‘Massive increases in the standard of living’ for whom? The decades of the 80s and 90s brought massive increases in hunger, homelessness and poverty along with spectacular income advancement for the rich. To the extent the 1970s was the last decade in which the average family could get by on the average workingman’s paycheck, the standard of living for the majority of Americans has actually significantly decreased.
What’s lit the fire under the liberal’s collective asses and propelled Dean to the forefront of the Democratic primary is the collective recognition that we’re descending into a society whose government is dominated by corporations (aka a burgeoning fascism).
The invasion of Iraq for the purpose of seizing its assets and dividing its economy among the “coalition of the bellicose” (even the President has abandoned the excuse that weapons of mass destruction had anything to do with it) was an unmistakable symptom of despotism, raising the stakes of this election beyond partisan bickering to a referendum on the future of the nation itself.
One way to read this (the way you are) is to say that they are claiming that 52% of the cumulative tax cuts up through 2010 will go to the richest 1%. I must admit that their use of the word “total” could lead you to assume this.
However, I would argue that a more logical way to interpret this, in light of the first clause, is that the 52% figure is a statement about the tax cuts in that year and that “total” simply refers to all of Bush’s tax cuts…and does not imply we are taking a cumulative total of all years up to 2010. If you look at some other info from CTJ, I think that you will find that this intepretation is indeed the correct one.
I’ll admit that their wording was not completely clear on this point but hopefully now that we have it settled, you will no longer make the claim that the tax cuts cost $97 billion per year. And, that you will also understand the difference between averaging over a phase-in period and looking at the tax cuts once totally in place (especially given that the newly passed 2003 cuts, not included in this analysis, make the phase-ins faster in addition to adding more tax cuts such as the cut in the dividends tax rate).
Geez, now I realize that we could have avoided all this argument about the cost of the tax cuts if you just linked to the most recent CTJ analysis of the Bush cuts. This link gives the cost of the tax cuts in each calendar year, either counting or not counting interest on the debt. What could possibly be simpler!?! [The only question I have is if this is in 2003 dollars or, if not, what sort of inflation rate they are assuming.]
Note that my estimate of $200-250 billion a year on full implementation was considerably south of the mark if sunsets don’t kick in. In 2010, the tax cuts cost $234 billion in that year with sunsets and $449 billion without the sunsets! If you add in the interest you have to pay in the additional debt, this rises to $328 billion and $580 billion, respectively.
[My apologies for vastly underestimating the sort of fiscal train wreck the tax cuts set us up for if we actually do as Bush wants and get rid of the sunset provisions!]
My bad on the WorldCom/Enron mix-up. But I think my ponit is still valid. You didn’t give a reason for why “Enron” was proof that businesses needed more regulation. I assumed you meant it was because of the investors who last their money. Was that incorrect? If it was, what was your reason for stating that more regulation is needed?
So i take it when America gets attacked again and planes fly into the Sears tower, you will be all “Ho-hum, seen it before, the Dept of Homeland Security will deal with it. That’s the solution with capitalism.”
Here is CTJ’s take on how the CBO’s deficit projections get altered once you consider this sort of stuff. Note that the baseline deficit figures that CTJ starts with as a baseline are different than what Ravenman quoted because they look at what CBO calls the “on-budget” deficit rather than the on-budget + off-budget deficit. Does anybody recall the difference? I think it might have to do with the surplus being run by social security…I think the total deficit counts in that surplus (thus reducing the deficit number) while the “on-budget” part considers the deficit that is being run in the rest of the government besides S.S. I.e., at the moment, the government is essentially borrowing from the social security trust fund and the question is how to count that.
The “off-budget” is any of the trust funds: SS, Medicare, the highway trust fund, etc. There’s probably other stuff in there too. Once you include these, the apparent size of the deficit decreases, as all of these are running surpluses.
Anyway, two points:
1 - For Sam Stone to think that opposition to regulation is a “moderate” position is weird. In this country, anyway, it was a Republican named Teddy Roosevelt who’s name comes up as the first President to be concerned with two things: regulation of business and conservation of the environment. Opposition to these things is the mark of a far right agenda, in my world. Nothing moderate about it at all.
2 - Dean represents the maximalist position of the left, on both Iraq and the tax cuts, which is why he is garnering so much support. Realistically, should he get elected, he will be dealing, unless the math changes radically, with a solidly Republican House and Senate. So even for moderate Democrats supporting Dean right through to the election will be more likely to get them their moderate agenda than anything the left is looking for, just because of what the realities of DC will be next year regardless.
Should Bush be re-elected with a Republican House and Senate, we’d be facing four years of unrestricted Republican rule. If the Senate winds up filibuster-proof as well, I’m buying gold with both hands and all four of my dog’s feet, because I’m firmly convinced they’ll bankrupt this country twice over.
Alright, I see what they did. It was very tricky - they confused the issue of when the tax cuts go into effect with the total benefit of the tax cuts.
Over ten years, the top 1% will pay a total of $477 billion less in taxes. That is roughly 40% of the total, ten year tax cut of $1.3 trillion.
But remember that the tax cuts are phased in. In the year 2010 alone, Americans will pay $234 billion less in taxes than the year before. In that year, the top 1% will pay $121 billion less in taxes – that is, in 2010, the richest will reap 52% of all that tax cuts in that year, which is the year in which the phase-in of all taxes will be complete.
So, this group that wrote that little summary was mixing apples and oranges in not clearly distinguishing the figures $477 billion and 52%.
But if you look at the tables toward the top of the page, the overall numbers are the most accurate in terms of who benefits from the 2001 tax cuts.
You’re basing your counting of Dean’s tax policy based on the deficit of 2003. The first year that a Dean presidency would have any effect on the deficit would be 2006 (he submits a budget in February 2005, enacted by the fall of 2005, and goes into effect in 2006). The 2003 deficit of $450-odd billion will be history by then, so it’s pointless to use that number.
My bad - I should have said that you only showed that he’d increase spending by ±$65 billion in each of the first two years of his Administration. In other words, by roughly $130 billion over two years.
Yeah, that was my guess at how many Americans would remain if 100,000 foreign troops went to Iraq.
But I’ll give you this: if Dean was successful in bringing 100,000 foreign troops to Iraq, and still maintained 110,000 US troops at the same time, I’d be pissed off at him.
As I noted, this number is true with the new 2003 cuts in place only if all the sunsets in the tax cuts are allowed to happen. (For example, the whole cut in dividend tax rates now goes away after a few years.) If these tax cuts are extended, as Bush has expressed the desire they should be, then this number increases to $449 billion. And, that doesn’t count interest on the additional debt produced by the tax cuts.
As they say, a hundred billion dollars here, a hundred billion dollars there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money!
jshore/ - good call again, as you have made several times previous in this thread.
And, just to respond with my own point of trivia, when Everett Dirksen made that “pretty soon you’re talking real money” comment, he was actually talking about millions of dollars. How things have changed…
Does that include possible AMT relief?
I thought about this some more, and figured out that after I did my tax planning last year, I delayed taking some options until this year, figuring that by the time I file next year, if the Republicans are still in power, they’ll pass some form of cut to this. The Center on Budget Policies and Priorities more or less assumes they will.
So it emerges that their failure to do much of anything about this provision is actually, BTW, a bit of a Machiavellian twist to get a cut in later, when more people are affected. To which I added my own little bit of delaying, both because I figured the options would be worth more this year and because I figured I’d wind up being taxed less on them.
I’ve got to believe that any realistic cut on this one is going to swell the deficit by quite a bit.
And then there’s military spending. I have to apologize that I don’t have a cite handy for the below, but I have it saved as a spreadsheet I downloaded from a government site on the budget, and that site did an amazingly good job of hiding the military budget line. I had to search really hard for it, and from what I remember had to total up some lines to get the total figure, because they didn’t do it for you.
Anyway, keeping in mind that the 2004 figure is a projection:
1999: 261,380,000.00
2004: 370,707,000.00
This spreadsheet shows the figure continuing to increase beyond that. Just the difference here is worth more than 100 billion dollars.
To emphasize again, terrorism is NOT a military problem, for the most part. It was made into one, but any realistic plan to combat it involves intelligence and police work for the most part, NOT the military. So spare me justifications for the above based on terrorism.
The numbers I have quoted do not assume any AMT relief, as far as I understand…They are only the Bush tax cut provisions actually enacted. The one cite I gave above (here it is again) to a CTJ analysis of future deficits did look at what they considered to be a more realistic CBO deficit scenario than the baseline scenario. And, that scenario did include AMT relief in it. Under this scenario, the on-budget deficits in the 2010-2013 years were, roughly speaking, around $1 trillion a year. The surplusses in the social security trust fund will be running ~$300 billion at this point which means (assuming this makes up most of the off-budget stuff) that the total (on-budget + off-budget) deficit will be in the neighborhood of $700 billion a year. [Unfortunately, they don’t separate out AMT relief from extending the Bush tax cuts…i.e., getting rid of the sunsets…but these two items together account for $216 billion of the deficit in 2010 rising to $433 billion in 2013. And this does not include the increase in interest payments due to the additional debt incurred by these adjustments.]
pantom:
Are your options ISOs? If not, AMT is not an issue. Also, assuming AMT doesn’t change (and I don’t think it will), you tax differential is worse the lower the tax brackets are in the regular code.
Are you aware of any plans to increase the “deduction” you take when you figure AMT? Last I checked it was something like $33k.
No offense meant if you’ve already figured all this out.
Of course it’s a military problem. As long as terrorists have the support of other states, the military must be involved. You can not send FBI agents into Pakistan to break up a cell that is protected by the government.
Trying to solve the problem of terrorism with police is like moving next to a hive of bees and ‘solving’ the problem by trying to swat bees before they sting you. At some point, I suggest looking for the hive. And when you do, it helps to be armored.
pantom said “for the most part”. I think he’s right on that. We had to go into Afghanistan as a military action, but much of the rest of the “war on terror” is police (intelligence and spy) work. We’re dealing with a widely dispersed network of cells. The military can go against training camps, but getting the guys who are the going to commit the next act of terrorism is police work.
I appreciate the clarifications from all who have analysed the figures.
I have not forgotten this thread, but unfortunately my employers want me to waste time working instead of arguing on the Internet. I hope to return here eventually.
To add to the mix, I understand that Dean promised to balance the budget “in the sixth or seventh year of his administration”, which apparently got a big laugh from his audience, and that he is currently considering some kind of “middle class tax relief”. I would like to include these assumptions in further analysis of Dean’s economics.
