Speaking of this, I actually did a double-take at the length of that pause before he started to answer. It seemed like hours.
That debate went about how I expected it would. Biden came out with high energy, but he didn’t make Ryan look bad. There wasn’t a hands-down winner. I can see the argument for either side thinking they won. Biden is taking heat for his immature antics, but I completely see why he acted that way. The best he could have hoped for was to re-energize supporters that were somewhat dejected after Obama’s lackluster performance. I think he did that. Ryan, meanwhile, just had to keep his cool, not look uncomfortable and not make any big mistakes. So really, both sides probably felt like they accomplished what they wanted to.
Well it must take a longggg time to muster up malarky for Romney, since Eddie always maintained that* how* a child was conceived doesn’t change his definition of “life”
and therefore always ruled out rape, incest or threat to the life of the mother as credible reasons for terminating a pregnancy.
Thanks. Yeah, not the best zinger, but Ryan set it up for him.
(emphasis added)
You mean the one from the Congressional Budget Office, I presume? Thats the only one that called the plan “impossible”? Just the one, then?
Be that as it may, Ryan did call out to six studies which he claimed “debunked” the CBO’s report. From the Washington Posts concurrent fact-checking blog:
If we are generous, we can fairly say that these are six opinions. I’m inclined to regard the Heritage Foundation as hopelessly partisan, your mileage may vary. But to offer these as six “studies” on a par with, or equal to, the Congressional Budget Office is an exercise in disinformation.
It would be fair to notice that Ryan merely tossed this nugget of horseshit into the stew without much emphasis. It is so noticed.
In that I think pro-life people who would make exceptions for anything are some of the biggest hypocrites in the world, I admire Ryan in the context of not believing* any exceptions should exist.
*That is what he believes, isn’t it? I can’t keep track.
Of course, the Democrats keep referring to ‘tax cuts’, while Ryan and Romney are talking about tax RATE cuts. There’s a big difference. As they said, if you cut rates, but also cut loopholes, you can do it in a revenue-neutral manner.
Now, can you cut rates 20% and still maintain revenue with loophole removal? I’m not sure. And could they get the political support to remove large loopholes like the home mortgage deduction? Probably not. Almost certainly not in that specific case. So the Obama campaign is perfectly right to raise this as a problem.
Biden missed the obvious retort to the Kennedy/Reagan comparisons: They reduced rates that were VERY HIGH. In Kennedy’s case, he reduced the top marginal rate from 90% to about 70%. I don’t think anyone today thinks that a 90% tax rate is a good idea, or even a 70% tax rate. And I think that most economists would agree that cutting top marginal rates from 90% to 70% would have a bigger growth effect than cutting rates from 35% to 28%.
In any event, Romney and Ryan should either stop using specific numbers like 20%, or they should probably provide more details as to what they would cut. Providing details of loophole cuts is a stupid idea now, because A) you have to get agreement from a divided congress, which is a setup for broken campaign promises, and B) any cut you offer up now will be used as ammo by the opposition.
So, Romney should just reformulate his tax plan in terms of general principles: “We’re going to cut as many loopholes as we can possibly get Congress to agree with, and I’m going to push hard to get those cuts. Then we’re going to take the revenue from those cuts and use it to lower the tax rate across the board by an amount that gets us a revenue-neutral result. That may be a 5% cut, or it may be a 25% cut, but that’s the direction a Romney administration will push for - a broader tax base, fewer loopholes for the rich and politically connected, and a fairer, more efficient tax system.”
I’m surprised they didn’t go in that direction in the first place. They should have known that offering specific numbers for the tax cut while providing nothing but generalities on the loopholes they’d remove was going to give the Obama campaign a weapon to use against them.
Cutting rates while canceling deductions can be revenue-neutral, but that doesn’t make it neutral for any given individual’s taxes. Instead, even assuming the sort of equipoise Romney/Ryan claim to be able to achieve, it means that some people’s taxes will go up while other will go down, depending on what deductions they were previously claiming.
For me, it would be a massive tax cut. We take very few deductions. But that means for every person like me, there’s another taking a big hit, or three more taking medium-sized hits.
Now, they can focus those hits on the rich, but isn’t that against their entire governing philosophy? If their plan is to effectively tax the rich more while cutting effective rates for the middle class, how exactly does it differ from Obama’s proposal? Is there some school of economic thought that says paper rates and not effective rates are what matter?
My favorite line of the night:
Ryan: “If we tax every millionaire in the country at 100%, it would run the country for just 98 days. Look out middle class! They’re coming after YOU!”
Biden: ?
Then its not somewhere in between now is it?
$20,000 wouldn’t even cover employer provided health benefits for some people.
The left seemed to largely agree with you on this point during the last debate. Obama lost the debate, Romney didn’t win it.
The reason Ryanm has so much trouble with facts is because he likes to lay things out in detail and Republican ideas don’t look like they can work unless you are looking at the 50,000 foot view with foggy goggles on.
5% is just not very inspiring.
If you were a millionaire in the 1950’s paying a marginal tax rate of 90%, the JFK tax cut just TRIPLED your after tax income on your marginal income.
Reagan’s FIRST tax cut ALMOST DOUBLED your after-tax returns on your marginal income.
Going from 35% to 28% increases your after tax marginal income by maybe 10%. Its just not going to have anywhere near the effect that JFK or Reagan’s tax cuts had and they are going to be much more destructive to federal revenues than either of those cuts.
With the exception of the home interest deduction, most loopholes will disproportionately hurt the rich and the largest corporations. They’re the ones who make the most use of tax loopholes.
The difference is in how the rates are collected, and in the effect they have on the economy and incentivizing bad behavior.
When you raise tax rates, you do two things: First, you make the incentive for tax-avoidance greater, ensuring that more people will engage in it. Second, you raise the value of the loopholes that exist, pushing more marginal cases into taking advantage of them. What also usually happens when rates are increased is that lobbyists scream at the government for exceptions, and the government responds by creating even more loopholes. In the end, you may not get much more in revenue, but you now have an economy where more people are acting in ways that avoid taxes instead of increasing revenue.
You can clearly see this with the corporate tax rate. The corporate rate creeps upwards, large businesses get exemptions and credits and loopholes, and the effective tax rate remains low. The U.S. collects corporate tax as if the rate was about 13.5%, even though the top federal statutory rate is 35% - the highest of any major country in the world.
To get the effective rate that low, large corporations have carved out thousands of tax exemptions and loopholes for themselves. Billions of dollars are parked offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.
So who pays the full 35%? Small and medium sized businesses - the ones who can’t afford lobbyists or who have billions of dollars they can park offshore.
So the Democrat’s answer to this is to raise the statutory rate higher, which will increase the incentive to engage in even more tax avoidance. We’d much rather have companies basing their decisions on improving productivity and revenue. The economy would be stronger.
So the Romney plan is to do the opposite. If the effective tax rate is 13.5%, and it’s obtained by people acting to avoid taxes instead of in the most economically efficient way, it would be far better for the economy if you maintained the effective rate by lowering loopholes, then using that revenue to lower the statutory rate.
Paradoxically, it’s also a more ‘progressive’ strategy, because it takes away the advantage the very rich and powerful have in shaping tax policy to their benefit.
I also want to point out that Republican policy is NOT defined by how much you can lower taxes on the rich. In fact, ‘supply siders’ believe that when you lower taxe rates, the total amount of tax you will collect from the rich goes UP, even if the percentage of their income they pay in tax goes down, because their income goes up enough due to growth and a reduction in tax avoidant activity to more than compensate for the rate decrease.
What Republicans believe is that you cannot grow an economy by burdening the most productive members of that economy with higher tax rates. Now, it’s true that in the past some Republicans turned this into a reflexive ‘protect the rich’ attitude, but that has changed rapidly in the past 12 years or so. One of the big changes I’ve seen in the Republican Party is a new appreciation for the dangers of crony capitalism, and how there are many rich people who are using the power of government to enrich themselves.
I honestly believe this is one area where Republicans and Democrats can find some common ground. I think both sides can agree that crony capitalism is a bad thing, and that ‘capitalists’ who run to the government to protect them from the market need to have their wings clipped. Whatever the tax rate is, I would hope that we can all agree that taxes should be fairly applied and that the very wealthy or the very powerful should not get preferential tax treatment.
It worked for Obama, didn’t it? Remember how he was for government transparency before he was for throwing laws from WWI about espionage at whistleblowers?
What’s that saying, “Politics is the art of the possible”? Its absurd to call a right-winger a hypocrite for moving indisputably closer to what they want to achieve when the left-wingers can say with a straight face that single-payer health insurance and giving private insurers a captive customer base with their mandate are both in the same direction.
It does! No shit?! All of it?!! I gasp, I swoon, I clutch my pearls and faint dead away. Yes, pearls. I rock a little black dress, eat your heart out.
Do they know about this, have you been in touch with the Romney people? That their plan voids and nullifies the political power of the rich to bend the rules their way? While I was prepared to be pleased if the Republicans should happen to stumble into the light, I was not prepared for this. Has Gov Romney been knocked off a donkey recently, perhaps after that left turn at Albuquerque? I’m somewhat pessimistic, and skeptical of surprises. Especially great big ones.
Its too many for me, I fold.
Yes, it is.
Even they don’t believe that any more. The intelligent ones that is. However, enough people hate social rights enough that they overlook that and vote for them anyway.
Corporate tax and income tax are two different things. When we talk about the Romney plan to cut rates by 20% and close loopholes, we’re talking about the latter. And in that category, unless you’re talking in terms of absolute saving and not percentage savings, I think your claim is false. Got a cite?
The rest of your post is addressed to why it’s better to raise effective rates by cutting loopholes rather than by raising rates. Some of your arguments are correct and some are not (like tax avoidance being a consequence of paper rates not effective rates, or people choosing to take a deduction based on anything but whether it saves them money or not), but it’s beside the point because Barack Obama doesn’t disagree with you. If Obama wins, the compromise on spending and revenue is highly likely to involve closing loopholes in a way that focuses on the rich.
The principal dispute between the parties is not whether it’s a good idea to cut loopholes while lowering rates. That’s been agreed to in principle for a long time. The principal dispute is whether this should be done in a weigh that primarily raises the effective rates of the rich or not. Obama says yes, Romney says no.
Read again what I wrote. I’m not calling out anyone specific as a hypocrite. I’m saying since Ryan is pro-life and doesn’t believe in exceptions, that I respect him for it. If you believe life begins at conception, then making exceptions is hypocritical. This has nothing to do with right vs. left.
My impression of the debate as a Romney/Ryan supporter:
Biden impressed me with his knowledge and his debating skills. He is experienced and capable. Ryan showed that he was no pushover, and parried Joe’s assaults fairly well. He tired at the end and Joe scored a few points.
Biden’s laughs and smirks for the first half an hour were very off putting and disrespectful. I don’t care if you are Albert Einstein debating Jessica Simpson. You listen her speak and then firmly rebut her assertions. Laughing and mocking are marks of someone who is insecure in his own positions and has to resort to petty insults.
The sad part is that Biden was more than capable enough to spar with Ryan without doing that. Without the smirks a modest Biden win. With the smirks a bloody and meaningless draw.
I don’t think Biden did that because he thought Ryan was beneath his contempt, I think he did it because that’s what Obama supporters wanted to see.
What if you’re Albert Einstein debating the Iraqi Information Minister?
A weaker opponent is worthy of respect. An opponent that cheats is not.