[andyt]

Lemmy wrote:

andyt wrote:

I think you're way off in your figures, Lemmy. (And this after you agreed iwth me and didn't call me a troll). Dep of defense is 18% of the budget.

"Military" spending is part of many other budget lines than the Dept. of Defense line. But whatever its share, that should, objectively, be where we'd find that share of savings if we're going to cut spending, no?

Absolutely. But it's probably not 50%, so cutting the military some will not be the magic solution either.

[Canadian_Mind]

There is no reason why you couldn't have a shallower increase like that. I'm not arguing one way or the other. I just find it odd that Andy has issue with me having a progressive tax scheme when he's said in the past that everyone should be charged at the same rate.

So what if the rate of increase is higher at lower income levels than it is at higher levels? The lower wealth individuals are still paying a smaller percentage of their income than wealthier individuals. If you have a tax scheme where the rate of increase goes up with income, then you are going to end up charging the majority of the population little to no taxes, and the few wealthy almost 100%. Not only is that unfair to the rich, it'll drive them, and the primary source of revenue under such a scheme, right out of the country.

[Lemmy]

andyt wrote:

Absolutely. But it's probably not 50%, so cutting the military some will not be the magic solution either.

It may not be 50% of the current budget, but it's more than 50% of the debt.

[andyt]

Canadian_Mind wrote:

There is no reason why you couldn't have a shallower increase like that. I'm not arguing one way or the other. I just find it odd that Andy has issue with me having a progressive tax scheme when he's said in the past that everyone should be charged at the same rate.

So what if the rate of increase is higher at lower income levels than it is at higher levels? The lower wealth individuals are still paying a smaller percentage of their income than wealthier individuals. If you have a tax scheme where the rate of increase goes up with income, then you are going to end up charging the majority of the population little to no taxes, and the few wealthy almost 100%. Not only is that unfair to the rich, it'll drive them, and the primary source of revenue under such a scheme, right out of the country.

Who you talking to now? I thought we were having a discussion. You appealing to the howling dogs on this forum to help you out?

I've never said everyone should be charged the same rate. What I have said, echoing by buddy Warren, is that the rich should pay at least the same rate as middle income earners. Me and my buddy Warren actually agree that the rich should pay a little bit higher rate than the middle income. Where Warren stops being my buddy, I would guess, is my idea of having continual steps up to 90% for very high incomes. That's not original to me either, Lester Brown wrote about it in the 1980's. I believe his highes rate was 85%, I just thought i'd ramp it up a bit.

Read the argument you make again. The wealthy, under my scheme would pay 90% on income over 10,000,000. Is that so bad? How many (few) people actually make more than 10 million a year? They would pay less on the the income below 10 million, surely that gives them enough to live on. And I admit I just pulled the 10 million figure out of my ass - don't know where the actual step should be.

Why is it that you think when you earn a modest income, your tax rate should go up if you earn a little more, but if you earn a great whack of money, you shouldn't pay a higher rate on that great whack you earned? How is that fair? Why should a Buffet, who earned 6+ million pay the same rate as that poor 1 percenter who only made 1 million?

[Canadian_Mind]

I wasn't appealling. She made a comment, and I responded.

And my apologies, I was under the impression you were for a flat tax.

As for the high figures, I don't agree with 85-90 percent. I believe everyone has a right to keep what they earn. I'd argue for a 40% flat tax across the board, but I understand that the less wealthy likely need a greater percentage of their income then the more wealthy, which is why I instead argue for a curve. I don't really look at it as the tax rate stepping up with income, I like to look at it as if it were curving down with lower incomes from a flat 30-50% tax rate.

[Psudo]

Lemmy wrote:

There's no question. Government bureaucracy is too large. Even most on the left concede that point. But you're wrong about Reagan and Bush II. Those two administrations are responsible for the overwhelming majority of the debt and most of that spending was military spending.

Source

Defense spending is shrinking long-term as a proportion of GDP while non-defense spending grows. Defense spending is less than a third of non-defense spending.

As for most of the debt arising from Reagan and Bush II, that is a relativistic statement. The government is too big and expensive, as you've already conceded. It should be smaller. Reagan and Bush II reduced one measure of it -- tax receipts -- and not the other (mostly because no one has ever successfully reduced the other). Having only one reduced creates a lot of debt, but who deserves the blame: the people who shrank one measure of government's size, or the people who refused to shrink the other?

That's why "the other" (federal spending, especially non-defense spending) is my pet issue. The size of government spending MAKES the deficit a problem and MAKES tax reform an issue. If the size of government spending is reduced (as it was following each of the three global wars) deficits and debts shrink, too.

If you want to criticize the Reagan and Bush II years for their non-defense spending, I'll agree with you. But those Presidents provided the only significant efforts to reign in government's size outside of the typical post-global-war reductions.

Lemmy wrote:

What is the US budget composed of, other than debt service? More than half is the military. The rest is roughly split equally among Medicade and Social Security. When defense spending is nearly 60%[,] you can't legitimately claim non-defense spending is the primary contributor to the debt.

Source

Defense spending is 23% of the annual budget. Medicaid and Medicare are each nearly as large, but not quite. You've confused discretionary spending with total spending; all of discretionary spending could be cut without eliminating the trillion dollar deficits we've been seeing lately. Mandatory spending must be addressed, too.

I'd be happy to cut the budget at $2 from non-defense spending for every $1 from defense. Heck, I'll even match the defense cuts with tax revenue increases, too. I've proposed that before.

Lemmy wrote:

[Defense spending] may not be 50% of the current budget, but it's more than 50% of the debt.

Judging by the above graphs, I doubt that. Maybe if WW2 and Vietnam debt is included, but it's not a modern defense spending problem.

[Gunnair]

I rather like Cain. Ever since his "America's got to learn how to take a joke."

[andyt]

Canadian_Mind wrote:

I wasn't appealling. She made a comment, and I responded.

And my apologies, I was under the impression you were for a flat tax.

As for the high figures, I don't agree with 85-90 percent. I believe everyone has a right to keep what they earn. I'd argue for a 40% flat tax across the board, but I understand that the less wealthy likely need a greater percentage of their income then the more wealthy, which is why I instead argue for a curve. I don't really look at it as the tax rate stepping up with income, I like to look at it as if it were curving down with lower incomes from a flat 30-50% tax rate.

Sorry, I didn't see Brenda's post.

[Teikiatsu]

Thanos wrote:

999 sounds great as a price for a large pizza.

That joke was funnier the first time we heard it.

Thanos wrote:

Kinda sucks as an economic policy though.

It's better than the 71,000 page monstrosity that we currently have.

[Teikiatsu]

Thanos wrote:

Correct. The only solution is more revenue. How many tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of government workers have been laid off over the past two or three years?

Seriously?

Thanos wrote:

Unemployed is unemployed and no one who gets laid off somehow cosmically deserves it, the way most Republicans apparently think that they do, just because they worked for the government instead of the private sector.

Unemployed in the public sector means that their job no longer requires tax dollars, ergo less tax revenue is needed.

You seem to be working on an assumption that every single public sector job is vital and necessary. I do not think they are all like that.

[Psudo]

People confuse net and gross all the time.

The stimulus saved hundreds of thousands of jobs! ... while the economy overall lost jobs. The former is gross, the latter is net.

The government sector lost tens of thousands of jobs! ... while adding hundreds of thousands more.

We cut spending over and over! ... while adding more, so that total spending always goes up.

Gross describes the magnitude of a single force, and net describes the combination of an entire category of forces. Net government spending, net government employment, net government power and intrusiveness all go up and up and up year after year. It is erosion of freedom defined.

[andyt]

Without the stimulus, those jobs there were added would not have been, so job losses would have been much higher. It's easy to criticize Barry because his plan didn't miraculously reverse the disaster that Bush left him, but only ameliorated it. You guys would be much worse off with McCain/Mouth running the show, and wouldn't even have the satisfaction of blaming the black guy for the mess.

[Psudo]

andyt wrote:

Without the stimulus, those jobs there were added would not have been

There's a subtle logical flaw in that argument. First, the facts:
1) The stimulus has it's fingerprints on millions of jobs.
2) Unemployment is high anyway, and has been high longer than anyone expected.
The fact that stimulus fingerprints are on those jobs does not mean that would not exist without the stimulus. Even if we could tell what the economy without the stimulus would look like (which we can only speculatively estimate), we can't possibly separate the effects of the Bush stimulus (mostly tax cuts) from the Obama stimulus (mostly spending). Maybe the next century of economists studying what happened will give us some new insight, but there's no obvious economic lesson to be learned from two different plans that, together, almost sorta half-worked.

andyt wrote:

the disaster that Bush left

FactCheck.org, in an article called 'Who Caused the Economic Crisis?', wrote:

• The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
• Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
• Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
• Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
• The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and down payment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
• Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
• Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
• Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
• The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
• An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
• Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The blame belongs to just about everybody over the past 20 years, not just Bush. If Kerry or Obama had been elected President in 2004, there's little reason to believe the economy would have turned out differently.

[Pseudonym]

Any tax plan that starts with "Throw out the current tax code" is going to garner some support. Whether or not you understand all the issues involved, you know that it is not working as well as it should.