It is an article of faith that all Republicans must campaign for tax cuts. John McCain is, of course, carrying the tax cut banner, saying tax cuts are more important than deficit reduction.
Without debating the relative imprtance of tax cuts vs a balanced budget, is there a “Three Bears” tax rate that Republicans would agree is just right? Or do Republicans believe taxes should continue to be cut until there are no federal taxes any more?
And if either goal is achieved (the perfect tax rate, or no taxes at all), what would Republicans run on?
Taxation should be at a bare minimum. Period. The authority of the government should be limited to what is absolutely necessary, not what we have now. Hand in hand with this is the idea that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t do it. By and large, I can live with that. See, when I say we need to “cut programs”, dammit, that’s exactly what we need to do, cut them. Completely. As in out of existence completely.
And that’s the rub, isn’t it? Nobody honestly wants what they run on. You didn’t really think they did, did you? If NARAL gets an unfettered right to abortion in the Constitution, they die as a result of their own success. Same with the NRA- you didn’t really think they wanted a decisive victory, did you?
In all cases political, winning is even worse than losing.
As Al Franken said, we can all agree that tax rates should be set somewhere between 0 and 100%, right?
I agree.
I agree. Let’s get rid of what is not necessary.
I agree with this too. Which ones do you want to cut?
While I agree, I also accept that living in a country like America, there will be many “programs” that are “necessary” for some people, even if I don’t agree.
Of course not. Just as there is no tax rate that Democrats agree is just right.
Holy false dichotomy, Batman! Maybe Ron Paul might advocate something close to that, but I’m not aware of any Republican who advocates 0 federal taxes.
That looks like a very cute thing to say, but unless the guy is an anarchist (which I can’t believe he is), then he doesn’t advocate 0 federal taxes. The OP has simply set up a false dichotomy after bemoaning the fact that Republicans don’t all agree on some specific tax rate. Color me unimpressed with that thesis.
That’s what you assume, but by his statements he’s a demagogue and a buffoon. The OP seems to be asking, not what the tax rate should be, but if there ever is a tax rate at which Republicans would stop calling for lower taxes. Given that McCain is calling for more cuts despite the deficit, the spending on Iraq, and the lack of success of the previous tax cuts in producing a great economy for all, it seems like a fair question.
Cutting unnecessary spending is fine, but even if all earmarks could be eliminated it would do very little in helping to pay for the elimination of the AMT. McCain is preaching faith based economics - tax cuts are the answer, with faith that they’ll pay for themselves and that spending could be realistically cut, no matter what the evidence is. Do the Republicans have a reasonable metric for calculating what taxes should be, or are they always too high?
Actuall, no, we can prove mathematically that virtually any tax cut will result in more money taken in receipts given a sufficient span of time. We may still be in the phase where we can garner rewards within a year, but if not, we would still probably garner them within several years.
By definition taxes are always too high. Any taking fom anyone by force (which is what taxes are, period) from people is too much. However, we accept that some level of things must be paid (barring libertarians) because we have no other sufficiently good option.
We generally disagree that a claim of “social welfare” is an acceptably good reason to enact programs and raise taxes. In fact, we generally thik the government is likely to botch up the job and ruin any good it might once have done. For example, the local projects in Knoxville. Took the administrators almost 40 years, but they finally managed to turn them into a den of vice, grinding poverty, and drug abuse. The original idea wasn’t bad in conception: make some cheap housing available. In practice, they slowly destroyed what had been a thriving (if materially short) community. And we see this happen a lot with government welfare programs. And it bothers us, since it’s ultimately blowing money on doing real harm.
Given that McCain is talking about what to do during an economic downturn and given that he has voted against tax cuts in the past, I’d say it’s not a fair question.
The metric would simply be funding those programs any Republican decides are legitimate functions of the government. And you’re not going to get all or even most Republicans to agree on what that is any more than you’re going to get Democrats to agree on it.
The trouble is, tax revenues increase year after year without stop. Now imagine how much it would increase if no one had an agenda for cutting taxes.
The other side of the question, if taxes shouldn’t be cut, surely the tax rate isn’t exactly perfect right now at this exact instant. If it’s not exactly perfect, then it should either be raised or lowered. So how much should it be raised? How much is enough? 50% of GDP? 80% of GDP? 90%? 100%?
We have to fight like hell against taxes just to keep the rate of tax increases low. And this is simply due to the mechanics of public spending, there are an infinite number of things public money could be spent on, but only a finite amount of public money. So the easy solution is to increase taxes so we can have more public goods. You’re not against public goods are you? You don’t hate the poor, the elderly, the troops, schools, hospitals, roads, mail delivery, and so on, do you? We’ve got to pay for this somehow, right? And so we increase the public budget every year to pay for these public goods.
Complaining that since Republicans always want to cut taxes, that must mean they are in favor of no public spending is just silly. It just means that their ideal tax rate is lower than the current tax rate, and has been for decades. If a 300 pound guy is constantly complaining that he’s trying to lose weight, you don’t imagine that he wants to starve himself to death, do you? And there’s no sense for him to pick out an ideal weight if he’s struggling not to put on more weight, let alone lose weight. And even if he somehow started losing weight, there’s no point in asking him when he’s going to stop, because even if he somehow got to his ideal weight that wouldn’t mean he could stop dieting, he’ll have to continue his new way of eating for the rest of his life.
And so even if we somehow decreased the Federal budget to 20% of GDP, it wouldn’t stay there unless we constantly and ruthlessly looked for ways to cut taxes and eliminate spending. Because otherwise, we’d soon bloat right back to where we started, and beyond.
20% of GDP is pretty much the high end, historically. It’s gone above that from time to time, but not by much. For example, it was 20.1% of GDP in 2005 (the last year I’ve seen numbers for).
Despite scraping my brain, I cannot remember where I saw this, and it wasn’t all that long ago. A conservative economist played with some numbers, and said optimal public spending (taxes) for overall economic growth should be a wee bit under 30% of a given GDP, barring large-scale emergencies. Not saying where I stand, 'cause I’m not sure; it was just something odd to see a political conservative come out in favor of government.