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Tax cuts or Deficit reduction?

Which is more important to you?


  • Total voters
    22
Not so. Increasing taxes would indeed increase government revenue, but it would also slow the economy by taking money out of the hands of the citizens. The government, to get this scheme to work, would have to take all of that increased revenue and pay off the deficit with it, thus doing nothing to help the economy at all. Overall, you have a net loss which, over time, results in less tax money making it into government coffers.

It's a lose-lose situation.
I was thinking longer-term.

Given a few years, I think taxes that are too high (especially with multiple tax brackets) would reduce revenue because the higher tax (especially if bracketed) would be a disincentive to earning more money.

Other factors affect this, obviously…

If there are more government restrictions and/or requirements on an area of potential business, thus increasing the operating costs of such, it seems to follow that potential businesspersons would be less likely to try starting/running a business in that area.

In my mind, I imagine some kind of balance between taxes that are too high and taxes that are too low, and another kind of balance between regulations and such that are too restrictive and those that are too unrestrictive.

Part of the current disagreement between a the “Right” and the “Left” as they currently stand in the USA – at least as I understand it – is that the “Left” thinks the tax rates and regulations are not high enough or regulatory enough (respectively), while the “Right” thinks the opposite.

Personally, I think it’s a bit more nuanced than that.

I think some (if not most) of the regulations/restrictions are (depending on area) either too targeted, or too general. In short, they are not designed well.

But I digress…
 
But specifically between tax cuts and deficit reduction, which do you think is a bigger priority?

tax cuts because tax hikes are an excuse for the government to spend even more
 
Ironically leading economists will tell you now is not the time to cut spending or reduce taxes. Doesn't make any sense to me but that is what they are saying.

What really really really pisses me off is I heard McConell and Boner say "We" need to cut government spending as in we the people. *&^^%$#@! Hey dumb ****s you were the ones with your hands on the check book not us! (I'm referring to all congress critters.)

It's like the fox in the hen house saying "WE" need to stop eating the chickens!

:hammer:
 
Republicans and conservatives have lately been championing two positions: one, that taxes need to be cut as low as possible, and that the deficit needs to be shrunk as small as possible. As I see it, by themselves the two are exclusive. Ignoring a change in spending, reducing revenue by cutting taxes means more money is borrowed and the deficit grows. So between cutting taxes and reducing the deficit, which would you say is more important?

The premise is flawed.

First, you're asking a hypothetical in hopes of catching people in a hypocritical situation based in real life. However, spending IS an option in real life.

Second, you're hypothetical also assumes that somehow having more revenue coming into the government will magically make the deficit reduced. This somehow assumes that the government will not turn around and spend all that new money gained in ways they wouldn't had they not gained it, thus leaving the deficit at the same point but having us paying them more.

If somehow, someway, we lived in a black and white world where literally the ONLY choic was "Tax Cuts, High Deficit" or "Deficit Reduction, High Taxes" and in said magical world there was a garauntee that the money gained from lack of tax cuts would go directly to reducing the deficit then I'd say the second option.

However, that's like saying "If given a magical world where there's a choie between owning a unicorn or owning a dragon, I'd choose the dragon". Wonderful, I've chose a fantasy answer....doesn't really have much relevance to reality.
 
Ironically leading economists will tell you now is not the time to cut spending or reduce taxes. Doesn't make any sense to me but that is what they are saying.

What really really really pisses me off is I heard McConell and Boner say "We" need to cut government spending as in we the people. *&^^%$#@! Hey dumb ****s you were the ones with your hands on the check book not us! (I'm referring to all congress critters.)



It's like the fox in the hen house saying "WE" need to stop eating the chickens!

:hammer:

Boehner and crew admit that they let the people down and that they were foxes in the hen house. They also were given a second chance, so how about we actually give them one?
 
Ironically leading economists will tell you now is not the time to cut spending or reduce taxes. Doesn't make any sense to me but that is what they are saying.

some certainly would; most especially those who devote themselves to a crackbrained keynesian model.

and, of course, the ones who don't study history:

A depression not only harms millions of people. It leads to intense political pressure for more government spending, higher taxes and other assaults on economic liberty. So it’s important to get through a depression as quickly as possible. Which U.S. president ranks as the best depression fighter?

Not the fabled Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who came to power in 1933, since the Great Depression persisted until the federal government conscripted some 12 million men into the armed forces. Biographers and political historians hail FDR’s charismatic personality, his "Fireside Chats" and his political genius, but his tripling of taxes, his laws making it more expensive for employers to hire people, his anti-discounting laws, his large-scale destruction of food, the 700 industrial cartels he enforced, the monopolies he established, the frivolous antitrust lawsuits he authorized against big employers – these and other measures throttled recovery and prolonged unemployment averaging 17%.

America’s greatest depression fighter was Warren Gamaliel Harding. An Ohio senator when he was elected president in 1920, he followed Woodrow Wilson who got America into World War I, contributed to the deaths of 116,708 Americans, built up huge federal bureaucracies, imprisoned dissenters and incurred $25 billion of debt, for which he has been much praised by historians.

Harding inherited the mess, in particular the post-World War I depression – almost as severe, from peak to trough, as the Great Contraction from 1929 to 1933, that FDR inherited and prolonged. Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway, in their book Out of Work (1993), noted that the magnitude of the 1920 depression "exceeded that for the Great Depression of the following decade for several quarters." The estimated gross national product plunged 24% from $91.5 billion in 1920 to $69.6 billion in 1921. The number of unemployed people jumped from 2.1 million in 1920 to 4.9 million in 1921...

One of Harding’s campaign slogans was "less government in business," and it served him well. Harding embraced the advice of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and called for tax cuts in his first message to Congress, April 12, 1921. The highest taxes, on corporate revenues and "excess" profits, were to be cut. Personal income taxes were to be left as is, with a top rate of 8% of incomes above $4,000... Federal spending was cut from $6.3 billion in 1920 to $5 billion in 1921 and $3.2 billion in 1922. Federal taxes were cut from $6.6 billion in 1920 to $5.5 billion in 1921 and $4 billion in 1922. Harding’s policies started a trend. The low point for federal taxes was reached in 1924. For federal spending, in 1925. The federal government paid off debt, which had been $24.2 billion in 1920, and it continued to decline until 1930...

With Harding’s tax cuts, spending cuts and relatively non-interventionist economic policy, the gross national product rebounded to $74.1 billion in 1922. The number of unemployed fell to 2.8 million – a reported 6.7% of the labor force – in 1922. So, just a year and a half after Harding became president, the Roaring 20s were underway! The unemployment rate continued to decline, reaching a low of 1.8% in 1926 – an extraordinary feat. Since then, the unemployment rate has been lower only once in wartime (1944), and never in peacetime.

"The seven years from the autumn of 1922 to the autumn of 1929," wrote Vedder and Gallaway, "were arguably the brightest period in the economic history of the United States. Virtually all the measures of economic well-being suggested that the economy had reached new heights in terms of prosperity and the achievement of improvements in human welfare. Real gross national product increased every year, consumer prices were stable (as measured by the consumer price index), real wages rose as a consequence of productivity advance, stock prices tripled. Automobile production in 1929 was almost precisely double the level of 1922. It was in the twenties that Americans bought their first car, their first radio, made their first long-distance telephone call, took their first out-of-state vacation. This was the decade when America entered ‘the age of mass consumption.’"..
 
I voted for cutting taxes. I'd cut taxes for those earning under $150,000, and leave everything else (ie: let them expire for people earning over this).

Note that people who earn... $200,000 for example are taxed at the reduced rates for the first $150,000, then at the increased rates for $50,000 above that.

People are spending most of their income below that bracket. Letting them keep a little extra will create demand for goods & services.

I don't mind being in a deficit during a recession as long as they completely pay it off... which they won't. This is my one condition. If they're just going to go through a deficit without cutting the military budget to account for it, and chuck it all on the National Debt, then I am opposed.

ie: I'm not really in any of the categories lol.
 
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