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bull . under what government program? be specific if you can.
There seems to be increased "emergency" legislation that comes on the heels of a media buildup to scare the nation into accepting the legislation as a life line. When the smoke settles, the rich got richer and we are still in the same we were in before only now with less money. It's just a funneling of wealth under the guise of leadership. It's been accelerated in the past few years.
The reason the wealthy stay that way or get richer while others are treading water is because the federal government shields the wealthy from repercussions of bad decision making. We buy a home we cannot afford, we go broke and file bankruptcy. The wealthy do it and they end up with the home and the money they originally paid for it as a bailout. Now they've doubled their net worth.
bull . under what government program? be specific if you can.
would have been nice to see it fail so everyones taxes go up and the national deficit is lower imo
Taxes aren't the only variable in that equation.
TR mentioned the deficit; what else would you include?
Do you think that $1 in spending cuts for every $41 in taxes will reduce the deficit? Me neither.
lol
As if wealthy bankers and Wall Street types didn't get a windfall from bad business then they bailed before it crashed, and the feds just gifted the businesses that made these people wealthy trillions of dollars.
What program... lol
you suggested wealthy homeowners were bailed out; nothing could be further from the truth. wealthy defaulters did not "keep their homes" because of a bailout.
neither does TR; he was talking about the counterfactual: if the deal had failed and we went off the so-called fiscal cliff.
are you talking to yourself?
No, that's your bailiwick.
Well no . Next you're going to tell me people didn't actually eat a cake they wanted to have as well.
It's my fault, I didn't realize the capacity for abstract thought was so low here.
DarrinS: however that may be, your reply to TR was pretty much a non-sequitur.
what you said was literally wrong.
people will take you at your word. not saying what you really mean is just lazy and not indicative of anyone else's incapacity for anything.
whatever, dude
Wanting to have your cake and eat it too is literally wrong, but it's called a figure of speech. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us. Wait, Plymouth Rock wasn't even airborne, how's that even possible?
I'd like this, too, only if the increase tax revenue was immediately spent on economic stimulus to attack the 8M jobs deficit, and NOT to pay down the deficit, which can wait until the economy, and esp jobs, are at top speed.
a misleading one if it is that. seems more like a dodge, tbh.
No. Wealthy people don't buy homes and default. Their company buys a billion in ty loans for pennies on the dollar, the individual gets rich from the bonuses then bails, leaving the company struggling as the feds come to the rescue with our money. In essence the company has it's cake and eats it too, although that's just a metaphor so no actual cake was harmed in the making of this post.
the deficit has been building since Repug 2001 tax cuts forced through by reconciliation, then more tax cuts in 2003, two wars, Medicare Advantage, Medicare Part D, and Banksters Great Depression.
Deficit tripled under the Repugs.
That's 12 years of deficit increase. It will take up to that long to reverse it. But it will never be zero. doesn't have to be zero.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...st-in-decades/Tuesday’s tax increase is the biggest in decades
Posted by Zachary A. Goldfarb on December 31, 2012 at 3:37 pm
The broad increase in taxes likely to occur Tuesday is highly unusual by historical standards.
Based on data from the Treasury Department and Moody’s Analytics, here’s a chart showing, for tax increases since 1940, the magnitude of the tax hike in the year following enactment as a percentage of gross domestic product. The three red bars represent options for what will happen starting tomorrow.
But tax hikes have been a rarity recently. Also drawing on data from the Treasury study, here is a chart showing the one-year revenue effects, as a percentage of GDP, of different policy actions.
Assuming we have a fiscal cliff deal, a little over half of the tax hike next year will come from the expiration of the payroll tax cut, which affects every American worker. That tax cut has been in place for two years, replacing a similar tax cut that was in effect in 2008 and 2009.
Because of the expiration of the payroll tax cut, all workers will pay 2 percent more in tax on their salary next year. A worker earning $50,000, for instance, would pay $1,000 more in taxes in 2013 than in 2011 or 2012.
Payroll taxes haven’t gone up since the late 1980s, as this chart based on data from the Social Security Administration shows.
It’s been even longer since middle-class Americans have experienced an income tax hike. On the other hand, wealthy Americans have seen both sizable tax cuts and increases over the past 20 years, as this chart from Owen Zidar of the University of California, Berkeley, shows.
you should have said that instead of using such clumsy, misleading figurative language.
btw, your thread le is misleading, too. the debt ceiling and sequestration come up again within a couple of months, so it's not strictly true to say "the cliff has been bridged," whatever that means.
(another crappy metaphor, tbh.)
"Wealthy people don't buy homes and default"
eg:
http://www.noticeofdefaultcalifornia.com/luxuryhomes.html
yeah, DMC's trying to cover more than a bit of careless generalization here
Reich give the background on why the 1% and United Corporations of America were financing the FixTheDebt campaign, and what really going on witht the Repugs/tea baggers since 2010.
The Ongoing War: After the Battle Over the Cliff, the Battle Over the Debt Ceiling
"`It's not all I would have liked," says Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, speaking of the deal on the fiscal cliff, "so on to the debt ceiling."
The battle over the fiscal cliff was only a prelude to the coming battle over raising the debt ceiling - a battle that will likely continue through early March, when the Treasury runs out of tricks to avoid a default on the nation's debt.
The White House's and Democrats' single biggest failure in the cliff negotiations was not getting Republicans' agreement to raise the debt ceiling.
The last time the debt ceiling had to be raised, in 2011, Republicans demanded major cuts in programs for the poor as well as Medicare and Social Security.
They got some concessions from the White House but didn't get what they wanted - which led us to the fiscal cliff.
So we've come full circle.
On it goes, battle after battle in what seems an unending war that began with the election of Tea-Party Republicans in November, 2010.
Don't be fooled. This war was never over the federal budget deficit.
In fact, federal deficits are dropping as a percent of the total economy.
For the fiscal year ending in September 2009, the deficit was 10.1 percent of the gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in America. In 2010, it was 9 percent. In 2011, 8.7 percent. In the 2012 fiscal year, it was down to 7 percent.
The deficit ballooned in 2009 because of the Great Recession. It knocked so many people out of work that tax revenues dropped to the lowest share of the economy in over sixty years. (The Bush tax cuts on the rich also reduced revenues.) The recession also boosted government spending on a stimulus program and on safety nets like unemployment insurance and food stamps.
But as the nation slowly emerges from recession, more people are employed - generating more tax revenues, and requiring less spending on safety nets and stimulus. That's why the deficit is shrinking.
Yes, deficits are projected to rise again in coming years as a percent of GDP. But that's mainly due to the rising costs of health care, along with aging baby boomers who are expected to need more medical treatment.
Health care already consumes 18 percent of the total economy and almost a quarter of the federal budget (mostly in Medicare and Medicaid).
So if the ongoing war between Republicans and Democrats was really over those future budget deficits, you might expect Republicans and Democrats to be focusing on ways to hold down future healthcare costs.
They might be debating how to make the cost controls in the Affordable Care Act more effective, for example, or the merits of moving to a more efficient single-payer system, as every other advanced country has done.
But they're not debating this, because the federal deficit is not what this war is about.
It's about the size of government. Tea-Party Republicans (and other congressional Republicans worried about a Tea-Party challenge in their next primary) want the government to be much smaller.
"My goal," says conservative guru Grover Norquist, "is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
What's behind this zeal to shrink government? It's not that the U.S. government has suddenly become larger. In fact, non-military government spending relative to the size of the U.S. economy remains the smallest of any other rich nation.
Apart from the military, Medicare and Social Security account for almost everything else the federal government does - and these programs continue to be hugely popular, as Republicans learn every time they threaten them.
The animus toward government has more to do with the growing frustrations of many Americans that they're not getting ahead no matter how hard they work.
Government is an easy scapegoat, utilized by much of corporate America to convince average Americans to cut taxes, spending, and regulations - and divert attention from record-high corporate profits and concentration of income and wealth at the top.
The median wage continues to drop, adjusted for inflation, even though the economy is growing. And the share of the economy going to wages rather than to profits is the smallest on record.
Increasingly it's looked like the game is rigged, especially when people see government bailing out Wall Street (the Tea Party movement grew out of the bailout, as did the Occupiers), and handing out corporate welfare to big agriculture, big pharma, oil companies, and the insurance industry, to name but a few of the recipients.
The outrage grows when average working people are told - falsely - that a growing portion of Americans don't pay taxes and live off government handouts.
The battle over the fiscal cliff is over, but the trench warfare will continue.
http://robertreich.org/post/39402888541
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