It is in increase in the revenues in the nominal terms, not adjusted for the change in the size of the economy or the change in the value of the dollar.
That does not by any rational meaning mean “an increase in the taxes” which is understood in the ordinary usage to mean the rate of the taxes…
To assert another meaning, it is to try to claim that every time a revenue level changes (due to the boom or the recession in the economy) the tax level has changed, even if the taxation rate has not changed.
That is nonsensical and it is incoherent.
they make sense in the sense that I can tell that there is a lack of a comprehension of the meaning … or a gambit of the creation of confusion to pursue an ideological idée fixe
It is a very poor “rebuttal” since I think anyone reading in the ordinary sense understands the meaning to be the taxation rate - but you are choosing for some political reasons make a rhetorical play.
It remains that from outside of politics, it is nonsensical.
I certainly didn’t make this claim you asserted, although septimus tried to make the inverse argument, and I did find it “nonsensical”. To recap, he said:
I think you’ve made a good argument that the revenue the government collects moves independent of the nominal tax rate. Do you think you’ve managed to convince septimus of this? Because he’s the one that seems to think the one is dependent on the other, not me.
1992 was 16.73% of gdp
1996 was 18%
2000 was 19.75%
2004 was 15.4%
2008 was 17.155%
2012 was 15.13%
2016 was 17.47%
It’s been bouncing around 17% of gdp, usually lower, sometimes higher. Dollar tax receipts are higher than 1992. But those numbers need context, which is why we need to look at them in relation to GDP…where the trend has bounced around, but been stable, not increasing.
To get our fiscal house more close to order, we’ll need some tax increases. We sure as heck didn’t need the last tax cut.
Agree. But if neither party wants real spending cuts (and neither does), then we at least shouldn’t be cutting taxes, and we should actually raise them.
If revenue moved independently of the tax rate, the Laffer curve would be flat.
That tax revenue is not totally determined by the tax rate doesn’t mean that it’s independent of the tax rate. As Ramira said, the economy is a major factor, for instance the unemployment rate.
Since it is obvious that this is really about the domestic american partisan political games with the language to create the strawmen and the distortions, and has only the vague relationship with in fact any economics, the last clarification and it is left to the political rhetoric games:
Now of course by cutting out you create the strawman to dodge the incoherence, what I wrote
And indeed by the rhetorical sleights of hand it is clear there is this attempt to imply but dodge the saying openly that the taxes increased - although the sense of the phrase is nonsense - but it fits your political demarche it seems.
It is better to recap why I even posted, from your post that I replied to you said
the emphasis added.
Here you make the error or the rhetorical trick to mix the idea of receipts with the “taxes” and make a comparison with no normalisation for either the inflation or the economic growth. It is a nonsense statement.
No, I have made the simple point that the revenues collected show in the nominal terms not adjusted for the inflation are in relation to the taxation rate AND the change of the national income over time (and so the function of the three) - the comparing of a nominal revenue number not in 1992 to a projected revenue in 2022 without adjustment for the national income (the GDP roughly) and the inflation change is nonsensical.
And to “naively” take a series of the nominal receipts numbers over the period of three decades and make a statement about “decreased taxes” which is normally understood as rates, it is playing the rhetoric games or it is showing an illiteracy in the economic numbers.
The observation of Septimus is quite easily understood as an observation about the idea that the decrease in the tax rate does lead to decreased receipts - holding constant the national income. This is the ordinary observation and understanding - of course it can be deliberately misinterpreted for rhetorical effect. It is clear he wants to say that holding the tax rate the same the deficit is decreased versus the situation of the tax cuts…
I leave the distorting political rhetoric exchanges to between you two.
So they posted the numbers that [del]everybody[/del] almost everybody would consider obviously more relevant, but you insisted on posting the misleading information. Got it.
And then you bragged that they had shown the relevant data … and still refused to copy-paste it. Got it.
(PS: Primary sources will show raw data as a matter of course. That doesn’t mean they consider it particularly “informative.”)
That is simply not a true statement. Look at Table 1-1. Both revenues and outlays have gone UP. If you have alternate facts then by all means show them rather than making statements with no proof.
If you look at the US debt you’ll notice that not one cent has been paid on debt principal since Coolidge was in office .
Even when we had much higher and more tax brackets the debt has increased over every single president’s term(s) in office.
This leads me to believe that no one cares about the debt. Politicians certainly don’t. Republicans only care when Democrats incur debt and Democrats only care when Republicans incur debt. Voters don’t care about debt because they keep electing one party or the other and both parties done noting but run up debt for many decades.
I can’t see how giving politicians more of our money is going to do anything to reduce the debt.
I disagree strongly. The federal budget can’t be rewritten from scratch every year. There are government employees who have to be paid, and people who rely on them to be doing their jobs. There are procurement and construction contracts that take place over multiple years. There are people retiring this year who’ve made plans that rely on a certain amount of Medicare and Social Security so they don’t live in a cardboard box. And there’s interest on existing debt that has to be paid, or the economy would collapse. If we elected a president and congress who were passionately dedicated to just balancing the budget, they couldn’t do it in a year. Or if they could, the turmoil of such a sudden change would cause more problems than it solved.
What they could do is to start lowering the deficit to start bringing us closer to a balanced budget, and keep at it. We didn’t get these huge deficits overnight, and we won’t get rid of them overnight, either. I expect this country to be around for a while, let’s use that time to our advantage. Let’s make next year’s deficit smaller than this year’s (especially in a time when there’s such a strong economy), and let’s make the next year’s deficit even smaller. I know we all love a quick fix, but there ain’t one. It’s gonna take discipline and responsibility over the course of decades.
Fortunately, there is a party that has done this. Look at the deficit trends under Clinton and Obama; multiple years running up less debt than the one before. That’s the way to get out of this. Put Republicans in office and they spend like drunken sailors.
If you look at that table, the years in which the deficit has gone down generally correlate to the amount of revenues going up (usually due to a booming economy). Look at the Clinton Administration: expenditures went up by what, 25% or so over eight years; but revenue went up by 90% over the same period. Viola, budget surpluses.
When we’ve had really bad deficits, spending has either had rather small growth (like the early 1990s) or significant growth (the late 2000s to early 2010s), leading to no firm rule there – but revenues dropped off the cliff, like the 20% reduction in revenues from 2008 to 2009. When economic growth picked up and revenues started coming in again, the deficit was reduced by 70% with no major changes to spending.
The lesson is: if you want to balance your budget, revenues are usually your independent variable.
I never mentioned anything about balancing the budget in one year.
And as I said the trend of adding debt has gone one for decades and because it has gone on so long it is obvious that voters don’t care.
And Clinton actually ran a surplus at the end of his terms and he did not put one cent of that surplus towards the debt principal so what good does it do to run a surplus if we are not going to pay down debt?
As I said giving more money to politicians is not the answer to the debt.
In my view, there’s a clear different between how the two political parties have approached the budget deficit. During my lifetime, Democrats have made the problem better and Republicans have made it worse.
I wonder what you think this even means. If he spent the money instead of applying it to debt, then it wasn’t a surplus was it?
There are various ways to present data (does government-held debt count? are interest payments included as spending?), and combining data from different sources you can get results that seem contradictory. So what else is new?
Publicly-held federal debt as a percent of GDP fell from 66.1% to 56.4% during the Clinton years. This drop is not at as earth-shattering an an earthquake 8.5 on the Richter scale, but it is still significant.
(And if you need to complain that that table uses “as a percent of GDP” instead of the raw number, I’ll throw up my hands in exasperation.)
If he ran a surplus then the government collected more money than it spent. There were no government obligations that surplus had to be spent for so it should have been applied to debt principal
And if you don’t know how to make a principal payment on outstanding debt then I can’t help you
I know exactly what I’m talking about here. Who do you pay to reduce the principal on the debt held by the public? Seriously, just answer the question, because I strongly doubt you have an answer.
Walk me through exactly how that works in your version of things.