The next big cuts in Washtington

[tvashtarkatena]

We've been funding our low tax rate through a ballooning debt. The R's want to have their cake (no increase in debt limit) and eat it (no new taxes through the ever magical and often mythical mechanism of 'economic growth') too.

[rob]

trickle down economics is like when your brother pees in the bunk above you.

[tvashtarkatena]

I find all the chest puffing about the upcoming national default laughable, considering that only 28 Rs voted to shut the government down - an infinitesimally tinier political risk that, when it came down to it, caused no small amount of shrinkage among that set.

 

This is what happens when the loud and stupid confront reality, I guess.

 

Still, its entertaining to see the rats on Fox bite each other after the Dems electrified their cage, then kicked it across the room. They negotiated and extra 5 whole Billion...out of the original 67 Billion differential proposed. 7% of the way there! Rather than keeping their eyes on the prize, they went after the ever popular but fiscally insignificant NPR and Planned Parenthood. Way to keep your focus, gang. Of course, pushing religiously driven, socially conservative repression IS the real tea bagger agenda, in as far as anyone can cobble together a cohesive agenda at all from that disgruntled clusterfuck of a (bowel?) movement.

 

Yeah, there's gonna be quite a few one termers trying to figure out how they're gonna feed their 10 kids if they keep this 'hard hitting' performance up. If they weren't so stupid they'd cut the military, raise taxes on the wealthy, and drop the religious crap to gain widespread popular support...but they won't, cuz' they are.

 

Stupid, naive, and, in the end, ineffective. Not a good combo when you've got such a psychopathic base. Pact with the Debbil and all that....

 

Mandate!!!!!!

Edited April 13, 2011 by tvashtarkatena

[prole]

You're becoming more and more like Billcoe everyday.

[ivan]

And which "tax" is that? Income tax alone, or all taxes together?

from the source, slideshow availabe here: http://www.cnbc.com/id/42192653?slide=1

 

World's Highest Tax Rates

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has been compiling data on government taxes among OECD countries since 1965. The group's annual report looks at internationally comparative data based on public revenue from *tax contributions as a percentage of gross domestic product for each country, then ranks them based on the highest and lowest overall tax rates.

 

Here, we take a look at the OECD's 2010 report details. Click ahead to see the world's highest tax rates as a percentage of GDP.

 

By Constance Parten, Senior Producer

Posted 11 April, 2011

 

Source: OECD

 

* For the purposes of the OECD's report, “taxes” is confined to compulsory, unrequited payments to general government. Taxes are unrequited in the sense that benefits provided by government to taxpayers are not normally in proportion to their payments. In the OECD classification, taxes are classified by the base of the tax: income and profits, payroll, property, consumption and other taxes. Compulsory social security contributions

paid to general government also are treated as taxes.

 

[j_b]

[video:youtube]Ga2xHL_jKpc

[kevbone]

[video:youtube]Ga2xHL_jKpc

 

Wow....where is FW?

[j_b]

"Representatives from the 77-member House Progressive Caucus gathered at the Capitol on Wednesday to roll out their plan to cut the deficit and put the budget back into balance. Their simple solution: pull the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, install a public option for health care, raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations and voila, America is fixed."

 

duh!

 

 

[billcoe]

Well, all this wrangling got the amount that the government spends down to $3.7555 trillion in federal spending in this fiscal year.

 

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/boehner-obama-deal-leaves-fy11-spending

[Kimmo]

Being a politian should be low paying job.

 

Right, so that only rich people can afford to be in office. Fail.

 

dual density. both at a very high density.

 

the humor here of course is that any president in the history of the US might have been motivated by the salary.

 

or that any president wasn't rather wealthy to begin with.

 

or senator. or congressman.

 

but, it's not only the religious that need their myths.

[j_b]

Well, all this wrangling got the amount that the government spends down to $3.7555 trillion in federal spending in this fiscal year.

 

Funny how right wingers suddenly decided to take Obama at his word although they accused him of lying non-stop since inauguration.

 

Pay attention to what they do, not what they say!

[Crux]

[video:youtube]

[prole]

Hook, line, and sinker...

[Crux]

And from there (Glenn Greenwald) to Krugman:

 

WTF? "Win the future?"

Edited April 14, 2011 by Crux

[JayB]

"It is not as though we have never tried high tax rates before. From 1951 to 1963, the lowest tax rate was 20% to 22% and the highest was 91% to 92%. The top capital gains tax rate approached 40% in 1976-77. Aside from cyclical swings, however, the ratio of individual income tax receipts to GDP has always remained about 8% of GDP.

 

The individual income tax brought in 7.8% of GDP from 1952 to 1979 when the top tax rate ranged from 70% to 92%, 8% of GDP from 1993 to 1996 when the top tax rate was 39.6%, and 8.1% from 1988 to 1990 when the highest individual income tax rate was 28%. Mr. Obama's hope that raising only the highest tax rates could keep individual tax receipts well above 9% of GDP has been repeatedly tested for more than six decades. It has always failed.

 

Federal revenue from the individual income tax exceeded 9% of GDP only eight times in U.S. history—during World War II (9.4% in 1944), the recessions of 1969-70, 1981-82 and 1991-92, and the tech-stock boom-bust of 1998-2001. Revenues were a high share of GDP during the three recessions because GDP fell.

 

The situation of 1997-2000 was unique. Individual income tax revenues reached an unprecedented 9.6% of GDP from 1997 to 2000 for reasons quite unlikely to be repeated. An astonishing quintupling of Nasdaq stock prices coincided with an extraordinary proliferation of stock options, which the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances found were granted to 11% of U.S. families by 2001, and with a reduction in the capital gains tax to 20% from 28%, which encouraged much greater realization of taxable gains through stock sales. Revenues from the capital gains tax rose to 10.8% of all individual income tax receipts in 1997 and 13% by 2000. The unexpected revenue windfalls in President Bill Clinton's second term were largely a consequence of lower tax rates on capital gains.

 

Using IRS data, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley have estimated that realized capital gains accounted for just 13%-22% of reported income among the top 1% of taxpayers from 1988 to 2006, when gains were taxed at 28%—but that fraction swiftly reached 29%-32% in 1998-2000, when the capital gains tax fell to 20%.

 

The average tax rate of such top taxpayers was mechanically diluted by the greatly increased realizations of capital gains after 1997 and 2003, since a larger share of reported income consisted of capital gains. Yet the amount of taxes paid by top taxpayers reached record highs for the same reason—there was more revenue to be had from taxing many gains at a low rate than from taxing fewer gains a high rate."

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704529204576257261171406994.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

[prole]

I should probably say, I could live with this as an end result. If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no —

 

Bingo. If Obama had been using the fireworks from the speech last night to define the Administration's narrative from the get-go, the terms of the debate would look far different than they do now. A radical Ryan-plan would never pass the trial balloon stage. This is more of the same: allow the Right to frame the debate for a couple months, meet them "half-way", give an amazing speech, and then negotiate everything away. We should, as Greenwald does, be asking if this is by design. If it is, the liberal punditry that's eating out of Obama's hand today are getting played.

[Crux]

Good point. When taxes on the rich are cut, GDP is stifled, as evidenced by a maintained ratio of taxes to GDP. Therefore, we should increase taxes on the rich to pre-Reagan levels in order to stimulate GDP, increase total revenue, and pay down the deficit.

Edited April 14, 2011 by Crux

[tvashtarkatena]

 

Drop the income limit on higher tax rates until you get your 9%. It's a policy choice, nothing more. The author and his parrot implies there's some hard mathematical limit at 8%...then immediately contradicts his own erroneous assertion one short paragraph later. Well, he's only been wrong 15% of the past 60 years, I guess. It ain't exactly the speed of light we're talking about here, apparently.

 

In any case, the piece clearly argues for taxing the rich first, then doing more if needed.

[Sam Furley]

"It is not as though we have never tried high tax rates before.

 

Mr. Obama's hope that raising only the highest tax rates could keep individual tax receipts well above 9% of GDP has been repeatedly tested for more than six decades. It has always failed."

 

Unfortunately, this doesn't register with many on the socialist end of the spectrum. They continue to delude themselves into thinking that taxing the rich will get us out of this budget conundrum.

 

Feel-good logic is so trendy, it's what got Obama elected.

[tvashtarkatena]

So both you and JayB support taxing the rich, plus other measures.

 

There's lots of common ground here if you look for it.

[Sam Furley]

You clearly have a problem with reading comprehension.

 

I was commenting on the WSJ article Jay_B linked to.

 

"President Obama's response to congressional efforts to curb runaway federal spending is to emphasize, once again, his resolve to greatly increase tax rates on married couples whose joint incomes are above $250,000. This insistent desire to raise taxes—which he repeated in a speech yesterday while complaining about "trillions of dollars in . . . tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country"—is a distraction. It won't solve our nation's fiscal problem."

 

I have no idea what Jay_B's position is on taxing the rich, so I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that we both support taxing the rich. Probably the same way you yourself came to the conclusion that taxing the rich is a good idea - confused [feel-good] "logic".

[rob]

I don't see what's so bad about increasing the handicap for people that are really good at making money. It evens things out. Taxes should feel the same to everyone. Right now, taxes on the obscenely rich do no feel the same as they do to me. They don't matter to them. They should matter. We should all have the same burden.

 

I'm sure now you'll just call me a bunch of bad names, and clearly you can't understand my position and so you'll have to resort to personal attacks or whatever, and I'm OK with that.

 

I don't see why people are having such a hard time with the concept of returning tax rates on the extreme wealthy back to what they used to be. We're not talking about "gutting" them or whatever. They are all doing quite well. They are not under attack.

 

It's strange, though, that the people protecting their tax cuts seem to be people who would not benefit from their tax cuts. I don't actually hear the extreme wealthy agitating for tax breaks. It's the have-nots that are working so hard to keep the rich from shouldering a proportional burden.

 

Weird.

[Jim]

I should probably say, I could live with this as an end result. If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no —

 

Bingo. If Obama had been using the fireworks from the speech last night to define the Administration's narrative from the get-go, the terms of the debate would look far different than they do now. A radical Ryan-plan would never pass the trial balloon stage. This is more of the same: allow the Right to frame the debate for a couple months, meet them "half-way", give an amazing speech, and then negotiate everything away. We should, as Greenwald does, be asking if this is by design. If it is, the liberal punditry that's eating out of Obama's hand today are getting played.

 

Have to agree with that. While the Repubs always fail at governing they are crafty at politics. Something the Dems appear to be cluess about.

[tvashtarkatena]

I should probably say, I could live with this as an end result. If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no —

 

Bingo. If Obama had been using the fireworks from the speech last night to define the Administration's narrative from the get-go, the terms of the debate would look far different than they do now. A radical Ryan-plan would never pass the trial balloon stage. This is more of the same: allow the Right to frame the debate for a couple months, meet them "half-way", give an amazing speech, and then negotiate everything away. We should, as Greenwald does, be asking if this is by design. If it is, the liberal punditry that's eating out of Obama's hand today are getting played.

 

Have to agree with that. While the Repubs always fail at governing they are crafty at politics. Something the Dems appear to be cluess about.

 

You guys really need to check out the negotiated numbers sometime before you circle jerk each other like this.

[Sam Furley]

I don't see what's so bad about increasing the handicap for people that are really good at making money. It evens things out. Taxes should feel the same to everyone. Right now, taxes on the obscenely rich do no feel the same as they do to me. They don't matter to them. They should matter. We should all have the same burden.

 

I'm sure now you'll just call me a bunch of bad names, and clearly you can't understand my position and so you'll have to resort to personal attacks or whatever, and I'm OK with that.

 

I don't see why people are having such a hard time with the concept of returning tax rates on the extreme wealthy back to what they used to be. We're not talking about "gutting" them or whatever. They are all doing quite well. They are not under attack.

 

It's strange, though, that the people protecting their tax cuts seem to be people who would not benefit from their tax cuts. I don't actually hear the extreme wealthy agitating for tax breaks. It's the have-nots that are working so hard to keep the rich from shouldering a proportional burden.

 

Weird.

 

Why should anyone have to even things out? Don't rich people earn their money just like everyone else? Why should rich people be penalized? Simply because they're rich? Rich people obviously went right somewhere along the way.. they probably made some sacrifices, they most likely took some risk.. why should anybody be penalized for achieving?

 

The last two of your sentences don't make any sense.

 

I'm sure now you'll just pretend none of this makes sense, but put down the bong for five minutes, and give it some thought.