2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

[Kepler]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

I'm trying to have this NOT be about what "I believe" I'm trying merely to point out material that is in the public record, the number of times he has contradicted himself. You can comfort yourself by saying he is merely being expedient, that's the nature of 21st century politics in the USA, and I won't disagree (nor will I agree). I'll respect that as your opinion, maybe you see something I'm missing. Myself, I won't trust anything a person says after they have lied to me several times. That's just my nature.

I'm not actually thinking he's being expedient. I would like to see a list of the presumed contradictions Obama has made, preferably with both the accusation and the offered defense, to judge for myself.

As for Obama himself, believe me I have absolutely no illusions -- I recognize he has the "lifeless eyes" of a shark that pursues its prey. One of the parlor games at my home (we are not exciting people) is to try to figure out exactly what Obama himself is personally driven by. I understand the ideology that drives him, in large part because I share it. But that has nothing to do with the psychology of the man himself. For example, it was painfully obvious Dubya was the inept son scrambling all his life to Earn Daddy's Respect. Cheney's daemon was simply the boardroom calculus of sheer private, personal interest, with a generous seasoning of being a disaster as an ethical human being. Clinton was like watching a remake of "All the Kings Men," this time with more sex scenes. Reagan was a slick salesman and a gee-whiz-aw-shucks actor, right to the very soul. Obama is a mystery, though he may just turn out to be a soulless technocrat and, to paraphrase Spengler's great one-liner put down of Hitler, "not a hero, but a heroic baritone."

[Rover]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

I for one am fully supportive of the Romney/Ryan argument, as detailed here by Fishy, that the rich deserve even more tax breaks than they were given during the widely popular Bush administration and the stellar economic times associated with that era and that policy. In fact, I hope The Mittster runs hard on this platform in the upcoming election. Its a swell campaign model....if it were 1980.

I suspect however the thought of a man who's shopping for a car elevator for his 4th mansion blathering to the working class stiffs of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan about how he needs a further reduction in his tax burder might not go over so well.

BTW - the idea of "revenues go up after tax cuts" is a stupid and easily disproven one. Revenue goes up as the economy tends to grow year over year. Hence they are unrelated occurances. The trick is are you borrowing money to cut taxes, and if so do you get that money back as its invested into the US economy? As places such as China are growing far faster than the US and have been for awhile now, any wealthy investor with half a brain will put a good portion of his tax cut into that communist dictatorship with a planned economy because that will give them a higher return. A first year business student could tell you that, which makes me wonder what exactly some of your cons do for a living....

[Kepler]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

BTW - the idea of "revenues go up after tax cuts" is a stupid and easily disproven one. Revenue goes up as the economy tends to grow year over year. The trick is are you borrowing money to cut taxes, and if so do you get that money back as its invested into the US economy?

Exactly. Though to be fair I wouldn't say it was obviously stupid on the face of it. One thing to remember about supply-side is it was worth trying, in 1980. Liberals sometimes forget that. Of course, the other thing to remember about supply-side is we did try it and it failed* spectacularly. Conservatives sometimes forget that.

(* it did not fail, of course, for the very wealthiest segment of the population, and given their tremendous power to create narratives and influence elections, that's why it is still with us)

Supply-side will join Marxism on the ash heap of history. Nice ideas in theory. Complete nonsense in practice.

[Rover]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

It really is funny how conservatives are stuck in a time warp from 30-40 years ago. Its like they want every Dem Prez to be Carter and every GOP candidate to be Reagan. They want to refight the Cold War, put gays back in the closet, make birth control a crime (which is an issue for 60 years ago actually as Olympia Snowe correctly stated recently), etc. The funniest part is when people too young to even remember that era start parroting the party line. Trickle down economics not only has been thoroughly disproven by actual events, few people younger than age 70 actually believe in it. I half expect conservatives to start a movement to bring back the CHiPs TV show and to reunite The Knack.

[FreshFish]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

BTW - the idea of "revenues go up after tax cuts" is a stupid and easily disproven one. Revenue goes up as [or "if"?] the economy tends to grow year over year. Hence they are unrelated occurances.

Huh? you say it is "easily disproven" in one sentence and then say in the next sentence that revenue does go up after tax cuts because the economy grows? Some might call that correlation.

I've never argued "direct causation" I've limited myself to "correlation." Others do argue that the tax cuts lead to economic growth which leads to increased revenues, as you describe.

Also, you completely misrepresent what I've been consistently saying. I'm not saying and never have said we need to reduce taxes any further; I've said that tax policy based on non-economic goals such as revenue redistribution, however noble the idea, is ineffective in practice. I've said even more clearly that the problems are all on the spending side, and this goes to both parties' lack of consistency, and both parties' desire to pander to their respective bases.

Most people don't realize that the so-called "rich" are more an artifact of prior year tinkering with the tax code. At one time, most small businesses were organized as C-corporations, so that corporate income did not appear on individual tax returns. However, tax code manipulation then drove many small business owners to re-organize as "pass-through" entities for tax purposes instead. Suddenly, corporate income is appearing on the owners' personal tax returns instead of on a separate corporate tax return. Economically, nothing has changed, but suddenly, overnight, "the rich" appear to be a lot richer, even though nothing has changed. I will bet everyone here however much they want to bet that as soon as the top personal tax rate is increased, while corporate tax rates are decreased (Obama has already signed off on the latter, you know) "the rich" will re-organize their businesses and business income will no longer appear on the owners' tax returns, it will again appear on the separate corporate tax returns instead. The personal income of "the rich" will then decline, and tax revenues will decrease instead of increase. Meanwhile, those of us who are wage slaves and don't have the opportunity to reorganize our cash flows will disproportionately bear the burden. I will give you a double-or-nothing bet that when the anticipated revenue increases from raising taxes on "the rich" fail to materialize, taxes on the rest of us will go up.

Now, just because I can look at the world in a hard-headed way does not also make me hard-hearted. I agree that a skewed income distribution is unhealthy for society. I merely think that government compulsion is the wrong way to fix it because you can be sure we will merely have government overlords as the new rich. That trend is as old and as predictable as human nature.

Now I don't mean for this to sound like I am saying you are well-intentioned yet naive, because that doesn't quite convey what I mean to say. I am not as adept in English as many of you, and so my formal stilted attempts to express myself in English do not always adequately capture what I am trying to communicate.

[Kepler]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

It really is funny how conservatives are stuck in a time warp from 30-40 years ago. Its like they want every Dem Prez to be Carter and every GOP candidate to be Reagan.

Not surprising. The Dems fought every election as FDR vs Hoover for 40 years. When you have that perfect horse, you ride it as long as it stays upright.

Saviors last for two generations: Gen-1, the people contemporary with them, and Gen-2, the children raised on the Heroic Stories. Gen-3 doesn't care and can't relate, and the world has changed so much by then that the Savior's rhetoric (and enemies) are completely irrelevant.

The GOP is right now run by Gen-2 (with a few feeble Gen-1 dinosaurs). Gen-3 is still in high school. I strongly suspect that there is no current public figure over the age of 30 who will be in any way relevant after the next "revolution."

[Craig P.]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

BTW - the idea of "revenues go up after tax cuts" is a stupid and easily disproven one.

I don't think that's exactly right. The "Laffer Curve" effect is real when tax rates are high enough. The problem is, the curve really is curved, it's not a straight line as the Norquist nuts would have you believe, and the extremum is somewhere in the neighborhood of 60% if I remember right—well above current rates. So, raising taxes will certainly raise revenue, though probably not quite as much as the percentage of the increase.

[amherstblackbear]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

Restricting ourselves to correlation is a colossally bad idea. Sh**, there's a correlation between ice cream sales and cases of drowning. There's a correlation between the number of fire trucks that respond to a fire, and how bad the fire damage is. If we're not talking about causation, why bother?

[Kepler]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

I don't think that's exactly right. The "Laffer Curve" effect is real when tax rates are high enough. The problem is, the curve really is curved, it's not a straight line as the Norquist nuts would have you believe, and the extremum is somewhere in the neighborhood of 60% if I remember right—well above current rates. So, raising taxes will certainly raise revenue, though probably not quite as much as the percentage of the increase.

Again, correct.

Historically speaking we are now way, way to the left of the optimal point of the LC. The tax structure has now become an exercise in the rich sheltering their assets regardless of the effect on the rest of the country; it has zero to do with economic efficiency.

You can run a country that way, but it aint America, it's France circa 1788.

[Rover]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

Fishy, I don't know what you do for a living, but apparently brevity and getting to the point aren't requirements of your career. However, I'll play along....

You seem to want to operate in some sort of fish bowl (no pun intended) where political calculations are divorced from the country's budget. That's like hoping the tooth fairy waves a magic wand and the budget gets balanced.

The solution to the deficit problem is one of both tax increases and spending cuts. Neither will do the trick alone. The funny part is these plans are already out there, and some have been agreed to (well, at least before the House GOP tried to walk them back).

So, #1) Eliminate gimmicky and stupid Bush tax cuts and go back to Clinton era rates. Why? Because that's when the budget was last balanced, so no excuses. Yes, this affects everyone, even lower income people, but so be it. In conjunction with this, get rid of special interest deductions for oil, farmers, ethanol, take your pick. Also reign in some big ticket deductions in the tax code, such as home mortage interest over a certain amount. Should be able to get at least 1/3rd of the roughly 1T we need to balance the budget. #2) Military spending needs to go way, way down. By about 200M a year down. Now going off of today's deficit a bit of that will come from winding down the wars. No problem with counting that. However, Allies need to start doing their fair share. In NATO I believe only 3 countries spend up to their recommended amount on defense (3% of GDP maybe and its England, France maybe and one of the smaller countries from the Baltics). South Korea has had 60 years to come up with a defense plan. No need for US troops there. #3 is domestic cuts. Same as what the military is taking. Take your pick as there's plenty of targets. Again some of these have already been agreed to. This gets to 3/4ths of the problem, and I'd expect a growing economy to take care of the rest.

BUT, you say, that doesn't address the cumulative national debt. That is correct, and that will only be solved by means testing benefits for both Social Security and Medicare. For SoS, I would put the savings back into the program as it is supported by dedicated revenues. I would also index the growth in benefits to a lower rate (again, already being discussed).

A balanced budget, not massive tax cuts, raises investor confidence and gets investment flowing back into the country. Much like....wait for it...the Clinton Era.

[FreshFish]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

Obama wants "millionaires" (does that mean people with income over $1 million? we'll see...) all to pay a minimum tax rate of 30%, for the explicit purpose of "fairness"...

The Obama Treasury's own numbers confirm that the tax would raise at most $5 billion a year—or less than 0.5% of the $1.2 trillion fiscal 2012 budget deficit and over the next decade a mere 0.1% of the $45.43 trillion the federal government will spend. When asked about those revenue projections, White House aide Jason Furman ... explain[ed] that the tax was never intended "to bring the deficit down and the debt under control."

The goal, Mr. Furman explained, is to establish a "a basic issue of tax fairness." Millionaires should pay an effective tax rate no lower than a middle-class secretary or a plumber.

It's not about the revenue. The White House itself says so.



Source: Wall Street Journal, 4-11-12. I used the ellipses to remove the WSJ commentary.

[joecct]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

Rover

The Clinton surplus was a result of an expanding economy from the Reagan tax reform and a GOP House that said "No" enough times that spending did not go through the roof.

We have 1/2 of that now.

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

Rover

The Clinton surplus was a result of an expanding economy from the Reagan tax reform and a GOP House that said "No" enough times that spending did not go through the roof.

We have 1/2 of that now.

Reagan had nothing to do with it.

[Rover]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

Rover

The Clinton surplus was a result of an expanding economy from the Reagan tax reform and a GOP House that said "No" enough times that spending did not go through the roof.

We have 1/2 of that now.

From "How to be a Good Republican" joke circa 2000.

#10? - Must believe that current economic boom is due to policies undertaken by Ronald Reagan 20 years ago, but yesterday's gas prices are all Clinton's fault!

[Handyman]

Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

Reagan had nothing to do with it.

Good luck convincing him of that.