(04-28-2018 10:51 AM)Machiavelli Wrote: We could kick up the rates til we balance the budget.
No, we can't. We really, seriously, can't. At least not on an across the board basis, and certainly not on a "progressive" or "soak the rich" basis. Either way, we would end up with the highest marginal tax rates in the world, by a mile. Do you really think that would not drive money and jobs overseas on a massive scale? We'd end up with farms and mines on one end of the economy (because they have to be where the resources are), and Wal-Mart on the other (because retail has to be where the customers are), with nothing in between. We'd ship our raw materials overseas and get back finished goods. We'd be a banana republic, or Argentina. Not a lot of people realize this, but 100 years ago Argentina was the 7th most prosperous economy in the world, and after they managed to dodge WWI, there were great expectations for the future, in some quarters even greater than for the US. They adopted a massive wealth redistribution model, as personified by the Peronistas. Look at where they are today. It would take longer for the US to get there IMO, because we have far greater natural advantages. But we'd get there.
Quote:We have to start making our politicians make hard decisions. I think Republicans would pay a heavy price if they cut social programs. For every attack clog I can give you three people who would want health care. Stop calling it Obamacare too. It’s Trump Care now. They’ve cut so much of the revenue side but we still have the goodies of it. Typical Washington.
They haven't cut that much on the revenue side. Get off that deceptive "$1.5 trillion" number. That's a ten-year number. Politicians are very good at using that technique to overstate the effect of something they oppose. If we're going to talk about that number, then it needs to be compared to the $8.5 trillion that was already baked into the cake under Obama. See
https://www.cbo.gov/about/products/budge...mic-data#3 for CBO projections. And on an annual basis that "$1.5 trillion" number actually averages $150 billion, on top of revenues in the $3 trillion range now and climbing to the $5 trillion range (and spending about a trillion higher across the board) by the end of the decade. So this "huge" Trump tax cut is really little more than a drop in the bucket compared to the problem inherited from Obama (and yes, from GWB, although attributing most of it to him requires some really dishonest and disingenuous manipulation of the numbers).
You are absolutely correct in that we have to start forcing our politicians to make tough decisions. But here's the thing. Without cuts to social programs, we can't get there. There's just too much money there, and not enough elsewhere. But that doesn't mean screwing the poor. There are better ways to do social programs. For example, France's Bismarck system provides truly universal care--and unlike UK's NHS or Canada's single-payer, good care--but costs the French taxpayers less
per capita than we spend on Obamacare (and it's still Obamacare, cut out the Trump Care nonsense) not to provide universal care. How? Simple, they don't have the myriad gatekeepers and redundant levels of bureaucracy that accompany anything our federal government does. Same thing for welfare. We could provide every American a subsistence-level guaranteed basic income--using either Milton Friedman's negative income tax or the Boortz-Linder prebate/prefund--for less that we spend on our current welfare hodge-podge. Again, how? Simple, those approaches don't require the legions of bureaucrats that cause the 3 counties with the highest household incomes in the US, and 7 of the top 12, to be in the DC area--where virtually no value-added production takes place. Those things could be run by the IRS with a decent computer system. This approach would also go a long way to eliminate the "welfare plantation" whereby democrats have kept the poor dumb and poor and dependent on handouts--and thereby reliable democrat voters for half a century (to be fair, republican insistence on "means testing" is a major contributor to the problem, and will remain so as long as republicans continue to be "democrats lite"--just do what the democrats want, only don't spend as much on it--instead of pushing for meaningful reform).
Do those reforms, and on the military side never spend a nickel fighting another war that we don't intend to win--or even a penny fighting a war that we don't want anyone to win--and we'd make a pretty big dent in spending. Then put in a consumption tax and lower and flatten and broaden our income taxes to the point that we are truly competitive against the world.
We need massive reforms on both the tax and spending sides. Both Bowles-Simpson and Domenici-Rivlin were baby steps toward what we need. I was really hopeful in 2010 that the republicans, as the opposition party, would pick up the ball and run with it, along with Bismarck as a far superior alternative to Obamacare. But they didn't. So we have republicans who are idiots as the only bulwark against democrats who are evil. Not good.