If the whole point of your tangent here was to question whether not the unearned nature of the inheritance was a sufficient justification for taxing it differently, you could have saved us all a lot of time by simply stating clearly that this is the point you don’t think we have answered.
My answer to it, by the way, would be that a lot of different considerations go into decisions on taxation. One of them, in my view is whether the money was “earned” in some way but it is not the only one. Other issues are progressivity, how much “economic pain” the tax causes, whether the tax encourages or discourages behaviors that are useful to society at large, …
And Scylla, now that kimstu and xeno have weighed in with estimates of waste, I don’t see how you can possibly claim your number is “the only girl at the dance”. Not only that, but theirs come with cites and explanation. Yours may be the only number that is not falsifiable because it comes with no explanation of how “waste” is defined so it is sort of true by tautology under somedefinition of waste…This may be somewhat of a virtue in defending it but it is hardly a virtue in any scientific sense (sort of like creationism).
By the way, I was sort of wondering: Given your statement previously questioning why the government should get any more money when there is lots of waste and given that you pointed to the defense department as a prime example, I have to wonder if this then leads you to strongly oppose Bush’s increases to the defense budget. Or do we make exceptions?
As for the global warming, well I really haven’t had the time to go this far afield (hell, even to look into these waste numbers really)…Besides this message board is slower than molasses now…I’ll try to get to this in the next few days.
P.S.—Hi, Mandelstam and thanks for joining in. I heartily agree with what you said.
If the whole point of your tangent here was to question whether not the unearned nature of the inheritance was a sufficient justification for taxing it differently, you could have saved us all a lot of time by simply stating clearly that this is the point you don’t think we have answered.
My answer to it, by the way, would be that a lot of different considerations go into decisions on taxation. One of them, in my view is whether the money was “earned” in some way but it is not the only one. Other issues are progressivity, how much “economic pain” the tax causes, whether the tax encourages or discourages behaviors that are useful to society at large … [And, yes, I suppose one could come up with situations under which the heirs helped with the estate (this is perhaps part of the justification to structure it so that it does not effect very many family businesses, for example) but I don’t think this diminishes the fact that, as a whole, inheritance represents a windfall that is usually largely unearned and the luck of the draw.]
Now that kimstu and xeno have weighed in with estimates of waste, I don’t see how you can possibly claim your number is “the only girl at the dance”. Not only that, but theirs come with cites and explanation. Yours may be the only number that is not falsifiable because it comes with no explanation of how “waste” is defined so it is sort of true by tautology under somedefinition of waste…This may be somewhat of a virtue in defending it but it is hardly a virtue in any scientific sense (sort of like creationism).
By the way, I was sort of wondering: Given your statement previously questioning why the government should get any more money when there is lots of waste and given that you pointed to the defense department as a prime example, I have to wonder if this then leads you to strongly oppose Bush’s increases to the defense budget. Or do we make exceptions?
As for the global warming, well I really haven’t had the time to go this far afield (hell, even to look into these waste numbers really)…Besides this message board is slower than molasses now…I’ll try to get to this in the next few days.
P.S.—Hi, Mandelstam and thanks for joining in. I heartily agree with what you said.
[short global warming tangent] I would suggest that you read this thread where Skelly doesn’t directly state arguments but serves as a very vocal and unambiguous cheerleader for someone who does: http://cgi.3dresearch.com/~tpe/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=18&t=000007 (This is even currently a featured link from the front page of that The Political Edge website that Skelly is editor-in-chief of.)
In particular, note for example, the references in The Political Edge thing to the Oregon petition, the amusing history of which I documented in that Great Debates thread. And then there is the confusion between predicting weather and predicting climate at the end of vudrid’s June 18th post. Most of the rest of it is mainly quotes and various half-truths etc. from those few scientists (good ol’ Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer…with a little Lomborg thrown in for good measure) who disagree with the vast majority of the peer-reviewed science on the subject and all have short to nil publication records in peer-reviewed journals on this subject. Sort of like writing a whole tract on the origins of life using quotes and arguments only from those few biologists who believe in “creation science”.[/short global warming tangent]
Scylla: *Unless I’m mistaken (and I well might be) I don’t think either the subcommitee report, or the GAO report cited claim to have uncovered or even estimate the total of government fraud, waste, and pork in the budget. They just show specific items but make no claim as to their relation to the whole. *
Well, I don’t think anybody has a truly rock-solid number for the total dollar amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal budget; as jshore keeps saying, it would be difficult even to come up with a detailed definition of “waste” that everybody would agree on. Nonetheless, what I gathered from the GAO report and the House subcommittee’s report was that they were presenting these items as a comprehensive survey of the most salient items of waste in the total budget. I wouldn’t be surprised if they missed some stuff, but since they were avowedly out after the big-ticket items, I am skeptical that the total amount of w.f.a. would tally up to seven or even three times as much as the amount of w.f.a. that they reported. Or at least, if I’m to believe such a proposition, I sure need some good quantitative supporting evidence for it.
And, I don’t see why we wouldn’t include uncollected taxes in the total.
Really? Delinquent taxes that have been identified as probably uncollectable count as “waste, fraud, and abuse” on the part of the government? Is that the way uncollectable debts are usually handled? When your office has an uncollectable debt, do you designate it in your official accounting as an item of waste, fraud, or abuse on the part of your business? How so?
Just to get a rough number of how much of the federal budget these 700000 members of the bureaucracy identified by the NPR amount to, I took that number, assumed that the Clinton era attempts to cut it failed and transported it into 1999 where Kim has provided us with a total budget figure. I then assumed that salary and overhead means that these folks cost $200,000 per person in 1999 dollars. Multiplying it out, I get that these people cost just a tad under 8% of the total budget. So, even if you assumed you could get rid of 60% of these bureaucrats (which sounds extremely optimistic to me), you would save <5% out of the federal budget. So, we’re going to have identify a lot more sources of waste than this to get up to the 1/3 figure.
Scyla said in as many words that all domestic spending, including Social Security to be wasteful, except those benefitting the rich and the military industrial complex. That’s what Scylla probably means about the 33%.
Really? Delinquent taxes that have been identified as probably uncollectable count as “waste, fraud, and abuse” on the part of the government? Is that the way uncollectable debts are usually handled? When your office has an uncollectable debt, do you designate it in your official accounting as an item of waste, fraud, or abuse on the part of your business? How so?