Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy
No. of Recommendations: 1
No tax increases for "the rich".
Imagine that.
No. of Recommendations: 1
No. of Recommendations: 1
Dope1:
The Biden economy can be best described as a Pay Cut.
For everybody.
Some on this board will object, and to that I'll just say...https://www.fund.com/top/mortgage-purchase/rates/d...
Rates as low as 6.1%! How awesome!Umm. I don't have a mortgage.
No. of Recommendations: 2
Umm. I don't have a mortgage.
Good for you.
A lot of people do. Or want to buy a house.
I'll tell them that you said to Pound Sand.
No. of Recommendations: 8
I'll say it again: if no one is going to increase taxes on the wealthy (including unearned income, inherited assets, etc), then they aren't serious about the budget.
I don't care which party it is.
No. of Recommendations: 1
Dope1: A lot of people do. Or want to buy a house.
I'll tell them that you said to Pound Sand.
You said everybody.
And as usual, I did not say what you claim I said.
No. of Recommendations: 1
I'll say it again: if no one is going to increase taxes on the wealthy (including unearned income, inherited assets, etc), then they aren't serious about the budget.
I don't care which party it is. - 1pg
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And I'll say it again: if no one is going to show some spending restraint, then they aren't serious about the budget.
I don't care which party it is.
No. of Recommendations: 1
I would agree if we had excessive spending. As it stands, important programs are underfunded. Infrastructure is underfunded. So right now we need more revenue.
But, yes, once we have the "more revenue", we need to curtail Congress's proclivity to spend (to buy votes, usually).
No. of Recommendations: 4
[1pg]I'll say it again: if no one is going to increase taxes on the wealthy (including unearned income, inherited assets, etc), then they aren't serious about the budget.
I'll say it: if no one is going to increase taxes on the upper-middle class that would never consider themselves wealthy (including higher marginal rates and reducing common deductions like mortgage deductions), they aren't serious about the budget.
[BHM] And I'll say it again: if no one is going to show some spending restraint, then they aren't serious about the budget.
I'll say it: if "spending restraint" doesn't include cutting military sending, Social Security, and Medicare spending, then they aren't serious about the budget, either.
I don't care which party it is.
Our kinda-sorta long-term baseline budget deficit is about $1-1.5 dollars. It ballooned well above that for a few years because of some significant one-off coronavirus spending, but that's going to wane after this budget year. You can't close that hole with taxes on the wealthy. And you can't close that hole with reducing non-defense, non-discretionary spending.
If you're serious about the budget, that means that both tax increases for families earning less than $400K and changes to military and SS/Medicare spending have to be on the table. That's how we know neither party is serious about the budget.
No. of Recommendations: 1
As it stands, important programs are underfunded. Infrastructure is underfunded. So right now we need more revenue. - 1pg
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Should every good idea be funded? Immediately?
I would say no. Establishing priorities and deferring gratification are an essential element of fiscal responsibility.
No. of Recommendations: 0
You said everybody.
LOL. Sure.
No. of Recommendations: 1
If you're serious about the budget, that means that both tax increases for families earning less than $400K and changes to military and SS/Medicare spending have to be on the table. That's how we know neither party is serious about the budget.A-yup.
There's lots of pain to be felt by a lot of people.
One simple adjustment is to return to the historical level of government spending equal to ~20% of US GDP. Right now we're at 25%:
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-g...During COVID it got as high as 30%.
No. of Recommendations: 3
No. of Recommendations: 9
One simple adjustment is to return to the historical level of government spending equal to ~20% of US GDP. Right now we're at 25%.
That's part of the problem, though. Too many people believe that such an adjustment would be "simple."
You're talking about (roughly) reducing the federal budget by about 20%. That's around $1.3 trillion dollars per year. That's an impossible number to achieve without major cuts in programs that no one would ever vote to cut. It's just too big.
If you take the major mandatory spending programs off the table (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, veteran's benefits and pensions, interest on the national debt, and the like), the entire rest of government is about $1.7 trillion. Of which about $800 billion is defense. Which leaves about $0.9 trillion for the entirety of the federal government. You could eliminate every single non-defense program outside of the mandatory programs - and still be about half a trillion short.
It's not just not "simple." It's nigh on infeasible to think that could ever happen. The numbers are too big. You'll never get the votes to cut the things you'd need to cut. The party that's ostensibly on the side of cutting spending (GOP) isn't just refusing to cut defense - large swatches of the party are livid that the debt limit agreement doesn't raise spending enough. But all the mandatory programs are off the table, too: the consensus in the current "worker's party" version of the GOP is totally supportive of Medicare and Social Security and veterans benefits and all the other mandatory spending programs. Sure, they might in theory handwave towards trimming Medicaid - but Medicaid isn't big enough (about 10% of the budget) for adjustments to the program to solve this problem, and there's no political will to take an axe to it.
It just can't be done. It's the GOP's big budgetary lie - that we can meaningfully address the deficit solely by reducing spending without making changes to programs our voters love (Social Security and Medicare and vigorous defense spending and veterans' support). It's the inverse of the Democrats' big budgetary lie - that we can meaningfully address the deficit solely by increasing taxes on only the rich, without increasing taxes on huge swatches of our voters who are quite certain that they're already paying their "fair share."
Both of those big lies are....well, they're lies. The numbers are too big. Too much of the federal government's spending is too popular for the GOP to credibly cut; but the federal government's spending is also too big for the Democrats to credibly fund it only with taxing "the wealthy." So they both lie, and say that it's possible for the American people to have what they want (tons of really expensive entitlement and defense programs!), not have to pay any more in taxes, and reduce the deficit somehow.
No. of Recommendations: 0
Sheesh.
LOL@u. I gave an example. Is it your position that no prices have gone up in the last few years?
If so, then one wonders why the Fed has been raising interest rates.
No. of Recommendations: 0
You're talking about (roughly) reducing the federal budget by about 20%. That's around $1.3 trillion dollars per year. That's an impossible number to achieve without major cuts in programs that no one would ever vote to cut. It's just too big.
We'd have to look at the top level numbers to see where it's all coming from.
There is one simple thing to: stop with the baseline budgeting and move to more of a zero based budgeting scheme.
Another is to continue to look at the entire health care model and system as it is...but that's another thread.
No. of Recommendations: 5
We'd have to look at the top level numbers to see where it's all coming from.
There is one simple thing to: stop with the baseline budgeting and move to more of a zero based budgeting scheme.
I disagree.
Again, there's no simple things to do here. There's no "one cool trick" to address the deficit. The problem (okay, one of the many problems) in our politics around the budget is that both parties keep falsely insisting that there's a simple, relatively painless way to "solve" the deficit. Only the iniquity of the opposing party keeps us from getting that strong fiscal health that we could achieve with a "simple" solution.
But that's just not true. The federal government has a huge budget. But that's because most of what it actually spends money on is very popular among most voters. Oh, sure - there's plenty of stupid things that government does, and tons of things that are unpopular.
But almost everything it actually spends money on is stuff that voters like (or at least know has to be paid for): Social Security, Medicare, Defense, interest payments, pensions and retiree benefits, etc.
That's why even Grover Norquist never got his dream of a government so small you could drown it in a bathtub, even at the height of GOP anti-spending fervor. It's not because the federal government should be using a different budgeting scheme. It's because about 90% of what the government spends money on is deeply popular in both parties. Voters want the popular stuff, without having to pay for it themselves, and without raising their own taxes or having deficits.
That's a problem, of course. What voters want is impossible. But you don't win elections by telling voters that they're wrong.
Both parties solve that problem by lying about the budget. The GOP pretends that you can have popular stuff, no deficits, and tax cuts...just by cutting unpopular or wasteful things. That's false because the unpopular wasteful things are a rounding error in the budget. The Democrats pretend you can have the popular stuff and no deficit just by taxing "the wealthy" - which is false, because you can't raise enough money from the 1% (or 3-4%, if you go down to 400K) to pay for everything.
No. of Recommendations: 2
Good for you.
A lot of people do. Or want to buy a house.
I'll tell them that you said to Pound Sand.
****
Dope1....remember since TMF I said- the Liberals want, Hunger Games for 70% of Americans.
You just saw one example, I am not exaggerating.
Putting us all in one big urbanism housing project is an aim of theirs.
See? If their housing is satisfactory - they want the rest to eat cake.
Al Qaeda didn't "hate our freedoms"nearly as much as Liberals do.
No. of Recommendations: 2
I get what you're saying, but I would want to see numbers. Because one number sticks in my head: about 1% of the population owns 90% of the wealth. So where is the biggest bang for the legislating buck? That 1%. Chasing the other 99% seems kinda pointless. I'm not sure off-hand if 1% goes down to the level you quoted ($400K), but it might. Our household never pulled in that much, ever, and we retired early last year. So, yeah...$400K is wealthy. Not Bill-Gates-wealthy, but at least modestly rich.
We need to find a mechanism to account for legacy wealth and unearned income, not just paychecks. A lot of the uber-wealthy don't earn paychecks. If, after we get a fair share of that (i.e. they benefited from our system, so they should contribute), if we're still lacking, then we can tweak lower brackets. But now you're talking about going after only 10% of the wealth, which doesn't seem like the best use of IRS (and legislative) resources.
I know someone will jump on the theft part of this, but I think it was Dillinger who, when asked why he robbed banks, said "that's where the money is". Well, the 1% is where the money is.
No. of Recommendations: 5
I get what you're saying, but I would want to see numbers. Because one number sticks in my head: about 1% of the population owns 90% of the wealth.We don't have wealth taxes in the U.S. We probably can't have wealth taxes at the federal level, absent an amendment to the Constitution. But we'll turn to that in a moment.
Looking at income taxes, the Trump tax cuts reduced government revenue by roughly $250-275 billion per year. The Bush tax cuts reduced government revenue by closer to $300 billion per year. Even if you repealed
both sets of tax cuts - a
massive increase in income taxes - you'd still generate less than $600 billion per year.
And a non-trivial chunk of both tax cuts applies to households that are not "the wealthy" - at least, as defined by the Biden Administration. About half the dollar value of both tax cuts went to households under the $400K income level that the administration is using as the line under which they will not entertain increases to income taxes. So the amount of extra revenue that you could raise by completely repealing both sets of tax cuts for people earning more than $400K would "only" be a bit less than $300 billion.
Compared to a deficit of $1.3 trillion. Not even a quarter of what you need.
What about a wealth tax? Well,
assuming you could get around the constitutional and logistic issues, you're still not going to get anywhere near enough. The Warren "Ultra-millionaire" wealth tax would "only" have raised about $200 billion per year - and that's before people start avoiding (not evading) the tax:
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/...Again - even combining the most ambitious wealth tax that's ever been released by a Senator with one of the largest income tax increases on the wealthy in modern economic times, you don't even get close to 40% of the deficit.
There's just not enough money there. The deficit is too big. If you're not going to cut spending, you have to raise taxes on people we don't regard as "rich."
And that's not even counting the other stuff that Democrats would really want to implement (like universal health care) with the proceeds of those kinds of taxes.
The reality is that you can't have the kind of robust social welfare state that virtually all European countries enjoy without having the kind of broad-based, somewhat regressive type of tax system (ie. a VAT) that imposes sizable tax burdens all the way down to the middle classes. Democrats are misleading their voters when they claim that there's a way to deliver their fiscal promises only by taxing "rich" folks.
No. of Recommendations: 0
If you're serious about the budget, that means that both tax increases for families earning less than $400K and changes to military and SS/Medicare spending have to be on the table. That's how we know neither party is serious about the budget.
What would you suggest? An extra 1% over 300k over 3 years, increase the age for SS by 6 months every year until 68 is reached?
No. of Recommendations: 2
There's just not enough money there. The deficit is too big. If you're not going to cut spending, you have to raise taxes on people we don't regard as "rich." And that's not even counting the other stuff that Democrats would really want to implement (like universal health care) with the proceeds of those kinds of taxes. - albaby
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And therein lies the rub. If we finally corral those loathsome 1% tax cheaters and tax the living crap out of them, then my bet most of any increase will go to new or expanded programs rather than deficit reduction. So we wind up with higher entitlements, higher taxes, and still un-capped deficit spending. Politicians get more mileage out of partially paying for new promises rather than fully paying for yesterdays promises.
No. of Recommendations: 2
IN 1992 one candidate said - fix this problem while we're still strong.
He officially in writing called for draconian tax increases and spending cuts. He called it 'fair shares sacrifice' to give the American dream to future generations.
Anyhow, here we are.
More of the country is a dependent of the government.
This problem is never going to go away, its going to get worse until something cataclysmic happens.
