If by “everybody” you mean 2% of the population then you and I have a different definition of what “everybody” means.
What you said was:
“Not everyone on this planet deserves the same monetary values because not everyone on this planet is willing to work to get there.”
So, you were making a claim on who is “deserving” and suggesting those who are not rich are those not willing to work for it.
It’s not Obama who decides whether or nor the tax cuts expire, but if Congress does, then pretty much everyone who pays income taxes will see his taxes go up. So far, the Republicans are opposed to extending the cuts for everyone except “the rich”, but all the tax cuts expire if nothing is done, not just those for “the rich”
Fair enough but then no one is raising taxes this time around. The sunset clause takes effect which Bush and a republican congress put in. So, considering that, it is Bush and the republican congress of 2001(?) that is doing it.
So nobody has to pay the additional taxes?
Correct.
Correct.
If McDonald’s has a sale on Big Macs for $1 today and tomorrow the price goes back to the usual $2.50 (or whatever it is) did they raise their prices on you?
And further…
If the guy, who a month ago planned for the $1 day of cheap Big Macs, no longer works for McDonald’s and the new guy just lets that promotion go as planned would you blame the new guy or the old guy for the more expensive Big Mac tomorrow?
yes, they raised the price to $2.50 after lowering it to $1.
Actually, from the customer service threads I’ve read here, clearly in a lot of cases the answer is “the new guy”. But of course the customer’s not always right.
Not to pick on you, because I don’t know you from Adam, but do you even know what the Dept. of Education does? Can you name any of their top three budget items?
A third of what they do is provide grants to poor people for early childhood education and so they can go to college. Are you against that? It could be spent by the states, but why do that? There are significant efficiencies of scale and there’s no political content to it.
About another third is spent on enforcing federal civil rights laws, IDEA issues (special ed. and disabilities), and collecting and centralizing educational research. Which of those are you against, or think states would do at all, much less better or more efficiently?
What I imagine conservatives actually object to, using federal grants to encourage certain school reforms, constitutes about $14 billion in annual spending. But even much of this money is spent on things like school buses to help implement school-of-choice programs (to create competition among public schools). Are you against that?
And so on.
Like earmarks, singling out the Department of Education is popular largely because of misconceptions about how much money is spent on its programs (a tiny tiny proportion of the budget) and misconceptions about what that money is spent on. And like any other budget-cutting, when you actually get down to details, the decisions aren’t easy. Of course every little bit counts, but the focus on these particular tenths of a percent of the budget seems suspiciously like an abstract and misguided ideological concern rather than concern about the deficit.
No.
The $1 price was a sale. It was temporary from the get-go and everyone knows it. No one raised the price when the promotion is done. It just went back to where it was.
Do you expect me to believe you bitch to the supermarket manager everytime their sale on lettuce ends that they raised prices on you?
I consider the work of the Dept. of Education to be better left to the states, not the Feds. I do not see any reason why that should be a Federal operation.
I did not single out Education - I was pointing out that CATO lists them as one of the Depts that could be completely eliminated at the Federal level and that I agree with them. Much of what they do is nothing more than income redistribution across states (and as a resident of California, we lose on that subject). So we pay taxes to send money to DC to have it pay for a bureaucracy that then divides up the money and sends it back to the state where THEY have to have a bureaucracy to administer it themselves, plus they must follow the Federal rules on how to spend it. This is a waste of money, a creation of too many non-educational jobs, and I don’t think that it is effective.
Now, will this close the entire gap? Of course not, but it fits in my personal perspective that we need less at the Federal level and more responsibility and choice at the local level. On a personal level, I am a hard core libertarian at the Federal level, but the closer I get to home I am happy to have lots of involvement. I vote for tax INCREASES in my town, I am against them in DC. In my town, I can call two members of the Council, two members of the School Board, or several senior Police officers in my town of over 100,000 and get a call back. If there is a problem, I can get involved in fixing it. None of that is possible at the Federal level.
Education problems are local, not national. The solutions need to be tailored to the local issues, and can NOT be generalized. If California wants to teach music, then let them. If Kansas does not, that is the choice of the people of Kansas.
There is no such thing as a temporary tax reduction because there is no such thing as a base tax rate. It is what it is what Congress votes it to be and the nano-second people see it go up they will see it for what it is, an increase.
Is there a base rate for a Big Mac?
It costs McD X-amount to make a Big Mac. It costs the government X-amount to provide whatever they are providing.
McD sets a price. The government sets a price. Same thing. They take in more or less. They can price it at whatever they want.
The tax cut was temporary. Sorry if you can’t wrap your head around that. It is no different in principle than McDs putting a temporary decrease on some item they sell. When it goes back up no I have ever known deems it a price increase.
I guess my point, Algher, is that the Department of Education is not actually doing very much of the kind of top-down control or redistribution of money that you suggest they are. To the extent they are taxing Californians to pay for curriculum in Kansas, we’re talking about a tiny part of what they do. As I pointed out, the plurality of their spending is Pell Grants, and if you add that to the national-level research projects and enforcement of federal civil rights, it is the vast majority of what the Department does.
The money spent that goes to individual schools just shouldn’t be topic A in discussion of spending priorities any more than the color of body armor should be topic A in Afghanistan war strategy. But even putting aside how it distorts the deficit discussion, proposing the elimination of the entire Department of Education because you don’t like the fraction of their mission that involves grant-making to states is like abolishing NASA because you don’t think they should be doing climate research. It is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The devil is in the details but it can be a good idea.
We don’t need to tinker with the retirement age. Eliminate the social security cap and make all forms of compensation subject to payroll taxes and we are basically done.
When a car salesman gets a commission on the sale of a car, he pays social security and medicare on that money, when a hedge fund manager get their 20% cut of profits on their hedge fund, they frequently not only pay no payroll taxes on their compensation, they don’t even pay ordinary income taxes, they pay capital gains.
Why do you think conservatives haven’t been cutting? We’ve had 30 years of cutting, there’s not a lot of stuff left to cut, but perhaps you can identify what you would cut.
There is nothing temporary about a tax rate that has existed for years and there is nothing permanent about any tax rate. The tax rate is what Congress says it is and currently it is set to go up.
The only true tax rate is the one you’re paying now.
Why can’t we increase taxes on the rich and increase spending by a comparable amount to keep the ledger balanced? Depending on how the government spent the money mightn’t we end up in a better place?