I dont give a rats ass about a balanced budget.
Let the GOP do the tax increase and cut the budget- which would have to be the military.
Yup, like I said hot potato.
Sure, why not, it’s not real anyway. 
But the GOP keeps doing this:
- Cut taxes on the Rich.
- Increase funding for their projects
- When the Dems are in control, whine about any budget increase: "but the deficit!"
- Blame the Dems for any needed tax increases.
So, and i want to make this perfectly clear- fuck them.
When they want to actually work on budget issues rather than play politics, fine, until then- fuck them.
Unless the US is in danger of not being able to pay its creditors on time, there is nothing dangerous about borrowing more money in a time of need. And we do need it.
And I find the idea that the president is supposed to control the money supply very strange. The whole idea of the Fed is that it is independent. No one in government should be able to control it.
Also, Obama became president during an economic downturn. The Fed had to lower interest rates to get things back up and running.
Finally, as long as conservatives keep pushing that taxes should be super low, especially for those who can afford to pay the most, they don’t really have much ground to complain. That’s how you make up deficits–you bring in more money.
Right now, Biden is trialing doing some more for the people, to see if they like it. And, if they do, it puts pressure on Congress to increase taxes to pay for it rather than scrap it. The threat of the debt is a feature, not a bug. If they really care, they’re going to have to come to the tax table.
Most likely such a policy would lead to a massive recession and decrease federal revenues enough to made the deficit even worse.
Tax increases on the rich work - the rich haven’t done badly at all during the pandemic, except for a few actors. Cutting the budget would lead to massively decreased spending and both misery and job cuts.
It is pretty much agreed that the 2009 stimulus was inadequate and led to a slower than desired recovery.
Is inflation rising? A bit. Consumer prices were falling last spring, so comparisons this spring will be, ahem, inflated. As for the longer term, the bond market’s expectation of annual inflation over the next decade has shot up all the way to … 2.15%. You arrive at that number by subtracting the yield on inflation-protected 10-year Treasury notes from the yield on ordinary 10-year notes. Another measure, the median estimate of consumer price index inflation in the Survey of Professional Forecasters, is 2.2%. The professional forecasters who are surveyed expect the Fed’s preferred measure, which is the price index for personal consumption expenditures, to rise 2.03% a year through 2031—almost smack dab on the Fed’s target.
…and soon.
Bill Clintons 1993 budget was incredible.
Eliminated the cap on medicare taxes
increased taxes on corporations, income, capital gains, etc for the well off.
Increased AMT.
I hope Biden raised taxes on the well off by trillions. But without a wealth tax, it won’t be complete. Taxes on capital gains, dividends, income, corporations etc is fine but if you don’t tax wealth you won’t reduce inequality.
“Reducing inequality” and “reducing the deficit” are different goals. They’re not necessarily incompatible, but they require different approaches.
I prefer that in the form of a property tax.
You can’t buy a house around here, they are all already sold to large investors who then rent them out for twice what a mortgage would be.
You don’t pay taxes on the first million or so of property that you own, and then you start paying a progressive tax rate after that.
This would both be a very good source of revenue from those who can afford it, and also be useful in reducing the effects of income inequality.
The overall goal of fiscal policy should be reducing income inequality.
With regard to wealth taxes, what do you do when someone owns a business worth, say, $10 million? Lots of people like that are cash poor. Are we going to make her liquidate her business to keep up with taxes?
What if her business then fails and she never realizes any of its value? Too bad?
How are you going to take any significant wealth from a guy like Elon Musk, who owns little property and doesn’t have a lot of cash? His entire wealth is locked up in Tesla, SpaceX, etc. Gonna make him liquidate shares every year until he loses control of his companies?
Jeff Bezos has so little cash (for a multi-billionaire) that he has to cash out Amazon stock to prop up Blue Origin. Just how are you going to get his money?
This is the standard case. Very few people have a billion dollars in liquid assets lying around. How about a rancher with $50 million in land, but with his ranch barely breaking even? Gonna take away his ranch?
Taxing the rich always sounds great in theory to some types of people. In practice it rarely does much except screw up the economy. Clinton’s luxury tax had to be repealed because it was actually costing the government tax revenue - it damaged the industry for luxury goods like small airplanes and sailboats, putting lots of people out of work. And the rich just found something else to spend their money on.
In 1975, the corporate tax rate was 35%. The capital gains rate was 40%. The average income tax rate was 37%, and the top marginal rate was 70%.
With those rates, all much higher than today, government tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was 18%.
By 1986, the capital gains rate had been dropped to 20%, the corporte rate had also been dropped to 20%, the average marginal tax rate was roughly the same at 38%, and the top marginal rate had been lowered to about 40%.
With all those tax lowerings, the government’s tax revenue was… wait for it… 18%.
We can go all the way back to the 60’s, when the top marginal rate was 91% and the corporate rate 45%, Government revenue was lower, moving between about 14% and 16% of GDP through the decade of the highest taxes.
In fact, government revenue as a percentage of GDP has been remarkably stable, never going below 14% or higher than 21% from 1955 to 2010. And none of the increases or declines really coincided with changes in tax policy, but rather to changes in the business cycle (recessions, hot growth, etc).
The idea that you can raise trillions of dollars by taxing the rich is just wrong. The rich have many options, including leaving the country.
Anyone who thinks they can suddenly raise massive amounts of money through taxation needs to explain why that hasn’t seemed to work in the past 70 years, when tax rates have been all over the map while actual tax revenue stayed remarkably flat.
The countries that manage higher amounts of tax revenue per GDP generally do it through sales and excise taxes. But sales taxes are regressive, so you aren’t going to get those billionaire bastards you really want to punish.
The truth is that the rich aren’t getting richer because of low taxes. They are getting richer because of loose monetary policy causing asset bubbles that they are uniquely positioned to take advantage of, and because governments have protected them with bailouts and policies that wind up benefiting major corporations at the expense of small businesses and individuals. Regulatory capture gives their big corporations advantages they shouldn’t have. I imagine the 1.9 trillion ‘stimulus’ will find its way mostly into the hands of the powerful and well connected.
The problem for the left is that these are all policies they championed or enacted. The bigger government gets, the wealthier the connected and powerful will become. Even the Soviet Union and Cuba had fiendishly rich people, as does Communist China. Fidel Castro was worth $900 million when the average cuban made $20/month. Yasir Arafat’s daughter has billions. Those Oligarchs in Russia were already rich before the Soviet Union fell.
Where government wields power, the rich will wield governments. The solution is to reduce centralized government power and put it back in the hands of the people. Tax increases will be avoided by the super rich, and fall primarily on entrepreneurs, small businesses, and large farmers and such.
ISTM that it’s more a combination of different types of taxes. The US tax revenue as per this tax structure table is about 18% consumption taxes, which is low compared to the OECD average of 32%, but comparatively high in property taxes (12% vs. 6%) and in income taxes (42% vs. 24%). But those proportions vary very much between countries; e.g., Switzerland’s revenue is about 21% consumption taxes, and Poland’s 24%, while Norway’s is 30%.
All those countries have higher tax revenue as a percentage of GDP than the US does.
And yet the US is already far more economically unequal than stereotypically “big-government” “socialistic” countries such as France and Germany, not to mention the Scandinavian countries. The US is #51 out of 159 countries in inequality on that list, China’s #68, India’s #95, France is #121. In short, a bunch of different big countries that all have big governments and sizeable absolute numbers of rich people are all over the map in terms of economic inequality.
Hmmm, that’s the routine boilerplate conservative prescription of “cut taxes, starve government, and let the prosperity trickle down freely”. We’ve been trying that for decades in the US and the results haven’t been impressive.
We’ve seen in the Trump era (and in the pre-New Deal era as well) that conservatives in general are perfectly happy to let the rich go on wielding government for their own benefit even when government isn’t doing jack-shit for the non-rich. This sudden concern about unfair domination by the wealthy, at the very moment when a more responsible administration is trying to actually improve life for the non-wealthy, does not come across as very convincing.
So, wait. The middle class paid less and the rich and large corporations paid more and tax revenue stayed flat given those inputs. This sounds like a feature, not a bug, for going back to 1975 rates. Middle class taxpayers taxed less is a bad thing?
Damn, I didn’t realize just how bad things are for the rich.
Maybe they should have bake sales or something . . . like the poors do.
Yeah, tax revenue as a percent of GDP is a rather nonsensical argument anyway, but when you have not a shred of ground to stand on you tend to grasp at hilariously desperate straws.
I mean, lets say tax revenues were 99.9% of GDP. According to this metric, that’d be bad whether GDP was 0.5x or 1000x current GDP as a result of that tax. Nope, tax revenues as GDP are higher, therefore it’s bad! 
Lol, looks like Sam discovered deficit financing. Wait until he finds out how much debt the Republicans have put on the US government to keep to that 18%!
He knows already - after all, he has assured us that he has been a consistent critic of deficit spending regardless of which party is in power.
To be fairest Sam has never voted for anyone that increased the US deficit or debt.
snerk