Do any advocates of “tough medicine” ever suggest actions which hurt themselves or their own best interests? Like:
#1 “We need to stop all these tax breaks for the oil companies!”
#2 “what about your mortgage interest deduction and health benefits not counted as income?”
#1 “uh, I worked for everything I have!”
If we need spending cuts, does anyone ever cut their own throat? If we need tax increases does anyone ever say “go ahead and tax me, I can chip in a little”?
Yes. All the time. Warren Buffet, Bill Maher, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and many others are affected by higher taxes on incomes above $250,000 (or $400,000 as it eventually turned out). They all have no problem paying more.
As for mortgage deductions vs. corporate welfare for Big Oil, it’s a silly comparison. People who get the mortgage deduction spend the money saved in taxes on consumer goods, thus supporting the economy. Take away the mortgage deduction, and the housing market will crash (again). Take away the ‘free money’ Big Oil is getting, and they’re still going to supply oil.
Are those guys advocates of ‘tough medicine’ spending cuts though?
To a much smaller degree than Gate or Buffet, I’m one of those people.
My city currently has a populist “no tax is a good tax” mayor who is cutting services (services that, as it happens, I don’t use). Since I rent, my rent includes property tax, and commercial property here is taxes at about 4x residential property rates. During the last budget cycle, I emailed my councillor and the mayor telling them both I was willing to pay the extra tax (it would have been about $24 a year) to keep the wheel-transit funding (the funding used to transport dialysis patients was cut) among other services.
I also canvassed for, and contributed to the campaigns of, members of a party who are more likely than not to raise taxes in my tax bracket. I’m hardly rolling in cash, but I’m not going to be the primary recipient of the services that money would go to, either.
So, certainly, there are people who are willing to pay a bit more, even if it does not directly benefit them.
I benefit from the mortgage interest tax deduction and I am favor of limiting it or eliminating it. Encouraging home ownership is one thing, encouraging indebtedness is something else entirely.
And here, if you’re talking with a conservative, immediately they switch their portrayal of liberals from low-income moochers to “latte liberals”, rich people who casually assume tax burdens that are ruinous to the less fortunate. Funny how that works.
All spending increases have to be offset with a spending cut somehwere else, in the name of deficit control. But tax cuts which reduce revenue and increase the deficit don’t have to be offset with revenue increases elsewhere. Why is that? Even Paul Ryan’s newest budget proposes tax cuts for the rich without offsets, which will increase the deficit.
Maybe it is a silly comparison but the point remains. Everybody seems to be in favor of buckling down and dealing with the deficit, then when you talk to them it is always somebody else that is the problem. Rich people need lower taxes, they are being “crippled by high taxes” while poor people say they are screwed by a system that is heavily weighted in the favor of the business and the wealthy. Nobody seems to consider themselves “rich”; if they do acknowledge they are better off than most people, it’s only because they worked hard for it. However, if a poor person is working hard but still always a couple weeks from homelessness, they deserve it because they made poor choices. Everybody has an excuse. At this point I am only interested in people telling me what sacrifices they personally are willing to make things better, not what they think somebody else should have to do.
I’m three years from being eligible to retire, and I advocate removing the income cap on the social security tax, and some form of means testing, both of which would take dollars out of my pocket.
Unless you’re really super-rich, I doubt this will affect you one nickel.
I benefit from the cap on SS taxes, and I think it should be lifted. I’m not super-rich, I’m in the upper middle class in a high cost of living area.
Depending on the spirit of the means testing - do we want to quit paying it to the really rich, or do we want to quit paying it to everyone who not be poor without it - anyone with a decent-sized pension could be affected.
And although my salary does not normally hit the income gap, I have occasionally surpassed it when I’ve worked assignments that involved lots of special and overtime pay.
The only means testing that will get through a Democratic Senate will be on very wealthy recipients–a half-mil a year income or better.
Yes, but as cheaply?
Then I favor tougher medicine than the Democratic Senate does. 
Actually, I question the assertion that the cutoff would be anywhere near as high as $500,000: it’s being debated whether to raise income taxes on people in the $250,000-$400,000 range. People in that income range are nowhere near as rich as retirees making $500,000. If you are retired and making $500,000 a year, you most likely made a lot more when you were working.
To the OP: I believe that to reduce the deficit it will be necessary to raise taxes and/or reduce benefits on not just the very rich. Since I will have a fairly good pension and have some investment income, I expect to be more likely to have my taxes raised and/or my benefits reduced than retirees who have no income other than social security. And I am willing to discuss this. Does this address the OP’s question?
Social security is actually in better shape than other programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
And sort of unrelated: the term “means testing” is at best inaccurate, and at worst Orwellian. It would be more accurately termed “income testing” - denying benefits to people with *income *over a threshold. “Means testing” would be if they reduced benefits to people with low incomes but lots of assets, as Medicaid often does.
I’m generally an advocate of smaller government*, and I advocate tax changes that would hurt me all the time. Mortgage interest, taxing dividends differently than regular income, means testing for programs like Social Security, etc.
*If that qualifies me for being an advocate of “tough medicine”…
I believe there are people out there that want to take a painful pill now to prevent total failure down the road but I don’t hear politicians talking to those people. The Pols are only trying to engage people with the mindset of “I didn’t cause the problem, why should I have to suffer?”
raising my half od the payroll tax from 4.2 to 6.2 hit me but it was needed to keep ss solvent. im for higher taxes if everyone pays mzore or if services go up to match the taxes.
Here in Ontario the government is subsidizing electricity usage to a degree that can only be described as bordering on the insane. It is financially and environmentally ruinous.
If one of the parties had the courage to change this - end the subsidies and charge people what electricity actually costs and THEN some to help pay our debt, while giving an offsetting income tax credit to lower income families to they don’t get screwed, I’d not only vote for them, I’d volunteer for their campaign.
But such a policy would undoubtedly cost me money.
You compare a subsidy, which is money extorted from many people and given to a few, with a tax deduction, which allows someone to keep money they earned in the first place.
The answer to your question is simple. Some people are hypocrites and some are not.
I voted for California’s Proposition 30, which raised income taxes on people with incomes over $250,000, but also raised the state sales tax. I thought it was a very clever compromise; I was willing to take the hit to my purchasing power in order to have what I consider to be a more fair income tax.
But I also believe in tough medicine in my personal financial transactions. I live on a strict budget that restricts my purchases of non-necessities even when in the short-term I have the money to buy them. Before the laws were changed to take it into account, for many years I calculated and paid the use tax on my Internet purchases, including purchases from Amazon where sales tax was not charged.
I absolutely believe in changing the laws to make sense and provide necessary services, even if my costs might be increased.