I’m “ignoring” it only in the sense that every single person in the thread is, since nobody else brought it up either. :rolleyes:
The new proposed limit on the estate tax is what? 1.5MM? That’s “wealthy”? I prefer to call it “prepared for retirement, almost” or “ready to pay for my kid’s educations, sort of”.
I’m certainly not igonoring cap gains. I brought that up. You make it sound like it’s a conspiracy to help rich people. Look, the simple fact of the matter is that rich people pay most of all kinds of taxes. If you cut taxes, then you are helping rich people because they are the ones paying the taxes. It also benefits everyone else because of the increased money to spend on investments and hiring, but that’s more indirect.
No. They are just lowering all kinds of taxes on everyone, because that’s what they believe is best. Not all things are conspiracy theories. Some things really just are as simple as they sound. Republicans don’t like taxes. When they get elected they lower them. This benefits the rich because they pay more taxes. That’s it. There’s nothing more to it than that, unless it’s the Oliver Stone movie version of reality.
To tell the rest of the story, the marginal tax rates were also raised on the middle class in the Clinton era. And this alone makes your conclusions kinda suspect.
Well, you’ve really only got one data point there that supports your premise - that 32% in 2003 (and it has some note associated with it that I can’t read - your link doesn’t seem to go anywhere). I’ll grant that the pending data ain’t gonna be pretty when it is tabulated, but I’d not like point to too sweeping a trend from a single data point.
No need to search ‘em out. I’ve got the data right here; the numbers you’ve given us are accurate. Revenues in the next several years have been projected with some reasonable growth tho’, so we’ll hafta see how it turns out in the end.
You seriously are providing cites to Gephardt and Daschle saying that Bushs’ tax cuts are bad as if it proves anything?
I could dig up a cite from Frist and Bush saying that they are good. It would be equally meaningless.
First of all it has been almost “several years”. In any case not all of the cuts were delayed. They started smaller and get bigger over time. If you don’t know anything about the cuts I suggest reading more up on them before you attempt to debate the merits of them.
I know you’re kidding, but it’s worth pointing out that yes, the tax cuts were massive because they resulted in huge amounts of tax savings for the wealthy, and much smaller savings for the more numerous non-wealthy. As noted by FactCheck.org,
The majority of Americans aren’t getting anywhere near the $1870 tax savings estimated for that hypothetical family of four. And a few hundred bucks is easily drained away by increases in other taxes.
Sorry, but he cut federal tax revenues and tried to offset the revenue loss slightly by shaving funding to the states and thereby causing or exacerbating state budget shortfalls. You can view this as a good thing or a bad thing, but the fact is that it reduces the actual effect of the federal tax cuts in terms of increasing the amount of money available to taxpayers.
We’re supposed to be talking here about the actual effects so far of the Bush tax cuts. Not what the effects will be when the tax cuts get bigger; not what the effects would have been if state and local governments had cut taxes too; not what you would predict the effects to be just by looking at the raw numbers for marginal rate cuts; but what the effects have been.
This isn’t an easy question to answer, which is why there’s a debate about it, and certainly there’s room for disagreement on most if not all of the conclusions. But IMHO you’re being so eager to conclude that the tax cuts must have been a good thing that you’re rather losing sight of the actual subject of debate.
My snippets came from the same articles you listed. So, if the articles are valid for making your case, then the same articles are valid for my case, which is, the tax cuts are mostly smoke and mirrors. The bottom line is, I haven’t seen any decrease in my taxes.
Tax cuts MAY stimulate the economy, but only temporarily. The theory is simple: people have more money in their pockets so they spend more. This drives up consumption, which is a component of GDP. Of course, in lieu of these tax cuts, the government could just keep the taxes and spend the the money itself. This yields the exact same effect on the economy: it drives up government spending, which is also a component of GDP. No real difference, except that a GOOD government will spend the money more efficiently (due to its size) and for the betterment of the society, versus an individual spending only on himself. It is up to citizens to vote for a government that will spend money wisely; i.e. education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc. This leads to a higher standard of living for everyone. When a citizen votes for a government for the purpose of helping only himself, we get corrupt governments that are more interested in paying back their constituencies through selective tax cuts.
But when taxes are lowered relative to spending, it hurts everyone in the long run. What Bush did was similar to someone immersing himself in credit card debt and then proclaiming how much better off he is financially. Lucky for him that he had some low interest lenders by the names of China and Japan (and others) with their own motivations. As the credit card debt gets larger, fewer people will lend to you at the lower rates. You’ve now become a riskier investment. And then you die (or your term runs out) leaving everyone else to pay off your debt. The US government is still the safest investment on the planet, but its recent decisions suggest that it might not be forever.
A counter-argument is that tax breaks for the wealthy lead to re-investment. This is the supply side argument: Wealthy individuals take their excess cash and invest in new projects providing for longer term growth. This leads to more jobs, which leads to more money for everyone. This is the biggest scam of an idea in recent US economic history. Only partisan hacks convince themselves of this, and there is absolutely no evidence that this occurs. In reality, the wealthy will always invest in good projects with solid financial returns. And projects with solid financial returns are dependent on a society that can afford to purchase the new thing that is being sold.
Malarkey. Cuts to capital gains taxes, estate taxes and taxes on dividends provide virtually no relief to the middle and lower classes. These tax cuts are for the primary benefit of the wealthy. Why shouldn’t these categories of income be taxed in the same way as the income I WORK to earn? Why do Rerpublicans seek to exclude these categories of income, in particular, from taxation?
Why? Because those cuts benefit the wealthy donors to the party, that’s why. (Bush’s “base,” as he calls them.)
The Bush tax cuts are not an across the board, class-blind benefit to everyone. They are a targeted effort to make taxation more regressive, i.e., to shift the relative burden of taxation away from the wealthy and down to the people who work for a living.
This isn’t really a meaningful statement because half of all individuals and families don’t really pay any income tax at all! The bottom half of taxpayers only pay a few percent of the total income tax burden. They actually get that back in credits, so all told there is no taxes paid by them.
( They do pay payroll taxes, and other taxes, I’m just talking about income tax, which is what Bush cut. )
So, if half of the people aren’t paying a tax, and Bush cuts that tax, it’s not really fair to complain that only half the people benefit from the cut. Of course people that already basically don’t pay income taxes won’t benefit from a cut in income taxes.
Good point.
I’m still far from convinced that the increase in state and local taxes is enough to make up for the loss in federal taxes, though. I think it’s more likely that that difference is simply not made up at all: It’s just deficit spending.
In any case, even if it’s true that state and local spending raised because of Bush’s cuts, I’m simply pointing out that this can and should be blamed on the states who raised taxes! They could’ve cut spending instead.
Wouldn’t it be wise to, instead of looking at what the politicians have to say, or looking at polls, we focused on some measurable benchmarks to see if the Bush tax cuts have had any effect? I suppose we could look at where the economy was when the cuts were put in place and then look at it now. We could look at unemployment rates when the cuts were put in place and the unemployment rates now…and perhaps the total number of jobs and maybe some average salaray type calculations (if such a beast exists). Before I (or someone better at looking this kind of thing up) bothers though, would this be acceptable as measurements for how the tax cuts have done or not done?
In other words, most people won’t experience any significant “money in their pockets” effect from the Bush tax cuts. Which is what I was saying back in my first post.
By the way, the Tax Policy Center table in the FactCheck.org link has a more detailed breakdown of the average tax savings for different taxpayer income levels:
Sure, but the hard part is identifying definite cause-and-effect relationships between tax cuts and particular economic changes. What do tax cuts actually do? In a general qualitative way they tend to stimulate the economy, as Debaser pointed out. But what specific economic results follow from them directly?
The middle class definitely benefits from cuts to capital gains, estate taxes and dividend taxes.
Not only rich people own stocks that pay dividends. Not only rich people leave estates, unless you count 1.5 million as “rich”. The real estate taxes I mentioned do actually only apply to the poor and middle class. There is a limit of 500K.
Because you’ve already paid taxes on them, and paying more taxes on these things cripples the economy. People don’t sell their houses if they know they’ll take a huge hit on capital gains. They pay plenty of taxes already. They shouldn’t get slammed with tens or hundreds of thousands more just for selling their home and retiring to Florida.
But the income tax cuts were. (To everyone that actually pays income tax that is.) That’s what I was referring to. As I’ve already stated multiple times: Yes, rich people make out good when you cut just about any taxes, since they pay so much more in taxes to begin with.
You’d do yourself a favor if you tried to understand that conservatives just don’t like taxes. That’s it. It’s really not a conspiracy to hurt the poor. Lower taxes on everyone, rich and poor is what’s best for all. I know you can’t agree with that because of your beliefs. But, I wish you could at least wrap your head around the idea that we do believe that and it’s not just pure evil that motivates us.
Not true. Even people who don’t pay taxes at all got rebate checks, for instance.
Do you have a date for those numbers? Since the cuts are incremental over time, it makes a big difference if those are from the first year or current, or 10 years from now.
It’s tough because tax cuts are like shovelling sand against the tide. The way more important factor is general economic trends that are out of our control for the most part. Even the Fed’s discount rate, which is far more influential than tax cuts IMO, has a curbing effect at most on the economy.
If we are heading for a recession, then not much will stop that from occurring. It’s a part of the natural cycle. Cutting rates down, and cutting taxes down can soften the recession, as they did in this case, but they won’t stop it. Looking at unemployment figures isn’t a good measurement for the effectiveness of taxes.
I agree (which is why I asked the question almost rhetorically). And of course the answers are going to break down along economically partisan lines (IMO), so you aren’t going to get an answer we can all agree on. I can see that in the discussion so far, where folks on one side are claiming that there was no effect because no everyone benifitted equally from the tax cuts, while the other side (the side I happen to agree with for the record, in case someone didn’t know ) points out that of course not everyone benifitted equally…not everyone pays equally, and some folks don’t pay income taxes at all. If we can’t agree on benchmarks of what does or doesn’t constitute the effect of Bush’s cuts then there really isn’t going to be anymore point to this thread then the countless other threads on this subject.
Since we are then to just giving opinion (backed up in some cases by data each individual thinks is important but others don’t), I’ll say that to me its pretty obvious that the cuts have had SOME benificial effect…because the economy was in recession when Bush instituted the cuts and in a surprisingly short time (to my mind) the economy is strong again…and this despite some pretty heavy set backs (like a certain that whole 9/11 business and more recently a certain hurricane that nearly washed away one of our major cities) and fuck ups (like the whole Iraq invasion fiasco). Even WITH these things the economy is still on the rise. Why? Well, I’m sure there are a lot of factors…one of those factors I believe is the tax cuts.
Economic analysis must deal with goverment as it exists, not government as we would like it to exist. The case that the former actually allocates resources more efficiently than the free market is not terribly persuasive.
Sorry I took so long to get back to this, but you misunderstood what I was trying to get accross earlier
I find this to be on topic:
To clarify, if Bush had really made the tax cuts to spark the economy out of a recession, capital gains, estate, and dividend tax cuts are just about the slowest cuts you could choose to pump money back into the economy to get out of a recession. I find that argument to be disingenuous.
Wage tax cuts, fuel tax cuts, even corporate tax cuts are far more effective at pumping money quickly back into the economy. Unless Bush was relying on 2000 or so Estate tax windfalls to prop it up. Which would tie nicely into his foreign policy.
Bush cut taxes. People are asking the effect of this. I’m saying one effect was that it helped to soften the recession by giving a boost to the economy.
But, economic stimulus wasn’t the only reason to cut taxes. I’ve said over and over already that conservatives want small government and less taxes. It’s a part of what we believe. It’s better for lots of reasons. That it helps the economy is only one of them.
(Oh, I know that Bush has been spending like crazy and not acting like a conservative. I’m probably more angry about it than you all are.)
That was the basis for Reaganomics and Trickle Down economics. It was a great deal for the big boys, but not such a good deal for anyone else. Very little actually trickled down.
