A renegade Mexican making fun of and Argentinean.
Rich!
Now on to tax cuts, what is you're problem. as a conservative i see no qualm with the tax cuts, the libertarian side of Republicanism approves the govt taking less of our money. That's right because tax cuts do not cost anything to us, that's our money. The reason we get deficits is because we do not eliminate govt spending like social programs, and pork.
IF you want to about W, a bout the prescription Drug plan. THat is pandering and fiscal irresponsibility. Don't do it on tax cuts
Bravo!!!
If it guaranteed a Republican in the white house in 08??Conservatism has nothing to do with fiscal policy today. Rove, et al would nationalize the nation's health care industry if it would pick up a few more votes.
Yeah he and they would unfortunately.
T Pork, you would need three promotions to get to be an asshole.
The one think I said I can take you to task on:
First of all, we didn't really have a surplus. That was an accounting trick. President Bush was given a recession by the last congress and president. A recession is defined as three consecutive quarters of negative growth. This was declared in at such a time it started in 2000, before president Bush took office.
I disagree with deficit spending in general except in time of recession or war. President Bush has had both back to back, and still the economy has improved.
The deficit is the largest in history by dollar amounts only. As a percentage of this nations wealth, it is shrinking. Would you say a person of 200 pounds and 5% body fat (10 pounds fat) had more fat than a person of 150 pounds and 6% fat? (9 pounds)
Can we look at things in their proper perspective? With a larger economy, percentages equal, time and inflation will always yield larger numbers in raw numbers.
As for taxes, ever hear of the Laffer Curve?
wiki: Laffer Curve
The Laffer Curve: Past, Present, and Future by Arthur B. Laffer
The question isn't about raising or lowering taxes, but how much more can we lower them before we start losing revenue again. We still need to lower total taxation before we get to the peak of the revenue.
So, the US CAN afford the baby boomers' retirement?
No need for the Repugs to with destroying Social Sercurity and Medicare/Medicaid?
No need to cut federal cancer/medial research?
Just think where we'd be without wasting $1T on the ing Iraq war!
Last edited by boutons_; 08-04-2007 at 08:58 PM.
When the 2000's recession began is open for debate, but it was likely in early 2001...
WikipediaThe US economy shrank in three non-consecutive quarters in the early 2000s (the third quarter of 2000, the first quarter of 2001, and the third quarter of 2001). Using the common definition of a recession as "as a fall of a country's real Gross Domestic Product in two or more successive quarters", then the United States was, strictly speaking, not in recession during the period.
The beginning and ending dates of the recession, however, are debated by those using a less traditional definitions of the term. According to the initial report by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the Early 2000s recession lasted from March 2001 to November 2001, as real Gross Domestic Product dropped during this period by 0.2% total from the fourth quarter of 2000. However, even this definition is in doubt. Several members of NBER's business cycle dating committee have said that revised data indicates the recession actually began some time within the final months of 2000. Committee members suggest they are inclined to move the date.[1] NBER President Martin Federstein said:
"It is clear that the revised data have made our original March date for the start of the recession much too late. We are still waiting for additional monthly data before making a final judgment. Until we have the additional data, we cannot make a decision."[1]
Using the stock market as a benchmark, the recession began in March 2000 when the NASDAQ crashed following the collapse of the Dot-com bubble. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was relatively unscathed by the NASDAQ's crash until the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, after which the DJIA suffered its worst one-day point loss and biggest one-week losses in history. The market rebounded, only to crash once more in the final two quarters of 2002. In the final three quarters of 2003, the market finally rebounded permanently, agreeing with the unemployment statistics that the recession lasted from 2001 through 2003.
LinkyIn fairness to Mr. Laffer, there's nothing wrong with this theory. It's almost certainly very true in countries with very high rates of taxation. If you consider the extreme, say a 99 percent marginal tax rate, then the government will probably not be collecting a lot of revenue. To begin with, citizens are going to hide as much income as possible. (The more honest ones will turn to barter and avoid the tax system entirely.) And no one is going to rush out and take a second job or build a factory if they get to keep only $1 of every $100 that they earn.
So it's entirely likely that slashing tax rates from 99 percent to 30 percent could increase government tax revenues. It would deflate the black market and provide a huge new incentives to get back to work and invest - the honest way....
But here's the problem when we take Laffer's theory and try to apply it in the U.S. We don't have a 99 percent marginal tax rate. Or 70 percent. Or even 50 percent. We start with low marginal tax rates relative to the rest of the developed world. (Yes, I understand that it may not feel that way after the check you wrote last month.)
So cutting the tax rate from 36 percent to 33 percent is not going to give you the same kind of economic expansion as slashing a tax rate from 90 percent to 50 percent. There's no huge black market to be shut down, no big supply of skilled workers to be lured back into the labor market, and so on....
Will it generate new economic activity? Probably. And that will generate some incremental tax revenue for the government. But remember, it also means that the government will be taking a smaller cut of all the economic activity than they already were...
Think about a simple numerical example: Assume you've got a $10 trillion economy and an average tax rate of 30 percent. So the government takes $3 trillion.
Let's cut the average tax rate to 25 percent and, for the sake of example, assume that it generates $1 trillion in new economic growth (a Herculean assumption, by the way). So now, what does Uncle Sam get? One quarter of $11 trillion is only $2.75 trillion. The economy grows, government revenues shrink.
That's basically what happened with the large Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts, both of which were followed by large budget deficits. Yes, spending has a lot to do with that, but the bottom line is unequivocal - In both cases, government revenue was lower than it would have been without the tax cuts.
Statistically not meaningful using such elementary extrapolation, especially considering that none of the functions are linear.
Nope. That will be a future disaster. President Bush wanted to take some action to improve it, but was shut down by the nay-sayers and the media propaganda.
The republicans never wanted to destroy it. They wanted to fix it. now I don't agree what they wanted to do, but talking about it and finding solutions is a good idea isn't it? Oh well, The democrats didn't want to talk, They just wanted to politicize it.
What about the bill passed in the house, and I think recently the senate that reduces Medicare benefits to fund added children in government run insurance programs. Just a new money grab by democrats!
Is there a need for something like that? Private practices and hospitals benefit from such things. There is plenty of private research happening. It's just a fell-good spending program.
Who’s talking about cutting it anyway? I haven’t kept up on that issue.
How do you figure it cost that much? It that the total of the spending supplementals stripped of pork? The other costs are normal military upkeep costs. The money that would otherwise be used for training is being used to solve real world issues instead.
Where would we be without the uncons utional social program spending? At least military spending is cons utionally authorized!
I'm not sure which way you are on the issue, but you are right it's not a simple linear function. It is highly questionable where the sweet spot is. We do know that the tax cuts a few years back have returned more than even the optimistic economists though it would. In my opinion that means we are still on the high side of taxation.
Bouton's debunker link is both right and wrong. It is written to leave the wrong impression and uses extreme examples. There is no "jump start" in revenue when lowering taxes. The initial effect is lower revenue, but it then climbs to higher levels than it would otherwise be. The author also uses a single stage static thought. This is a very dynamic scenario, and the cascade effect is what if next to impossible to predict.
The author is clearly ignoring part of Laffer’s logic. Wheelan says:
Goes to prove he is a pundit using junk science. This is clearly against Laffer’s claims and anyone reading his work, rather than what pundits say about him will know this.If Laffer were right, lower taxes would never require any spending sacrifice. We could pay a mere one percent of our income in taxes and still fund all of our government spending -- and maybe more! Do you think that's really possible?
Bouton. Do you ever read the material you post for fallacies? You are always quoting material from ignoramus’s.
"Bouton. Do you ever read the material you post for fallacies?"
go yourself, I didn't post any "material" in this thread.
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