The site is blocked where I’m at today so I can’t get into it from here. Provisionally I’ll accept the source. Do they have any actual figures in there on how much annually repealing the tax breaks on those making $250k/year would be? This would be a good theoretical place to start…how much (in theory) are we talking about bringing back into the government per year if Obama gets his way and is able to do this?
I would really rather leave most of the rest of the discussion behind at this point…the OP is pretty straight forward. What dollar figure are we looking at (in theory) as an increase if Obama repeals the tax cuts as he says he will? $100 billion a year? $200 billion? $2 billion?
That figure nailed down, the debate would center around…realistically, how much WILL the government ACTUALLY bring in? Because there is no way in hell it’s going to be the theoretical number…people will find alternative ways to shelter their money. So…realistically what percentage of the money will the government ACTUALLY have to work with after Obama repeals the Bush tax cuts?
xtisme: Well, I don’t think the specific thing I linked to goes into actual dollar values but I know that is the sort of thing that CTJ has reported before, so it would just be a matter of searching through their stuff.
Both ways of expressing this seem correct, since the goal to some extent is to restore the tax rates for the wealthy to the pre-Bush situation. Of course if they called it a tax increase on the wealthy, the Republican ads would say
The question to ask here is how people sheltered their money during the Clinton years. We’re not going back to punitive taxation, just the taxation rates that didn’t seem to keep anyone from working during the Bubble. Also, if someone found a tax shelter then, they’d keep it unless it was one that was economical at the old tax rate but not the new one. It’s not like the cuts were going to make anyone stop looking for ways to lower taxes, after all.
In the last few years, he’s been in favor of a version of PAYGO that only applies to spending increases, but not to tax cuts (or extension thereof). Obama has been consistent that PAYGO should apply to both, since either one increases the deficit.
But if you really want to compare apples to apples, Bush signed the Medicare prescription drug benefit bill AFTER the White House budget office acknowledged that the bill would violate PAYGO requirements. So if you’re still going to say that Obama opposes PAYGO, and you seem to be saying that Bush IS in favor of PAYGO, I wonder how you can square the circle of Bush signing a bill that violated PAYGO in a way that makes the economic stimulus plan – which Obama didn’t vote on, as you note – look like pocket change?
Furthermore, Bush’s current budget director, Jim Nussle, authored the law which reset the PAYGO scorecard in 2002, thereby making PAYGO irrelevant.
So yes, Bush supports PAYGO, much in the way that I support Manchester United: if asked, I’d say they’re my favorite Premier League team, but I really don’t care all that much about them.
During the past seven years the rich got much richer, the poor got poorer, the middle class stagnated, and the deficit exploded. And Shodan thinks that stale Henny Youngman era tax jokes indicates a knowledge of economics.
Well, sure, he’s got some degree from some two bit community college in Massachusetts, but does that mean he’s educated? And not even an honorable degree, but with the qualifying magna cum laude, which probably means its just about a step above a GED.
How much economics did he take at Harvard Law School? I would hazard to guess that if he had any economics courses, it would have been as an undergrad at Columbia.
Now, he may well know quite a bit about economics, but going to Harvard Law (or Columbia undergrad) doesn’t automatically make it so.
Well, we had a guy with an MBA in there, had some very unconventional ideas about economics, like how starting an expensive war was the perfect occassion for a tax cut. I kinda think so long as we can avoid that sort of brilliance, we’ll be more or less headed in the right direction.
Besides, its not all that important what he knows, its much more important what the people he listens to know. The people who tell him that this can be done likely have the same sort of degrees as the people who swear it can’t. Economics is more like bean bag than it is like physics.
Besides, the guy is a policy wonk. After a war wonk, it will be make for a refreshing change.
Which hardly speaks specifically about Obama-- Harvard or no Harvard.
Yikes. That’s what people said about Bush and his A-Team cabinet. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell were all highly regarded in 2000.
Only if you don’t know beans about economics.
It’s pretty clear that Bush delegated the war decision to Cheney, who I guess could be called a student of war/the military. Hopefully Obama isn’t a economics wonk in the same sense that Cheney is a war wonk.
Shodan, what exactly is this language you speak? All the words in it appear to resemble English words, except for their meaning. A very curious linguistic phenomenon.
