“I will not raise taxes on the middle class to pay for my programs.” – William J. Clinton
“Who is the more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows him?” – Obi Wan ‘Ben’ Kenobi
It would behoove you to consider just how honest McCain is likely to be at this point. He still has a pair of wars to fund and a recent history of completely flipping on promises and statements. At least Obama is (presumably) somewhat more straightforward about the necessity of taxation to recover from the recent and record glut of junk food deficit spending.
Because its a transfer of wealth from the corporation to you - we normally tax transfers of wealth.
(Personally, liberal though I am, I’d get rid of corporate income tax which just discourages domestic investment by business - I think people having JOBS with which to pay income tax is better for our economy than corporations paying it - but unfortunately, its a big picture concept lost on many Americans.)
North of $250k (physician in a past life; sales now).
I don’t really care who wins; I am more bemused than anything else by politics.
I do think my taxes will go up much more substantially under Mr Obama than Mr McCain. Mr Obama will likely have a Democratic congress, and probably one that is pretty darn liberal in terms of programs and taxes. Republican wails to the contrary, he may end up being the most conservative of the two branches. From a tax standpoint, the safer bet is Mr McCain for lower taxes because campaign platforms are meaningless (why do we pay so much attention to them every four years?) and it’s more likely that less will get done with a Repub Prez and and a Dem Congress. Fewer programs means fewer new tax initiatives to (at least partially) fund them. In the long run all these damn programs are only partially funded by taxes, and the borrowing just keeps going up…
My anxiety is not paying more taxes. It’s establishing more programs with broader reaches. We need to pay off our debts, and I don’t trust the Federal government to do that, period. If I thought Mr. Obama wanted more of my money to pay debts, I’d cough it up without complaint. To date Republicans and Democrats use $10 of income to fund $12 in programs, and that will catch up to us eventually.
I have a complaint about the notion that income is the same as wealth. As I’ve discussed elsewhere in a past thread, we need to find a way to tax wealth. Those of us with high incomes know the difference. You can be Bill Gates and show no income, for goodness sakes. But I don’t want to derail the thread.
I haven’t responded to this question because I don’t understand it. Are you asking whether tax policy affects rational people’s behavior? Are you asking whether the amount that someone expects to be able to take home affects their lifestyle choices? Because you’d have to be utterly irrational not to consider taxes when making your budget.
The OP asked whether people expect their taxes to go up under an Obama presidency. The answer, to people in certain tax brackets, is yes. And for me, I’d prefer to be taxed less rather than more, all else being equal. (And contrary to the OP’s opinion, I don’t think it’s “greed” to prefer to pay lower taxes; I think it’s simply rational.)
But all else isn’t equal, and tax policy is just one issue to consider when selecting a president. One of the reasons I couldn’t support Clinton was my belief that she preferred/prefers the expedient to the truthful. Ultimately, when considering the host of issues, I can’t support McCain even though it’s in my economic self-interest to vote Republican. Such is life.
But on the narrow question of whether I expect my bank account to be plumper under Obama or McCain, that’s a no-brainer: going simply by what they claim they intend to do (McCain: not tax rich folk; Obama: tax rich folk), McCain’s my guy.
It’s not like you made a conscious decision to not get rich if it weren’t for those pesky taxes.
Okay, so say it in a less confusing way, people still want to be rich, no? If so, then there’s no disincentive to be rich. Now, I don’t condone ginormous taxes on the rich, but life is still pretty comfy for the rich (I presume) regardless of who’s in office.
I understand the idea of ,don’t try and take my money, Take someone elses, But we have a National Debt of 10 bill. We have Lehman declaring bankruptcy, Freddie and Fannie going down, 12 bank failures and 200 more on the watch list. If you think we have to save these institutions to keep confidence in the economic system, where will the money come from?
So cutting the capital gains tax rate will encourage the purchase of more buildings and equipment.
Many politicians and hacks claim this. The empirical evidence for it is thin.
Furthermore:
Anybody earning over $250,000 should recall that your prospective McCain/Bush tax cuts will most assuredly not be counterbalanced by federal spending reductions. They will be financed by borrowing (i.e. deficit spending), either from domestic residents (thereby cutting into investment) or by foreigners (thereby expanding the trade deficit).
And presumably somebody will have to pay that debt back, with interest. Somebody == you and your successors. There’s no free lunch.
Then you should be quite pissed at your media sources, right? They’re not doing their job.
And you should pat yourself on the back for reading this message board.
Take a hard look at this chart. Ok, Obama’s health plan will cut the share of uninsured while McCain’s will not - but we might have guessed that.
What’s less known is that McCain wants to cut down employee-based insurance in favor of having people buy insurance directly from the insurer. He does this substituting in a tax credit for a tax deduction - and then increasing the credit at less than the cost of medical price inflation.* And those with generous employee-provided plans take an immediate hit.
I haven’t yet looked into what if anything McCain wants to do about pre-existing conditions. But I do know that private insurers have every incentive to exclude the sick from their pool, and that a shift to nongroup plans will make such a strategy more viable, absent an elaborate and determined federal enforcement mechanism.
Technical: it goes up with general price inflation, which is quite a bit less than the increasing cost of medical care.
Which is exactly the problem isn’t it? I haven’t seen either candidate make any mention of “balancing the budget”. Tax cuts with a decrease in spending is fine. Too bad nobody wants to talk about cutting spending.
You are mistaken. Obama’s plan is to keep the dividend tax rate at 15% for those earning less than $250k, and to increase it to 20% for those making more than $250k.
McCain wants to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent. I’ve read a theory that the best way to increase dividend taxes is to elect McCain. If McCain wins, with a Democratic congress, they are not going to make the Bush cuts permanent. If Obama’s plan comes through, they aren’t going to want to make one of their own look bad, and will approve his plan.
The additional 5% wouldn’t apply to me, but even if it did, I can swing another 5%. I would hope most individuals earning $250k, no matter where they live would not be worried about it either.
I remind my readers that Bill Clinton had budget surpluses, while George W Bush reversed them, giving us a sea of red ink.
McCain will send us deeper into the hole. Though most Americans will have their taxes lowered by the Obama plan and raised by McCain, McCain’s program costs more.
Numbers matter. McCain’s plan is objectively less fiscally responsible than Obama’s. No contest. And let’s face it, McCain’s shoot-first-and-backpedal-later approach to foreign policy is likely to prove expensive.
That said given the upcoming retirement of the baby boomers, I think that a return to Clinton-level fiscal responsibility will take a long time. It won’t occur under the Republicans for they are all talk, and it won’t happen under the Democrats until they achieve universal health care.
Some say that this is the most important election in their lifetime. I say no: that happened in 2000.
I asked exactly what you meant earlier to give you a chance to explain. You have now explained and clearly identified the evil and immoral perspective you have on society, which makes the productive slaves to the unproductive.
The measure of taxes should be the very least necessary for government to do what it needs to do (which should itself be the very least necessary to protect us from enemies from within and without) not the amount the rich don’t “need” or wouldn’t “miss” or the amount that would make taxes become a “disincentive to be rich.”
Wow. What about investment to aid the commonwealth? Things like roads and schools increase the wealth and strength of the nation, though they are incompatible with economic fundamentalism.
OTOH, I fully support pure libertarian experiments, provided they occur elsewhere. Have you thought about Western Sahara? Here in America, our values are reflected in the Consitution: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Emphasis added.
We’re talking about the system of U.S. federal income taxation, so roads and schools are a bit left field.
I didn’t say that I believe U.S. citizens should each pay zero U.S. federal income tax. I think the effective tax rate and the incidence of the tax should be determined from the bottom up (i.e., by looking at how much money is needed) and not from the top down (i.e., by looking at how much money it would be OK to take from the rich).
Re: the constitution, keep reading a little further than that. The federal government only has limited power, and acting to promote the general welfare is not one of those powers. (Now, certain parts of the constitution, such as the commerce clause, has been interpreted so broadly that many of the strict constitutional limits on federal power have been eroded, but the point remains that no branch of the federal goverment has plenary power to promote the general welfare.)
Cutting taxes does not magically make the burden of paying for what the government does disappear.
The burden can be shifted so the middle class takes a bigger hit, and it can hit everyone via a weak dollar. The burden can be shifted, with interest, to your children. The burden can hit us in subtle ways we don’t immediately recognize. But the burden will not disappear no matter what you do.
Massive spending while pretending the burden does not exist is utterly irresponsible and inexcusable.
Historically, the economy has done better under Democratic presidents than Republicans, to a large enough extent that even the wealthiest Americans come out ahead under Democratic leadership compared to Republican.
But people will always be seduced by the promise of a free lunch. Responsible economics are not appealing. Promises of magic which obscure the ominous burden, growing ever larger and being paid in less obvious ways, are what get the votes.