This is true, however there are several arguments against this. Some economic, some more philosophical:
-Redistribution punishes those who are successful and rewards those who aren’t.
-It creates market distortions. IOW, it can encourage growth in goods and services the government thinks people want and need at the expense of industries they actually want and need.
-It makes the economy less flexible and adaptable to change. While losing your job sucks, obsolete businesses need to either adapt or go out of business so their resources (labor and capital) can be put to more productive use elsewhere in the economy.
Of course the flip side is that social safety nets turn what could be life-altering disasters into temporary setbacks and inconveniences. Money spent helping keep poor people from becoming unemployed and homeless is better than money spent on additional police and prisons.
Also, government does have a role in building and maintaining national infrastructure. It’s hard to have private sector businesses if there are no roads or rail or power connecting them.
This attitude is so hopelessly incorrect, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
First: It is Republicans Reagan and Bush-43 who are noted for deficit spending in recent times. To blame Obama for the tax cuts(*) he adopted to counter the financial crisis of 2007-2008 shows … [checks forum] a failure of perspective.
Second: The “liberals” (e.g. FDR and BHO) who adopted deficit spending did so not because it is a responsible long-term fiscal policy, but rather in spite of the fact it is not. Even you know this much, Shodan. Why the urge to misrepresent?
(* - And yes, the $800 billion “Obama stimulus” largely took the form of tax cuts and other transfer payments. Right-wingers ignore this fact so they can propagandize the stimulus as “liberal spending.”)
It sounds good to the little guy and the fat cat both. Everyone pays tax; few want to pay more, or even as much tax.
The average voter doesn’t question “fiscal responsibility” - they think of it as living within one’s means.
The wealthy voter understands it’s a smoke and mirrors term to get the useful idiots on board for policies that favor him. The “responsibility” always starts at the bottom, ends somewhere in the upper middle, and is selectively applied to programs of the “irresponsible by nature” center-left.
The idea is that limiting government revenue will limit government spending, the way a business or household would work. There are so many problems with the model it’s barely worth discussing.
You want a case study? California’s Prop 13. Study it well. The taxpayers revolted, slashed property taxes to a permanently negligible level… and basically destroyed the seventh-largest economy in the world. Nearly all of California’s current deep woes trace to the economic adaptation of having a revenue stream removed. (In short, the revenue had to come from somewhere to support the state’s needs; it came in the form of enormous slush-fund economics where all taxes and revenue are poured into a common pool that has very limited controls and oversight, instead of differing revenue streams for different purposes, each with focused oversight.)
You don’t fuck with the military - you need their worldview and their mindset. When the chips are down, you want that manly, martial, obedient sector of society to grow in influence, to provide a feeling of strong secure patriotism and a bulwark against enemies within and without.
Perhaps conservatives think these things because they stick their fingers in their ears and squinch up their eyes very tightly whenever the evidence tells them otherwise.
For instance, they recently forced the Congressional Research Service to take down a report on the outcomes of reductions in the top tax rate because they didn’t like the conclusions.
So it’s OKAY/Responsible for Reagan and Bush to cut taxes to counter financial crises, but wrong/irresponsible for Obama to cut taxes (see above on the nature of the ‘stimulus’) to counter a financial crisis?
Either you are communicating your point very poorly, or you are arguing with yourself.
If factual analysis holds any interest for you, examine this graph. If you choose to respond, be aware that … this is a test! I’m sure you can misrepresent the data for partisan purpose. I’m curious if you’re capable of an objective understanding.
It’s a very nice graph. Did you happen to compare 1983-1984 to 2010-2011?
[QUOTE=Airk]
So it’s OKAY/Responsible for Reagan and Bush to cut taxes to counter financial crises, but wrong/irresponsible for Obama to cut taxes (see above on the nature of the ‘stimulus’) to counter a financial crisis?
[/QUOTE]
It’s the mirror of what septimus is trying to push. I am trying to get him to be consistent.
He claimed
OK - if you cannot blame a President who adopted tax cuts to counter a financial crisis, then why is he blaming Reagan and Bush for adopting tax cuts to counter a financial crisis?
My question for Liberals would be, “why do you think we can tax ourselves out of the deficit?” I’d be in favor of raising some taxes if we could cut into entitlements at the same time. But raising taxes while going further into debt doesn’t make any sense to me.
Because we can do anything we want to Defense. If we don’t do something with entitlements, we can’t get there from here.
Neither the poster (as far as I can tell) or Obama is saying that tax cuts were used to fight financial crisis. Tax cuts were a counterproductive but necesary compromise in order to pass the stimulus - as far as I can tell, this is Obama’s position.
On the other hand, it’s intellectually dishonest for you to praise tax cuts in one instance and yet criticize them in another similar instance based on who was doing it.
It’s not necesary for the poster here, or Obama, to feel that tax cuts are an effective tool for fighting financial crisis in order for someone else to make this observation. They are essentially judging you by your own support of your own premises, without necesarily making judgement on the correctness of those premises.
Good luck actually comprehending that rather than trying to find some sort of gotcha ya tu quoque. Nate Silver gives the odds of this happening as less than 1%.
The fact that you, in that very same post, claim that you’re trying to get another poster to be consistent would make your head explode if there were some sort of cosmic justice.
Math? The idea that the United States is broke and destitude is ridiculous. The US is ridiculously rich, still by far the richest country in the world. We’re just running a deficit because we’ve decided to set historically low tax rates as a gift to the rich because they’ve used Fox News and all their various propoganda outlets to utterly convince half the country to vote against their best interests because going back to tax rates still far lower than the average rate over the last century makes you a communist.
Letting the Bush cuts expire would erase half the deficit overnight. Raising the top bracket by a few percent closes the rest of the deficit.
The idea that we can’t close the deficit by increasing taxes is absurd - the US economy is huge relative to the size of the deficit, and it only requires tweaking the tax rate a little bit to close it. The idea that there’s just not enough money there to tax, like we’re some third world shithole that can’t run a country, is absurd and a complete myth created by the right wing propoganda machine. The whole “debt crisis” is self-inflicted by greed and corruption in our political system. It’s not a real crisis of any sort.
The more you analyse the way in which Conservatives are defending tax cutting policies whilst gutting government programmes, the more it seems to be of defending the results of all that money spent on lobbying for themselves rather than for the good economic health of the country they ‘love’ so dearly.
SenorBeefthey’re even against that modest proposal.
Its a scam. Its a recent development among the adults in the Republican party.
No Republican presidential nominee except George W Bush could have signed the Norquist pledge.
Reagan raised taxes several times.
HW Bush did so as well.
Dole voted to raise taxes several times
As did McCain.
It is more than selfish fiscal irresponsibility, it is the notion that you can get your way through sheer obstinacy regardless of the emrits of your case, especially since tax cuts are one of the most popular forms of bread and circus.
Almost true. The trouble is that Obama and the Dems don’t want to rescind the Bush tax cuts. They want to raise taxes only on the rich, and that covers less than 15% of the projected deficit.
Let me genericize the argument to try to convey my point.
Poster 1: Person A uses Policy X to combat the problem, which is the correct action to take. Later, Person B uses Policy X to combat the same problem. This time Poster 1 says that it’s the wrong solution.
Poster 2: But Poster 1, how can you say that policy X is correct when person A uses it but not when person B uses it? You’re being inconsistent
Poster 1: Aha, so since you support when person B does policy X, you must then agree it was correct when person A did it.
The error here is that poster 2 does not have to judge policy X to be the correct solution to the problem. They can think policy X is a really bad idea. But they can still correctly point out that poster 1 feels that X is the correct solution and therefore they’re being dishonest when they praise Person A and criticize Person B for its implementation.
The tax cuts in the stimulus were stupid. Corporations were already sitting on giant piles of cash - record cash reserves. There was no demand. Cutting taxes in that situation is like pushing on a rope. But in order for the stimulus to get passed, they had to compromise and make it half up of tax cuts, thereby not only pointlessly racking up 400 million more in deficit, but reducing the actual positive effect of the stimulus. Then, later, republicans just throw that whole total number up as Obama’s 800 million stimulus added to the deficit, ignoring the fact that they required half of it to be created in order to appease them.
I’m sure you can misrepresent the data for partisan purpose. I’m curious if you’re capable of an objective understanding.