No you don’t. Government is inherently more honest than business because its run by the people who can vote them out and not profit motivated
That’s why haggling/bartering is necessary. Policy requires a decision and often individual positions conflict, and despite all the efforts by media and campaign ads to form narratives for entire parties any specific representative’s constituents are a complex web of interests and so then are their goals.
Besides, this is a hypothetical, ‘what would you give to get something’, so all the “Republicans are teh EVIL!” crap is also irrelevant to the question even if proved true.
Not only in an ideal situation would I, but I think there’s some reasonable hope for a political consensus around the Republicans de-emphasizing (if not ditching) most social issues as well as what I’d call populist issues (for example extreme reluctance to compromise on immigration and denial that carbon emissions pose a risk, even if Al Gore types overstate the certainly of negative outcomes of that risk) at the national level, and the Democrats conceding that command economy government solutions don’t work, especially in the US at the federal level (the US isn’t Denmark, or even Germany, different kind of country). At one time both parties were less attached to their extremes about issue like that, not so long ago (Bill Clinton ‘the era of big govt is over’).
So much more growth and market oriented federal policies (including the way we reduce carbon emissions, say carbon tax replaces the payroll tax, even Al Gore had a good idea now and then), strict control of federal spending at or not far above the post WWII avg. level as % of GDP, and leave a lot of the rest to the states, whether they want higher taxes and higher social spending. Stop the continuous war to try to impose high/low social spending and taxation on the states which disagree, either way. Same with whether states want to more strictly control guns, have gay marriage etc. I realize some of those issues are harder to deal with if state policies differ, but they are just too divisive to solve at a national level, isn’t that proven by now? And many of them don’t absolutely have to be solved at the federal level. We have a federal system, let’s take advantage of its strengths.
Right, because everything will be fine and dandy as long as we have gay marriage, an assault weapons ban, and maybe a federal Caesar Chavez and Sacagewea Day in exchange for Social Security being subjected to the uncertainties of the market, Medicare being voucherized, Medicaid being gutted, millions of Americans left without health care, the wealthy getting further tax cuts, and spending on infrastructure, scientific research, and education being reduced even further. :rolleyes:
I’d be interested to see how that works. If the Republicans have control of the purse strings, wouldn’t they use that to defeat social issues they don’t like? I mean, how effective (without going into pros/cons of it) would the ACA be if it was budgeted 12 cents per year in the name of conservative spending (being an obvious social issue ploy under the guide of their “financial protection” of the US)?
Or would it be more along the lines of “We’ll arrange money in, you arrange how to spend it without going over income”?
I’m sorry, this logic makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Like, there are words here, but I can’t seem to grasp the argument at all. Are you telling me “everyone else has to pay because I (and millions of others) do X” is a better motivation to stop doing X than “I have to directly and specifically pay extra because I do X”? That’s kinda ridiculous.
I’m just gonna let that sit there. The problem with progressive taxation is not “progressive taxation is difficult”. The problem with progressive taxation is “progressive taxation is made overly complex by interests looking to subvert it”. Your solution is to throw the baby out with the bathwater and completely fuck up the system.
…Are you serious? Do I really have to go over Taxation 101 with you? Never mind that the first half of that sentence has just about nothing to do with the second part. Politicians could equally rachet up a flat tax if they needed money for their own concerns and pet projects. Of course, the reality is that we as a society have determined (I guess I do, huh?) that there are certain public goods and services we demand. Roads, bridges, police force, social safety net, et cetera. It is then up to the government to collect the revenue to fulfill those needs. And as it turns out, if we take a flat %, what happens is that those on top barely notice, while those on the bottom starve. Hence: progressive taxation. Because how we tax people should reflect the fact that as you become more wealthy, less and less of your income by percent goes towards keeping you alive. Government revenue in 2012, according to the world bank, made up 10% of GDP. 10% is nothing for a billionaire, but I have a few friends who are just scraping by who would have to choose between heat, home, food, and medication - and usually not 3/4 - if they lost 10% of their income. That’s why this is a moral issue. It is more wrong to steal from someone who cannot afford the theft than from someone who would not notice it. This is really basic stuff. Stuff everyone should understand.
Congratulations, your tax rate is progressive.
I don’t really consider the economic considerations of healthcare to be severable from the social ones. So we’d probably end up with a compromise there; something like a market-based system with high deductible plans and health savings accounts, only the Feds credited you (or gave you) the first half of each year’s deductible. Same goes for public education - it’s both an economic and a social issue. And public research funding.
However, I have no real problem with privatizing Social Security, cutting taxes and spending, and so on. In my experience, the economy functions essentially the same under Democratic or Republican control.
So then what’s your distinction between social and economic issues? And such a plan as you propose would be extremely horrid, in effect achieivng voucherization of Medicare.
Same question applies.
I have far of a problem with those than with not having universal background checks or not having gay marriage considering it will affect far more people in a far worse way. Additionally, I would say if you really no problem with privatizing Social Security, you are not in any meaningful sense a Democrat.
Nonsense-could the Affordable Care Act have passed under a Republican administration? Could the Democrats have achieved even the partial repeal of the Bush tax cuts without a Democrat in the White House? If anything, social issues are the ones that function irrelevant to Republican or Democratic administrations.
Taxes are not social policy. Even if there is some bullshit reason given, e.g. “it’ll pay for health care for those people who smoke!” or “it’s a luxury item!” all it’s actually doing is adding money to the general fund that they are under no obligation in most cases to spend on the feel good message that accompanies the pitch to add the tax.
If you want people to stop smoking in your society, ration it or outlaw it. Note: The War on Drugs is a massive failure. Restricting prescription meds and the class of meds that went behind-the-counter to dampen meth making is a failure, also. People do what they want. If you don’t factor in the fact that you are going to pay for health care for people that smoke, jump off buildings, or strap a juicy steak to their balls and dangle them in front of a pitbull for fun - you aren’t being realistic about the health care you wish to provide. You want to provide UHC? Do it right.
I never made the claim that “progressive taxation is difficult.” That’s your own straw man.
The real problem is that progressive taxation includes multiple tax avenues that are not fair to most people - especially the poor. The person paying a “luxury tax” of $8 for their $50 a month basic cell phone (numbers for easy maffs) is being penalized for…having a means of communication that’s all but required by our society. But the rich person (who probably has a $150 plan, granted) is barely affected by that while the poor person gives up a meal or two for the month because of it.
I am serious, and I think that you need to actually stop and review what taxes are for: Funding a government. They are not tied to morality. They are tied with a direct need to make sure the government can buy labor, light bulbs, vehicles, and all of that other fun stuff so that they can do what their constituents want. Much like you explain here:
See? Do you see “enforcing some party’s moral values” or “social values” in that list of what a government needs money for? What happens when the Republicans get into power again and they do something crazy like add an excise tax to gay marriage? I think that gay marriage should be a right like any other kind of marriage, but if you start trying to legislate with taxes, you open this sort of bull up. We already have this sort of crap happening with just allowing/disallowing the act of marriage itself.
Except that it wouldn’t be as easy. Let’s say that your city wanted more revenue. Well, they’ll just raise taxes on cigarettes. You don’t care because you think smokers are jokers. Half of the constituency is fine because “I don’t smoke” or “I don’t use that much alcohol” or “Another 50 cents for internet is fine” despite these affecting the poor worst of all.
Under my idea, if the city needs more cash moneys, then they need to go to the voters and say “We will need to cut $X from service(s) yielding Z result(s) if we don’t get another Y% in taxes from you.” A straight forward, simple tax that everyone can see directly: “I make (easy maffs) $100 and this will eat another $1 from my check.” In the situation where the current rate is 75%, the likely answer will be “No, the lost of services has to happen because I simply can’t afford to eat as it is.” In the situation where the current rate is 4%, the likely answer will be “Okay, I’m livin’ large an another $1 is fine.” (Easy answers with the easy maffs, too.) But this gives an actual real-life balance between the services offered and the direct cost of providing and/or maintaining those services for all to see.
Allowing taxes to be hodge-podged the way we currently do in the US is the most insidious, regressive tax structure we have yet come up with and it desperately needs to go, despite the label of “progressive.”
Except that this is always true. Even if our current tax structure was simply stripped of all loop holes and write offs - the rich barely feel it. So you are using a criticism of my idea to say that the extant system is better, when the criticism applies equally to both.
So, you are either going to set a maximum income and tax everyone at 100% of some low figure, such as $200,000, and be completely progressive, or you won’t kid yourself that it’s better to progressively tax based on this particular criticism. Additionally, with a flat income-style tax that I’ve proposed, the poor would save a boatload more money than under our current piece-meal system, even assuming that they would make more than $30,000 because all of the little taxes on near every good and service they consume aren’t eating their paychecks at every opportunity.
If they got the first 30,000 free and didn’t have all of the other taxes that eat away their lives, they would be gaining a lot of money under this plan. They don’t “lose” ten percent of their income (Assuming that’s the figure we decide is “best”) they’d gain all of the income they are losing through various taxes that they probably don’t even notice. Water bill? Usually taxed. Electric bill? Taxed. Phone bill? Taxed. Internet bill? Oh, you better believe that’s taxed. Rent? Oddly, not usually taxed.
I’m sorry, but your friends on hard times are currently being boned six ways from Sunday and we should change things so that they aren’t.
Taxes are not theft.
Additionally, this plan gives them a LOT back. I’m not sure where your criticism actually is, anymore. This plan is bad because…because why, exactly? Because after you make more than $30,000 you pay the same tax percentage until you manage to suck all of the currency from the earth? Since the actual dollar amount contributed continues to rise (because: percentage) as the income rises, how are they not paying their share? Without additional deductions they will actually contribute this, keep in mind.
I would also remind you that the poor would get an extra tax-free paycheck: Any fines, fees, etc collected would be disbursed to them. I’m not sure if your 10% GDP figure from the World Bank includes revenue from those sources, but it would be a kickback to everyone instead of additional padding for the general funds.
I don’t know how to say this nicely, so I’ll be blunt: you have it all wrong. We need enough revenue to make the government and whatever programs are instated in that government to operate. We should simply do this directly and without trying to mine additional revenue streams out of every aspect of daily life for the government. Business does that enough, thank you.
Then why are you condemning it based on the fact that it’s not?
I have to echo Qin Shi, here: If everything is a combination of social and economic, how would you give the Rs the economic side and the Ds the social side? Wouldn’t that just make it go from “Congress does very little” to “Each house has the parties shooting at each other across the floor”?
hum… Hard to say. I’m very liberal re things like Gay rights and abortion, and UHC. Legalize marijuana? Sure, makes and saves $. However, I do dig my feet in re additional gun laws.
Re-write Amd 2? Sure let’s take a look. Additional laws in general that are IMHO, nanny laws need to go away. That’s my republican side. But it’s very conflicted.
I think it might be helpful to de-complicate the tax laws, but at the same time I would like to see more incentive to tax the ‘rich’ to give more towards expanding business, new technology, and education. I think a lot of this is already in the tax code, but would like to see more done in this direction.
My family is not rich, but comfortable. It aggravates me that at least at County levels, when I vote for something that would increase my taxes (for say education [we don’t have kids] or road work), it usually fails.
I didn’t say that. 
I said healthcare, public education and research are both. I don’t think (for example) that marriage rights have any substantial economic component, or that marginal tax rates are part of social policy.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have said “everything” but I would interested in how you think it would work for something that you consider married together, such as health care.
But I think the path to some kind of consensus* is to separate out two things. One is having as free market an economy as possible, and the other is to have some kind of welfare state to sand the rough edges off a free market economy as it impacts people who can’t compete well in one. It’s not a new POV I’m inventing, it’s basically that of for example the editorial pages of ‘The Economist’. Besides being ‘social issue’ liberals, they also support a welfare state. They just don’t support command economy solutions, or redistribution as an end in itself**. Under that kind of approach you wouldn’t reject for example voucher/privatizing entitlements, or education, if it gets the job done in a more efficient way, allows the economy to grow, nor reject as a matter of faith that such methods could even address social needs (see 20%, below).
And basically one would recognize a central fact. The US needs healthy growth to fund the entitlement promises it has made to its citizens (the lower growth path we seem to have settled on has ominous implications for the long term fiscal situation). And while more equal incomes are a good thing all else equal, it’s kidding yourself to think that a heavy focus on that won’t hold back growth in the US (it doesn’t answer that point to cite other, different, countries). Same with addressing the carbon problem, though under a consensus both sides would come to recognize that that’s necessary to some degree (and drop the phony BS on the left about about how it will be win-win via ‘green jobs’ working for crony capitalists subsidized by tax revenue, no sorry that’s nonsense: it’s going to cost us in growth and standard of living to address that problem, but we may just need to do that, but do it the least inefficient way possible).
*not universal agreement. At least 20% of the electorate will say any reform or compromise is ‘evil socialism’ or ‘sacrificing the poor, women and minorities on the altar of the markets’. Probably more. You can’t make everybody happy.
**encapsulated in our President’s answer to a question from a friendly media person in the 2008 campaign: ‘would you raise the capital gains tax rate even if the increase in rate decreased the govt’s revenue intake?’. Mr Obama quickly answered, ‘yes, it’s about fairness’. He didn’t challenge the premise of the question, but just gave what I think is his honest belief, but a kind of belief which cannot lead to consensus in the US in the foreseeable future at least, and I don’t hesitate to say I hope it never would.
I’m not trying to talk about the population as a whole. I’m more interested in how we can make the politicians, themselves, m make this work. I get that there will always be differing view points - and, in fact, I encourage them where it’s feasible even if I disagree with someone’s else’s point of view.
As a result, I don’t see how trying to separate fiscal from social will do anything but give one party complete control. Whoever holds the purse strings holds the power, at least in my opinion.
Thus, I’m interested in a mechanism that would allow for this segregation without giving one side the magic bullet that would give them de facto control. I’m especially interested in RNATB’s opinion in how it would play out to something he believes is going to be married inseparably.
As for income equality - I couldn’t care less about it. I really only care about evening the playing field. I care about all the things that make income equality extreme. I look at it this way: There will always be a difference. Someone/some company will always make the next iPhone or the next Viagra that gives them a crapload of cash. There will, conversely, also always be those people who couldn’t point and click their way out of Oregon Trail in their 20s. I see no reason to say that the latter should make as much as the former. But I also see no reason that the latter needs to get bent over a barrel or have the chips stacked against him so hard that he can’t crane his neck high enough to see the goal on the other end. The barrel bending and tilted field are what I want to end.
One political negotiation I’d be interested in seeing is:
- Repeal “birthright citizenship” acquired via 14th amendment.
- Open the borders to make it fairly easy for immigrant workers to come to the US and work.
I’m partial to birthright citizenship but I do understand (if not agree) that BC gives an incentive for people to come to the US, have a child, and potentially get social benefits for the child. If getting rid of BC meant that conservatives would be willing to open the borders I’d strongly consider it.
Answering this question depends on knowing whether these negotiations are carried out in good faith, and the positions we end up with will be fairly set in stone.
For instance, I’m generally pro-choice. But (and granted I’m speaking as a man here) I would be OK with abortion being illegal after some number of weeks, as long as it was completely locked in stone that it would remain legal and accessible and unhindered up to that point. I’d also happily surrender on gun control, and I’d be OK with things like drilling in ANWAR, IF it was set up in a way such that there was a bunch of transparency about the safety features, and an escrow fund set up ahead of time to deal with cleanup, etc.
(It’s also not clear if it counts as a compromise if it’s just a position I supported all along, like nuclear power.)
Then there are other issues where I’m really really certain that my position is the right one, but it’s also just not THAT important in the grand scheme of things. Trade having the 10 commandments on the wall of every government building in America for actual universal healthcare? I’d do that in a second.
Obama has been pretty good so far. Managed to extract you from two wars, and hardly involve you guys in any new ones. That seem to be a fairly good track record when you consider the competition.
Change “pro-choice” to “pro-life” and that pretty much describes me as well.
Things that I’d happily give the republicans:
- Everyone has the right to own firearms for whatever reason they want. Force states to recognize other state’s concealed carry laws. No limits on magazine sizes, etc. Whatever the craziest republican gun nut wants, they can have.
- Lower capital gains taxes and income taxes and business taxes, etc.
- More money and support for nuclear power, natural gas, and maybe even “clean” coal if it really is any better than coal.
- Abortion can be illegal after the 2nd trimester, with medical exceptions.
Here’s what I’d want in return
- Actually be the party of “limited government,” and drop all opposition to things like marriage equality, war on drugs, contraception, etc.
- Stop all the nonsense about sex, nudity, obscenity, etc. (this goes along with the first)
- Stop with all the race-based dog whistle nonsense. No voter ID laws. No legislation that proportionally hurts minorities more than the majority.
- Support net neutrality
- Allow more government spending on infrastructure, science research and development, etc. Don’t crow about “volcano monitoring” and solar cell research and stuff. Actually support it!
- No more anti-science in general. Admit global warming is caused my mankind and we should try to stop it. Stop denying evolution, or teaching the controversy. Stop believing that rape pregnancies can be shut down by a woman’s body if it’s a real rape. Stop believing the Earth is a few thousand years old, and humans lived alongside dinosaurs.