Speaking of playing, I notice no one is actually refuting the OP’s impression of what the prevalent feeling is among Republicans WRT the future.
So do Republicans express a lot optimism about the future, pointing to policy initiatives that promise to solve our problems? I hear a lot of doom and gloom about the deficit and about Obamacare, and it’s been awhile since I heard someone say, “we’re gonna win the war on terror”.
And demand increases when you don’t have to charge as high a price for your product in order to meet your tax burden. Plus lower taxes allow you to devote more of your revenue to advertising, which increases demand, and to R & D, which creates better products and therefore more demand. Taxes are a burden which makes everything a business has to do in order to prosper and create jobs more difficult.
But taxes are less of a burden now than ever before in recent history, so where are the jobs? And aren’t taxes assessed on profit? If an investor is afraid he’s not going to make a profit at all then how can the tax burden be a worry?
So you want to tax wages & salaries instead of business incomes why again? If the businesses are the power, why shouldn’t our tax code tap that power directly? I don’t see that your argument proves what you think it does. In fact, I don’t see any real understanding of macroeconomics in it; forgivable in your case due to youth, not so excusable in the case of grown men with professional political careers who repeat this drivel as if it meant aught.
At least you admit that’s a problem. And the poor aren’t really getting richer, if we’re measuring domestic purchasing power. Health care is much more expensive in the USA than it was before you were born.
Cites, for us often being told to emulate Spain, Iceland, New Zealand, Japan, or Korea?
I suppose we could let you deduct part of the cost of advertising & R&D.
But advertising doesn’t exactly increase the supply of money in your customers’ pockets, so its utility in raising demand is limited. And the best R&D is done by the state, putting new techs into public domain so more companies can exploit them.
Businesses do not lower prices when costs go down, they take more profit. Business will charge what the market will bear.
That’s not the way it works around here. The OP made an assertion, and has offered nothing to back it up other than: *Go look at what they are saying.
*
We don’t operate under the “Prove that I’m wrong” principle here.
Not necessarily (or at least only if we’re talking about fixed costs, or if the firm is quantity constrained in some way). A reduction in the cost of producing an additional item could easily imply that a lower price, with greater quantity demanded, may be profit maximizing. Compare for example the price of a new iPod today with a new iPod in 2004.
And that’s fine. Because they must also pay their employees, vendors and other costs what the market will bear. But you seem to underestimate how much pressure a lot of companies have to cut costs in order to stay profitable.
Things are not always “good” or “bad” for everyone uniformily. And it is a tough sell making things worse for some people in order to make them better for others.
I’m picturing a couple of cavemen arguing about how to equitably divide up a recent kill. After much discussing, eventually one of them says “you make a compelling and articulate argument. But allow me to counter with this witty retort…”
[spoilers]
…smashes the other caveman’s head with a rock.
[\spoilers]
The way to defeat your political enemies is to characterize them in a manner in which people will find objectionable.
Yep. This is true.
But the question is, is there a point where we should make things a little less good for the comfortable to make things a little less dire for the unlucky?
I like this analogy a lot. Do you know what happens when we allow a jet engine to keep all its forward momentum for itself rather than transferring some of it to the rest of the vehicle? It shoots off on its own, leaving the vehicle standing still. It’s super fast since it doesn’t have to help carry the weight of the rest of the vehicle, but it’ll eventually crash into a mountain.
Reagan did that amnesty thing and Republicans don’t seem so keen on that.
Reagan raised taxes several times (he had one huge tax cut in 1981 followed by a series of tax increases to try and shore up the resulting deficits that the tax cut created). Sure he cut more than he raised but over the course of his presidency, he raised taxes a dozen times. Republicans these days have drawn a line in the sand saying that we cannot do anything to reverse the effects of the tax cuts we have had over the last decade. I don’t think that a candidate could win the primary if he admitted that raising taxes was “on the table”
Average incomes have been treading water (on an inflation adjusted basis) for the last decade, while worker productivity has been rising. Labor’s share of increased productivity over the last ten years has essentially been zero.
Poor churches would have very very little taxable income, they are basically hand to mouth operations. The congregants aren’t really concerned about the the tax write off.
And many of them have higher tax rates than we do. A tax race to the bottom is retarded. That doesn’t mean we can’t have tax reform but it does mean that trying to compete on tax rates is stupid when it is one of dozens of factors that influence economic growth. If you want to live in Estonia, then you should move there because I guaranatee you taht Wall Street is not about to relocate there because of the lower tax rates.
We don’t need big companies to come here if we create the sort of environment for small and medium sized comapnies to become big companies.
Over the long run yes but not right now. Cutting WASTE is always very important and if you can make an argument that something is wasteful or inefficient then great, but cutting spending pruerly for the sake of cutting spending during a recession is bad policy. Same can be said for cutting taxes. In fact there are some tax increases that do more good (in the sense that they improve the economy) than any harm they might do (by reducing economic activity).
If they are mistakes then they are intentional mistakes.
More importantly too many people have a flimsy grasp of economics which allows Republicans to bamboozle them. How else do you explain cutting taxes on the top 2% in the name of preserving a weak economic recovery while cutting federal spending that everybody agrees is not wasteful despite the fact taht it will slow the economy and increase unemployment?
I think the argument continues: And more people will endeavor for the prosperity once the load is lightened.
Except for a couple of years in the late 80’s early 90’s, taxes haven’t been this low since the Great Depression. Where is all the frikking prosperity?
Besides, we generally only tax net income.
Reducing taxes is generally an inefficient means of solving a demand problem.