In my experience, libertarians are very all right with people dying, starving, and generally enduring needless hardships. This is why they are very bad at governing.
This is a slight confusion of the issue. Every act of consumption is an act of production, but certain purchases are more stimulative than others. For instance, unemployment expenditure is massively stimulative (I’ve posted the cite before). Exotic instruments and other expenditures on the financial economy are less stimulative, if at all. If rich people really did spend the same proportion of their income each year on luxury goods as the poor spent on amenities, there would be essentially no problem, since yacht repairing would become a viable career choice for the proletariat. The issue is more their relative lack of spending (locking capital into financial instruments and offshore accounts), which in turn causes a concentration of capital and resources. While conservatives claim the economic game is not zero sum and that the productivity of labour can increase exponentially, even they (if sufficiently instructed in economics) cede that land is limited and that having the means of production in few hands is intrinsically harmful (though they may disagree as to the point where intervention is warranted, if at all).
Indeed. Survival of the fittest! Let the most thick-headed survive! Never mind the fact that humans have control over their environment and that those surviving a catastrophe may not be the fittest in the post-catastrophe environment. In fact, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
The funniest thing is if supply side economics did work, the government with the lowest effective tax rates would have the highest revenue and they’d have fuck all to do with it. Funding medicare or unemployment or infrastructure would draw people away from the beneficent free market, so what’s left? A massive military and police force for no particular purpose (since libertarians are essentially isolationists)? Burning the money to counter inflation? Rebates and further cuts?
God bless you, Job Creator.
I would expect quite a lot. What, do you think working and middle class folk just keep all their money in savings or in a mattress or something?
I keep all my money in a change jar on my dresser.
The other point, of course, is how much would a slash in the long-term capital gains rate actually help them? I’d bet that most of that money is already in tax-advantaged vehicles.
Indeed, I bought my first shares of mutual funds when I had only been working for a year or so, as soon as I had just a little bit of savings. So I’ve had capital gains and dividends for my entire working life.
However, I’m still voting for Obama for many reasons.
Tax talk is all smoke and mirrors. Spending is key. Whether or not taxes go up, if spending goes up it will be paid for in the long run or else the government will be forced to default or inflate its way out of the debt. Due to the nature and magnitude of debt liabilities the most likely possibility is default. Neither party wants to cut spending in any serious way. Neither party wants to raise taxes in any serious way. The US government will default on its debt. Right now it’s only a matter of when.
I don’t know. I don’t even make six figures, and most of my savings is in index funds, in addition to the tax advantaged Roth and SEP IRAs that I have for myself. The bulk of my money is in non-retirement accounts, as there’s only so much I’m allowed to put into retirement (my Roth and SEPs are maxed out). I don’t think I’m that much a fringe case, am I? My parents have also been the same way, and they make significantly less than I do. Having non-retirement money tied up in the markets is not something only wealthy people do.
Mitt Romney could have a plan to make us all mansion owning millionaire with champagne filled swimming pools that reduced the public debt to zero and I still wouldn’t vote for him because his party is filled with homophobic, misogynistic, religious fanatics.
JFK must have been an evil supply-sider.
Still I imagine a relatively small portion of your income and your tax burden is due to dividends and capital gains. Getting beyod anecdotal evidence here is what it really comes down to: 0.7% of income in the lower 80% versus 38% of income for the top 1%. So a capital gains tax will help the rich and poor alike it, will just help the rich fifty times more.
And what were those tax rates in 1962, btw? I’ll help you out, they ranged from 20% to 91% marginal rates. You see how that can be an entirely different situation, right?
Huh. Top diary on the conservative blog RedState is entitled “The Next President.”
Was it really that good?
What is it with the right that they see things only in black and whilte. If lowering taxes in ose situation is good it must be good in all situations. I will take the bold step for a liberal to agree that the top 91% tax rate of 1962 was too high, and that a tax rate of 77% was a better. That doesn’t tell us anything about the optimal tax rate for today’s economy. The right always like to point to the Laffer curve but it doesn’t really tell us anything.
If the laffer curve was applied to food, you would have on the one hand, if you eat 10 pounds of lard every day you will be unhealthy, on the other hand if you eat nothing you will die. So there must be some amount between nothing and 10 pounds of lard that his most healthy. The conservative conclusion: eating 9 pounds of lard is healthier than eating 8 pounds of lard.
[QUOTE=John F Kennedy]
so long as our national security needs keep rising
[/QUOTE]
Hmm, our national security needs could not be the problem in and of themselves, right? I mean, defense and such are intractably inflationary, right?
Yes, that is correct. I don’t cash out my positions, so no capital gains for me. Dividends, yeah, but dividends are a small portion of the income picture. So a slash in capital gains does nothing for me right now.
Yes, the marginal rates were higher. But the justification is still the same. JFK’s justification was that the tax cuts would prevent another recession while also increasing revenue. And that is what happened. Those who say “tax cuts can never increase revenue” ignore the history.
I am not aware of anyone who ever said that. Clearly, a completely confiscatory tax rate would lead to a perverse lack of incentive that would hamper economic growth. Since we have nothing near that, it is not in issue. In Kennedy’s time, we apparently did have something near that. (I am still a bit skeptical that the Kennedy case is all that clear-cut because I have the impression that those near-confiscatory tax rates were accompanied by lots of loopholes and it may well have been plugging of the loopholes that brought in quite a bit of revenue … I haven’t studied the Kennedy case like I have studied the Reagan and GW Bush cases, so it is only in those latter two cases that I can say with authority that the claim you made earlier in regards to the Reagan tax cuts was complete hogwash. I am glad you are no longer defending such nonsense.)