So you’re okay with allowing the tax rates to revert? Good.
The real problem is that the tax rates for the wealthiest Americans are as big a cut in the deficit as you can find easily. Get the easy ones out of the way first and then work on the tough ones.
Please list the other 700 billion cuts you have for comparison. No one is saying it’s gonna solve everything, but it is a necessary component of the overall program.
Tax receipts from the wealthy is very cyclical but when you have our debt and borrowing capacity, you can handle the cycles. What you can’t handle is a long term structural deficit that exceeds economic growth.
Social security reform is nice, but remove the FICA cap and you are almost there. Medicare is the problem.
Like any scarce commodity, medicare needs to be rationed and if we have removed the market mechanism for rationing goods (because we do not believe taht this particular good should be distributed based on ability to pay), we need to ration it on some other basis. Death panels have a bad name but that in effect is what we need.
The thing about negotiating is that you have to be ready to walk away from the table. If the other side knows you are going to keep negotiating until you reach an agreement, they will just hold out until you give them everything they want.
Obama has no line in the sand and teh Republicans know it. Why the heck would they ever comromise on anything meaningful.
As far as I can tell, very few posters in this thread have even addressed the matter of why we should expect tax increases to be more or less productive than spending cuts. Before Shodan and Diogenes the Cynic go seven or eight more pages making bare assertions about the nature of economic reality, I would appreciate if each would take a moment to support his opinion.
From where I’m standing, a return to responsibility will require both changes in taxation and decreases in federal spending – and I do not see why we must exhaust one before trying the other.
In the last normal budget we had (no stimulus/tarp), federal income taxes were about 1.3 trillion
The defense/security budget was 1.1 trillion.
right now the entitlements pretty much pay for themselves (there is a looming problem but we still get more social security revenue than we spend in social security payments and the medicare trust fund still has money in it so we aren’t spending incoem tax dollars on the entitlements yet).
Discretionary non-defense/security is about 350 billion.
So where do YOU think we spend most of your tax dollars? Or are we counting FICA too?
As usual? When have I ever been wrong about taxes?
Look at tax receipts in 2001. Now look at tax receipts in 2002. Tax receipts dropped 140 billion dollars.
In 2003 they dropped another 70 billion.
If you are saying that tax receipts were higher in 2008 than they were in 2001, then sure. But did you really think I was saying that taxes dropped and kept dropping every year for all eternity.
Over time as the economy grows tax recipts will increase.
For example, between 1993 to 2000 tax receipts went up from 1.25 trillion to 2 trillion.
Most people compare tax revenue to GDP not to the census.
But still not enough.
We have both a spending problem AND a revenue problem. We can’t cut our way out of this deficit.
Your facts are highly distorted by the prism throuigh which you see the world.
Ermm the column you are talking about shows that 2001 receipts were $2215 billion and 2008 receipts were $2285 billion.
Are you sure that I’m the one that is usually wrong?
Did you seriously think I meant that taxes went down and then stayed down forever? tax receipts grow with the economy as well as the tax rate.
If you look at the years immediately following the tax cuts tax receipts dropped from $1991 to $1782 in nominal dollars and from $2215 to $1901 in 2005 dollars.
Are you sure that I’m the one that is usually wrong?
Most people compare tax receipts to GDP not the census, there is a reason for that.
You still sure about that?
Whatever they “took” was not enough. the federal income tax is structurally insufficient to achieve a balanced budget.
We have both but noone is proposing that we make the stimulus permanent. there is one party that is proposing that we make these historically low tax rates permanent.
Your facts are distorted by the prism through which you see the world.
And yet you have not suggested a single significant cut, instead spending all your time talking only about increasing taxes, which will not address the issue.
This is the sort of thing to be careful about when talking with liberals. You jumped immediately to trying to get me to agree with the tax hikes you want, ignoring the 90%+ of the problem.
If the Democrats were going to do anything about the deficit, they would have done it when they controlled Congress. They didn’t, because they weren’t. Fortunately, the GOP now controls one of the houses, and, as mentioned, it already has had a good effect on Obama (although not on the other left-wing fat heads in the Dems). That’s fine, they were never serious about anything beyond more tax-and-spend and grow-the-deficit. All that stuff about Keynesianism was bullshit - they certainly wanted to grow the deficit during recession, but had no intention of restoring it to surplus.
If you think government jobs are so awesome, then go out and get a federal job. I don’t think government workers are looking for sympathy. Most federal workers who have posted in this threaad seem to be OK with the pay freeze despite the fact that the trade-off they made when they took the federal position was to sacrifice money for security.
I wouldn’t have minded in the least if Obama had traded two years worth of COLAs and my next step increase for something worthwhile, for instance, the last two votes needed for passage of the DREAM or DISCLOSE Acts.
I don’t mind being used as a bargaining chip, but I’m pissed at having become a political giveaway.
Very sorry about the quote - multi-quoting and editing often trips me up, I’ll work harder at getting it right. Thanks for fixing it Marley.
As to your claim that cigarette taxes and tanning booth taxes prove Obama is a liar about spending cuts, well, I’ll just say I disagree. Obama just proposed one spending cut. He has routinely called for others.
I see no reason why one should come before the other. Especially when you consider that the Democrats acknowledge the need for austerity measures (at least to some degree) while the GOP is steadfast in opposition to any tax increase. Sorry, but I see very little reason to believe the “we’ll increase taxes later” promise from a party that has such a bad record when it comes to deficits (at least for the last 15 years).
Madness. Medicare Part D alone is a much larger unfunded liability than the stimulus. So were the tax cuts. The idea that the deficit is the Democrats fault is ludicrous.
I already proposed some up-thread. Index SS differently (basically a benifits cut) with a phased-in 2-year increase in the retirement age. DoD budget freeze pending a review of actual security needs. Elimination or reduction of farm subsidies. I’m not sure if you view tax deductions a tax increase or a spending cut (likely the former, if I had to guess), but I would consider phasing out the home mortgage interest deduction, since I think it distorts the housing market. There are dozens of others I’d consider as well. I also think that successful implementation of health-care reform could do more for the deficit than anything else, since Medicare projections are the largest budget-buster.
I have no problem with attacking the spending side (hell, I was a Republican in the 90s), but magical thinking with regard to taxation drives me crazy. As does the militant “no tax raises ever” rhetoric.