And Obama wants more taxes?

[Pablo]

o-u-t-r-a-g-e
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All religions are the same - Guilt....just with different holidays.

[Dread Pirate Westley]

I fully support the concept of taxing capital gains at the same rate as any other income. Other than that, I suppose it's better them (millionaires) than me, but it's all just pandering to the masses, anyway.

Feel free to call me a socialist and explain how my plan would stifle job creation and kill puppies, but I don't plan on reading it, so it's probably not worth your time.
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The sooner you accept one simple truth, the sooner we can all get along with our lives.

I'm right.

[raekuul]

Something about Trickle-Down Economics, but I never bought into that anyway. Small Businesses are the way to go.

[Mackay]

Hey Pablo, do you happen to know whether the report is objective? It was both an interesting read and far beyond the reach of my understanding of American politics. It actually seems like a really good way to go about eliminating wasteful spending (eliminating duplications, as opposed to eliminating programs that some might deem necessary, or at least humane? Of the two, I'll take this for sure.), but I don't know whether the report is likely to be slanted to look good to someone like me who doesn't have a deeper understanding of the implications of these eliminations.

For instance, I have no way of knowing how good the "estimate" is on the cost of such overlaps, and whether it is the amount 'saved' by eliminating one of the duplicates, or whether it's instead showing the total being spent. The report just says "Estimated Cost", which to me leans very slightly toward the latter interpretation, meaning that eliminating duplicates wouldn't save the total amount of the costs listed in the report. But then, I didn't even check if the totals add up to what was stated in the article, so maybe they aren't meant to. =)

There are also programs for which their being cut concerns me regardless of whether there's a duplicate perfectly ready to step in and pick up where it left off. For instance, food safety regulation. Again, the report's objectivity is important here - if the government believes that current food safety levels can be maintained while performing these cuts, then it's probably OK, I guess - it's just that the immediate reaction on my part was an instinctive one of negativity when I got to the section about food safety. (also various forms of assistance for those with low income, but that's one of the aforementioned perception-of-necessity-varies-highly-with-ideology ideas, yeah? )

Practically (and also ideologically), I prefer raising taxes. Spell "outrage" at me all you want, $200 billion over a decade is peanuts on this scale. It's another way of appearing to do "small-government" things while keeping the bloated system in place. And I think addressing the bloatedness of the system needs to wait for better economic times. Creating more unemployment while decreasing assistance to those in need while they need it most seems counterproductive to me - decreasing the ability of Americans to spend money even further and choking small businesses to death as a result. Corporations would probably be fine, though.

We can both agree that your government should massively cut defense spending though.

[extropalopakettle]

[Mackay]

[extropalopakettle]

On a related note (because it's not worth a new topic, and I'm too lazy to change topics), I just dropped my iPhone 3, it shattered, and the government is NOT going to compensate me for the injustice!

[Mackay]

[Zag]

[Pablo]

[Pablo]

What ABC News has to say. (For those who dismiss Fox News as a source)
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All religions are the same - Guilt....just with different holidays.

[Pablo]

My point is.....with government fraud and waste what it is, why would anyone think there would be a benefit to giving OUR government more money? It appears to me to be motivated more by a desire to punish the rich - to make them poor also - rather than a desire to improve the country. Is there any logic at all to support the hypothesis that the extra taxes collected would, in fact, reduce the deficit? Or would they be used for more pork?

By the way, extro, I have O'Reilly on TV right now. He's saying the same stuff I am. But the difference is that he's getting paid for it and I'm getting hassled for it. waaaah waaaah That's not FAIR!
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All religions are the same - Guilt....just with different holidays.

[Mackay]

Did I say something whiny? You and extro have both made posts that are mocking a sense of entitlement I don't think I expressed, and which I don't think is accurate of the lower-income groups I mentioned tangentially, either.

My main post addressed possible shortcomings of the government report linked in your first article, as well as my ideological and practical reservations with regard to only cutting spending. Does that translate as "wah wah I'm a big liberal baby who thinks I should have access to safe food"? I'm seriously baffled.

[extropalopakettle]

[mck*]

My bad, then. I didn't understand the point of your post, and when Pablo repeated/played off your joke, I thought it must have been relevant somehow. Sorry

[Pablo]

[Scurra]

(sorry, double posting)
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_{still Quiz Olympiad champion. Must get a life.
New definitions: COFFEE - someone who is coughed upon}

[Scurra]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/09/11/paul-begala-why-now-is-the-time-to-defend-big-government.html

The point here is that for every argument against "big government" there is an equal and opposite one in favour. It's just that there is a natural tendency towards merely saying that the arguments advanced by the other side are clearly nonsensical and should be rejected out-of-hand, rather than giving them any investigation or discussion. Thus the statement "no new taxes" is superficially appealing but is too often based on the premise that the only alternative is "give me everything you have".

As it happens, even though I am an advocate of "Big Government" (in that I think that there are things that are best provided by the country for the whole country), I am also very aware of how easily it goes wrong. I think that the US Federal system is one of the well-designed systems in history*, it's just that it clearly now no longer operates in the way it was originally intended as the National (or perhaps even supra-National) level has gradually absorbed powers that clearly ought to be operating at the State level. And that's bad.

*it seems to be working out much better in Germany, which has a similar Federal structure but also has proper multi-party democracy instead of the unfortunate two-party dichotomy that both the US and the UK largely suffer from. But then again that's partly the benefit of losing a major war and having to rebuild government from scratch...
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_{still Quiz Olympiad champion. Must get a life.
New definitions: COFFEE - someone who is coughed upon}

[Pablo]

The central issue is not the relative good or bad of government. It's not a matter of big is bad....or good.... or right or wrong. The central matter here is that humans are predictably corrupted by wealth and power. The health of a civilization depends squarely on preventing the accumulation of wealth and power in a small number of places. Our government has reached that critical mass. It is no longer motivated by service to its citizens, it is motivated by holding its power and gaining more. Raising taxes, in our current situation, will not remedy that problem. It will only make it worse.

The founders of our country understood this and made every effort to limit the accumulation of power in government. The first 10 amendments (Bill of Rights) were specifically designed to protect citizens from government. The reason they understood this so well was that they saw governments get too powerful in Europe and saw the result. They didn't want to see the same thing happen here, and for a couple centuries, their Constitution worked pretty well. In the last few decades, the government has grown exponentially, accumulating more power and wealth along the way, and our country is manifesting all the symptoms of that.

Scurra, were it not for this corruptability of humans, pretty much any system would work....communism, socialism, etc. We could have a hypothetical/academic debate over big government vs small government, maybe over tea and crumpets. However, in the real world of humans, big government just doesn't work.

By the way, what the hell is a crumpet?
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All religions are the same - Guilt....just with different holidays.

[Scurra]

[Pablo]

[raekuul]

Well, the bulk of today's "Big Government/Small Government" argument appears to be determined by where you stand on what a State can and can't do without the Fed's approval - in so many words, States' Rights.

If you want the governing power to be primarily carried by the Federal Government, then no matter what else you believe, you're for "Big Government." By the same token, if you want the governing power to be primarily carried by the various states, then no matter what else you believe, you're for "Small Government."

Yes, there are some things that can - and should - be handled by the Federal Government: Taxation, War, International Affairs, and Immigration, among others. At the same time, many things that are handled by the Federal Government could probably be better handled by the various states - Education, Law Enforcement, Public Works, and the like.

The problem arises in which systems should be handled at what level - as naturally what I think should be handled at one level, someone else will think should be handled at another level.

[Trojan Horse]

[Pablo]

[Zag]

The hell with a progressive tax. At this point I'd be satisfied if we taxed the rich as much as we tax the middle class -- that is, at the same rate. As Warren Buffet pointed out in an article that someone here linked to, the rich people's income tends to be taxed at a lower rate because much more of it is capital gains.

And I used to scoff at the flat tax. Of course, I believe that the flat tax proponents wanted to exclude capital gains altogether, so I'll continue to scoff at it. (~checks his facts~ Yep, they don't want to tax capital gains at all. Isn't that handy for the ridiculously rich?)

Edit: You do know that that argument is ridiculous. Right, Pablo? Since the Reagan tax "simplification" which drastically lowered the taxes on the rich, money and power have become concentrated at a rate otherwise unprecedented in American history.

[Zag]

Oh! Here's a much better basis for taxation.

Let's turn this stupidness on its head. The argument for lowering the capital gains tax was that encouraging investment would improve the economy. But that is, at best, an indirect effect. What improves the economy is actually producing things. So the act of creating something more valuable from parts or from the ground is what really matters -- THAT is what we should be encouraging. This is primarily farming, manufacturing, and resource extraction (oil and coal, for instance). The people doing these jobs should not have to pay as much in taxes, in order to encourage this activity.

Capital gains just represents pushing money around without actually creating anything. Similarly, marketing, advertisement, politics, ... none of these actually produce anything which improves anyone's quality of life. The income made from these activities should be taxed heavily.

[Quailman]

[Chuck]

The extremely rich can't really be taxed because they own the politicians and would still have control over how the taxes are spent. Taxing the rich takes money away from the moderately rich and effectively gives it to the extremely rich.

The people have little say in all of this. Their votes determine who is elected from among those who run for office, but running for a high office takes a lot of money so it's the extrememly rich who decide who gets to run. The voters get to choose only which of the extremely rich peoples' agents gets elected.

[Scurra]

Chuck, running for election may be ruinously expensive in the US but that's not necessarily the case in other places where there are different rules (especially about media coverage of individual candidates.) That's not to say that the "independently wealthy" aren't the majority of political candidates everywhere anyway simply due to the fact that they can afford to not work during a period when they won't be earning, but it doesn't stop other candidates from standing - and sometimes doing unexpectedly well (we have had several MPs in the UK who have won in the face of well-established opposition.)
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_{still Quiz Olympiad champion. Must get a life.
New definitions: COFFEE - someone who is coughed upon}

[Pablo]

[Pablo]

[Poisonium]

[Zag]

[Pablo]

[Pablo]

[Scurra]

[Pablo]

[raekuul]

You want the Government to shrink and live within its means, in other words?

[Pablo]

[Scurra]