Re: Republican Platform Won’t Protect Mortgage Tax Deduction
It's not as progressive as you might imagine from that oft-cited statisic. The fact is that income taxes make up less than half of federal taxes, and the biggest reason so many people aren't paying any is that most of our wealth is concentrated in the top 5% of the population, and moreso the top 1%, and even moreso, the top 0.01%. We are slowly but surely working our way back to the good old days where the robber barons maintained vast fortunes while the working class barely scraped by.
Wealth and income are different, and taxation is directed at income. High rates for higer income earners make it far more difficult to get ahead (and that's where I am, incidentally. No family money. graduated with some but reasonably debt because of scholarships, but with a bucketload of kids and extremely expensive real estate, very hard to scale income up high enough where more than half of every extra dollar goes either to property or sales taxes).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you maintain private insurance and see private doctors in Canada if the national system isn't meeting your needs?
No. If the public system covers a particular service and you are covered for a public service, it is illegal to pay for it out of pocket or for a doctor to provide the service for cash or other payment. A US resident could pay cash for an immediate MRI if he can pull the right strings, and even animals can get quick MRIs for cash, but since the costs are covered by OHIP regular folks cannot jump the queue.
That's how non-cash rationing works. You ration with dollars. We ration by restricting supply.
In any case, the bolded part is the alpha and the omega of discussion. Specifically, you spend about half what we do per capita and about 6% less as a percentage of GDP. If we could reduce our health care spending to your level we could easily out-compete most, if not all of the BRIC countries, let alone the OECD countries. This is the number one thing dragging the US down, and sadly, the real solution to the problem isn't even on the table.
The real solution is to shift aware from "on demand" health care. Not sure if that is something you guys are prepared to accept.
in reason investment is down -- and second place isn't even close -- is that demand is down. Simply put, no one is going to invest in a new factory when their existing factories are running at 70% of capacity. By the same token, if demand is oustrips production no one is going to give up the profits that a new factory could generate on the off chance that some regulation may come to pass that would cut into profits.
Since the regulatory environment affects profits, regulations do have a very real impact on the margins (and since we are talking about 1 vs 2 vs 3 percentage points, the margin is what matters). But yes, all of it ties together. The consumer climate also is affected by the business and regulatory climates.
yroll tax cuts, and the automatic "sequester" spending cuts. Now, I'm sure you will throw the partisan BS flag, but IMO this is almost entirely a Republican created, self-inflicted wound. Obama and the Democrats have proposed that we extend the middle class tax cuts immediately, but Republicans are holding the middle class hostage in order to force the top tax cuts.
my view that was a political manouvre by the dems rather than anything serious. If they got what they wanted there was no way they would deal on the rest, while they could use their out-manouvering of the republicans to demagogue them for raising taxes contrary to their proposals in order to undermine their base.
Both your political parties need to grow up and fix thing is a collaborative and productive way. Problem is, they both seem to be pretty full of clowns.
The middle class tax cuts are a major source of consternation for businesses because their expiration will have a large, immediate effect on consumer demand. Similarly, the automatic spending cuts are a direct result of the Republicans' refusal to accept a reasonable compromise during the debt ceiling fiasco.
Again, political manouvering by both parties got you into that. If the democrats actually made any sort of good faith effort to develop a budget that showed some modicum of fiscal responsibility, it perhaps would have been easier to get the republicans to give them the blank cheque to borrow money.
Which isn't to say the republicans are blameless either with respect to your sequestration mess or your budget and entitlement crisis, but I think the democrats here are the greater of the two evils (the president and the democrats have no real plan to address the issue and have not passed a budget in years)
Generally speaking there are very good reasons for energy-related regulations, as we saw with the BP disaster. But it's really impossible to discuss at this level of generality.
And this is exactly my point. You focus on the negative of what could go wrong if you produce. That's fine, but understand the very real economic and social costs of doing that. The BP disaster cost a lot of money, but ultimately doesn't seem to be that big of a deal environmentally at the end of the day. But the limitations you have on energy production and your insane subsidies of uneconomical energy generations (biofuels, anyone) are a massive drag on your economy, which has an impact on all different sorts of other consumer and producer metrics.
And your delay of the Keystone is just ridiculous.
I don't think that anyone is interested in prolonging regulations that have little practical benefit. And while I'm sure that there are many, those on the right have a tendency to condemn all regulations without giving much thought to rationale behind them.
I agree. At the same time, those on the left have a tendancy to embrace regulations without giving much thought to how well they achieve their intended purpose or what they side-effects might be.
Just an example. Environmental regulations for recycling are often fronts used by incumbent producers to restrict the supply of recycled product in the market, preventing consumers from buying used and/or preventing an independent business starting up to purchase used product, refurbish or otherwise re-ready it, and sell it in competition with the incumbent producers. This is just one of countless examples of how a well-meaning regulation (who can be against recycling, after all) are in fact used by large businesses to insulate themselves from competition, maintain higher prices and stifle innovation.
It is important to look at all of the effects of regulations, not just their intended purtpose or how well they achieve that purpose and only that purpose.
The left will generally argue that regulatory capture resuts in underregulation as opposed to over or misregulation.
But that's not all true, I don't think. It's not wrong, but it results in all of these things, each of which promote the interests of the entities that have captured the regulators over the greater good.
As one easy illustration, minimum biofuel requirements in gasoline benefit generators of biofuels and the industrial farms that produce them, while harming drivers (bad for cars and mileage), eaters (drives up food prices) and the overall economy. Those minimum requirements represent over-regulation resulting from regulatory capture by those interested in profiting off biofuels.
And from what I can see California is the worst with this, pursuing all different sorts of nonsense regulations that, if you dig a bit, are ultimately driven by a partisan interest that believes it can profit from the regulation.
Not enough, unfortunately, but I think there's a general consensus on the left that we should spend much less than we do on the military and corporate subsidies.
Military is a tough one and I don't propose to know enough about it, other than you need to maintain your qualitative advantage however you see fit (which I know doesn't say much about specifics). Corporate subsidies you are likely right.
I think that many on the left also believe that we could and should achieve huge savings by going to a full-on single payer health care system.
You can. But the "savings" to your economy will flow from a combination of things, not all of them desirable (or avoidable). You will need to ration care. You will need to reduce capital investment in medical equipment and technology. You will need to reduce payments to doctors and various other professionals in the system. You will need to invest less in the physical infrastructure of your clinics (other than things not covered by our public system like laser eye surgery and aspects of dermatology, our clinics and hospitals and medical buioldings are pretty decrepid and would probably shock you).
Not to say this isn't the right choice for you, but that would be what you are getting into.
I also believe that most on the left would support eliminating all of the Bush tax cuts, i.e., returning to Clinton-era tax rates, once the economy is on a solid footing. That, in and of itself, would stop the growth of the debt in its tracks.
Perhaps. But tax increases are extremely easy to demagogue and very difficult politically. Those ones also wouldn't be nearly enough if you had single-payer healthcare. Our combined federal/provincial take as a percentage of GDP is around 50%. You're not going to get there by raising taxes to undo those tax cuts.
Would the left support increasing those taxes on the middle class as well as a, say 7-10% VAT (sales tax)? That's most likely the real question.
You're playing both sides of the fence, there. I would say that it was specifically your stricter banking regulations that prevented you from getting hammered by the financial meltdown the way that we did.
And I think that's about right. Except for the fact that the crisis was government driven through government creation and fostering of the sub-prime market and, most crucially, the govenrment allowing for the creating of these mortgage-backed securities, which allowed lenders in the sub-prime market to shift the risk from these loans to other parties, while your government-backed lenders (fannie and freddie) absorbed much of that risk and other massive financial institutions absorbed much of the rest.
As far as energy production, I think it's largely a myth that regulations are to blame for our reliance on foreign oil.
It's also not what I'm saying. You need forein oil. Fine. But With fewer regulations you would produce more oil. Sure that would displace some foreign oil, stemming a bit of the massive outflow of payments, but it also would result in increased wealth generated within your country. Oilfield development generates a whole wack of jobs, and royalties from production generate a massive windfall for whichever govenrment of yours licenses those rights (for us it is provincial govenrments, so Alberta has by far the lowest ioncome tax rate in Canada and no provincial sales tax even though it pays for healthcare for everyone).
Some people need to tone it down a bit here. Stop with the personal comments, the inflammatory comments, the baiting.
