Highly Progressive Approach to Deficit

Agreed. Obama is a dunce boy and it is only media brainwashing that prevents the USA from seeing his utter stupidity. Go over the "fiscal cliff". Let dunce boy worm himself out of yet another situation where his stupidity is proven but the media does not cover how idiotic his response was. I look forward to to the collapse of the USA. It will be fun.

 

Ah, patriotism.

 

I assume you are joking here. I'm not the puppet front for an administration intent on bankrupting the USA. If anyone is a patriot, it is a person in the USA who still shows up to work despite the complete annihilation of the capability of social mobility in the USA.

 

You just said you look forward to the collapse of the USA because you didn't get your way in the election. Grow up.

Acting as if social mobility disappeared in this country on January 20th, 2009, is hilariously dishonest.

 

A government spending money that a government does not have and you tell me to "grow up"? I don't spend money that I don't have (i.e. characteristics of a teenager).

You seriously have some information to prove that social mobility has increased in the USA since 2009 outside of food stamps and government jobs?

 

Personal finance and public finance are two entirely different things. The largest source of our current deficit has come from two things: 1) We doubled our defense budget over the past decade under President Bush and waged two unfunded wars. In the past, we'd always raised taxes to pay for wars. 2) We dramatically slashed revenue from the Bush tax cuts.

Meanwhile, every proposal Obama makes is obstructed by Republicans when Republicans put us in this situation to begin with.

Do you have any information to prove that the recession started under Obama? Do you have any evidence that social mobility has not, in fact, growing worse and worst for thirty years straight now, with some exception during the Clinton years that Republicans refuse to let us return to.

 

Are you missing something? Did you miss the entitlement increases in food stamps, healthcare and welfare (i.e. bribery for votes)? I'll take your word that you are simply ignorant and not INTENTIONALLY trying to mislead others. I do acknowledge that the military increases are a problem, however, that is like trying to blame your parents because you are ugly. Deal with it. Be a man and lower the military expenditures. If things work out badly, be a man and own up. There is a puppet running the USA now. He is not a man.

 

Did you miss the recession? Do you think that maybe had something to do with increases in food stamps? Just perhaps? Or are you intentionally trying to mislead others?

"Be a man about it" is not a legal option for the President of the United States to perform any sort of budget action. Congressional Republicans have refused to cut defense expenditures. Congress has the authority for that, not the President. Check out the Constitution and then get back to me.

 

There has always been puppets running the government.

 

You mean the recession caused by Clinton, Dodd and Frank. Your leftist history books neglect the impact of the threat of racial lawsuits against banks to lend to unqualified borrowers. This should have resulted in the collapse of banks in the early 1990's. The banks chose to deal with a negative investment structure by resorting to fraud (i.e. credit default swaps). Let me give a layman analogy. You are a casino owner and instead of your staple Blackjack you are now forced to make 50 % of your business based off of Bubbagump (a hypothetical game with a payout ratio of 53 to player and 47 to house). Of course, this is doom. You can go out of business now, OR you can charge massive entrance fees, massive parking fees and sell food and drinks at 3 times the cost. You saw the banks take the survival plan. The USA government bailed them out because the USA GOVERNMENT WAS ULTIMATELY AT FAULT.

 

This literally has nothing to do with why it happened. Risky investments were made and then bundled up to seem like much better ones than they actually were. Billions of dollars of fake value was created based on nothing but junk investments. When these inevitably failed, the whole house of cards came crumbling down. The (*)(*)(*)(*) are you talking about "leftist history books", this (*)(*)(*)(*) happened four years ago I remember it happening and we can track why it occurred.

 

Reality is a hard truth, brother. I won't stand in the way between you and UFO sightings. Believe what you like.

 

Who is dumb enough to believe nonsense from a right-wing website?

 

Appeal to ridicule. Another logical fallacy. Nice.

 

A lot wrong with your arguement.

The OECD tax rate is an average over many different nations with different cultures, economiea, and forms of government ranging from the US to Venezuela (dictatorship), Cuba (communist), Afghanistan (war zone), Greece (fiscal disaster), and Germany (strong successful economy). The average OECD tax level is irrelevent.

But following your OECD baseline, you mix apples and oranges to make your tax point. The OECD 2011 total tax avg is 35.2% of GDP , while the OECD tax level for the USA is 25.1% of GDP, not 15% as you claim. http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/taxation/total-tax-revenue_20758510-table2 The "mid-thirties" OECD value you use is an average of the total tax (personal income, social security type taxes, property, plus some other taxes).

Increasing the US tax base from 25.1% to 35.2% to meet the OECD avg adds 40% to the federal tax revenue. Roughly $800B. Not $1.5 trillion as you claim. Not enough to close the deficit, certainly not enough to solve the fiscal problem.


Lets pursue the "tax the rich" idea. Total personal income in the USA is $12.95 trillion in 2011. http://bber.unm.edu/econ/us-tpi.htm . In 2011, from http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/, the top 5% earned $2.889 trillion gross (thats before any tax deductions) and paid a total of about $660 billion in federal income tax (Note that total federal personal income tax revenue is near $1 trillion, so the top 5% paid near 66% of all personal tax). Thats an effective federal income tax rate of 22.8%. To balance the budget, the govt needs another roughly $1 trillion. Here's how that works out if you just tax the top 5%:


2011 tax generated from incomes of $100k and above $659,615,751.00
total persoanl income $2,889,000,000.00
effect rate of the top 5% 22.8%
after tax income of the top 5% $2,229,384,249.00
additional fed rev needed $1,000,000,000.00
after tax income of the top 5% $1,229,384,249.00
resulting eff rate on the top 5% 42.6%

Congratulations, raising the effective tax rate of the top 5% to 42% balances the budget. This year.

And the 42% wont really balance the budget. The economy is not static. People will divert income, companies will move, people will leave income oveseas instead of bringing it into the US. Taxes depress the economy as well. Doubling the tax rate does not double federal tax revenue. To balance the 2013 budget the rate will have to be higher than 42%.


Look at the White House budget http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/tables.pdf

Every year, the govt needs more revenue. Thats demographics working on social security, medicare, military retirement pay. In 2020, the projection is that social security payroll taxes will not exceed social security benefit payments as they do today. In 8 years (2020), take every single penny the top 5% earns, and you cannot balance the 2020 budget.


Before 2020, the middle class is going to start seeing major tax increases, and those wont help for very long. Within 10 years or so the tax rates required to meet the federal govt expenditures would be such a burden on the economy, the economy would collapse.

The fiscal problems cannot be solved through tax policy alone. Period. Its simple finance and economics.

The only solution is extensive tax reform and entitlement reform. There is no easy way out.

Cutting defense and executive branch spending isnt going to do it. Health care costs are not going to come down since obamacare did not address the fundamental causes of health care costs.

 

Not even a little irrelevant. It tells us what the average taxes are among most countries. We can certainly look at just, perhaps, Europe but that hurts your argument even more; most European countries fall above the average.

I've already addressed this in another post. 25% is the total US tax bill, including local, state, payroll, income, etc. 15% is for the federal government alone. Bumping it up by ten would put us roughly in the average rate for most countries in the world. We'd still be below top first world countries, though. So the issues of taxes being "too high" is not an actual issue here.

No, we'd increase the US federal tax base from 15% to 25%. I'm not confusing apples and oranges, you are. Ten percentage points of GDP is $1.509 trillion. Fact.

I didn't specify at all how I'd raise it beyond a couple of ideas. Income tax would only be part of that. Congratulations on proving something not up for debate. I can do a detailed breakdown if you'd like.

You literally just said, a line before, that it would.

We're well below the tax rate required to depress the economy. We have much lower taxes now than we have in the past and our economy did perfectly fine. Of course the economy isn't static and of course you have to adjust the budget each year. Sometimes it'll be off a bit, perhaps a couple million dollars or more each way. That's not an issue. A small deficit or a small surplus from year to year doesn't break the bank. Even our current debt isn't troubling, it's simply the lack of action on it that is. Getting the deficit cut by even 50% would go a long ways towards long term fiscal security. My proposal does even better.

The increase in budget is usually approximately the size of the growth of the economy. So in 2020 the 5% will earn proportionately more than they do now and the situation is roughly the same. We've increased the budget nearly every year for 200+ years. It's a pretty simple concept.

Healthcare costs are actually going down some. If we adopted single-payer healthcare, it'll go down even more. The defense budget alone is responsible for 70% of our deficit. So, yes, cutting some defense spending would make a huge difference.

 

dan, the people have moved beyond patriotism because the country no longer has a unifying principle. There is nothing which might serve as the object of patriotism.

 

The values enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence still stand to this day. People have worked to obfuscate those values, but they're there.

 

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution enshrined the classical view of individual liberty that grew out of the European Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The classical ideal of individual liberty is still embraced by about half of the American people. However, it appears that the other half of the American people have embraced the ideal of equality as it was born during the French Revolution. Equality of outcome, not equality before the law, is the French Revolutionary view of the meaning of equality. The ideal was the basis for the development of Marxist theory. I call this view Postmodern Liberalism.

There is a natural tension between the ideals of individual liberty and equality of outcome. Equality of outcome requires a devaluation of the component of individual liberty called the right to private property. But there is no way the two principles can coexist in true peace in a multicultural society divided by class and race.

 

I disagree with your assessment. I used to be a very gung-ho libertarian and I still philosophically consider myself one in that I support maximum liberty for the maximum number of people. The issue with libertarianism, or classical liberalism as many people support it, is that it ignores the reality of the world we live in. We were creating a society from scratch, perhaps that would be a great option. But we aren't. We're a society that has developed, really, for thousands of years now. Institutions and oppressions of the past have effects on the present. And most importantly, government is not the only source of oppression. Social structure can be oppressive. How free were people during the Great Depression? The Constitution says nothing of exercising your right to starve. The New Deal and measures like the New Deal preserve liberty far better than the corporate favoratism of the Republican party and some elements of the Democratic party.

 

What clause of the US Constitution (the Social Contract) mandates social justice?

 

Is this in response to my statement or do you wish to start a new conversation? Because I'd be interested in hearing a response, but this is also an interesting topic.

 

These are reasonable points. I don't think anyone in the 1700's saw population growth exploding to 310 million people. However, at some point the citizens of the USA must make a decision. Is this still the USA? If you want to bring up constitutional arguments, you have to be able to defend them. If the USA is dead, put the cards on the table and fold your hand. Charlatans with ulterior motives should be exposed for what they are and not try to hide behind emblems of the USA with immunity to criticism.

 

I don't think the USA is dead at all. I see the federal government as having ample Constitutional authority to exercise the kinds of things I'd like to see. You have to remember, the Constitution is more about telling government what it can't do than what it can. It lists the things that it can't (Bill of Rights), what it must do as a bare minimum (enumerated powers), and then leaves plenty of room for congressional, presidential, and judicial discretion in executing the responsibilities laid out under the enumberated powers.

You can disagree with my assessment and my reasoning, but I think you would agree that an argument can be had at the very least. I see programs like SS, welfare, and good education reform as a key part of upholding the General Welfare clause.

 

Here is where we clearly disagree. Although I consider myself an independent with right leanings (currently), I thought the most heinous insult to the USA recently was the Affordable Care Act. I would not have even blinked if the concept was universal healthcare. The difference is discrimination (i.e. the government now gets to decide who pays and who receives). A universal healthcare system is by definition nondiscriminatory and eliminates the need for tort-reform. The fact that the current charlatans in charge advocated the Affordable Care Act proves to me that they are not acting in the "public good".