Honestly, anyone who uses “class warfare” to refer to an action that, at worst, denies someone a vacation home, is a nutball of the first order, in my opinion. If you want it to be warfare, ideally we should be talking about deaths numbering in the thousands or more, but a minimum threshold for calling something “warfare” ought to mean that we’re denying someone some basic necessity of life, making it harder for them to continue to exist.
XT, I don’t know what liberals you’ve seen calling for confiscatory tax rates. I’m about as lefty leaning as we get, and those of us on these boards seems to be arguing for a small (on the close order of 3%) increase in the highest marginal tax rate, or something substantially similar. To which the ‘conservatives’ reply with howling about class warfare.
I heard part of a talk by Steve Forbes about the flat tax (which he is still pushing) and there is something I don’t get. He was pushing it in large part because people spend so much time filling out tax forms. (His speech must not have been revised since TurboTax became ubiquitous.) But the hard part about the flat tax is cleaning up all the special cases. I don’t care what the rates are per bracket - computing that takes ten seconds even without a computer. I don’t care what the cutoff is. Computing that is even easier. Without “reform” of deductions a flat tax is just a bonanza for the rich. Why don’t flat tax advocates work on that. If we all agree it is to be revenue neutral, setting tax rates and the cutoff point won’t take any time at all.
If you have a set of tasks, it is a good idea to do the riskiest first, since you then won’t be wasting effort doing the simple ones only to have the project killed by the hard one. And there are plenty of tax breaks liberals would love to get rid of, so there seems to be room for compromise. (Assuming Grover doesn’t call loophole reduction a tax hike and thus illegal.)
That this isn’t happening gives me the sneaking suspicion that the ulterior motive is to flatten the rate without reform, and reduce revenue some more.
We are very close actually. I’m trying to A) establish some fairness in the tax code and B) use the tax code to limit Congress’s access to money for non-constitutionally authorized spending which is completely out of control. This explains why I don’t like the revenue-neutral “requirement” to switch-overs to a different tax systems. The only ways I can come up with to force reduced spending is to reduce the taxes we send to them and chop the taxes they collect and send back to the states, and have the states tax their own citizens for what they want in their state.
It becomes much more clear now!! That “B” of yours seems to be new to this thread. Not new as an argument, “starve the beast” has quite a history, but new to this discussion. I’m not sure how that can be twisted into class warfare though.
We are well clear of the class struggle (@ left hand) thread lol. Wasn’t adding it to contribute to this, but to explain my position.
In Canada, we have a ‘basic personal deduction’ that everyone gets. It’s not arbitrary - it’s based on the absolute minimum income you need to survive. It’s on the order of $10,000. Let’s call it that for simplification. No one is taxed on that first level of income.
In Alberta, we have a flat tax rate of 10% on taxable income. So if you earn $20,000 taxable income, you pay nothing up to your basic personal deduction, and 10% of the remainder, so you’d pay an effective tax rate of 5% of your total income.
However, if you make $100,000, you’ll pay 10% on $90,000 of it, or an effective tax rate of 9%. In this way, a flat tax with a basic non-taxable income IS a progressive tax. The guy who makes $20,000 pays $1,000 in tax, and the guy who makes five times as much pays nine times as much in income tax.
Now, the tax is essentially flat between someone who makes $1 million and someone who makes $10 million, because the basic deduction becomes a trivial part of the mix. But the key is that poor people pay far less in tax both in absolute terms, and in terms of a percentage of their income. But once you’re up in the middle classes, there is very little distortion from taxation in making career or business decisions. This leads to a more efficient economy and a better result for everyone.
You pretty much have it. Reforming deductions is going to be tough because it’s just so damn easy to lobby Congress for them–they wanted to add yet another deduction this summer for the cash won by Olympians fer Chrissakes!
Changing the rates is much, much harder, but once that gets done–even if all deductions are eliminated at the same time–there will be plenty of lobbying to keep certain deductions in the tax code. And the rich can hire far more lobbyists than I can, so guess which side benefits…
But see, this is a strawman argument. No one arguing with you is talking about such a trite thing as denying someone a vacation home, so right there I guess that throws out everyone from being a nutball. 
As for the argument about putting ‘warfare’ or ‘war’ on everything, to me that’s merely a matter of semantics, and not all that interesting. If you don’t like the LABEL, well, that’s fine, and you can argue semantics and the misuse of hyperbole to your hearts content. It’s the concept that is being discussed.
Well, on the one hand you are downplaying the fact that there are, indeed, many liberals (or lefties) who DO want confiscatory tax rates…and many of them are on this board. Still more who wouldn’t have a major issue with them if they happened, even if they aren’t constantly beating the drum for the things. Just because YOU don’t want that, doesn’t mean that all liberal/lefties agree with you, right? Hell, go to an OWS protest, or look at pictures from one, and you’ll see that it’s not uncommon to think in terms of confiscatory tax rates in leftwing/liberal circles…and even on this board you don’t get a lot of liberals/lefties standing up and saying ‘well, I agree we need a tax increase, but those guys are nuts and don’t represent us’. Some do…but they are mainly the liberals that seem to be the most knowledgeable about economics and tax policy.
On the other hand, conservatives, ESPECIALLY on this board, aren’t in lock step and going on about class warfare for a few percentage points of tax increase. Oh sure, some are…and some on this board are…but, as with you and liberals/lefties, conservatives aren’t in lockstep agreement either (though as with liberal/lefty types, conservatives also tend to speak in talking points that are spoon fed to them by the hive mind :p). Many SDMB ‘conservatives’ (including myself, since I get labeled with that all the time) don’t have a major problem with a modest tax increase (devil, meet details), and don’t generally go about labeling it as ‘class warfare’ any time someone brings up a tax increase.
Here’s the thing though…the tax increases that are being proposed by liberals and lefties most certainly ARE targeted solely at The Rich (though, in my unschooled estimation, it will be the middle class that will bear the main burden of any realistic tax increase, because the symbolic ‘lets let the Bush tax cuts expire only on folks who make, um…adjusts blindfold, turns around twice and puts the donkeys tail on $250,000/year…yeah, $250k/year. THOSE rich bastards can afford it!!’ aren’t going to bring in more than a few hundred billion a year. And that’s being generous, since I doubt that most of the TRUE rich are going to end up paying all that much. These folks have access to the best tax lawyers out there, and have options in sheltering their money that the rest of us can only dream about). So, you can see why conservatives might be a bit suspicious of the motives of liberals on this score…it sure does LOOK like they are using current popularist sentiment to push through an agenda that they have been pretty open about supporting for decades now…namely that The Rich don’t pay enough in taxes, an that they should. With ‘enough’ defined by…well, gods know, but probably the same arbitrary donkey tail that they picked the $250k thingy from.
Actually, what LHOD just did IS ‘class warfare’. He basically said that taxing the rich more is just ‘taking away a vacation home’, implying that the rich can be taxed without consequence that that they don’t do meaningful things with their money.
But let’s look at what the very rich ACTUALLY do. Money taxed away from Bill Gates is money that won’t be spent by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Money taxed away from Elon Musk is money that won’t be invested in SpaceX. Money taxed away from James Cameron is money that won’t be used to fund deep-sea exploration or to create new movie-making technologies. Money that’s taxed away from Burt Rutan is money that won’t be invested in whatever awesome new aircraft or spacecraft he’s working on.
This is what liberals fail to appreciate. They think the economy is this big static thing where the rich are sitting on piles of money that are being dwindled away on frivolous things, and so it’s better to tax them and give it to people who will use it for more important things.
In fact, the economy is a roiling turmoil of cash flow. Piles of it appear where an idea was successful or a business more competitive than its peers. That pile is generally then re-invested by the people who demonstrated superior ability by amassing it in the first place. The ones who fail lose their pile, and new piles appear elsewhere. But those piles of money are absolutely essential to a market economy. The very rich don’t put their money under a mattress - they re-invest it.
What the left wants to do is skim off those piles whenever they appear. They want to lop off the peaks of the private economy and distribute the matter contained within to the people in the valleys. What they don’t understand is that it’s the existence of the peaks that makes a capitalist economy so efficient. Capital bubbles up where it does the most good, and then it’s re-invested where there’s the most need.
Silicon valley would not exist were it not for the existence of very wealthy venture capitalists looking for high rates of return on their investments. The new private space-age that is upon us is the result of a lot of ambitious young billionaires re-investing their own money. Elon Musk of paypal, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and Sergei Brin of Google, Peter Diamandis… These are people who created massive value in the economy, built some of those huge piles of cash, and are now reinvesting it in the next space race.
Had government taxed all their money, none of this would exist, and I have no faith that government would have spent that money nearly as well or with as much positive effect to the country as a whole.
There IS fairness in our current system though. It’s not class warfare. A progressive tax system that is balanced is really the best and most fair way to go about taxing the public for all of the services that the public expects from it’s government and society. We actually have a pretty good balance now, though I’d like to see a simpler system with many if not most deductions eliminated.
I agree that we need reduced spending, though I realize the Keynesian’s don’t agree and want to increase short term spending until the recession is over. Personally, I think that a modest tax increase (progressive of course) across the board coupled with real, meaningful spending cuts is the way to go, even though I think this will stifle the economy and whatever tepid recovery we might have in the next year or so.
One more point about ‘small’ tax increases on capital gains and capital formation: These incremental increases do the most damage to risky investments, and it’s precisely those risky investments that generate the big returns for society when they work out.
For example, let’s say that Musk needs investors for his Falcon Heavy rocket program. Let’s further assume that it has a 10% chance of success measured in returning a profit of 15X your investment of $1 million.
That means that 9 times out of 10, you will lose $1 million. One time out of ten, you earn $15 million. So the expected value of your investment of $1 million is $600,000. If the investment takes 5 years to come to fruition, then that’s roughly equivalent to a rate of return on your money of 12% per year. That might seem like a lot, but that’s the kind of return an investor would demand for an investment that has a 90% chance of eating all his money.
Now, what happens if we tax that profit if the investment succeeds? Well, at 15% capital gains, that $15 million profit becomes $12.75 million. Now the expected after-tax value of the investment is $375,000 instead of $600,000, and the annual rate of return on the investment is now only 7.5% (simple interest - less if calculating compound interest). That starts to get dangerously close to the return on investment in much safer things, and makes it harder for Elon to raise his capital.
Now what happens if you raise the capital gains rate from 15% to 28%, to ‘level the playing field’? Now suddenly that $15 million if you ‘win’ is only 10.8 million. So now your expected return on your capital is $180,000, or 3.6% per year. NO ONE will invest in a risky venture for that kind of rate of return when they can earn as much buying U.S. Treasuries which carry little risk. So Falcon Heavy doesn’t find investors, and the U.S. loses out on a rocket that could potentially cut the cost of spaceflight by a factor of five.
That’s the real effect of higher taxes on capital - it punishes risk, and pushes capital towards ‘safe’ investments. Venture capital dries up. Perversely, it has the opposite effect of what progressives would like: It makes it very hard for people without money to find success in business, because it’s hard to find investors. The people who currently have the capital are more likely to hang onto it and invest in low-risk ventures that also have a low rate of return.
That means economic growth slows down, which hurts the people at the bottom the most since they are absolutely reliant on the jobs that come with high economic growth, and because often their best shot at an improved standard of living is to live in a country where GDP is growing rapidly. Just look at the disproportionate impact recessions have on the poor to see how important GDP growth is to their fortunes.
The problem for ‘my’ side is that you can’t see the path not taken. We’ll never know what amazing things we never built because taxes discouraged people from investing in them. But the ‘progressive’ side can always point to the things that the government did with the money. The opportunity cost of that money is never factored into the equation.
Finally, let’s say that Musk just got lucky with Paypal, and doesn’t actually know what he’s doing, but he attracts all those investors anyway. What happens to those big piles of money? They move to someone else. The investors who didn’t do their diligence lose, and investors who are better at choosing winners succeed. Capital flows to them. That’s the beauty of capitalism - capital is always moving towards higher-value purposes. That’s how economic growth happens.
Shutting that down so that you can distribute the money to stimulate consumption of wealth instead of its production may work for a little while, but eventually you wind up with a low-performing economy and a low-performing workforce that lacks incentives to excel. You get Greece, or perhaps France if you don’t go that far. What you don’t get is the kind of innovation and exceptionalism that has kept America on top of the heap for the last hundred years.
Sam–are the current tax rates too high?
No, XT, you’ve got it backwards. It’s not that I’ve set the threshhold too low for class warfare in saying you can get accused of it for denying someone a vacation home:
Turns out you get accused of class warfare for TALKING ABOUT denying someone a vacation home. It’s freakin’ hilarious how hair-trigger the “class-warfarists” on the right are.
But let’s go back to that vacation home.
Obviously that’s not literally what it’s about. No tax code is literally written that says, “No vacation home for you!” Nevertheless, it’s not a straw man.
What’s being discussed–and what’s being called “class warfare”–is the idea of raising marginal rates on the very wealthiest Americans. That means we’re talking about taxing people more on the money they have left over after they’ve met their basic needs, money that instead will get spent on luxuries*.
Those luxuries might consist of tony private schools. They might consist of buying a new car instead of a used car. They might consist of remodeling the kitchen, or going to live theater on a regular basis, or on buying organic produce, or on taking a vacation in the Bahamas. (So far I’m limiting myself to what I might do if I had a little extra cash–forgive me if my imagination is feeble in this regard).
Or those luxuries might consist of a vacation home.
Yes, the wealthiest Americans will be denied some money they’d otherwise have, if folks like me get their druthers. But:
a) they won’t be denied all their luxuries. Nobody in mainstream politics in the US is discussing anything approaching a 50% top bracket, much less a 100% top bracket.
b) they won’t be denied basics of living.
Sam and his ilk make their ridiculous accusations of class warfare because they can. There is no class warfare in this country, at least, not from the poor to the rich. Hasn’t been since the thirties. The only class warfare going on now–the only serious effort to deny a class of people the basics of life–has been going strong in the opposite direction for the last 18 years or so, ever since the Contract With America mind-melded with the Republican Party. But in classic Orwellian War-is-Peace fashion, certain conservatives twist the term beyond recognition until denying some, but not all, luxuries to the wealthiest citizens is equivalent to stealing food from their mouths, throwing them onto the streets, and sending their children to the gulag.
It’s a morally corrupt argument, but there you go.
- yes, yes, job builders capital investment blah blah blah puke it’s spent on luxuries.
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
Turns out you get accused of class warfare for TALKING ABOUT denying someone a vacation home. It’s freakin’ hilarious how hair-trigger the “class-warfarists” on the right are.
[/QUOTE]
I agree he misread what you were saying there. It doesn’t lessen the fact that your own comment was a strawman though, IMHO.
It’s a strawman because you are creating a position that no one else is trying to defend, then attacking it. That’s what a strawman IS.
So, what you are saying is that an effort to raise ‘marginal rates’ on a small (and poorly defined) group of people bases solely on wealth (or, in actual fact based on the current efforts, on an arbitrary figure for annual salary…and one that won’t even effect really rich people, since most of them don’t even HAVE an annual salary in terms of work for pay), which translates into ‘class’ in the US isn’t about class warfare because, really, their ‘basic needs’ (as defined by, um, well you in this case) have been met, and instead it’s wise to confiscate that extra money to prevent it from being spent on ‘luxuries’ (again, defined by you). Is that a good summary of this paragraph?
As for a), I’ll just say so what and so what? The POINT is that what you are talking about is increasing taxes by some amount (lets just assume the Bush Tax Cuts only, and that liberal/lefties will be totally content with just that) on only The Rich (as defined by some arbitrary measure that has as much to do with pulling a number out of the ass as it does with, well, popularism) with the sole realistic rationale being an attempt at redistributing wealth. After all, unless you are delusional, getting rid of the Bush Tax Cuts(tm…arr) on only folks who make $250k/year or more is going to bring in a hell of a lot less than our current deficit spending is at. Maybe a hundred billion/year or so. Hell, lets fantasize and say it will be 200 billion a year…or even 300 billion/year. That’s a lot of money (and pure fantasy that we’d get that much), but it doesn’t solve all our problems…or, hell, any of them, especially since, at a guess, what we will actually do with that money is more spending, more deficit and more entitlements. And, to be fair, more new fighter planes, ships, tanks or whatever on the DoD side of things. Then what? It’s like the running joke around here…A) Tax the Rich! B)… C) Profit (well, economic boom and all our problems are solved)!!
The irony of your statement here is pretty much off the charts. You accuse ‘Sam and his ilk’ of making accusations of class warfare, then you turn around and…well, make accusations of class warfare, lefty style. And, honestly, I hear more about Class Warfare, Lefty Version 2.0 than I do the Righty version…but, I don’t hang out with nearly as many righty types as lefty types, and I DO post almost exclusively on THIS board, so maybe it’s just the crowd I hang with.
I agree, but then that’s why whenever I hear lefties going on about it, my teeth start to ache…
Oh, did you mean Sam’s argument?? I actually find his argument more compelling, but then I’m more in agreement with him than with you on this subject. I do think he went over the top and misread what you were saying earlier, but I don’t find that morally corrupt, argument wise. YMMV, but to me you aren’t attacking Sam’s argument, but instead attacking him (‘and his ilk’) here.
You’re asking the wrong question. How high tax rates should be is a function of how much money the government needs to do the things it’s doing. The real question is, “should government be larger, and the private sector smaller?” To answer that question, you have to look at the things government does, and ask if they would be better done privately. You have to factor in the opportunity cost of the money the government spends before you can tell if it was wise for the government to spend it.
That was the point of my last post. It’s easy to say the stimulus ‘helped’ if all you do is look at the jobs that were created with the money. To determine whether it helped you have to look at the opportunity cost represented by the 800 billion dollars that was spent. In this case, it was borrowed and spent, and so now the U.S. has an 800 billion dollar addition to the debt that it will have to pay interest on forever. That in turn has increased worries about the U.S.'s fiscal soundness, and made businesses less likely to engage in long-term investment.
Unfortunately, as I said it’s impossible to see the path not taken. So the advocates of government action have a built-in advantage - they can always point to the benefits of the spending, and never have to confront the losses to the economy that diverting all that money from the private sector caused. That’s hidden.
Anyway, back to your tax question - if we just focus on that, I’d say that the overall amount of tax the U.S. is collecting in terms of GDP is about right, or maybe even a little too low. I think the historical average of about 18.5% of GDP for federal government spending is a pretty good, and you should raise enough in tax to pay for it.
However, the structure of the current taxes is horrific. Taxes should be more broad-based, with fewer loopholes and exceptions. Everyone should have some ‘skin in the game’, so that the people voting for policies feel the costs as well as the benefits. In addition, the corporate tax rate is way too high, and the loopholes for big corporations are too many.
Canada’s tax regime seems pretty good. The federal corporate tax rate is 15%. In my province, the provincial corporate rate is 10%. So corporations here pay a maximum of 25% of profits in tax. If you qualify as a small business, the federal rate is only 11%.
Our tax brackets are like this:
First, we all get a basic personal deduction of $10,527. This is subtracted from our income for tax purposes. After that:
5% on the first $42,707 of taxable income
22% on the next $42,707 of taxable income (on the portion of taxable income over $42,707 up to $85,414)
26% on the next $46,992 of taxable income (on the portion of taxable income over $85,414 up to $132,406)
29% of taxable income over $132,406.
Here in Alberta, we pay a flat tax of 10%, regardless of income.
In addition, all Canadians pay a federal Goods and Services Tax of 5% on purchases, and most provinces also have a provincial sales tax (mine does not).
We don’t have a ‘wealth tax’, and if you get an inheritance it’s taxed as income instead of an inheritance tax being applied to the estate.
Capital gains are taxed at your tax rate, but only half the capital gain is taxable. So the maximum federal tax a corporation will pay on capital gains is 7.5%. An individual in a high income bracket would pay a maximum of 14.5% on capital gains. Provinces will add their own capital gains taxes.
That seems like a pretty good mix to me. Capital gains taxes are low, the overall tax system is reasonably flat, and everyone pays income tax but the poor don’t pay very much. Furthermore, our income taxes can be relatively flat because we make a lot of revenue from sales and excise taxes, which everyone pays. So if the government spends more money and raises taxes to pay for it, everyone feels it. This is a good thing.
Canada is not exactly a libertarian paradise, yet we get by with a much flatter tax system than you do, and with lower corporate and dividend taxes. One reason is that we don’t have nearly the number of exemptions and loopholes you have. We have no home mortgage interest deduction, for example. No earned income tax credit. Our corporations don’t have anywhere near as many loopholes they can use to game the tax system. So we raise enough revenue to pay for a government that is almost the size of yours without running the kinds of monstrous deficits you are running.
By the way, we cut our corporate taxes from 19% in 2009 to 15% today, and our tax revenue from corporations has gone up.
“Class Warfare” is when you single people out by class and then make statements about them designed to build political support for taking their stuff. So when you boil down taxes on the rich to “taking away their vacation home”, you do so to trivialize the issue and to play on people’s feelings of resentment against the ‘rich’.
As I pointed out in my math-filled message earlier, what you’re really doing when you raise capital gains taxes in particular is diverting investment from risky investments to safer investments. By taxing the rich more, you’re also reducing the pool of capital they have to draw from to make future investments. This all makes the economy less dynamic and lowers economic growth.
What you’re NOT going to do is ‘take away their vacation home’. The mega-rich will always have enough money for all the luxuries they could want. The small business ‘rich’ are more likely to be cash poor and live quite modestly in the first place. At best, you might affect the luxury-buying behavior of a tiny fraction of ‘the rich’ that exist between those two levels. So focusing on vacation homes as the main cost of a tax increase on the rich is ridiculous. But it does feed into the general envy/dislike of the rich, which is why it is an example of class warfare.
The notion of progressive taxes is not ‘class warfare’. Class warfare is all about how you justify those taxes. If you can build a case that the government is better at investing and innovating than is the private market, then you can justify taxing more money from the wealthy. But if your justification is “Those evil richies just blow their money on luxuries like a bunch of Thurston Howells”, then you’re engaging in class warfare.
To the wealthiest Americans, these things cost them a tiny fraction of their wealth. The rest of it is INVESTED. No one blows billions of dollars on hookers and booze and fancy houses in the Hamptons. They might blow a few million that way, but to the ultra-rich, that’s nothing.
But most rich people don’t behave that way anyway. You may be thinking of the ‘Hollywood Rich’ who live lives of great excess. Many ‘rich’ people who would be affected by these taxes live quite modestly. Many of them have their wealth invested in their businesses. A lot of farmers fall into the ‘rich’ category, but drive pickup trucks and live rather modestly. I know a number of people worth more than a million dollars and with family incomes in excess of $250,000, and I can’t think of a single one who drives anything more luxurious than an Acura or who owns a house bigger than 2,500 square feet.
The only person I know who has a vacation home is a friend who has an old cabin by a local lake - and he makes less than $50,000 per year.
No, but they will stop investing in risky ventures, they will spend more time looking for tax loopholes, and the threshold of profitability they will demand for expanding their businesses will be higher. That means the economic activity they generate (and they generate a disproportionate amount of it) will decline.
First, talk about your wild exaggerations, in a paragraph designed to show how ‘my ilk’ exaggerate. Pot. Kettle. Black.
Second, this isn’t about ‘denying luxuries’. Your side is trying to make it seem like that’s what it’s about, because you know that resentment of the rich is a good emotion to use to build your case. But ‘my ilk’ are not talking about that. We’re talking about economics, investment, leaving capital in the hands of those with a proven track record of multiplying it, etc. You don’t have good answers to those arguments, so instead you fall back on your “oh, poor Richie Rich!” populism. If you do engage in the economic debate, it’s to characterize it as ‘trickle down’, then claim it’s been a proven failure, then hand-wave it away.
Wow. Yessir, no class warfare around here at all. Just a rational discussion of economic policy. Or were you of the understanding that there would be no math?
I am curious what socialist country you’re addressing with your remarks, and which $800 billion represented “lost opportunity.” It certainly wasn’t the U.S., nor Obama’s stimulus. If you include grants to states to cover their revenue shortfalls for schools, etc., the $800 billion was mostly spent on tax cuts and transfer payments. (Admittedly some of the transfer payments went to needy people instead of billionaires, but that’s those liberals for you. :o )
The issue of diverting private investment to government investment is inapplicable in the U.S. Even if we include the slothful government workers at NASA (whose Curiosity has yet to travel 200 meters despite all the taxpayer dollars lavished on it), the total investment by the U.S. government which can be said to compete with private alternatives is … dare I say it? … only a rounding error. 
You’re the expert at numbers, Sam. Add up interest, military, and unavoidable obligations in the federal budget and compare with total revenue. There’ll still be a shortfall even if “Discretionary” spending is cut to zero! And discretionary spending includes overseas Embassies and Homeland Security as well as such Marxist boondoggles as EPA, FDA, and public schools.
Perhaps you consider the military to be a major public “investment.” One is never sure whether it’s slothful government managers the right-wing objects to, or just the lack of a profit motive, but much of our military operations have already been turned over to private managers. [sarcasm] But perhaps we should follow right-wing instincts and go farther … let Exxon wage the wars instead of the U.S. government, and let petroleum (in Iraq) or heroin (in Afghanistan) be the profit motive. [/sarcasm]
Medicare may be a good example for you. As inefficient as private insurance is, it might have done a better job than the boondoggle Medicare has turned into. This argument won’t help the GOP though: it was their side of the aisle that was most responsible, under the leadership of GWB and Karl Rove themselves, for turning that program into a giant wealth transfer from the public treasury to private corporations.
Summary: Sam Stone’s comments might be of great utility to some country (Soviet Union? Pinochet’s Chile?) where industry was owned by a government-controlled plutocracy. But it would be nice if he instead applied his analytical abilities to the U.S.A.
Nowhere did I imply anything of the sort. The example I used was specifically around the kinds of numbers we’re talking about: Raising the capital gains to 28%, etc.
I also said that the right size of government to me isn’t far off that 18.5% of GDP that was the historical average for the U.S. in the last half century. That makes me some sort of anarchist?
Your rant about the size of the discretionary budget vs the other functions of government is irrelevant, and I agree with pretty much all of it.
As for your rant about opportunity cost, I’m guessing that you don’t really know what I mean, because if you do your complaint was bizarre. Opportunity Cost just means you have to factor in the value of the alternative uses of any resource you are consuming. It says nothing about how big anything is or should be. It’s just part of the accounting equation when figuring out whether a specific action was a good idea.