American

Are higher taxes across the board a solution to our problems? If not, would increases in certain taxes do it? If not, then why won't higher taxes help?

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It's Obama's fault!

SouthernDemocrat

Is this just an academic discussion or something?

Reason why I ask that is that both candidates are proposing tax cuts. In fact, 85% of the population would get considerably larger tax cuts under Obama than McCain.

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Charles Krauthammer describing Obama:

"He's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament."

American

It's academic.

SouthernDemocrat

Generalities are never panaceas. This is true whether one is talking tax cuts, tax increases, or whatever.

DarkWizard12

We can't have tax cuts without cutting spending. any side proposing cutting taxes without doing that is well...THE definition of fiscal neo-conservativism, and yet both sides embrace it. McCain more than Obama, yet Obama still supports the tax cut.

PeteEU

No. Higher taxes are never a good solution, but neither is "too low" taxes. By too low I mean a situation where taxes are not high enough to offset the expenditure that government is having.

While government does not have to have a balanced budget, going for the moral high ground and attempting to get a balanced budget is preferred regardless of nation and having a huge deficit is ... embarrassing and not good in the medium and long run.

But cutting taxes and not spending is stupid, and increasing spending is insane if taxes are cut. As long as taxes vs spending is not "near" balance, then both need to be tweaked so it gets nearer balance. Sure a tax cut can give a tax income boost, but there as in all situations a point where the gain is not enough to offset the spending.

Now the real fix would be more transparency and accountability on spending, cutting pork, and fixing the tax code so that everyone and every company pay the taxes they should. This oddly enough is the basic "fixing" that almost every country needs to a degree.

As it stands now, there is really not much transparency or accountability in the US on where all the money is spent, and by who and for what reason. The massive amounts of money used in the military or other "pet projects" are just accepted for the most part. Personally I believe that companies are exploiting the US government by putting higher than needed prices. We have seen it with Haliburton and Iraq and I have seen attempts in my own country (but we have multi party scrutiny of all expenditure, so getting something like that in a budget is hard). But transparency and accountability would alone kill a lot of pork, but putting a ban on that is also a good idea.

Then there is the tax code it self. Having 2/3s of companies paying no taxes is just not good. Everyone should be paying some taxes so the burden is spread as evenly and fairly as possible. The same goes for the wealthy who can legally hide vast incomes from the level of taxation that "normal" Americans pay. It can not be right that a billionaire pays less % than a hard working middle class American. Alone this would be a tax increase for the top few percent of Americans, but they have not been paying their "share" as they should.

Now I know the right as always, will state that the rich pay most of the taxes bla bla, but as always to compare things there needs a perspective. Do the rich pay the same % or higher % of their yearly income than ordinary American's? I highly doubt that considering the literature I have read.

Now saying that, even the "poor" should be paying a certain amount of tax, if anything just a symbolic tax, so that everyone participates in helping society as a whole improve.

Now one could totally scrap the tax system and go to alternative methods like all out sales tax or flat tax, but I do not believe in those tax methods as they are biased against the weak in society. Progressive taxation is by far the best system for society as a whole, where as flat tax is the best system for the rich, and sales tax hurts the middle class and poor the most.

Anyway's that's my 2 cents worth.

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PeteEU

Metropolis

Government spending needs to be restructured before we start playing around with taxes. We need to limit the amount of money going in, and being spent. If you think about it - Are you more likely to 'budget' or search for alternative methods when you only have a few dollars, or when you have a seemingly endless budget?

10% of 1,000,000 is much larger than 10% of 10,000.

metreon

I think it is an exaggeration to anthropomorphize "government" as if it acts like a single thinking (or not) entity. Fiscal and organizational competence has to be established on an individual basis. And in any organization the Peter Principle would apply to such individuals, including governmental organizations.

I would agree that soaking the rich does nothing to clean up fiscal responsibility and efficiency in the government, - they are separate issues. Fiscal responsibility in any organization is ultimately tied to the individuals running it. And that is a matter of individual motivation, intent, and talent. I would argue though, that a culture of greed alone makes it difficult to insure a good intent. As Wall Street has demonstrated, accountability can be repackaged and sold if no one is looking at the details, at least up to a certain point. Government apparently does not have a monopoly on a lack of accountability.

Moreover, if part of the economic problem is consumer liquidity and the inability to go out and spend, I think the establishment of a more progressive tax rate will provide a partial remedy since a lower tax burden on the bulk of consumers might encourage a resumption of consumption. At the very least, those making the highest incomes have not been proving their relative worth anyway, as evidenced by the failures of the Enron's of the world to the collapses of solvency in some banks and Wall Street firms in recent weeks.

Even Warren Buffett has noted several times in the last few years how little the wealthy pay in ordinary income taxes on a relative basis to most middle-class taxpayers, - so much so, each time he has made this claim, he has offered a $1 million dollar challenge to those Fortune 400 to whom he spoke to prove him wrong. So far no one has been able legitimately prove his claim wrong. I would agree with him.

I am also tending to agree now with those who argue the notion of "trickle-down" economics has been debunked by 30 years of data tracking the growing disparity of incomes between the poor and rich. About all that has been proven by the 30 year experiment in deregulation has been that when oversight is diminished in key industries, those businesses will often begin to compete against other businesses in increasingly dishonest and unsustainable ways, all the while creating more subtle, efficient, and increasingly exploitive methods for funnelling wealth from the bulk of the population to the very wealthy.

The illusion of wealth given to many people, even the poor, via the housing bubble was, as we know now, irrational, - a drug of appeasement to dull the senses of a population increasingly being impoverished by a reality of lower real income relative to inflation. The Wall Street drug dealers are finally being taken down, but it has left the world in withdrawal.

Sportsbook

[quote=metreon;1057736397]I think it is an exaggeration to



Even Warren Buffett has noted several times in the last few years how little the wealthy pay in ordinary income taxes on a relative basis to most middle-class taxpayers, - so much so, each time he has made this claim, he has offered a $1 million dollar challenge to those Fortune 400 to whom he spoke to prove him wrong. So far no one has been able legitimately prove his claim wrong. I would agree with him.

QUOTE]

I really have a hard time when people use him as an example though. One could take away 99% of hiw money and he'd still be considerably wealthy by anyones standards. It is really easy to say tax the rich when one is the 2nd richest man in America.... I think soaking people who make, say, 250k a year is just the wrong action to take. It is not a lot of money if one lives in So. Cal or NY or anywhere where tuition to a school runs 20k a year for elementary. ( And no I do not trust government run schools to educate my children, so tuiton is a must have)

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Iriemon

Yes. A government that increases its debt in relation to GDP every year is eventually doomed to a economically hampered future.

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