As previously noted, through income/payroll taxes the government does tax itself.
and how much of the stimulus ramp up in government spending was in wage hikes that otherwise wouldn't have been? :roll:
Yeah, the fellow's point is that SS/Medicare, the entitlements conservatives so malign, isn't actually generating that 1.5 trillion deficit, and that maybe we should address said 1.5 trillion deficit instead of going after programs irrelevant to the problem.
yeah the fellows point also depends on Medicare not existing. when we get to the 2020's, Medicare, Medicaid, and SS will suck up every single tax dollar. No money to pay interest on the debt, no department of education, no department of defense, no housing and urban development,
nothing but Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. after that the problem get's
worse. those are
indeed the problem.
You even seem to acknowledge that the deficit isn't related to entitlement spending.
that's because the deficit is absolutely related to entitlement spending, especially as we drive into the future and the baby boomers fully move into retirement.
No, no, he's talking about revenues. I previously cited the source - twice, once specifying that it was in fact to cite Joe's argument - that notes that, in fact, US tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is very low compared to other wealthy nations.
that's nice. what you didn't do was demonstrate any point in US history where we have even come
close to generating 24% of our GDP in tax revenues - even under tax rates
far higher than they are today.
Except that our tax codes have so many exceptions that the actual effective tax rates are generally very low - the US has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the OECD based on _what corporations actually pay_.
well, when you make it worth millions or billions to spend hundreds of thousands reducing your tax bill - then yeah.
the cost of compliance with our tax code is around $431
Billion due to our idiotic decision to have a regime of high rates with high exemptions. squeeze out those hundreds of billions into productive uses by lowering both rates and exemptions to achieve revenue neutrality, and you will see some impressive growth. that's why the Presidents' Bi-Partisan debt reduction commission proposed exactly that.
Since US military spending almost doubled between 1998 and 2008 (
US Military Spending Since 1998 | Peace Action Maine ), and our GDP didn't remotely double, I'm not at all buying those graphs. I call shenanigans.
1. you are correct that military spending has risen over the past 10 years.
2. this in no way alters the fact that we are
below our historical average.
Joe Steel said:
As we have seen in recent years, American-style capitalism has been a miserable failure. It has created economic devastation unseen since the last time it failed miserably, the Great Depression. With such a legacy, I can't imagine why you're defending it.
:lamo you think that the government interfering in the housing market and then delaying a recovery through massive expansion funded by the withdrawal of liquidity from the private market is
capitalism?
Corporatism, man, it's
Corporatism.
Eric Cantor just admitted the Republican Medicare plan will deny some seniors the care they need.
since the Republican plan does not "deny" anyone (that would be the President's brilliant lets-just-have-rationing idea) anything, and doesn't effect current seniors at all (again, in contradiction to the Presidents' plan), I would like very much to see your citation
FACT: reduction in medicare expenditures off the baseline will occur. not because our politicians are evil and stupid (though many of them are), but because we don't have 60+ $trillion in cash to afford what is currently promised. and we're not going to get that through taxes - the
world doesn't have it. the question comes down to - who do you want to have the power over "what gets' cut" - patients and doctors? or bureaucrats?
Ryan's budget plan actually will increase the deficit.
Ryan's plan doesn't balance the budget for several more years, this is true. It does reduce the deficit off of the current baseline. the President's plan doesn't balance the budget at
all, and it
increases the deficit off of the current baseline.
Somehow these guys are managed to convince a segment of the population that what they plan to do is better than what already have. I attribute that to demagoguery.
no, demagoguery is demagoguery.
this:
The Republican budget will destroy Medicare…
There is an effort to bury this program that has kept the grandmothers and granddads and America’s children alive for them to be able to see their grandchildren grow up because they’ve had good healthcare. Where is the morality?
I just want to paint the picture of ‘no room at the inn:’ ‘Lights out, doors wide open and the drumbeat playing as people are being rolled out of nursing homes in wheelchairs, with crutches, some on beds.
Maybe we can just imagine the tragic scenes of Hurricane Katrina, when nursing home residents were pouring out of nursing homes in the wake of the disaster…Well let me tell you we’ve got Hurricane Ryan, and there’s a disaster coming.
- (Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D., Texas))
this is demagoguery. Accusing republicans of wanting to kill old people and autistic kids, that's demagoguery. Pointing out that Medicare and Social Security expenditures are set to explode at a rate faster than revenues have any prayer of keeping up - and that we are
already heavily in debt - that's not demagoguery. that's
math.
