government to get smaller. How this is supposed to happen has always been a bit of a mystery. Sages across the political spectrum have noted that both parties have consistently shown a willingness to spend money the Treasury doesn’t have.
At first, this strategy was considered a scandalous secret. Democrats – most notably the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York – asserted that this was what the Republicans were up to. Republicans denied it, insisting publicly that they were merely following the prescriptions of supply-side economics: Painful spending cuts are unnecessary because tax cuts will pay for themselves in new revenue. STB considers, by contrast, that tax cuts will pay for themselves by forcing spending cuts. Gradually, this theory became something Republicans would openly brag about.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_23/b4231006685629.htm

@Drake Bennett

This moment is a triumph for the 54-year-old Norquist, too. For decades he’s worked Congress and cable news studios to promote his single issue, promoting those who sign his pledge and punishing those who even consider breaking it. “He’s a little bit like the old Roman emperor, turning the thumbs up and thumbs down,” says Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser and Treasury official during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations. “He has an enormous amount of power, more than he’s ever had before.”

Yet even as it demonstrates Norquist’s power, the budget crisis threatens to undermine him. In recent weeks, Norquist and his organization have engaged in a very public dispute with Dr. Tom A. Coburn (R-Okla.), perhaps the most uncompromising spending hawk in the U.S. Senate, over the senator’s willingness to entertain tax revenue increases—not rate hikes, but the elimination of certain deductions and tax credits—as part of the so-called Gang of Six deficit deal. Coburn and GOP colleagues Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Mike Crapo of Idaho have been negotiating with Senate Democrats on a potential compromise, and they have argued that the yawning budget gap is impossible to close with spending cuts alone. To Norquist, entertaining the idea of a tax increase at the very moment when the deficit is forcing Democrats to consider deep spending cuts is snatching defeat from the jaws of political victory. Who wins the argument will determine whether the current deficit debate is the apotheosis of Norquist and his pledge or the moment their influence begins to wane.
…
Coburn, currently on a self-described “sabbatical” from the Gang of Six negotiations, thinks Norquist has hijacked the debate and imperiled the country. “We don’t have the luxury of taking [Norquist’s] position right now, because we can’t solve our problem unless we get an agreement to trim spending,” says Coburn. “Here’s the thing I would say: If you’re in Congress right now, and you allow somebody like Grover Norquist to tell you how to vote—you have an opportunity to really fix what’s wrong with the country, and if instead you do what special interest groups say—you don’t have any business being up here.”

Coburn’s argument touches on a larger criticism of Norquist’s pledge, which is that a myopic focus on taxes actually allows elected officials to punt on spending. After all, today’s deficit is largely the legacy of the Bush Administration’s taste for simultaneous tax cuts and spending increases (future deficits will be increasingly dominated by Medicare and Social Security spending). Norquist sees it differently: Taxes and spending are two different things, he concedes. “But a politician who can raise taxes never discusses spending less.” Ruling out tax increases “is a necessary but not sufficient condition to cutting spending.”

Ultimately, for Norquist, the deficit is somewhat beside the point. The problem for him isn’t government debt, it’s government spending. “The deficit is the tip of the iceberg, it’s the small thing on top of the bigger total spending,” he says. Norquist’s goal is to keep the temperature high enough so that the whole thing melts away.

Starving the Beast of Government

quoted in http://www.equitynews.info/2011/07/01/harlan-green-starving-the-beast-of-government-starves-u-s/

@Harlan Russell Green

…in fact this pledge has not succeeded in its stated goal of lowering government spending. In fact it has mainly succeeded in starving the main engine of economic growth, consumer spending. For each time Republican administrations have cut taxes in the name of shrinking government, this has instead shifted wealth from the lower and middle income classes to the top income brackets, which lowers the overall demand for goods and services.
…
Grover Norquist is not an economist, though he has a Harvard MBA business degree. So he chose to do his economic jousting without even the most basic knowledge of economics, it seems. Macroeconomic demand theory teaches that taking money from the pockets of those who spend most of it and transferring it to those who save most of it doesn’t increase demand for products.

Economic historians in particular know that tax cuts without spending cuts do not lower deficits, since it chokes off the revenues needed to pay down the deficit. The two largest expansions of debt as a percentage of GDP were during the Reagan and GW Bush presidencies — from a low of 47 percent in the 1970s to its current some 80 percent. They were also the administrations that would not make comparable spending cuts.

Back in the 1990’s, I remember seeing “Starve the Beast” referenced in U.S. News and World Report. It was seriously claimed by a few Senators as a justification for deficits even then.

There is a wing of the GOP that makes no secret of its opposition to entitlements. Newt Gingrich denounced Bob Dole as “tax collector for the welfare state,” as if that were a bad thing.

This is not a secret, let alone tinfoil hat time. This is what the Norquist/Gingrich/T.E.A. Party axis has explicitly campaigned on for 15-20 years.

[septimus]

@Martin_Hyde

As a Republican I’m starting to turn pretty actively against my party on this one.

At one point in the negotiations it seemed like President Obama was basically willing to give us 95% of what we wanted in return for moderate changes to the tax code and minor increases on a small subset of earners. To me, the fact that he was even willing to talk about reductions in entitlement programs meant we could have achieve real reductions in spending long term at the cost of tax increases which could have been scaled back 10 years down the road if we have an economic boom and they are no longer fiscally necessary.

Yes. The President bent over backwards, to the dismay of centrists let alone leftists, and it still wasn’t enough. Shouldn’t Americans be in an uproar about this, marching in the streets?

@Inbred_Mm_domesticus

Not only will there be a debt limit increase but at no point through this entire farce where we ever in danger of it not happening.

Maybe. But that doesn’t mean this stupidity is without consequence. Moody’s has placed the U.S. Treasury on credit watch and by some measures the Dollar is at an all-time low.

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

@Omg_a_Black_Conservative

Not true.

1.) Even when you take into account Federal, state and local taxes, the rich still have an effective tax rate higher than any other income group.

2.) The poor and middle class are getting a damn good deal in regards to taxes paid and money received in government spending (Federal, state and local).

Then how do you explain this article: How Does Warren Buffett Pay Lower Taxes Than His Secretary?

Warren Buffett stated in 2006 (and has repeated the state similar times) that he paid an income tax of 15.5% on his income of $46 million while his secretary paid 30% as tax on her $60,000 income. He mentioned that a few of his friends calculated and compared their percentage of taxes with that of their lower level employees and the same conclusion was reached: the US tax system allows the rich to pay less than the poor, which further widens the income disparity among the rich and the poor. Buffett, while slamming the tax system, suggested the US government take appropriate measures and increase the tax rate for the high income groups.

Do you have a cite for claim 1?
2 looks like a bare assertion. Sorry if being poor looks like ‘a damn good deal’ to you. Lots of wealthy people get that way by skimming the value off the labor of the poor and sticking it in their own pockets. You do know that, right?

[G-SE]

@septimus

One hears this fallacy ad nauseam, particularly from right-wingers. Does it have a name?

Yeah, almost as much as you hear every rich person in the US feels they don’t pay enough taxes, just because Warren Buffett thinks so. Give me a break.

[The_Other_Waldo_Pepper]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

Lots of wealthy people get that way by skimming the value off the labor of the poor and sticking it in their own pockets. You do know that, right?

Do the poor laborers consent to the value-split in question?

[Happy_Fun_Ball]

@Inbred_Mm_domesticus

Why do any of you think that there will be or ought to be a resolution to this issue before Aug1 (or the last possible minute)? There will definitely be an increase to the debt limit and considering the inability of all involved to find any sort of compromise it will probably be what Obama wanted in the first place: debt limit + nothing else.

President Obama may not have wanted to turn raising the debt limit into a political battle, but he has been more concerned about the debt and finding ways to solve it that the Republicans. You can see this way back in 2010 when the Republicans in the senate abandoned their own bill to create a fiscal panel to address the growing deficit as soon as President Obama endorsed it. (The bill failed with 17 Republicans and 36 Democrats supporting it).

Republican Sens. Sam Brownback (Kan.), Mike Crapo (Idaho), John Ensign (Nev.), Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas), James Inhofe (Okla.) and John McCain (Ariz.) all voted against the bill, despite being co-sponsors. A seventh GOP senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, had co-sponsored the bill and planned to support it but was forced to miss the vote for family reasons.

Because of this failure to seek solutions, President Obama established a bi partisan commission by Executive Order 13531 (warning PDF). This commission, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, consited of 18 members, 8 of whom were Republicans.

The results were disappointing. IMO, they came up with some good and bold ideas, but everybody shot it down on both sides of the aisle. President Obama gave it tepid support; you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t force it to drink.

If Republicans were serious about solving our deficit problems, revenue increases would be on the table…

[foolsguinea]

@yorick73

And those people are free to write a check to the Treasury any time they wish. So are the rest of you who feel your taxes are too low.

Then that wouldn’t be a tax, but a donation. That’s not how taxes work. There are some things that are important enough that we force everyone to pay according to their ability, rather than having a few responsible souls carry a bunch of free riders.

Avoiding an economic depression is one of those things.

Considering how much money wealthy investors will lose, or simply not gain, in a deflationary spiral; it’s not really that strange to tax the richest classes at a higher marginal rate to save everyone else’s purchasing power. You can pay a marginal tax of 50+% & whine, but see the peons still be working and buying stuff; or you can watch your assets shrivel away at some large random factor, as the commoners lose their jobs & start talking revolution.

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

@G-SE

Yeah, almost as much as you hear every rich person in the US feels they don’t pay enough taxes, just because Warren Buffett thinks so. Give me a break.

It is a question of numbers, not what every rich person ‘feels’. The wealthy do pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes, whether or not they ‘feel’ they should pay more.

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

@The_Other_Waldo_Pepper

Do the poor laborers consent to the value-split in question?

The answer could be yes or no depending on how you view it. Dude A, born into a wealthy family, put through Harvard only to return to take over the family business and make millions, consents to the arrangement and becomes a success. Meanwhile dude B, born into a poor family and unable to attend college at all, takes what job he can find to avoid homelessness.

Dude A lobbies his congressperson to abolish the minimum wage and succeeds. All the dude B’s of the world still need to avoid homelessness. Is ‘consent’ the heart of the matter?