Based on what?
Ok, well then, I think you’re wrong.
I’m using a term from microeconomics (and not what you are probably thinking about in terms of “welfare checks” etc.). Social welfare is one way of talking about the loss or gain in economic benefit that comes from distorting a market (whether by taxation, price caps, creating a new market, etc.)
It’s a subject which I would think you’d want some more familiarity with before declaring things like “tax reductions increase revenues.”
Quite right. But the idea that the effects of reducing taxation are so big that they actually directly increase revenues is, well, sort of silly. We’re nowhere NEAR the place on the Laffer Curve where that makes sense, nor was the size of the the tax cuts large enough to create radical enough changes in people’s behavior.
IdahoMauleMan, your assertions fail to comprehend a very basic point: if you are increasing spending at the same time you are decreasing relative revenue, you are increasing the deficit. The exact same spending policies, without the tax cuts, would have resulted in smaller deficits. And the fact that revenues increased even with the tax cuts only means that the economy was humming along fast enough that revenues rose. But your assertions would only have some value if spending was on track to rise at that same rate, absent new spending initiatives.
The Republican Party, during the period in charge of both branches that control spending, vastly increased the deficit. They did so by a combination of spending increases (in large part resulting from the “War” on terror, the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, etc.) and tax cuts. It was NOT a time to be making tax cuts, unless you don’t mind having increased deficits.
It’s probably more than just the loss of revenue… The way the politicians’ pasts are scrutinized, he probably doesn’t anyone poking around his personal bone closet with a spotlight.
I am not challenging the notion that Republicans increased spending, and that increased the deficit. I am not supporting the Republican-controlled stewardship of spending in any way, shape or form.
I am challenging the notion that the tax cuts made things worse. I am asserting that the Republican deficit would have been worse without tax cuts.
Ok, I think we all get that now. But as we all noted, we think you’re wrong, and most of us explained why we think you’re wrong, including even some cites to some conservative economists who disagree with the assertion.
never mind
He’d have to take a pay cut. He has a $400 million dollar empire running right now, chugging away putting money in his pocket. All he has to do is go into the studio once a day and bloviate.
If he ran for office, he’d have to WORK…and earn around 1% of what he makes now for it.
Besides, here’s the secret. Rush doesn’t care about the Republican party. Rush cares about Rush.
And what reputable economist believes that any more?
It’s like the Laffer Curve – nobody knows what it’s supposed to look like; everybody accepts the premise that 0% tax means zero revenue and 100% tax also means zero revenue, but everything in between is shrouded in a fog and nobody even claims any more to know how to calculate that optimal maximum-revenue point.
They need to realize that this “pandering to the extreme right” is what got them into this mess. Sooner or later, people start to drift away because they feel they are being ignored, or excluded. Surprise, surprise. the strength of a party is not found in the extremes or the fringes, or the far edges of the bell curve. It is in the middle of the bell curve, where the “normal” people are. They need to realize that if a party does not represent their interests, people can and will leave.
They have been tossing the wrong people out. They have been listening to the wrong people. They need to return to the middle. It was never the super rich or the ideologue or the religious fanatic that made the party, it was the “commoner”, the guy in the middle.
It’s really hard to tell if you’re being deliberately obtuse or if you don’t get basic financial concepts. In 2000, you have two choices. Decrease taxes or do not decrease taxes. In both cases, tax receipts will increase in absolute terms in the future. You’re right that an absolute increase in tax receipts is good for your equation.
The real question is, which choice would result in incrementally more revenue? If we cut taxes, tax receipts go up by $100. If we don’t cut taxes, receipts go up by $400. Nobody is saying the tax cuts lost tax money in absolute terms. Receipts increased by $100. We’re saying that if we’d not cut taxes, they have gone up by $400. There’s $300 not received that could have helped avoid deficit spending.
Do you see the difference?
There’s a bunch of cites showing that this is exactly what happened with real numbers. You keep bringing up the absolute increase as if it’s relevant somehow, but it isn’t.
He’s asserting that revenue wouldn’t have gone up, or up as much, had there been no tax cuts. In other words, he’s still holding to the concept that a tax cut equates to more tax receipts.
I don’t think he’s actually asserting that. Though I agree one could assert that, and if they had evidence to support it, it would be a valid point.
Actually there was a third option in 2001 - decrease taxes to actually help the economy. (There was a recession going on, so cutting taxes wasn’t utterly stupid.) The tax cuts that happened, for the rich, might increase investment - but after the bubble the problem was over capacity, not lack of investment, so the cuts that were put into place were stupid. Cutting taxes for the lower part of the income distribution would have increased consumption and grew the economy much faster.
This leads to a situation analogous to the tax one. During that period there was job growth. However, the growth did not equal the number of new workers coming into the economy, so unemployment increased, just as deficits increased because spending increases faster. As for IMMs assertion, I think voodoo economics still covers it well. Only a true believer could still believe that nonsense at this point. Sure lots of Republicans still do, but I think the public has wised up.
If the Republicans were serious about this stuff, they’d have cut spending before cutting taxes. They don’t because they know cutting spending is politically impossible, and so they’d never cut taxes. Only someone living in political la la land would think otherwise.
I think he’s right in many cases, but I think he’s better at finding fault than coming up with solutions himself.
The first thing the Republicans should do is distance themselves from the anti-immigration crowd. The Democrats have been trying to wake that Latino sleeping giant. The Republicans are becoming very much the party of the South and rural West. Listening to Republicans rant about illegal immigration reminds people of their grandfather blaming everything on Mexicans.
I don’t hear anyone going on about immigration that much considering Mexicans are leaving in droves. There is of course the consideration that the Mexican civil war is being fought in the cul-de-sacs of Phoenix.
Besides it’s better to be Kingmaker than King. Kings have to take responsibility, Kingmakers just need to be ready to replace the King.
I am actually asserting that. I am pointing to the evidence of
-
lower tax rates, and a more simplified tax structure, as increasing tax revenues following the Bush tax cuts and the Reagan tax act
-
The long-term trend of government revenues that equal approximately 18% of GDP, through wildly varying tax regimes. Suggesting that finding the tax rate that maximizes GDP growth is optimal. I would find it curious if someone argued that higher taxes stimulated GDP growth.
Opposing points to my argument include the marginal tinkering at the higher end during the Clinton years, which didn’t seem to damp income tax receipts all that much. It’s something definitely worth debating.
Sure, who among them is going to do that? The RR and the Limbaugh listeners are the party’s base now. * They’re *the decision-makers. Do you expect them to just shut up and hide while the party regroups around Olympia Snowe?
How do you expect anyone not to compare that rhetoric with the results of the recent GOP virtual monopoly? *What *growth did they achieve? *What *regulation did they not gut or flout?
The real world is against you on that one, pal. Most people know it, too.
After all these decades in operation of the GOP’s big-money “think tanks”, they haven’t produced anything along those lines at all. If “they are possible”, how about a hint or two about what they might consist of, *before *this claim of yours that they’ll be attractive? Puppies for everyone might be attractive too; the GOP could develop that approach to popularity too, just as realistically.
That would only reconfirm the Democrats as the party of responsibility.
Even you seem to acknowledge that they do not have such “reasonable approaches”. How could they, if the driving attitudes behind modern Republicanism are based on repudiation of the very concept of community organization and responsibility in favor of “entrepreneurial capitalism”, and refusal to accept the Tragedy of the Commons as a real phenomenon, and for that matter personal hatred of Al Gore and derision at everything he says.
In short, you need the Republicans to repudiate the core of what is now their very being.