(08-16-2012 04:17 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(08-16-2012 04:08 PM)Max Power Wrote:  That is a huge chunk of money that they refuse to bring in

No, not really, at least not in relation to the size of the problem.

I actually don't disagree that much with your basic thought. I think the republicans should gladly give in on this issue to get something meaningful in return.

Letting the "Bush tax cuts" for the "wealthy" expire won't do much to help the deficit, nor will they really do much to hurt the economy. What we need to close the deficit and help the economy is substantial tax reform, to the extent that the "Bush tax cuts" will be little more than rounding error.

$85 billion is about 8% of our trillion dollar deficit. If you were rounding I think you'd round it to 10%. There really is no reason not to do this. I'm not saying the conversation should end there, but do it already.

(08-16-2012 04:24 PM)Max Power Wrote:  

(08-16-2012 04:17 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(08-16-2012 04:08 PM)Max Power Wrote:  That is a huge chunk of money that they refuse to bring in

No, not really, at least not in relation to the size of the problem.
I actually don't disagree that much with your basic thought. I think the republicans should gladly give in on this issue to get something meaningful in return.
Letting the "Bush tax cuts" for the "wealthy" expire won't do much to help the deficit, nor will they really do much to hurt the economy. What we need to close the deficit and help the economy is substantial tax reform, to the extent that the "Bush tax cuts" will be little more than rounding error.

$85 billion is about 8% of our trillion dollar deficit. If you were rounding I think you'd round it to 10%. There really is no reason not to do this. I'm not saying the conversation should end there, but do it already.

I'm not rounding. And right now the deficit is still over a trillion, so your little exercise in gaming the numbers by playing plaintiff's counsel fails. And if you're not saying the conversation should end there, then exactly what else would you propose to do to take care of the other $900 billion plus?

I just crunched the numbers and it's 6.5%. 1.3T deficit, 85B revenue increase.

When we get back to producing near our capacity, we can start finding spending to target so we can balance the budget. Obviously, I would like to target defense. But until that time, cutting spending it counterproductive. This is why Bush screwed us so bad. He walked into a balanced budget and booming economy and just ran up the credit card in ways that did little for the economy and overinflated the housing bubble. Now the economy is weak and the debt is huge as a result and we need to spend even more to get out of it.

(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.

(08-16-2012 04:10 PM)Max Power Wrote:  

(08-16-2012 03:58 PM)Smaug Wrote:  

(08-16-2012 03:08 PM)Max Power Wrote:  

(08-15-2012 01:01 PM)Smaug Wrote:  

(08-15-2012 12:59 PM)Max Power Wrote:  What about people who had a steady income when they had children, but lost their job and need food stamps?

You have described a temporary situation.

Now, describe a scenario where multi-generational dependence on the government is acceptable.

It could be temporary, or it could last years, especially in this economy.

So you want to take food out of childrens' mouths because you find their parents' and grandparents' dependence unacceptable?

Well, you dodged the question, but...

Let me type this slowly so that it sinks in.

I do not want children to go hungry.

What I want is for parents to be responsible for the children they bring into the world.

And you have a naive notion that by making them responsible for the children the bring into the world they will become responsible. Doesn't work that way.

I didn't say I had a solution. I'm just identifying the problem.

Any ideas you have that don't make it more difficult for me to provide for the children I did father, I'm all ears.

(08-16-2012 04:32 PM)Max Power Wrote:  I just crunched the numbers and it's 6.5%. 1.3T deficit, 85B revenue increase.
When we get back to producing near our capacity, we can start finding spending to target so we can balance the budget. Obviously, I would like to target defense. But until that time, cutting spending it counterproductive. This is why Bush screwed us so bad. He walked into a balanced budget and booming economy and just ran up the credit card in ways that did little for the economy and overinflated the housing bubble. Now the economy is weak and the debt is huge as a result and we need to spend even more to get out of it.

And 6.5% is closer to 5% than 10%, isn't it? So the whole 10% rounding crap was just inflating the impact wasn't it? Probably the exact same kinds of games you play with numbers in jury arguments. I've seen plenty of your type.

I'm sorry but perhaps you didn't understand my question. I'm asking for specifics. How much defense do you want to cut? Do you want to cut it in half? That plus the tax cuts on the "wealthy" would leave you somewhere around 30% of the deficit. Where do you get the other 70%? And how realistic is a 50% cut to defense? What if you cut 25%? Now that plus the tax cuts would knock about 20% off the budget. Where would you get the other 80%? And how realistic is a 25% defense cut? And exactly where in defense do you get those cuts? And yes, I am rounding a bit with these numbers, but if you want to be more precise with the percentages feel free.

And oh, yeah, good trick to throw Shrub into the mix. When all else fails, blame Shrub.

President George W.Bush was a hell of a lot better president and leader than BHO EVER dreamed from his Father he is. I'd love to see "W" take BHO up in a F-106 and punch him out at about Mach 2. That would wrinkle his brow.

Ah, the worthlessness of the "One". I hope he does not get over himself until reality bites him squarly in the butt about 12:01 AM Nov 7, 2012. Talk about a real lame duck... you'll see one then.

If only TN 9th coulld rid themselves of the Cohen nightmare. That's expecting too much, however. :muttering: I guess you folks therin will have to live with him.

ENJOY !!!

(08-16-2012 04:21 PM)Max Power Wrote:  

(08-16-2012 03:22 PM)Motown Bronco Wrote:  The cycle of dependency ultimately has roots in psychology: That is, subconsciously settling into a society "role," feelings of low self-worth, considering one's self as a perpetual victim, developing a dignity-robbing "it is what it is" mindset. These things can't be measured by charts, graphs and numbers. But it's the result of a too-accomodating welfare state. What is that one singular point between temporary help that keeps people motivated vs. entitlements that are so heavy and long term that it saps one of motivation? That, I don't know. But the once you cross a certain threshhold, it becomes that much harder for one to physically and psychologically break out of it.

I'll give some politicians the benefit of the doubt in that they mean well (the cliched "bleeding heart"), but don't understand the long term ramifications of it. Much like a parent who gives their kid candy and toys every time they demand it, because it makes them feel good, but don't recognize the negative long term issues that will result from it.

Still other politicans are fully aware, yet are too enamored with being at the levers of power and controlling things. The poor people in that cycle will always march lockstep to the polls and vote for whoever will continue the gravy train. So the more people locked in, the better.

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.

I'm glad I reread this diatribe before I responded, and saw that you were addressing the "general You" instead of me specifically. Many of your assumptions don't even describe my ideological views, let alone who I'm voting for, and none of it addresses my main point about lifelong/multi-generational dependence and its long term psychological impacts, which was developing off a branched-off topic between you and Smaug.

Keep Calm and Carry On.

(08-16-2012 02:58 PM)Max Power Wrote:  From a American Sustainable Business Council survey--

http://asbcouncil.org/sites/default/file...pdf#page=3

Max, I just have a question about this chart from Asb..

Okay, weak customer demand = #1 argument, I can understand that...

But then you get to #2, #3 and #4...

Why separate them? They're all government regulated issues... Healthcare costs, taxes, regulations..

So by your own chart... 41% of all companies are not hiring because of Government interference... (And you could argue (both for and against) on that available credit 6% issue is also due to govt. interference).

And you want to spin this that it's a consumer based slow down?

(08-16-2012 04:08 PM)Max Power Wrote:  I'll add, as Hambone alluded, Obama has proposed letting the Bush tax cuts for people making over $250k expire (that's 2% of the population) and keeping them in place for everyone else (98% of the population). This would raise $850 billion dollars over a decade. The Republicans won't. f---ng. do. it. That is a huge chunk of money that they refuse to bring in, while they are bitching about PBS or NPR or Planned Parenthood getting some pittance. They would rather throw the whole country in chaos than have 98% of us keep a tax cut without the 2% getting a cut at the same time.

Max, I pointed this out yesterday... _but_.. There's no "combination" deal in place... The proposal from PBHO is that they'll raise taxes on the $250K earners in 2013... and then raise taxes on the <$250K earners in 2014.

There has been no sever-ability in place in any of PBHO's proposals.... PBHO has said this a number of times.. and his choices he offered were "it's this or expire them on everyone at once."

Btw... I wish people quit calling this a tax cut expiration!! The taxes have already _been_ cut. This is a proposal to _raise_ taxes on part of the U.S. Population.

(08-16-2012 04:08 PM)Max Power Wrote:  I'll add, as Hambone alluded, Obama has proposed letting the Bush tax cuts for people making over $250k expire (that's 2% of the population) and keeping them in place for everyone else (98% of the population). This would raise $850 billion dollars over a decade. The Republicans won't. f---ng. do. it. That is a huge chunk of money that they refuse to bring in, while they are bitching about PBS or NPR or Planned Parenthood getting some pittance. They would rather throw the whole country in chaos than have 98% of us keep a tax cut without the 2% getting a cut at the same time.

If that were really a priority for the left, they would have done it when they controlled both houses. Instead, they voted to continue them because they kn ew it would cost jobs. Now that they know they can't pass it, especially when they add the provisions they do, suddenly it won't cost jobs anymore?

The number is $85byn/year versus a 1.3 trillion dollar deficit. By your own math, 6.5% You and your ilk prefer to use a 10yr number because it makes it close to a trillion dollars... which psychologically sounds like a meaningful number... However... at $1.3 trillion a year for that same decade, we're talking about AN INCREASE in the EXISTING deficit of $13 trillion, and you have proposed eliminating 6.5% of that increase.

Meanwhile, Romney proposes virtually identical savings via $47byn simply by bringing some public sector employee salaries in line with their private sector counterparts and another $25byn by eliminating redundencies in state administered medicaid... and the democrats not only won't effing do it... but start screaming about starving children... even though ZERO benefits are targeted for any reduction by those plans.

Studies have obviously shown that raising taxes can risk jobs. Obama himself admitted this when he extended the cuts. Has a study EVER shown that cutting waste risks jobs?

Enough already about the "Bush tax cuts," particularly the ones for the "wealthy." As shown convincingly above, and admitted by Max, they have minimal impact on the debt and budget deficit. Ending them would have a negative effect on the economy, but it would be minimal also. It's not like we have a great economy now and ending those tax cuts is going to ruin it. And going from 35% to 39.6%, an increase of 4.6%, is not going to alter drastically the economics of many deals; a few at the margin, to be sure, but not many.

People are not suddenly going to start running overseas with their investment capital if we raise the top marginal personal income tax rate 4.6%--because they're already doing it at current rates. That's the problem. It's not the "Bush tax cuts." It's that even with the "Bush tax cuts" our top marginal tax rates--both individual and corporate, and particularly the interaction of the two in the double taxation of dividends--are still non-competitive by global standards.

The ASBC study that Max referenced suggests that the number one way to create jobs is to eliminate incentives to move jobs overseas. Well, what are those incentives? Three basic areas--lower wages, less regulation, lower taxes. Which one or ones should we eliminate? You don't like those choices? Then what options do you see?

Lower wages? Nope. What we can do is improve productivity by improving education and infrastructure. I can afford to pay ten times as much for labor if the labor is capable of ten times the production.

Less regulation? Dirty air, dirty water, unsafe workplaces? Nope. What we can do is streamline the regulatory PROCESS to provide greater speed and certainty of outcome without reducing the substantive impact of regulations. Norway has more stringent safety standards for offshore oil and gas drilling than we do, but their implementation procedures are more streamlined so that you can get a drilling permit in a small fraction of the time it takes here. So you can drill more wells and produce more energy while reducing the risk to the environment.

Lower taxes? We can reduce rates and broaden the base, generating more revenues while making US businesses more competitive in world markets. This is precisely what both Bowles-Simpson and Domenici-Rivlin recommended.

Do you have a better idea? If so, what is it?

I heard this last night on a commercial from one of the conservative PAC's and thought it was pretty good...

If Obama's policies are working then why are so many people not working?

I'll look for the commercial today. There are some good ones running in NC. Honestly Obama has some good ads too, dishonest but good. Stupid people will eat them up.

(08-16-2012 05:00 PM)Smaug Wrote:  I didn't say I had a solution. I'm just identifying the problem.

Any ideas you have that don't make it more difficult for me to provide for the children I did father, I'm all ears.

Well one solution is to make abortion freely available, which Dems push and which does a lot of the work.

What about poor countries where there is no welfare but poor people still manage to pump out baby after baby? They're "responsible" and they still do it. This is not just a US or rich world phenomenon.

(08-17-2012 08:49 AM)Max Power Wrote:  

(08-16-2012 05:00 PM)Smaug Wrote:  I didn't say I had a solution. I'm just identifying the problem.

Any ideas you have that don't make it more difficult for me to provide for the children I did father, I'm all ears.

Well one solution is to make abortion freely available, which Dems push and which does a lot of the work.

What about poor countries where there is no welfare but poor people still manage to pump out baby after baby? They're "responsible" and they still do it. This is not just a US or rich world phenomenon.

Poor countries typically have social structures where generations of families still live together and support eachother. In some cases, frequent breeding ensures the continuation of the family, because death rates are higher and/or life expectancies are lower. In THIS country, it is ALMOST normal for a 16-18yr old girl to get pregnant and move on her own so that she can get housing on her own, daycare and food stamps so that she can finish school. The polar opposite. Soft hearts, including mine, will applaud her sacrifices an ingenuityt to finish school, but ignore that she likely dooms her child/children to repeat the process. With the availability of abortion services in this country, very few children are brought into the world because they couldn't afford the morning after pill or an abortion. The BETTER solution would obviously be for her to NOT get pregnant in the first place, but she doesn't get housing and foods stamps unless she does.

Seriously... you would be impressed at the ingenuity of some people and their ability to manipulate and maneuver through the system. We curse when the rich do it, calling them evil, but not when the poor do. If I wanted to stop the problem, I'd hire some of these people who know the system backwards and forwards, and charge them with eliminating the negative incentives while still addressing the needs. In the same way, I trust a rich man, or someone who works for him to know how to eliminate tax minimizing schemes more than a middle class one.

and Owl // is correct. Similarly, Rather than ***** about the problem, I'd like to see the left address the issues/causes.

(08-17-2012 08:49 AM)Max Power Wrote:  

(08-16-2012 05:00 PM)Smaug Wrote:  I didn't say I had a solution. I'm just identifying the problem.

Any ideas you have that don't make it more difficult for me to provide for the children I did father, I'm all ears.

Well one solution is to make abortion freely available, which Dems push and which does a lot of the work.

What about poor countries where there is no welfare but poor people still manage to pump out baby after baby? They're "responsible" and they still do it. This is not just a US or rich world phenomenon.

Define "freely available".

And what else besided that? The left doesn't like time limits on government assistance. The left doesn't like work provisions, which boggles the mind because provides a two-fold benefit:

1. It gives people a little ownership of their effort.

2. It give John Q. the notion that his tax dollars aren't incentivizing sloth.

Remember, it can't make it any more difficult for me to provide for children I fathered.

And lets try to fix things here at home before we try to tackle the world.