Owl 69/70/75
Just an old rugby coach
Posts: 80,853
Joined: Sep 2005
Reputation: 3214
I Root For: RiceBathChelsea
Location: Montgomery, TX
|
RE: Joe Biden and Obama are both a disgrace
(08-16-2012 04:21 PM)Max Power Wrote: But we're not talking about luxuries like candy and toys. We're talking about health care to stay alive and food so they don't go hungry.
But forget the poor for a second. Someone explain this to me like I am a six year old--why in the **** do you people keep voting AGAINST your own self interest? Why do Republicans come out and readily admit their tax plan will decrease taxes on the wealthy and increase it on you (okay they'll dodge the last part but policy centers crunch the numbers and come to that conclusion), and you people start slobbering to vote them into office? Explain this to me without using the word "Obama," because as much as you might hate him, his policies are demonstrably far superior to your bottom line than Romney, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. If Romney gets into office, and he and Paul Ryan do what they say they are going to do, we are all personally, financially ******. Bye bye mortgage interest deduction! Bye bye child tax credit! Hello middle class tax increase!
If your answer is "we have a problem in this country, and I am willing to pay more to fix it" then why in holy hell do you vote for the party who is going to make you and you alone fix it? The rich people are going to have their "got mine, **** you" party when their taxes decrease and the Republicans eliminate "entitlement" and safety net programs that they will never need or use (Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment, Food Stamps, etc.) because they are rich enough for it not to matter. Romney will get to pay 0.82% in taxes under the Ryan plan, and you are willing to suck it up and pay for his share? The middle class should all pay more to make up for the wealthy paying next to nothing: WHY? That ****** makes $21 million a year (that we know about, not including the **** he is hiding), he should get to pay sub 1% in tax, but someone making $50,000 should pay 25%? Someone who would actually use a tax break to stimulate our economy by creating demand for products, rather than Romney throwing it in his Swiss bank account. Do you really think we can "spending cut" our way out of this? When taxes are the lowest they have ever been? Do you really think we should just gut the programs that people in this country rely upon to survive but keep dumping more and more money into our military? Even when you consider inflation, our military spending is higher than it has ever been. WHY? I don't see any Nazis running around, I don't see any nuclear arms race. And don't bring up terrorists. If we'd stop ******* around with their countries they probably wouldn't hate us so much. I'd be pretty pissed if the Chinese strolled in and installed a dictator of America, so maybe if we stop spending money to do that **** people wouldn't be so willing to kill themselves to slightly hurt us.
And do you truly, honestly think that trickle down economics is going to work? History has shown it never works. It just furthers the wealth gap between the rich and the poor, and once that gap gets far enough apart, people start to do crazy **** like revolt, in ways that makes Occupy Wall Street look like a tea party (protest). History has shown, on the other hand, that when the economy slows and the government steps in to create demand, the market recovers and that recovery directly helps people like you and me by putting money in our pocket who will actually spend it.
First off, I'm not talking about destroying the safety net. In fact, my approach makes that safety net stronger, not weaker. It does save some money, but that's because the money goes more directly to people who need it, instead of spending over half the cost on administration like most social programs do. And yeah, Medicare is the exception, but Medicare is mostly outsourced to the same insurance companies that are supposedly so terrible in doing it for their own account.
Second, the kind of tax plan I am proposing does not reduce taxes on the "wealthy" and increase taxes on everyone else. Exactly one left-leaning policy center has said that about the Romney plan, and as I have explained at length before, there are a bunch of holes in their methodology. A more balanced and truly bipartisan approach was adopted by the Bowles-Simpson and Domenici-Rivlin groups, and they both came up with generally similar concepts (reduce rates and broaden the base) to do that. And their analyses came to different conclusions.
Third, the problem gets more complicated because we really need to address both the trade deficit that approaches a trillion dollars and the budget deficit that exceeds it. That means we have to attract investment. What I don't understand about the left is that you criticize people for investing overseas to get lower tax rates there, but you somehow assume that raising taxes here won't cause more investment to move overseas. Exactly how do you plan to accomplish that?
As far as the pejorative "trickle down," two points. One there is a difference between true supply side economics (like what Reagan and Clinton did, and what just about every other developed company emulated when they saw how well it worked, and which the Bowles-Simpson and Domenici-Rivlin recommendations really reflect) and what could fairly be called "trickle down" (the "Bush tax cuts"). Two, it's pretty clear that true supply-side stuff works, and it's not at all clear that "trickle down" doesn't. The economy responded to the "Bush tax cuts" with more vigorous growth and job creation than it did to Obama's "stimulus" so far. It was not the "Bush tax cuts" that caused the crash of 2008, but people stopping mortgage payments.
As I've noted before, even Keynes himself was leery of trying to stimulate demand forever. At some point, he reckoned that you needed to stimulate supply to get the two back into some reasonable equilibrium. If you didn't, eventually you got so far out on the demand limb that further demand stimulus would seek to work. He dismissed this by saying that this was a long run problem and "we're all dead in the long run." Note that he didn't say it wasn't real, he just said it wasn't imminent. One of the breaks by neo-Keynesians with Keynes is the neo-Keynesian idea that you can stimulate demand forever and run deficits to do it without doing harm. We've been stimulating demand constantly, under a succession of neo-Keynesians on both the D and R sides, for 50 years or so. We consume more and save less than any other developed country, we are the largest debtor nation (both public and private sectors) in the world, and we are the largest net importer in the world. Sounds a lot like this is the long term and we are too far out on the consumption limb. And the multplier on "stimulus" was in the 1.25-1.5 range, which sounds a lot like Keynes was right and demand stimulus is losing its bang for the buck. These points are arguable at this point, and I'm betting that your opinion is different from mine, but this is what I think is happening. We'll find out whether I'm right or not over the next few years if we continue on the same path. I frankly hope that I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
(This post was last modified: 08-16-2012 04:51 PM by Owl 69/70/75.)
|
|