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Government, the answer to, and cause of all of life’s problems
#64
We don’t want a big Federal government. No one questions some of the needs for the Federal government. However, where we are now is that everyone expects the Federal government to manage everything.
You are effectively arguing a false dichotomy. If you don’t like the tax rate, you must want to make it zero. The real question is whether the Federal government has enough money to maintain what it ought to be maintaining. Right now, the Federal government has its hands in all kinds of things which are outside the scope of the powers given to it in the Constitution unless you expand the meaning of the commerce clause and/or the elastic clause. The Federal government should only have transportation funds for managing the interstate highway system instead of using it to extort the States. It shouldn’t be subsiding farmers and so on. Most of the things people expect from the Federal government ought to come from their State, city or county government.
Tommie: “Lowering taxes always increases revenue.” /// You are just a one note shrill.
As long as there is deficit spending, the only honest response is to cut spending or raise taxes until balance is achieved. Once achieved, then lowering taxes and spending can take place.
The notion of “starving the beast” makes stooges of the LIEberTARDS who urge that approach.
Silly Hoomans.
#67
Tommie: “Lowering taxes always increases revenue.” /// You are just a one note shrill.
That’s a strawman. No one believes that a tax rate of zero (the logical conclusion to “always lowering taxes”) improves tax revenue. No one. The equivalent opposite would be that you believe that always raising taxes increases revenue? It is just as preposterous. The root question is whether the Federal government has enough revenue to do what it ought to be doing.
As long as there is deficit spending, the only honest response is to cut spending or raise taxes until balance is achieved. Once achieved, then lowering taxes and spending can take place.
I would revise that to say that the only honest response is to cut spending until the debt is eliminated or well under control (say less than 3-5% of GDP).
Fundamentally, there is a root distrust that the government will do what it says it will do. If people actually believed that the government would spend the money from tax increases on lowering the debt, would eliminate those tax increases once the debt was under control and would not approve additional spending expenditures until the debt was under control, then most people would go along with tax increases. However, what happen actually happens in the real world is that tax increases never seem to go away. Somehow, someway new expenditures that we “must” have come out of the woodwork to blow up the budget. Mandate that the tax increases go to one and only one purpose: debt reduction, include an expiration trigger on those increases and balance the current budget by cutting spending and I and many others would go along with tax increases.
#68
A well-reasoned response.
If only it were reasonable to reason with bobo, the blathering bolus from the bowels of Bolshevism.
#68 Fundamentally, the negative perception of government grows because the Right has a more able PR machine.
Your contention that tax increases appear with bad circumstance and stay on into good times is not borne out by reality. It can be true in the case of regressive consumption based taxes favored by the right, but not in the case of the progressive income tax.
Everybody born during and after the 1960s has spent their entire life in a environment of falling income tax rates. Moves against this trend are much smaller, less frequent, and less durable than confirming moves.
#68 and #69
After WWII things took off dramatically. The ultimate cause was that the US Federal Government(FDR) could recognize things were bad and put up resources. The specific mechanism was a government directed program of emergency technology development and massive production during the war. They invested when things were bad, and it created the next tier of technology.
Government led tech/industry development programs really work. Outside of China these are generally private owned, but heavily influenced. These are now well understood to be very beneficial in the building stage of a industry.
The biggest threat I see to the economy is recurring costs.
The costs are not government costs, but simple daily life costs. Finance, medicine, and energy costs. If these things get nailed down it can only plausibly come from government.
On one hand, big money to actually catalyze improvements in reduction of non-renewable energy use and. On the other actual sanctions for control-fraud perps, as well as clawbacks of benefits given by organizations discovered to be fraudulent.
#70
Baloney. Regardless of how you categorize a tax, the reality is that often when taxes are increased they are rarely if ever are repealed or it takes decades to do so. What has changed since the 1960’s is that governments are craftier at creating taxes. In addition, I think you are not looking at the bigger picture which includes all the tax you pay. I remember when the sales tax was 5% in CA. Now it is 8.25% and in some places 9.75%! On top of the higher percentage you pay, you pay a higher amount due to higher prices. Even though CA has Prop13, because the value of homes in CA have increased substantially, the amount people in CA pay for property tax has gone up even accounting for inflation. When I look at the overall percentage in income I pay in taxes to my father, the comparison isn’t even close. In fact, I cannot think of a tax I pay now that is at a lower rate than it was ten years ago.
Again, no one trusts the government to do what they say they are going to do. This is not because of some Republican conspiracy. It is because of decades of the government not keeping its word. It is decades of politicians saying one thing and voting another. It is decades of one administration or group of elected officials saying one thing and the next group of elected officials doing something different.
Only when the Federal government stops digging its debt hole (which by recent estimates, even with drastic cuts and tax increases wouldn’t happen until after 2015) will any us entertain the idea of tax increases. When the Federal government demonstrates that it is serious about debt elimination by having a completely balanced budget (i.e. total deficit <= 0), then we'll listen to ideas about tax increases.
#71
After WWII things took off dramatically. The ultimate cause was that the US Federal Government(FDR) could recognize things were bad and put up resources….
First, FDR did nothing after the war since he didn’t make it to the end of the war. Second, the economy took off because all the competition for production had been bombed. In effect, we were the only game in town. Third, the government did not invest in research during the war to create jobs nor for the post-war economy. It did so to win the war.
Government led tech/industry development programs really work.
To be specific, this means military research and development. Yes, I agree that it can pay dividends but most importantly it saves lives. However, the military already has a huge budget of which a large portion is spent on R&D. When your spending deficit is 8%+ of GDP, additional military R&D is a luxury.
#73 The conservative mind is an amazing thing to me. It is taken as a point of fact that military spending is always beneficial from a security, economic stimulative, and technology transfer perspective.
I am suggesting NOT spending more R & D money on military matters, but as a catalyst to help develop industry. Modern mil stuff isn’t as transferable to civilian use as the WWII stuff. We should be looking at things to be sold at large scale.
I WASN’T suggesting that tech development was the purpose behind WWII, but that is the mechanism of the astounding growth afterwords.
Everything just worked better, because all the tech/manufacturing boundaries got pushed. We should do the push again, but for non-military reasons. That way we can target the focus to the real payoff(cost lowering energy/transport tech).
I understand that you can’t see past your political philosophy, but I would urge you to look at the economic development of Japan in the 20th century. Their production shifts dramatically downward after WWII, but trend is almost straight up for 90+ years(note: before, during and after the Marshall Plan).
You know how they did that? Private businesses operating under very tight government supervision.
It works.
#74
The liberal mind is even more fascinating. Somehow, R&D will always be profitable. The question is rarely *whether* something is beneficial. The question that generally needs to be answer is “what are you willing to give up to get it?” and “what level of risk can you handle with respect to getting nothing?”
RE: Research as a “a catalyst to help develop industry.”
Which industry(s) exactly? To do what exactly? Commercial enterprises do R&D to solve specific problems in a way that will be profitable. The military does R&D to solve specific problems to help them be more efficient. What would the goals be of general government R&D: to help certain companies make more money? What is their incentive?
Further, it is absolutely not true that R&D is always beneficial. There are numerous R&D projects that fail every year because they cannot convert the research into a tangible benefit. For military R&D, we accept this as part of the price of military development. For commercial R&D, this is part of the risk of investment. However, it is still the case that that these R&D projects have very specific goals. Only universities do research for research sake and when they do it is to increase the prestige of the university to get more alumni money and funding.
Everything just worked better, because all the tech/manufacturing boundaries got pushed. We should do the push again, but for non-military reasons. That way we can target the focus to the real payoff(cost lowering energy/transport tech).
It was a different era. After WWII, we were on top of the production world. Times have changed and now there is tons of competition from all over the globe.
Again, what you are ignoring is the *reasons* that those industries got pushed: the war. Roosevelt tried for years to push industry to expand and innovate through government spending and it did not work. What did it was the incentive of the war.
I would urge you to look at the economic development of Japan in the 20th century.
Yes, let’s look at Japan. Japanese national debt = 200% GDP. The country is broke and is currently experiencing deflation of their currency. After WWII, Japan focused on rebuilding using modern manufacturing techniques and developed new techniques to compete. In effect, they started over. That helped them become an economic powerhouse…for a while. However, it has been their government’s wasteful fiscal policies that have left that country mired in debt. That is the example on which we should base our fiscal decisions?