I think you’re going to have to accept that everyone on Earth thinks one thing and you, and only you, think something else. I’m sure you had to accept that before… cough cough monkeypunchthread cough cough
No you’re not, noone is taxed enough. The difference at the bottom of the scale is relatively minor, someone making 50K might pay about $500 more/year while someone making $5,000,000 might pay an additional $300,000. The tax cuts helped the high income folks a lot more than the rest of us but it helped anyone that pays income taxes.
I used to respect the CATO institute but the recent surge of populism has made them actually think they have a shot at libertarian idea working their way into government and now they have started repeating half truths to keep the populists in their corner.
Starting in my town and state, they can cut the high speed rail to nowhere money, and the hybrid bus money, the solar power array that was just built to serve my area, and the money for the stupid signs announcing road construction. Moving on to California, they can cut funding to anymore half billion dollar art school buildings and ignore any suggestions to build a new subway in San Francisco. There is plenty of waste in federal, state and local projects to choose from. When you start adding up all the little pieces of the pork pie the thousands becomes millions which become billions.
My community can’t afford the Christmas presents sent to other states in the last “stimulus package” any more than the other states can afford to pay for what we got.
Political votes, the other white meat.
Really. You think the public is going to think a tax increase is not an increase? Seriously? How many years has it been in place?
I just compared the mid range numbers of married couples hereand the dollar amount is substantial. Starting with the lower bracket you’re looking at a house payment if the taxes go up. Note that this site does not know what the breakout will be but is guessing on a 3% increase.
The point of this thread is that all of that WON’T LOWER THE DEBT. Even if all of that was cut, and taxes remain the same, it would be just a tiny portion of the deficit. That the TP’ers are not seriously proposing cuts in the Big Three (or 4 depending on how you count it) means that they are not “Actually Serious”, as per the OP.
to my knowledge the stimulus package has projects that have yet to start (I gave the example of high speed rail in my state). Not spending that money would remove the debt. Spending less money in the future and getting the economy back on line would increase tax revenue to pay off debt.
Every household has to do this to survive.
Both of these are patently wrong. I chose the word debt rather than deficit, because spending less debt than before does not get rid of pre-existing debt, it merely adds new debt at a lower rate. The current debt will never be paid off without severe cuts to the major programs mentioned above or tax increases or both.
If you assume every budget has serious pork in it then removing the pork frees up funds to pay off the debt.
You can assume that. In this case, you’d have find pork in major parts of Social Security, Medicare, or the Military. That is, if you’re Actually Serious about paying off the debt. You may find it there, but the TP’ers have not. Their actual words show that they will not stop the debt from growing.
Getting rid of pork is a good thing.
But as far as debt and deficit go, it’s insignificant, but several orders of magnitude.
Note, two separate concepts: [1] eliminate pork, because it’s wasteful, an easy to agree on point. [2] there isn’t enough pork to make a dent in the deficit.
It’s back to the same point I made about the CATO Institute. They went and suggested cuts for the smallest parts of the federal budget. Keep the number $400billion in mind, that’s the target. If it helps, think of it like $400,000 million. Cutting $1million from a program (by passing it off to the states) just isn’t enough. It’s a good thing to do, and something that should be done. But as far as the deficit is concerned, it’s just a drop in the bucket.
The reason what I said was significant with regards to the Tea Party (and to a lesser extent the Republican Party) is because those “reductions” are then used as a pretext for tax cuts. As if the two are some how even comparable.
There is a massive deficit (and has been for a decade), and until that is eliminated, there can’t be tax cuts. Don’t blow smoke up my ass by telling me you’ll pay for those tax cuts by shifting some of the Dept of Ed. to the states, then acting like a champion of reducing the size of the government.
Which brings us right back to the populist aspect of the movement. It seems to play so well to the entirely clueless.
I will admit that at this point, the debt is far beyond our reach. All we can hope for is to stop it from growing. But we’re kidding ourselves if we think it will shrink in our life time.
I’ve never worked for a company that couldn’t reduce costs operating costs. With a stroke of a pen Congress can reduce pay scales for Federal workers.
Either we reduce the debt or it will consume us. It’s not an option.
The status of defense as a classic government function hardly justifies the sheer magnitude of the present DoD.
That would just put the onus to tax on the states. Some states would be spending at least as much to maintain the schools, others would, well, defund the schools. Why is this desirable? Do you want education to vary widely in quality across the USA?
If we were ruled absolutely by Habsburgs, we could afford to neglect public civic education. But a democracy has no excuse for that behavior. We need an educated populace in order to make democracy work; that’s why public schools were invented. I fear we have already lost three generations in much of the country. There may be no hope now but martial revolution & the end of democracy.
There is something temporary about our current tax rate. It was written into the law! Good grief…look it up! It is not a secret.
It was put there by a republican president with a republican congress. Temporary from the get-go.
Why can’t you understand that? And why is it different fundamentally than a store having a sale for a week?
Again I ask you:
If a store has a sale for a week…they spell that out to their customers…do you feel they raised prices on you when that sale is over?
ETA: Not to mention the current president wants to retain the lower prices for 98% of the population. Unfair to the 2%? Well, the 2% get the exact same tax cuts as everyone else on their first $250,000.
Of for crying out loud. They made the changes 9 years ago. If we were talking about a week of tax reductions you’d have a point. Everybody has adjusted their budget accordingly.
It just flies right past you doesn’t it?
It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with civil servant salaries. Not a thing. The money is being spent on transfer payments to private citizens. And to a lesser degree on aerospace purchases, which keep private sector companies going. If you’re cutting, just cutting, you don’t get back into the black until you’ve made cuts in Medicare entitlements, Social Security payments, &/or brought on layoffs in private sector manufacturers for whom DoD is an end user.
The federal government is the largest employer in the United States. Salaries are one of many pieces of the budget pie that can be cut. To say we cannot manage a budget and reduce our debt is nonsense.
Good grief…how blind can you be?
The sunset clause was written into the thing 9 years ago.
This is a surprise to you? Are you paying any attention whatsoever?
Or did you think the sunset clause actually didn’t mean anything? It was there but everyone would just forget about it or something?
Seriously…what do you think it meant when they time limited this tax break? (Which is exactly analogous to a store doing a sale for some amount of time.)