This may seem superficially fair to people of a certain turn of mind. But I think it will have some pretty undesirable consequences. You’d see further tightening of labor laws to keep the franchise as small as possible so that existing employed people could help themselves to larger pieces of the pie. This in turn would drive less output over time and, sure enough, even fewer jobs. But as long as output contracts slower than employment rate, this would be a great policy for people with jobs. Terrible for “the system,” though.
We could pay for it with a simple poll tax.
As I said, “sort of”. And then went on to explain.
Let’s give them two years to start.
You ignored my “able-bodied”.
Nice try, but what I described has ZERO to do with gender or race. You, whoever you are, want to vote, great—contribute.
Hilarious.
and who gets to decide what constitutes a ‘contribution’? Who makes that call? You?
You raise an interesting point, but I don’t think it’s much of an issue. First, it helps the country to have as much employment as possible. Second, if what you describe began to happen, people could still vote. But there’d not t be a mechanism to account for someone losing their job. Maybe people have to have contribute 3 of the past 5 years. Something like that.
Kind of the way I feel about raising taxes on the rich.
If you’d like. Here a start: you pay tax on your income or you do work in the community in lieu of it.
I was simply commenting that a lot of hard work and pain has gone into gaining the right to vote for every American citizen. I was just surprised to hear such enthusiasm for going the other way. I wasn’t implying that anything you said was race or gender based. Just comparing the hard fought increase in access to voting vs. your proposed decrease. Thats it.
Also, very generous giving the H.S. kid two years to vote for free. So I’m guessing he’ll have to work full time while he goes to college or lose his voting rights then?
There are a lot of policies that would help the country that we do not do for a variety of reasons, many of which concern legislative politics and the structure of our electoral rules. It may help the country to maximize natural employment, but it would help me as an employed person to have a small electorate so that I could capture a bigger share of the benefits that come from controlling the legislature. The benefits to high employment are diffuse to me as an employed person, but the benefits of capturing a larger piece of the electoral pie are concentrated.
We probably don’t want to make it any easier for our politicians to concentrate benefits to small sections of the electorate.
Of course, this sad situation exists only because the wealthy do not pay them a fair wage for their labor…
Your analysis can go circular very quickly, magellan.
To get back to the OP, for those supporting extending the Bush tax cuts, what programs are you going to cut to make them revenue neutral? That seemed to be very important to Republicans in the recent debate over extending unemployment benefits, so I can only assume they intend to include offsets in the legislation so as not to increase the deficit.
DOE, DOL, and HUD gets you $106 billion.
I sincerely hope some GOP members of Congress propose those cuts, and have to explain them to their constituents. Any gains by Republicans in 2010 will be quickly reversed in 2012.
Or the largest defense department in the known universe?
Not as big a gotcha as you might’ve thought (though national defense, unlike education, is properly a federal function).
But sure – cut any funds for Iraq, and cut pork barrel unneeded crap like the syupid Osprey.
The repubs told the people what they would do and why. Yet people persist with the idea is is about giving people more money. The ones like Nordquist who explained the concept have lots and lots of money. Cutting taxes, raising taxes, doubling taxes ,does not matter to the kind of money they have. It is chicken feed. They had an agenda and they achieved it. They have fundamentally changed the nature of America and they are not done yet. They installed the haves into a much stronger and more entitled position in the country. They have gutted the money and power of the middle class who presumed they should have some impact in how the country is run. They have taken much of the security and arrogance away from many once fairly powerful people.
When they hear people arguing that the rich should not be taxed more it is music to their ears. We once taxes the upper class at 90 percent. The country did not crumble. Americans still created and built things. To many the challenge and creativity is the point of what they do. Money is a reward but when they get rich they are often surprised by how much they have. We create for many reasons of which money is merely one and not the most important.
Good blog post by Martin Wolf on the “political genius of supply-side economics.”
I was just about to post that. Bush and the repubs have put us in financial jeopardy and if they get back in power it will get worse.
I understand the sentiment and I agree. I think EVERYONE should pay something into the system. It is destructive to a democracy to have a group of voters who contribute who make no sacrifice, no matter how small, to the system. Most of the bottom 50% do largely in the form of payroll taxes. If you look at income taxes alone it looks pretty stark. The bottom 50% (HALF THE COUNTRY) pays 2% of income taxes while the top 2% pays 50% of income taxes. When we include payroll taxes the poor still pay a lot less (because they are poor) but their effective tax rate does not seem disproportionately low for anyone that believes progressivity has any role at all in taxation.
You can do that with great works of art, why not with some of God’s work as well?
We simply cannot provide a millionaire’s medical care to every child, we provide the medical care that is in society’s interest to provide (or we will when we get a single payer system) but that millionaire is going to be able to purchase more medical care for his children than the average Joe, its one of the things that comes with a capitalistic society and I’m not sure that its bad as long as we provide the average Joe’s child with reasonably good health care. The same can be said for education, everyone should have access to a good one but the rich will always be able to send their kids to travel through the great museums of the world and go to high schools where the teachers all have doctorates.
We don’t tax the rich more than the poor because of marginal propensities to spend or save. We tax the rich more than the poor because of marginal utility. I remember when I made $800/month and I had about $120/month withheld. That $120, changed my lifestyle significantly. After law school, I made $$15000/month. They withheld $7000, I could have had a bigger house but I would have eaten the same food, worn the same clothes, engaged in the same leisure as I would have if I didn’t pay taxes. If you increased by taxes by $120/month I wouldn’t have even noticed it unless you told me.
The only thing more destructive to modern democracy than voters who make no sacrifices is restricting the franchise from the poor, its a good way to keep them poor.
I sense conservative consensus is forming on a pretty bad idea.
The Bush era cuts NEVER funded a massive government. The Bush tax cut not only gave away the Clinton era surpluses, they created huge deficits (the argument was that the tax cuts would pay for themselves so those deficits were illusory).
There is simply no way to get to a balanced budget from where we are to where we need to be without a tax increase UNLESS the Republicans want to try and take a crack at cutting medicare, social security or military spending. I’m sure the Democrats won’t beat them over the head with it the way the Republicans beat the Democrats over the head when the Democrats tried to get rid of waste in medicare.
I agree that we need the stock market to provide liquidity for the folks who buy IPOs and we need speculation to absorb excess demand or supply of a commodity, but we don’t need the whole system to revolve around facilitating speculation and trading rather than investing.
True but the regulatory disincentives have withered quite a bit.
If you are going to whine about a 15% ltcg rate then we are really too far apart to have a reasonable discussion.
Capital markets isn’t what caused the closing of the gap. Not by a long shot. The capital markets are crucial for capital formation (they are the main reason society no longer need rich individuals when we can all own a small peice of a really rich corporation).
There is always another qualified person who will step into your job. The rich like the poor will always be with us. We couldn’t get rid of either if we tried.
The rich have threatened to leave the country if taxes go up since Eisenhower but we seem to keep growing more of them even when tax rates were at 90%.
The rich will always be with us, we shouldn’t abuse them but frankly they have been acting like soccer players. (I watched some soccer this year and it became obvious that whining was a soccer skill). Suck it up, play the game or get off the field, theres another guy sitting on the bench that wants to take your place and he’s just as good as you.
I think he’s whining about the 15% capital gains rate as well. He just feels very put upon by the fact that he is paying more money in taxes than some people make and it just doesn’t seem fair.
I think it might be states.
Do you understand how AMT works? Its like a minimum flat tax at about 28%.
Do you understand how the phaseout works?
“if in 2006 your AGI is $250,500, your itemized deductions will be reduced by $2,000.”
Much inherited wealth was never taxed in the hands of the decedent.
And YES the $10 to your nephew is income, but they don’t get taxed on it until they receive over $11,000(?) from one source in a given year or from someone who died.
The best argument for estate taxes is that the folks getting the money didn’t do a damn thing to earn that money and all it does is perpetuate dynastic accumulations of wealth.
It may be right but they are not rights. They are certainly not inalienable rights, heck even inalienable rights aren’t inalienable rights (just ask the blacks and indians).
Huerta88:
Yeah I thought that was fucking ridiculous too.
Diminished marginal utility doesn’t mean NO marginal utility.
The tax bill is determined (or at least should be) by the amount of spending we do. The tax code determines how that burden is borne. Society has determined that the burden should be borne by those who can best bear it. In other words the rich bear a disproportionately high share of the burden because they Can while the poor bear a miniscule portion of the burden because the burden of that miniscule contribution is magnified because of their poverty (I do agree they should pay SOMETHING).
Since Jesus has been brought up, I will note that Jesus understood the concept of marginal utility when a poor woman put a penny into the offering plate and the disciples scoffed at her. Jesus immediately chastised them and said that the pennies from the poor old woman meant more to God than a lot of money from a really rich guy because the pennies represented more of a sacrifice. (I’m paraphrasing). He was using it in the context of sacrifice but it is directly applicable to the concept of marginal utility.
I appreciate the notion of making sacrifices for your government but the notion of the franchise being pay to play seems a bit at odds with our history and democratic tradition.
You say that like there is some country that has a tradition of equality.
I think he’s saying that the march of democracy has always expanded the franchise to more and more people and the notion of restricting it from poor people seems at odds with our tradition.
Yeah I woulda never guessed 
Its a drop in the bucket compared to the multi trillion dollar cost of extending the tax cuts. You simply cannot cut enough spending to pay for those tax cuts unless you are ready to cut deep into military spending, social security and medicare/medicaid.