Do we roll income tax rates back 20-25 years too, Mr. I Love the Past?
Wait… what about the defense contractors? Don’t they justify massive military spending? Show a little love, man!
Back to a top rate of 28% then? Sounds great.
In his book The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, David Stockman, who was Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981to 1985 made it clear that it was never possible to cut taxes, raise defense spending and balance the budget by 1983 like Ronald Reagan promised to do during the 1980 campaign without cutting or eliminating domestic spending programs the fast majority of the American people and a sizable percentage of Republican voters would insist on keeping. These would have included major cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and military pensions, as well as the complete elimination of business and farm subsidies.
It is not “highly paid lobbyists and union reps” who prevent cuts in government spending but the will of the voters. Every government spending program has a powerful constituency to protect it. The largest and most expensive programs are the most popular. It is unfortunate that Republican politicians have to learn this every one or two decades. Republican ideologues never learn. They live in a fact free environment where nothing enters their closed minds that violates their dogmas.
During the Roosevelt administration, as the top tax rate grew, the per capita gross domestic product also grew, and the employment rate declined.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=213
http://www.singularity.com/charts/page99.html
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=203
None of which has any relevance to the point I was making.
An even bigger raft will demand cuts in foreign aid, blithely unaware that we only spend about $50 billion dollars on foreign aid in total.
How about this proposal;
we define the poverty rate as the bottom 4%.
The 4% of the people worse off (make it competitive!) are the ones getting aid checks, and of the 4% percent, there is a sliding scale for the amount of aid received. If you are in the bottom 1%, your monthly check is bigger than if you are in the 1 to 2% range.
Also, you need to be a citizen and have a clean arrest record and to pass a drug test to get benefits.
No matter what the vagaries of the US economy are, no matter natural disaster or calamity, the US will enjoy a fixed poverty rate of 4%.
(the whole idea here is to take the money out of poverty. Take out the incentive, and people will naturally want to quit doing it)
As the program shows success, we might want to trim the 4% every decade or so. Knock off a 1/2 point or so and see if we can’t get the poverty rate down to 1%!
YEA! Hardly any poor people!
Here is an idea for cutting down on some medical expenses.
If ‘Twahn’ smacks his ‘ho’ around a bit, and she needs patched up in the ER to the tune of $20,000, guess what, Twahn gets to sit in JAIL till he ponies up the $20K.
You might be surprised just how few times we might need to do this to get the point across. Taxpayers and hospitals aren’t going to be ‘enablers’ in these continuing negative behaviors.
Even better, some of these ‘ho’ types (who comes up with this terminology, btw? can’t we vote on stuff like this?) start getting beat less, maybe the rest of us get a warm fuzzy feeling we have improved their lot in life a bit . . .
Let’s fix Social security:
decide once and for all, how many worker bees per retiree you want. I think the current number is around ‘6’. I suggest we try ‘10’ for a while and see how it works out. (note GM, just prior to bankruptcy was trying to make a go out of ‘.1’!)
So, for there to be 10 worker bees per retiree, what would the retirement age have to be?
Well, have the darn actuarial types work it out. It would make planning into the future easier, the numbers would not be voodooized any more, and the guv’mint would have a handle on making social security work forever.
There you are, social security is fixed.
I think he’s serious.
Gas tax:
LOL, most (all?) states have it as a fixed amount like $0.23/gallon.
Well, make it a percentage of the cost per barrel of crude.
Bingo, I just fixed the hiway infrastructure crisis.
Jesus, is this so f**king hard?
What class of maroon are we voting into congress these days that they can’t fix the budget problem THIS AFTERNOON?
OK, the point of all of these posts, is to get people thinking out of the box. Pay as you go, everything on the table. Suck all the drama out of the problem, fix things and move on.
I am getting nauseous watching CNN and Fox trot out government poobahs everyday for their hand wringing, talking points, and mutual recriminations.
Let’s kick some a$$ and get going.
Which is an interesting proposal, because House Republicans have said that NOT everything is on the table. They have passed new rules which make it impossible to use tax policies to balance the budget. Those rules are so strict, in fact, that they would prohibit the closing of egregious tax loopholes to raise funds for either paying for new programs or reducing the deficit.
Yeah, you picked a top tax rate which was so disastrous for the country that a Republican President had to acknowledge that the deficit would explode if he didn’t do something to both manage spending and revenues.
I have often said that George H.W. Bush and the Democratic Congress made some really tough and unpopular decisions that set us up for the economic boom (and the return to surpluses) of the 1990s. Those folks are heroes for having the courage to reconcile that people expect certain things of the government, and we have to figure out how to pay for those core functions.
Contrast that to the cowardliness of the current crop of fiscal conservatives in DC who are all too happy to cut budgets for education, medical care for the indigent, better equipment for police in high-crime areas, and heating oil for old people in cold places, just so rich people won’t have to pay a cent more in taxes.
One Libertarian Think Tank (CATO) has already made their proposals for cuts:
http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/
Yes - this includes cuts to defense that will eventually be equal to $150 billion per year in reduced spending. With most of the budget going towards buying stuff, the cuts WILL hurt a lot of US companies, however.
As a Libertarian Republican - if the Democrats would cut programs to balance the budget at current levels, I would support tax increases to then pay down the debt. What I do NOT want is tax increases to just pay for a bloated budget. Bundle the cuts with an increase.
Well, I’ve been wondering where our new Dickens’ are coming from. Bring back debtor’s prisons. But, who are you going to put in jail for cancer?
It seems that for every serious problem there is an answer that is simple, straightforward, and utterly frickin’ stupid.
The problem isn’t that your suggestion wasn’t understandable. The problem is that your suggestion didn’t make any sense.
BZZZZTTT $694 billion > $564 billion.
I suppose you could cherry-pick the highly anomalous years of 1988-1990 instead of 1985-1987 (when it was 50% or 38%), when it was clear I was making a point about how taxes are generally lower than the miraculous past our OP thinks he can go back to.
Y’know, if you wanted to be a dick.
Yeah, except that it doesn’t. For example, Obama has already punted on those cuts to doctor’s fees that were baked into the CBO estimate. Also, it ‘captured’ 500 billion in cuts to Medicare, which either won’t happen or, if they had happened without Obamacare, would have cut the deficit by 500 billion.
Saying that the new health care plan reduces the deficit is really just playing games with the numbers. In fact, it increases government expenses quite a bit, and only becomes slightly deficit neutral because it raises taxes to pay for it or because it counts cuts that could happen whether or not the program is implemented. The bottom line is that the government’s entitlement commitments are greater with the the new program than they would be without it.
As an analogy, let’s say that I was living on increasing credit every month because my fancy cable bill costs $100/mo and I lease two cars for $1000 per month.
My friends tell me that I can get my house in order by selling one of my cars, saving $500/mo, and cutting my cable bill. My 'solution to that is to sell both cars, get rid of my cable, and buy a new, even fancier car for $1050/mo. Hey, I’ve cut $50/mo from my expenses, right? I’m fiscally prudent!
In fact, what I did was take an easy $500/mo cut I could have made by selling one of my cars and turned it into a $50/mo savings by buying a new luxury car. I’m still deep in the red each month, but now I’ve eliminated one of my easy cuts. It’s going to be even harder to get back into black now, since if I sell the new car I have no transportation at all, and since I used half my cable budget as well, I don’t even have that to cut any more.
That’s what Obamacare did - it took the lowest-hanging fruit, the easiest cuts to make, and used the revenue from them to pay for a new government entitlement that people will depend on. Then it added a bunch of new tax hikes to make up the rest. But even then it couldn’t get to deficit neutrality, so gimmicks were added such as delaying the spending for three years to make the numbers work.
Oh, and even with all that, it’s now becoming clear that it won’t be deficit neutral, let alone deficit negative. The 3-year interim financing for health insurance before the exchanges start up turned out to be under-funded by half. The 39 billion in supposed ‘savings’ from the reduction of fraud by imposing 1099 requirements on small business is going to be dropped. And the cuts to physician’s fees are not going to be implemented either. And this plan hasn’t even really gone into effect yet. Of course government plans NEVER go over budget once the implementation details are worked out, do they?
I wouldn’t be surprised to see that Obama’s health care plan ultimately results in an increase of the deficit of at least 200-400 billion dollars in the first ten years.