Political Crossfire Forums

He's right. As has been pointed out, that all falls apart when you stop irrationally pretending deficits don't matter. (Deficits being what we're actually talking about) Consider the trillions we've paid in debt and interest to cover insane Republican tax cuts. The trillions our descendants will keep on paying. In actual effect, a tax cut without a prior and proportional spending cut is just another way to blow money, regardless of what Arthur Laffer thought. Republicans have been on the "deficits don't matter" train for my entire life. Republican Jesus got that ball rolling, and I guess they've decided it would be blasphemy to stop and think about it for 5 minutes.

We've had this exact discussion so many times on OGPCF. Republicans have been driving batshit deficits since Reagan, and they've convinced the ignorati that it's a good idea. (Actually, now that we've got the complete Obama administration [and the costs of the 2008 crash and Great Recession] behind us, might be interesting to see if Democratic administrations have caught up...oh wait, we're going by Congress. So, really, Obama is completely off the hook, it would seem...all those crazy deficits to keep the economy from collapsing completely, well, Republicans get to eat that, too. Which is only fair, considering.)

Basically, Galt, your argument hinges on my unfortunate literalism when I said "spending"...but for the covered reasons, it's nowhere near that simple. But you know all this already.

Apologies. I shouldn't have been so precise. I should have said "blow money" or "insane deficits" or "catastrophic debt growth" or something.

Tax policy via budgeting gimmicks.

Can’t tell if this is just them testing the water or desperation.

And who cares about surpluses when we’re cutting taxes without controlling for costs?

i wasn't being emotive when i said the fact health insurance exists is because of confiscatory taxation policy. this is fact. between 1940 and 1946 enrollment with health insurance more than tripled to 30%. this was because of the revenue act of 1942: corporations had tax rates of 90% on profits in excess of prewar revenue. so loopholes were sought and loopholes were found. employee benefits could be deducted from profits. in addition to a 94% personal income tax rate at the top of 32 brackets with the bottom being 23%, this was a way to lower taxes both on the worker and the talent the company was trying to attract as well as on the company itself. and so health insurance itself came to be because of the very distorting effects of confiscatory taxation, and this form of paying for healthcare has had long term impacts on american society.

i'm fine with progressive taxation but 90% is too much; the rich are the most mobile people in society and we want to be attracting them to our country not repelling them. the laffer curve does exist but instead of using it to find optimal revenue for the government it is just used as an excuse to lower taxes. a major problem is government does not sell what it does right very well; people think NASA is around a fourth of the budget when it is under 1%. to convince people to raise taxes to pay for things the benefit the country one must actually state what those benefits are. democrats typically talk about things that are redistribution of wealth which just pisses tax-payers off: they worked for the money. talk about infrastructure, talk about schools, talk about basic healthcare. that makes tax increases on tax-payers something that they can stomach. and making it very clear who is impacted by the death tax so it's not like they're taking 90% of the bonds your grandmaw bought you when you were a itty bitty baby but rather they are using the inheritance over 5 million dollars to help all of us is something i think a lot of people would support -- if they really understood what was going on. people think that they'd tax any inheritance. and be upfront, it's to encourage people to not hold on to wealth for generations, but to move the money around