I’m glad we can agree on something. Ya know… bad luck happens to everyone. Successful and unsuccessful. How you deal with that bad luck is usually a direct reflection on how successful your life will be.
Seems you are all for just giving up and letting your life suck. Go you! That’s much of what’s wrong with this country. People more willing to live off of those that have instead of going out and getting for themselves. POTUS has been brilliant in expanding the dependence of the sheeple.
I live in San Diego. It’s expensive here. But we’ve got a great welfare system so you should be well taken care of.
I notice that the right-wing, wingnut, mouthbreathing publication, the NY Times, says that (like any tax incentive) it’s tough to know whether the jobs are actually being created because of the law, or just coincidentally. From the rightwing rag:
No, how you deal with that bad luck is about 10% of it–the rest is how much of a reserve you have to get through a run of bad luck. Standard risk analysis, we call it the Gambler’s Ruin. Y’know, out here in the real world, where we play with real money.
I am willing to bet that I make significantly more money that 75+% of Republicans, and pay more taxes than 75+% of Republicans.
But that’s because I’m in the 75th percentile of household income by myself, and I don’t have a lot of dependents.
Nice strawman, though. Sorry, bub, I’m closer to Buffet than I am to the welfare queens–I had a lot of advantages from my parents, and I have used them to be comfortable and happy, and I was very lucky to get a job in the tech implosion of 2003 because I had the right good friend, and I was very lucky to get out of my last company two weeks before it went under.
Don’t get me wrong–I work hard, I bust my butt. But easily 2/3 or more of my position in life is because I lucked into a friendship (who expects networking with a pagan dope fiend will get you your first serious network administration and security job, eh?) and had parents who were more than willing to cover me during the hard times.
As Buffet said, we are in class warfare, and his class is winning. And I’m closer to that class than to the poor. But, you’ve seen the drill, haven’t you? An increase in the minimum wage would lead to a disaster. Unionization would lead to the workers ganging up on the poor innocent managers. Wage stagnation during the Bush years went along with no increase to the minimum wage for a long time, which meant decreased purchasing power. Did that lead to prosperity?
I’ve been around too long to think the hardworking poor are ever going to catch a break. But let’s be honest about why they don’t pay taxes, shall we?
During a recession yes, if it leads to a decrease in consumption. But taxing the rich more would not. Taxing the poor more would. During prosperity, an increase in taxes likely won’t hurt, as in the Clinton case - and the case in the late Reagan years. Bush’s first tax cut wasn’t even wrong - except that it targeted the wrong people, and thus didn’t help as much as it could have.
The raise of the CEO doesn’t involve risking any capital. If risks get rewarded by capital gains, that doesn’t go up. And I’m not all that sympathetic to someone netting $250K from a business to them. We’re talking income from a business after all expenses and other tax deductions.
Here is a report on small business income. 8.1% of tax filers had small business income over 50% of total income. I have small business income from lecture fees, which I file in Sched C because I can deduct travel and hotel more easily. Only 10% of filers in the non-AMT 28% bracket have > 50% business income, it goes up a lot at the very high brackets, but no more that 39% even at the highest. Of course at 35% the income from the business might be very large.
The number of people in this bracket, and thus the number making this money from businesses, is quite small.
In any case, investments that are expected to return so little that a small increase in tax rate is going to hurt aren’t probably worth making.
You people in the sense of conservatives who are sure that people are going to turn down more money because they might have to pay a small bit more in taxes on it. And I was indeed saying that people who make that much are too smart to give it up because they might have to pay the Feds a bit more. Would you in my example?
Sure, when taxes are at confiscatory levels, lowering them can improve receipts.
It’s like a basic economic pricing model. At high prices, you get a smaller number of units sold, at low prices you get a larger number of units sold. If prices are too high, the price does not offset the reduced quantity, and you lower your revenues. In that case, when you lower your price you get higher revenue.
However, there is also a point where lowering your price will NOT get you a higher revenue. Where increased volumes do not net you a marginal increase in revenue, you just lose revenue the further down you push your prices.
I don’t have any confidence that Republicans appreciate this concept. They actually act as though we are currently an overtaxed nation even though our tax burden is lower than it’s been in decades. They haven’t seen a tax they couldn’t justify lowering.
Well, to edumacate you, I’m not conservative, I’m moderate. Secondly, you’ll have to provide a cite where I said people would turn down money because they had to pay taxes on it, or feel free to withdraw your bullshit strawman.
I’m not going to waste time arguing that higher taxes reduces economic growth (due to the reduced risk-taking… read: hiring… thanks to lower payoffs); it’d be like arguing that the sky is blue. You seem to suggest that I’m saying that all taxes are bad; I’m not. I personally favor eliminating the Cap Gains rates (which causes the famous ‘Warren Buffet pays less than his secretary’ lines that economically illiterate lefties like to spout). I would also put the payroll taxes back where they should be, since both programs they fund are screwed.
We can’t balance the budget by spending cuts alone, I realize that… but we also can’t grow out of it through tax cuts either. We need to do both.
As for the GOP, I believe that they are responding to the public’s pushback of increased government footprint and intrusion into their lives - and the tax rates (and previously, the debt ceiling) was a useful proxy for that discussion. Most of the public feels that the Government has gotten too powerful and feel it’s way too big. That’s undoubtedly why the Dems got their asses kicked last November, as a pushback against Obamacare and other federal intrusions.
A higher tax rate might reduce investment and savings activity, true, but the nice thing about tax money is that it gets spent on something. When money is spent or invested, jobs are created. When money is saved, nothing happens.
We have low tax rates already, and no one’s taking risks anyway. Better to start circulating that money in those cash reserves, and if taxing it is how we have to do that then tax it we should.
Hopefully you have an open enough mind to realize that the private sector is almost always a more efficient allocator of capital than the public sector, for a variety of reasons.
You are incorrect. Plenty of people are taking risks - starting projects, buying companies, bidding on deals, hiring people. I see it myself, all around me, in the world I’m in (Government contracting).
You’ve been doing an excellent imitation of a conservative. Are you or are you not upset that the bottom rungs pay no taxes?
We’re talking personal income taxes here, not business taxes. And we’re talking a restoration to pre-Bush levels, not to 1950s levels. We managed to scrape along with a bit of growth there. If you are looking at taxes and investment in isolation, sure there may be less investment, but if you are looking at taxes to be used to stimulate the economy, stabilize the deficit, and grow jobs and consumption, then I suspect the average business owner would invest. Obviously growth forecasts far outweigh tax policy in importance. The loss of jobs in 2008 and 2009 was obviously not the result of higher taxes, or even worry about taxes. The whole point is that a tax policy during a recession should move money from people who won’t spend it to people who will. At the moment there is plenty of money out there to invest, but not a lot of investments, and I have a hard time believing worries about taxes (or healthcare) have much to do with this.
I’m happy to hear you are in favor of tax increases. Do you agree with Chessic Sense’s idea of raising them on the lowest bracket? I agree with you about the Capital Gains tax - but won’t this discourage risk taking far more than a raise in the top bracket? Tax increases and spending cuts, even together, are not going to balance the budget; only real growth will do that; and that means an increase in demand which will stimulate an increase in hiring.
The operative word here is almost. In normal times it is true (except in cases of long term nationwide investments which no business can do) but in times of panic when businesses stop hiring and reduce investments, the government can do better.
Says who? Well, because government is composed of fallible humans whereas business is… No, that’s not it, its the magic of the Free Market, blessings and peace be upon it. Of course, the Free Market is an non-existent abstraction, there has never been such, most likely won’t, save in the fever-swamp dreams of Galtian libertarians.
And to what ends, this efficiency? The tobacco industry was clearly very effective and efficient at promoting smoking. Might the government have been more effective at reducing such dire results if the tobacco industry had not spent so much money hampering such efforts? Would you like to see that video of Boehner passing out tobacco money checks on the floor of the House? Or have you a weak stomach?
Why should I be pleased that business is efficient and effective when the ends and goals are negative?
As to your announced moderation, well, bless your heart, we all are! Moderates, that is. Partisanship is stupid, non-partisanship must therefore, by definition, be smart. Well, smarter. So, you are in good company, we are all moderates on this bus.
While generally true, that doesn’t change the fact that capital in cash holding accounts isn’t being allocated to anyone, and is completely useless for job creation, whereas the public sector doesn’t save anything but will churn those dollars out, creating jobs.
I’m in that world, too. Do you dispute my cite that private industry is saving record amounts of cash reserves rather than investing or growing jobs?
Their tax burden went up because their share of national income went up. It used to go up in relation to their share of national income but since reagan it hasn’t gone up as fast, which is mainly why we have the deficits we’ve seen over the past thirty years.
And in a previous post you have a quote about high tax rates holding back economic growth. I invite you to look at economic growth and job creation back in the high tax fifties to seventies and compare it to GDP growth and job creation from 2000-2010, a period when we had the lowest level of taxes and level of regulation since the 1920s.
Upset is too strong a word. I think that most reasonable people would agree that having half the population free-rolling on government benefits creates a very unhealthy relationship with Government - as well as creating a permanent underclass of reliable voters for those willing to spend us into oblivion.
I’m not making this stuff up - look at Greece. Look at France. They try to throttle it back a smidge before fiscal ruin hits them, and it’s rocks through windows and college kids who don’t know shit complaining about the monied overlords. At the rate we’re going, we’re about 1.5 steps behind them.
Unless you plan on raising taxes on everyone (ie, repealing the whole Bush tax cuts), which nobody, not even Hopey McChange has suggested, then it’s a drop in the bucket. I forget the exact number - maybe $39b per year? BFD. Instead, our pussy of a president has been going the other way, cutting payroll taxes (when Medicare, and now SS due to the disability freeloaders are nearly broke)
I think we need to make most Americans have some skin in the game. It’s the only way they’ll get outraged enough to be willing to cut spending. Like the old saying goes, if you had tax day on the first Wed in Nov, instead of Apr 15, then you’d see a completely different government.
Will Cap Gains tax repeal discourage some risk taking and economic growth? Absolutely. But the alternative is worse (ie, we end up giving the farm to Team ChiCom).
I disagree that tax increases and spending cuts won’t get it done - getting a handle on entitlements is 90% of the battle. That’s why I was so against Obamacare - we’re in a really deep hole, and he just dug us halfway to China.
