US FIscal Policy

Why do you lie. DTE?

Tax increases can’t close the gap because any new taxes will spur further spending, argues Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University. Politicians want to be reelected, and tax-increases make reelection more difficult, so “they offset the negative political effect of [imposing] higher taxes by increasing spending,” said Vedder

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Captain Buzzkill said:

I can see where you'd make that assumption, but again; look at the spending habits of Americans, and you can see why government spending doesn't go down. We're notoriously bad for living outside of our means, and our government is no different. People get credit cards and loans for things they can't afford, and then they shift those balances to other loans and credit cards to make payments, and before you know it, they're bankrupt. Our government is no exception, save for the fact that they have the ability to print more money.

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Sorry, I don't buy arguments based on analogies. They are notoriously unreliable.

Thrasher, do you have an argument, or are you just in this to poke holes in other people's points?

Semantics isn't enough. To effectively contribute, you have to offer your own theories and solutions. Sticking your tongue out and saying, "Nuh-UH!" to the person on the other side of the argument is what the politicians do.

Thrasher said:

Sorry, I don't buy arguments based on analogies. They are notoriously unreliable.

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How so? How is anything I've said inherently flawed?

Put up or shut up.

I already have and you countered with analogy, and I don't buy it. Reread my posts.

Thrasher said:

Why do you lie. DTE?

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You should actually read before you throw out the insults. The STUDY makes no such assumptions. Strictly numbers. $1 new taxes in , $1.17 new spending out. Nice and clean, no room for your wiggly. The professor then takes the data to make certain statements about the useful of new taxes. While I happen to agree with those statements, you've already pointed out the professor's potential bias so I chose not to bring his conclusions into the conversation. I did not lie, champ. READING, give it a try from time to time.

Nice try, DTE. You said

we've got almost 6 decades of data that shows that the 5% solution will most likely generate additional spending rather than solve anything.

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Guess what, you just described a cause and effect. Generate is a action verb.

Thrasher said:

I already have and you countered with analogy, and I don't buy it. Reread my posts.

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Well, you countered with your opinion, which - unless you're an economist - is about as valid as my analogy. Spending does increase, regardless of taxation, due to an increase in population or overall health of the economy, because there's more overall tax dollars being brought in. This doesn't equate to spending going down when the revenue does, as you hypothesized in your rebuttal. Instead of immediately returning excess money, Congress thinks up new and interesting ways to spend it, and due to the inefficiency of bureaucracy, incompetence, and corruption those programs become prohibitively expensive to maintain. If there's one thing that Americans hate worse than paying more in taxes, it's cutting funding to "Important Federally Funded Programs." So instead of doing the right thing and either raising taxes or cutting funding and programs - or both - our government simply prints more money and shifts the debts around to avoid dealing with them for a couple more years.

I fail to see how this explanation in any way doesn't resemble the average fiscally irresponsible credit card owner.

Your turn.

Thrasher said:

Guess what, you just described a cause and effect. Generate is a action verb.

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And your point is? Oh my gosh! You caught dteowner in a grammatical fallacy! I can only imagine the horror he must be feeling as his reality crumbles to ash in front of his eyes, after the blistering light of your truth strikes it!

Seriously, did you go to the Charlie Sheen school of debate? Stop being liberal, please. You're making the rest of us look idiotic.

dteowner said:

Perhaps. Two problems with the whole thing, though. First, it's being advertised by the lefties as the solution to the problem. 5% might be a step in the right direction, but it's not "the solution" by any stretch. Second, as I've mentioned about 20 times now, we've got almost 6 decades of data that shows that the 5% solution will most likely generate additional spending rather than solve anything. So, "The Solution" is a drop in the bucket at best and based on decades of evidence most likely ends up resulting in a step in the wrong direction.

That's not much of a real difference, nigger.

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well im convinced, what about you guys? is this guy convincing or what?

Captain Buzzkill said:

First off, you're going to "spank my overly-entitled butt?" Sorry, my friend, but I gave 5 years of my life to the United States Marine Corps, with 3 combat tours thrown in for good measure. Everything I get from here on out, I've earned as far as I'm concerned.

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First things first. Thank you. Genuinely.

Captain Buzzkill said:

Do we have issues with entitlement programs in this country? Of course we do. But the "entitlement programs" aren't what fucked everything up 2 years ago, took billions of dollars of TARP money, and wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars of middle class retirement funds. You say class warfare is incidental to the discussion, but I disagree. I think the upper 10% hasn't bled nearly as much as the bottom 90%, and one of the first steps we should be taking to rectify the situation we find ourselves in is to make the "elite" play fair.

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This is why I talk about "overly entitled". Fair is bullshit. There is no fair, never has been, never will be. Arguably, there shouldn't be, but that's a rather philosophical discussion. But let's just go with "fair", whatever that is. By what right do you take from the rich that which they've earned (or their ancestors earned)? How can taking something from somebody that isn't yours be "fair"? Because you can? How does merely having the power to do something make it "fair"? Because you think they should? Because you want your pound of flesh and you want to use tax code to deliver your vengence? You're punishing an entire group of US citizens over the legal (albeit incredibly stupid, but still legal) actions of a very small few, and that's "fair"? It's highway robbery, plain and simple. The idea is to take something that isn't yours. There's simply no way to call that "fair", so it's pretty pointless to even bring that utterly subjective utopian hooey into the discussion, let alone use it as some sort of justification. Ultimately, you seem to think you're entitled to take something that isn't yours. Thus, my comment.

Captain Buzzkill said:

It's going to require a combination of Republican and Democratic strategies: We need to pass laws restricting what the federal government can spend money on, and we need to bring in more revenue via closing tax loopholes and a modest tax increase, aimed at corporations and individuals who can obviously bear the burden. Anybody who thinks we can get out of this mess (I'm looking at you, John "Boner") without taxation is delusional.

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I'd largely agree with the theory (that "obviously bear the burden" stuff is subjective and entitled, but the rest sounds pretty good) , but philosophically it's insane to think the American government, as representatives of American society, can manage this. We've got an overly-entitled society--people think the world owes them something and that it should be free for them to have it. Bull, but that's how people think. Nobody wants to earn anything and they do their damnedest to pull down anyone that actually gets off their ass and earns something.

Captain Buzzkill said:

And I'd like to see some evidence that it's the "lefties" that are always blocking tax code reform.

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I'm afraid all I've got time for is anecdotals, and you're free to dispute those. Every report I've seen out of the mainstream media over the past 30-some years supports it, and lord knows the mainstream media wouldn't put the lefties in a bad light if there was any way around it.

Thrasher said:

Guess what, you just described a cause and effect. Generate is a action verb.

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I'm curious. When discussing the facts of the STUDY, why do you quote MY conclusions drawn from it? No lies here, champ. READING, GET SOME!

I said it was a bad way to argue, not that there isn't resemblance. Analogies rely on resemblance to fool you into think they are the same, when underneath they are not.

It's not an opinion. Spending rates do go up with the economy. They don't go down with the economy, so there is a ratcheting effect. Righties are arguing that decreasing taxes will decrease spending. What we've seen so far is actually the opposite ever since W. Spending has gone up as tax rates have gone down. And the debt has increased.

SAGO said:

well im convinced, what about you guys? is this guy convincing or what?

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Yea me! Do I get a gold star for the day?

dteowner said:

I'm curious. When discussing the facts of the STUDY, why do you quote MY conclusions drawn from it? No lies here, champ. READING, GET SOME!

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I quoted both yours AND the economist's conclusions that were the same. Imagine that. To say you made no reference to the conclusions is quite bizarre when you both said the same thing. Have you taken you medicine today, DTE?

Captain Buzzkill said:

You're making the rest of us look idiotic.

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You do that well enough on your own without any of my help.

Well, the conclusion is fairly obvious for anyone that doesn't stick their head in the sand, so I'm not sure that should surprise anyone that multiple people would draw it, but you disputed the facts of the study when in fact your beef was with a cause/effect that you projected upon it. I certainly wouldn't want to use your favorite dismissal on you, but does anyone smell dried wheat?

The cause and effect conclusion are right there in you original post. So this projection claim of yours is pure BS, DTE.

I also suspect the correlations he quotes because of the source, but I don't deny that the correlations could be true. It's the cause and effect that I am disputing more than anything else.

Ignoring what Thrasher is babbling on about:

In terms of the original topic, I simply don't think raising taxes would actually solve the bulk of this problem. I do think loopholes *should* be closed, and I wouldn't be necessarily opposed to allowing the Bush Tax cuts to expire, but I think we all know the bulk of the problem lies in the entitlement programs.

I can grab the hard numbers for this if you guys wish, but IIRC entitlements right now are about half the budget; in the next ten or so years, they're going to take up 72% of the budget. It's crowding out all the other items on the menu: defense, education, the EPA, and so forth. I hear a lot of people talking about its the wars/DOD that's bankrupting us, and that's simply untrue. They've added quite a bit of fuel to the fire, but even if you magically zero-ed out any and all defense expenditures and assumed no adverse effects on the economy/world trade/etc (AKA, impossible), you'd only buy yourself probably a decade or two at the most.

Social security, medicare, and medicaid need to be fixed. From what I've read, a universal healthcare system would help keep costs down and take care of the issues with the last two programs, but at some point we're simply going to have to do a variety of things to fix social security. What I hear bandied about, typically:
1) Means test the program so not every retiree gets full benefits.
2) Raise the contribution cap.
3) Raise the retirement age.
4) Cut benefits.

To be as blunt as possible, I'd prefer that taking care of retirees NOT mean that we have to cut money from schools, or investing in alternative energy, or loans to small businesses, or foreign aid (one of the pillars of a smart/strategic defense) and so forth. I think both sides of the aisle are going to have to sacrifice some of their sacred cows. *shrug*

dteowner said:

I'm actually mostly on-board with you up to this point. The key problem, taken straight from the first passage I quoted, is that Congress (and the lefties being tremendously good at spending money they don't have doesn't mean the righties are completely innocent either, see Dubya Dark Ages) has shown for several decades that they never found a dollar they couldn't spend. You can find several posts of mine where I've said that I'd be fine with a tax increase as long as it was 100% guaranteed to go 100% toward the national debt. That's the rub, which is exactly why I posted it.

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Well, let's just give up then, shall we? It doesn't matter what we do to free up money, congress will spend it anyway. Reduce military costs by 10%? Congress will spend it. Cut medicaid? Congress will spend it.

If congress inherently spend 150 % (or whatever number greater than 100 we're talking about) of what it gets from taxes, how will cuts in spending help? Congress will just find some new way to spend it, if that's how it inherently works when it gets new money to spend.

I do believe that while congress is thick headed it's starting to get the message that they need to reduce the deficit if they are to stay in office at this point. So that 60 year trend of spending more money than you get in from new taxes? I think it's about to change. For the time being, anyway.

As for printing more money - that's Keyneserism 101 on how to get an economy rolling again. All they need to do is put the newly printed money in bags which they dump from helicopters and the picture is complete.

dteowner said:

This is why I talk about "overly entitled". Fair is bullshit. There is no fair, never has been, never will be. Arguably, there shouldn't be, but that's a rather philosophical discussion. But let's just go with "fair", whatever that is. By what right do you take from the rich that which they've earned (or their ancestors earned)? How can taking something from somebody that isn't yours be "fair"? Because you can? How does merely having the power to do something make it "fair"? Because you think they should? Because you want your pound of flesh and you want to use tax code to deliver your vengence? You're punishing an entire group of US citizens over the legal (albeit incredibly stupid, but still legal) actions of a very small few, and that's "fair"? It's highway robbery, plain and simple. The idea is to take something that isn't yours. There's simply no way to call that "fair", so it's pretty pointless to even bring that utterly subjective utopian hooey into the discussion, let alone use it as some sort of justification. Ultimately, you seem to think you're entitled to take something that isn't yours. Thus, my comment.

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You want an argument based on fairness? They got what they got because they were lucky enough to be born talented to parents who could give them a good upbringing. They didn't earn the prequisites to get rich, and the reason they could get rich was because of those prequisites.

You want an argument that isn't based on fairness? They can spare the money. Really.

And why do you spend your energy on defending the rich anyway? It's not like they are the ones with the biggest problems. Even if we raise their taxes back to 90 % (I mean, if they don't like it they can always give away all their money and live on the same income as middle (or why not lower) class pepole. You know, if paying those taxes really sucks that much).

Übereil