Like many kids my age, I grew up on Mary Poppins, and that proper picture of England and Englishness – the well mannered, prudent, kind-hearted nanny teaching discipline and manners in the heart of London. This past week we’ve seen rioters in the streets of London protesting modest cuts to the nanny state, by throwing traffic signs through the windows of banks and luxury shops in order to get back at the people hoarding all the money… namely, the rich.
In Wisconsin, of course, we saw the same thing: mobs disrupting the legislative process because they didn’t like the outcome, and state senators walking out on their jobs and their oaths because they were going to lose a vote critical to their liege lords and masters, the members of the public employees unions. They know which side their bread is buttered on.
Speaking of heartless multi-millionaires… the mendacious Michigan Manatee of Malevolence – Michael Moore himself – appeared on the steps of the state capitol in Madison and said this:
“America is not broke! Not by a long shot! The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands! It has been transferred in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers, to the banks and portfolios of the uber-rich!”
Put aside the hypocrisy of a multi-millionaire who made his millions attacking capitalism; a man known to hire the cheapest non-union labor available and treat them as badly as anyone in the business. Put all of that 450 pounds of oleaginous quivering hypocrisy off to one side – or at least as far from center as it will fit – and ask yourself if Michael Moore is, in fact, correct: are we in fact broke as a nation? Or is there a “national resource” — namely the wealthy – that have locked up all the money?
Well, many of us on the right know that the left only wins when they can find one isolated sob story and sell that. Statistics – that is to say, data – that is to say, EVIDENCE – is usually fatal to the Liberal worldview.
Noted gear head, hot-rodder, statistical expert and super genius – my friend Iowahawk – took a few minutes out of a busy day of gapping spark plugs, did some basic research, and tried to figure out hot to actually pay for the 3.7 trillion dollars Barack Obama and the congress plan to spend in 2011. Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational Iowahawk!
We’ve got a year to pay for; let’s start at:
12:01 AM, January 1 The only thing more evil than a rich person in the eyes of leftists is a rich corporation. Let’s take the two most evil of all: Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart! Forget high taxes – let’s just take every penny of their combined 2010 global profits: $34 billion dollars! Now we’re talking! Spending all of their money gets us from midnight on January first to:
9:52 AM January 4 Okay, not as impressive as we hoped. So let’s now take EVERY SINGLE PENNY OF PROFIT from the other 498 fat cat companies on the Fortune 500 – ALL of it. That’s $357 billion! That’ll get us to…
2:00 AM February 9 Okay, we’ve taken every dime of profit from the big companies, and it’s only Super bowl time. So let’s grab the obscene corporate advertising – $250 million! — which will run the country for… 36 minutes. But why stop there? All the ad money on all 45 Super Bowls – that’s five billion dollars – gets us to:
2:00 PM February 9 Well, it’s obvious we can’t do this just on the backs of corporations. So if we’re going to soak the rich, lets start with the obscene sports salaries. Take all of the salaries from the NFL, NBA, NHL, Major League Baseball – not their endorsement deals, just their salaries – throw in all of the winnings on the PGA tour and redneck, knuckle-dragging NASCAR as well… That’s 9.4 billion, which gets us to…
1:00 PM February 10 Forget athletes… I mean, take all their money, but they’re not enough. Let’s get the rich! Let’s take 100% of every penny that anyone makes above $250,000. I can hardly wait. Let’s see:
A: Number of US households: 116,000,000?B:
Percent of households above $250k income: 1.93%
Number of households above $250k income: 2,238,800
Total income of households in excess of $250k = $1.412 trillion
Now we’re talking! Eat the Rich! Take everything everyone makes in America above 250k, which gets us from February 10 until…
6:00 PM July 2 Well, obviously we’re going to have to cut some spending. Let’s just stop paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – that’s where the money for health care goes, right? Into wars for oil? Not another dime; just bring ‘em all home. That would save us $105 billion Afghanistan and $159 billion in Iraq, a total of $264 billion – enough savings to cover us until…
4:00 AM July 29 Summer blockbuster season! Hey, we need the money, so screw you, Star Wars: take every penny in movies, toys, lunchboxes, etc — $25 billion – which gets us to…
4:00 PM August 1 Now God knows Hollywood has been good to the left, but they’re no longer useful idiots – they’re just idiots now. So, let’s evict everyone in Beverly Hills and sell their homes at current market value. 15,000 homes at $2 million per gets us another $30 billion, paying the bills through…
4:00 PM August 4 This isn’t working. Michael Moore assured us that there’s plenty of money. And that it’s all tied up in the rich. So liberal billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates – tough luck for you. $100 billion between them… they accidentally fall down the stairs at a public sector union rally, let’s say, and through inheritance tax we keep 50% of their loot — another $50 billion, enough to get us to…
4:00 PM August 9 All right. Let’s get serious: there are 398 more billionaires, according to the latest Forbes 400, with a combined total net worth of $1.29 trillion. A few hundred more accidents at 50% death tax – kill ‘em all and take their estate tax — that’s another $650 billion. Good until…
4:00 PM October 13 Still not there. Okay, forget this namby-pamby 50% nonsense. Kill all the billionaires and take all of their money. Take everything from the next 100 or so of the almost-billionaires, and that buys us an additional 73 days until…
4:00 PM December 25 Christmas! Almost there! See how easy this is? Now remember, this is for America’s poor, so in the spirit of Christmas let’s get rid of foreign aid. This saves $50 billion – getting us to…
4:00 PM December 30 So near and yet so far: we’ve still got a day and change to pay for. To cover the remaining $12.5 billion we’re going to have to hit every American man, woman and child for $40 to pay for that final 32 hours. Which gets us to:
12:00 AM January 1, 2012. Happy New Year, everybody!
Now what?
We’ve taken all of the profits, all of the salaries, all of the assets, all of the expenses and revenues and holdings of the rich and liquidated it. President Obama is proposing we spend 3.6 trillion in 2012 – one thousand billion of that more than what we take in. But that assumes 2.6 trillion in revenues… but revenues from what? We’ve destroyed the private capitol, destroyed advertising revenues, destroyed professional sports, taken every penny that people have to put into new business, or pay for things – it’s all gone. We ate the rich – ate everything they had – and we scraped through one year.
Now what?
{ 28 comments }
Outstanding video. So much so I posted it on FB just to educate my friends on the left.
You’re full of shit, asswipe/
Liberaldude, a self-identifying, representative of the tolerant and diversity-loving left, who replies calmly and with mountains of evidence and logic.
You guys are going to lose. And then you will be even uglier than you are today.
You know this is true.
It continues to amaze me how libs like LIBERALDUDE must resort to name-calling when they can’t make their point any other way. LOL!
I appreciate Bill’s coherent, reasonable, truthful examinations our current American condition. The shameful behavior of the hard left expands without reason. I pity them. Keep up the great work Bill!
Folks, the best thing you can do when assailed by virulent leftists is to point at them and laugh, and then talk to them like naughty small children. They have a tremendous desire to be taken seriously and to be listened to; condescending to them (and after all, that’s really the only way we can truly relate to them) drives them nuts. Well, MORE nuts…
nominal GDP was 14.12 Trillion in 2010. (that is the sum total of all incomes in the United States) Using nominal data is appropriate because we are looking at nominal spending as well.
3.7 trillion in spending implies an effective tax rate of 26%. The top 10%(or is it 20%?) take in about half of all national income. That implies that an effective rate of about 50% on the top 10%(at a federal level) would mean that we have the entire 3.7 trillion covered with no one else paying any federal taxes at all (that would include payroll taxes, excise taxes, estate taxes, tariffs, etc). Targeted cuts to programs which do not have strong fiscal multipliers (the military is the best example, but there are certainly better and worse areas within the military and evaluating those would be valuable) can make this required number much lower. A less progressive tax system (I.E. we do not assert that no one has to pay payroll taxes/SS/medicare taxes/excise/estate taxes etc) would also significantly lower this number.
But we don’t actually have to get quite that far, because we expect spending to fall (in real terms at least) in the coming years for various reasons not including cuts already budgeted. Or, to be explicit, expected growth rates imply that the structural deficit will shrink without much intervention. And it is actually bad for the overall economy for the U.S. to end its deficit at this time (it is good in the long term for us to fix it later, it is bad in the short term and long term for us to fix it now)
To our dear economist friend: when was the last time the effective tax rate was 26%?
The purpose of the exercise was to demonstrate the fallacy that the middle class could have their cake (government spending) and eat it too (low taxes for them, if not the rich). We can certainly fund our current government, for a time, with massive across the board tax increases. Of course the deadweight losses and competitive pressures will force everyone who can (I.e. The rich) to leave, and take their capital with them.
You say the military doesn’t have strong fiscal multipliers, what exactly are the mulitpliers associated with relative stability in resource producing areas (you think oil is expensive now, imagine what it would cost without the US Navy providing security for tankers in the Gulf), freedom of the seas, and subsidizing national security for the markets in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. Not to mention the simple confidence that ones hard earned property wont be taken as loot by the rampaging hordes. You want to talk about weak fiscal multipliers, how about all those transfer payments that make up nearly the entirety of the deficit and have a multiplier below unity.
Where did you study economics? The Midvale School for the Gifted?
“An Economist” needs to learn the difference between GDP and net profit. Net profit, less tax loopholes, is what we pay tax on, not GDP.
Larry. GDP is both the sum total of production and the sum total of income. The costs associated with one business are simply the income to another or to private citizens. So while each individual or individual business may only pay on his profit, the sum total of that profit will still be GDP. This is why the term I used was effective tax rate and not marginal tax rate or anything specific to an income category.
Jeff; Except that its not a fallacy. And making fallacious arguments to attack it is problematic. Current spending is much higher than it would be normally even under the projected welfare state that you suppose.
It is also important to note that deadweight loss is a utility calculation, it does not imply GDP reduction. Aggregate systems do not behave in the same way that a the single supply and demand schedule might imply. The issue of the rich leaving with their capital? Yea, that won’t happen. The things that the welfare state buys for the wealthy are orders of magnitude more valuable than the taxes collected. This is why you see rich people moving to the United States and Europe and not to developing nations and when they get there they choose to live in the highest taxed areas (New York, London, etc). Nor will they move their capital as if liquid capital is sitting with the person. People who live in the U.S. that have liquid capital have already moved it overseas(quite likely), they cannot remove their illiquid capital, that is pretty firmly fixed.
Transfer payments actually have much higher fiscal multipliers than military spending. Ditto taxes that poor people pay. That is not to say that security is not a good, but it is to say that our military does not supply security to the level that is required and it is to say that the marginal value of our military is currently very small. If we think about stability and oil, so long as we don’t care who is running the place (which doesn’t matter since oil is fungible) any money we spend stabilizing is a subsidy to those nations who have oil. But this will not modify the price at least, not the final price except to increase it (this is the nature of a subsidy after all). The short answer is that the military does not protect your property from the rampaging hordes. It is the lack of rampaging hordes that keeps your property safe. At least, within the United States. For an example of how well the military protects your property from the rampaging hordes, see Egypt.
As for when the last time that the U.S. had a 26% of GDP as tax revenue? Pretty much never. But this is mainly from lack of trying. And remember, we don’t need to get there, we only need to hit 23-24% (maybe less) since spending will be going down
Where is “military spending” actually spent? Mostly in salaries to employees and servicemen, who mostly spend it in the US, or in procurement of “stuff” from companies in the US who pay employees, who spend it in the US. This is the logic of a fiscal multiplier, is it not? The only difference between this and welfare or other government employment is what they do in return for the money.
That is part of the logic of the fiscal multiplier. Though iirc the majority of costs is not salaries, rather its in procurement. But those will eventually become the salaries and income of some people.
Note that different people spend in different ways: So we have explicit differences in the multiplier effect in that manner.
The other logic is the explicit benefit that the action brings. I.E. if we spend 30 million on a jet fighter we have a jet fighter that adds no productivity to the system. Military work, when viewed in the larger picture of the economy, is mostly make work and not productive work. Again, that is not to say that the military does not have benefits, but certainly we have exhausted the marginal benefits that ours brings. A cost./benefit analysis would show pretty terrible returns even in terms of “lived saved” if we compared to other types of spending.
If something is done that is productive, such as building roads, railways, power plants, and other productivity enhancing ventures then the multiplier effect is larger(at least we measure it as larger) because we capture all of the increased productivity as well.
It is for these two reasons, that military pay is largely make work, and that disadvantaged classes tend to spend a higher portion of their income than do the rest that even things like payroll tax cuts have larger fiscal multipliers than military spending.
_______
Anyway, a bit on theory of government from a public good and externality perspective. If we propose that the purpose of the government is to maximize the economic welfare of the polity (note that this may not be a good assumption for various reasons, chief of which is that it sets the raw dollar value of welfare for each person equal, when we expect diminishing marginal utility such that if we were maximizing happiness of the polity we would tend to advantage the less well off) then we have two main problems.
1) We have positive and negative market externalites. These require subsidies and taxes to correct. [This is why cap and trade was originally a Republican idea] correspondingly.
2) We have public goods to produce. These goods are things like security, reductions in some transaction costs etc.
This of course means that we have to tax, and ideally we tax such that the negative consequences of the tax exactly equal the positive benefits associated with the public good provisions and externality corrections. Furthermore, within that taxation scheme we should tax in the least damaging way possible.
So the question then seems to be is how much we should be spending on the public goods with the benefits that they provide versus the issues of taxation. The benefit of the military is comparatively very small and the benefit of social programs and infrastructure spending very high. And at any given level of taxation the cost of taxing the wealthier is much lower than the cost of taxing the less well off.
An economist,
You seem to leave out several known issues. 50% Tax rate would make a difference. It would drive out some business by taking away the desire to work 70 hours a week only to realize one could make more as an employee. That’s what I did and my two former employees are still looking for work. Now wouldn’t you have to raise the 50% to 55% and when does it stop? You chose to keep it simple but the fact is you leave out a number of cost already on small business in addition to tax. Do you libs ever consider items like, insurance, lawyers, rent, all the taxes from county and state? NO you don’t. You have to keep it simple because the reality doesn’t support you claims. Try starting you own business, run it for ten years, shut it down because the cost are to high, and then tell me how easy it all is!
It is impossible that you could make more money as an employee as the result of such a tax change. Consider that what is taxed on a business is profit and not revenue. As such, a tax change would directly hit your income. However, such a tax change would directly hit your employed income in the exact same percentage basis. So if you were making more money as a business before then you’re going to be making more money as a business after.
Also keep in mind that these are taxes on profits and we have stressed that we are only talking about high income earners, so if you’re hitting the income requirements to have the high effective tax rates as claimed (and note, we aren’t actually talking tax rates nearly that high) then you’re not shutting down your business as a result of the high taxes.
Now that does not mean that it might not dissuade you from taking such an action if you’re working quite hard and would find employment easier, but no one said that starting a business is supposed to be easy (though in the U.S. we subsidize small businesses to a significant degree because we believe that starting a business should be easier than the market would otherwise allow). And the fact that some businesses don’t survive, or that its hard, is not evidence of anything. What you’re describing and decrying in costs making it difficult to start businesses is the market reorganization mechanism. It is the thing that makes the system of private enterprise efficient.
Remember that all businesses are affected the same by the tax rate (well, at least the majority of small businesses, international taxes and income shifting can change that) just as they are all affected the same by things like insurance, lawyers, rent, and county and state taxes.
I am sure you are familiar with the arguments against a corporate tax. For a recap, the argument roughly goes that corporate taxes, unless the corporation legitimately has market power, are almost entirely transferred as price increases to the end users. This happens because industry costs are uniform, and the inter-market elasticities are necessarily smaller than the intra-market elasticities. This assumes that consumers can shift between markets, but with taxes the cost increases are going to occur everywhere and so intra-market purchasing decisions are left unaffected. At that point we are looking at spending elasticities that are so aggregate that they have roughly zero elasticity and so as above, almost all the costs should be transferred as price increases to the end users.
Well, that same system works for insurance, lawyers, rent, and taxes within each industry. That you did not succeed does not imply that “things were just too hard”. Though it may have looked like it to you, lowering those costs would not have made you any more successful. Costs do not modify the competitive landscape*. It would have lowered the prices that your competitors would have been able to offer in precisely the same amount that it would have allowed you to lower prices and you would have been right back to square one with the exact same profit.
This assumes a relatively competitive market. This is why the thing that they hammer into your head in econ 101 is “it is impossible to make economic profits”. When costs change it also happens for everyone else and the end result is the same. Zero economic profit.
Note that if we don’t assume a relatively competitive market then this can only imply that intervention is more likely the proper action, and of course, intervention requires taxes and you are back to the question I posed at the end of the last post.
*Note that industry specific costs can modify the competitive landscape by causing reductions in demand in that specific industry and these may land on different companies in different ways depending on their cost structure and relative advantages (note however that this implies a market that does not conform as well to the competitive assumptions). However, whether or not that modification lands on any particular actor is indeterminate, so complaining about these costs is still not justified within an economic framework.
You aren’t talking about high income earners. You propose an effective tax rate of 50% on everyone making more than the mean income, which in 2005 was a staggering $62000 per household. That’s the point of the video. It is simply not possible to fund the government as it exists today without massive tax increases for the middle class. Tax increases so large and so widespread that their economic distortions make it likely that current government cannot be funded at all.
THAT is the vivifying force of the Tea Party. THAT is what Paul Ryan’s Roadmap attempts to fix. THAT is what every liberal, including our President, has been lying about for decades.
No, i said that an effective tax rate the set of people who attain half the nations income (that would, roughly, the top quintile, or the top 20%).
Note that half of the income does not imply “over the average” or even “over the median”. And in fact cannot imply it (the set of people who collectively get half the nations income cannot include either the average or median income earner)
AND I noted that such a rate would meet current spending levels, but spending levels are expected to go down to about 24% of GDP, which reduces that burden.
AND i noted that such a rate assumed that no one else paid any federal taxes at all(which would be an unlikely scenario)
So no, i am not asserting what you think I am. It is in fact very reasonable tax rates that can bridge the gap.
There is no liberal conspiracy, no one has been lying to you, and Paul Ryan’s plan is unicorn economics. There is a pretty thorough dissection of the problems involved in its underlying projection (beyond the whole “cut taxes on the rich to pay for a cut to medicare and assume that the government shrinks to levels we haven’t seen since before WWII”) over at macroadvisers if you’re so inclined
http://macroadvisers.blogspot.com/2011/04/economic-effects-of-ryan-plan-assuming.html
I didn’t say median, I said mean. The upper half of the income has the mean as it’s lower bound because that’s the bloody definition. Yes, technically those making exactly the mean income are neither in the upper nor lower halves of the distribution, but you are missing the point. Your self-selected cutoff for a 50% effective tax rate is decidedly middle class.
I never said anything about a conspiracy. By the standard held against President Bush since 2003 liberals have been lying. By a more reasonable standard the majority have simply been wrong. There is a population, however, that should know better. Pelosi and Reid have either been lying to us or they are guilty of gross incompetence.
No the mean is the average. It suggests that if you add up everyone income and divide by the number of people you will achieve that number.
But that is not the point where the total of income breaks 50%. It in fact, cannot be unless everyone makes the same income. To show this is quite simple.
First off lets assume that everyone makes the same amount of money, so that the mean is the same as everyone’s income. Then, let us take 50% of the people and remove 1 dollar of income from them and take the top 50% of the people and add 1 dollar of income to them.
At this point we have a set of people totaling (n/2) who make (mean -$1) and a set of people totaling (n/2) who make (mean +$1). If we average these together we will get the mean. BUT if we add them all up, we will find that the total of income for the bottom 50% is (n/2)(mean) – $(n/2) and the total for the top 50$ is (n/2)(mean) + $(n/2). It should be trivial to see that any amount of inequality in income necessitates that people who make below the mean cannot have their incomes sum to half of the total. [specifically the total is n*mean and so this makes the % of total income that the bottom 50% get as 50% -1/(2*mean)%. Such that if the mean were 10 dollars then the bottom 50% would have 45% of the income and the top 50% would have 55% of the income. Of course, the U.S. is wildly more unequal than that. [that would suggest lower % take home for the bottom 50% and higher for the top]
Furthermore, the numbers that you are using to claim 62k income only include labor income and not capital income. This further skews the numbers towards the top income earners.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/business/29tax.html
This is from 2007, and details the results of an academic study. But know that income inequality has increased and as such the supposed tax (which is, again, much higher than it needs to be for various already explained reasons) would land on about 9-10% of the population. If we are going to have a 50% effective tax rate it would only need to be applied to about 10% of the population in order to pay for the entire government at current expenditures. More detailed studies can be found behind pay walls and a quick google can bring a deluge of other sources if you’re so inclined.
And expenditures are expected to decrease, and we don’t necessitate a system that only taxes 10% of the population rather we are OK with taxing everyone, so long as we tax the people who have less less. For instance, if we taxed everyone 15% then we would only need to tax the top 50% a total of 35% effective rate in order to meed the number which as has been explained is inflated.
Liberals aren’t lying to you. By the standard held against President Bush since 2003 they have undoubtedly not been lying to you. By a more reasonable standard they have simply been correct. Look, if the numbers added up to what you thought they did then yea, there would be an issue. But the numbers do not add up to what you think they do. And economics does not say what you think it says. And as a supposedly informed member of the voting public you should know better. You should check the data and the theories yourself. You should get into the nitty gritty and make sure that the system works the way you’ve been told.
But you haven’t. And i know you haven’t. Because there do exist counter arguments to some of the things i’ve said. And if you knew enough to bring them up i would have had to go and get the empirics that show that those complaints do not hold. I would have had to delve into the realm of statistics to explain what exactly is going on and how some people can be tricked by what they see (or simply want to lie about it). But I have not had to.
When you’re saying that “they’re lying about it”, you’re saying that I am lying about it. Because this is literally what I do with my time. I look at the facts and figures and make sure they conform with the theory. I study so that we can get better and more descriptive and predictive theory. I explain how changing certain things will modify the system and then inform people that different desired outcomes prescribes different outcomes and that most important is defining your desired outcomes.
For instance, it is entirely OK to support lower taxes on the rich and low social spending. If you believe that an aristocracy is desirable and should be supported by the lower classes and that the social upheavals that may come from the instability are not worthy of enough consideration to hedge against with public policy. Or, if you don’t believe in the concept of positive liberties, and feel that the encroachments upon the wealthy are of equal moral value to the encroachments upon the less so. Or if you believe that poor people are morally deficient, and anyone with a household income of under $150k is simply a bad person for not succeeding.
But i don’t believe that you hold to any of those tenets which would support such a system. So the problem must be in how you get your information and what you do with it.
“For instance, it is entirely OK to support lower taxes on the rich and low social spending. If you believe that an aristocracy is desirable and should be supported by the lower classes and that the social upheavals that may come from the instability are not worthy of enough consideration to hedge against with public policy”
Failed attempt at sarcasm.
+ My parents risked life and limb to come to this country to escape this precise kind of political conceit and moral masquerade which ultimately precipitated the confiscation of their property and loss of lives in the old country.
+ They would immediately recognized the sneering way in which you and your ilk would say ‘aristocracy’…much as Lenin would in describing the Kulaks or Ho Chi Minh would refer to Saigon’s minority Chinese capitalists and middle class.
+ “…Such that if the mean were 10 dollars then the bottom 50% would have 45% of the income and the top 50% would have 55% of the income)…” Is this how you refer to private citizens? Is this how you incentivize and promote individual wealth and productivity? As someone who claims to be interested in the empirical, has your brand of confiscatory economics worked for citizens in the South Bronx, East Harlem or Lower East Side? New Yorkers such as myself, already have 40 cents of their dollar redistributed to those whom you refer condescendingly as the ‘lower classes’. Which leads me to wonder who is the real ‘aristocracy’.
+ I’m unconvinced that you genuinely care about ‘the lower classes’ anymore than Mao cared about the poor; because if you did, you would have started your own business and hired the disadvantaged on your own payroll. You would have personally adopted and mentor a family from the projects and help them out of welfare, towards financial independence and prosperity. But I guess its less work for closet Marxists to elect hucksters like Charles Rangle than it is to coax a potato out of the ground and it give to the ‘poor’ themselves.
+ At the heart of this ‘debate’, is whether we believe that man, the individual is Sovereign and has the right to the fruits of his labor. Or that we should allow ourselves to become subjects to the moral dishonesty, cruel compassions and condescension of a new generation of tyrants.
I did leave out the possibility that you believe that the only moral system is anarchy. My mistake. The rest, well… Do you really feel the need to impugn my motives? Do you really believe that I am trying to reason with you out of dishonesty and hatred?
In 1943 F.A. Hayek wrote a book called “The Road to Serfdom” which pretty much said the same things that you are saying now. Except that it never happened. And its not going to happen, because no one wants it to happen. The political situations that have caused populist authoritarian governments to be instilled do not exist in the United states, at least, not as a force significant enough to make anything happen. No one is trying to make the U.S. communist, they’re trying to give more people the opportunity to succeed.
*quote*Is this how you refer to private citizens? Is this how you incentivize and promote individual wealth and productivity?”*quote*
I am simply describing a mathematical situation so that another poster can understand that his claim cannot be true. If you want to incent individual wealth and productivity then you need to take down the barriers to entry that disallow it, you need to lower transaction costs in order to make work more productive, you need to reduce externalities which impose costs on others without their consent. But to do this you also need to tax. And so we have to weigh the benefits of the action against the damage of the tax.
*quote*”I’m unconvinced that you genuinely care about ‘the lower classes’ anymore than Mao cared about the poor; because if you did, you would have started your own business and hired the disadvantaged on your own payroll”*quote*
Marginal Cost/ Marginal Benefit. The costs to me are large, and the benefit to society quite small. The benefit of convincing people that collective action can work (and taxing me more in the process) is much higher than the benefit of individual action. Ergo I take the position that coincides with a broad economic definition of “best interest” without any paradox.
I mean, by your own admission am I to say that you don’t care about anyone because you haven’t given everything you have to them? No, such a proposition would be ridiculous.
Oh, forgot to add something about regulatory capture. You seem to be of the impression that only one side is possible of regulatory capture. This is not the case. Regulation isn’t just what is on the books, but also what is off of them.
Remember, your motivation for the plans you have for my money does not matter. It will never matter. You have no claim on my money, altruistic though those plans may be. What legal bullshit justification that has been wrestled out of our founding principals was never intended.
You’re wrong. No matter what steal in the end, never forget that.
Spending, has, and will continue to increase. Sustained, and increasing high taxes, don’t just drive ‘the rich’ out of the nation, it destroys business and the opportunity for new business and innovation.
You can’t bite that much of the sum total of a nations wealth off each year and not expect destruction. Keep in mind that the government wastes a shocking amount of wealth just moving it around. What is it that you don’t understand about this? 3.7 trillion this year, out of a GDP of 14.6 trillion. This year? Those rich won’t stay that way for long, moving liquid or selling illiquid assets to the government, or not. Because if you had ever actually come close to the economics of business, you’d know that large costs are not clean bites. They slow and actually destroy wealth.
All that aside, the budget is growing. Welfare IS growing, and shockingly faster than our GDP, even if they were running parallel. That is exactly what this video was about. Even if our GDP could absorb the entire debt, 2011 and all, 2012 would be a probable 4+ trillion of sky in the pie. We’d be left with .4 or .5 trillion to fund the government. You can’t tax, no one has any money. No one has any wealth.
And that’s just this years budget. What about the debt. What if our debtor stop loaning. Don’t forget the double counting of looking at the GDP while assuming that the 40% of US investors can be taxed for new debt and hold old debt. Or credit rating has already been forecast to downgrade.
It’s absolutely ridiculous to believe that this is working. There are so many different ways you’re wrong. Again, most importantly, you have no right. It is not the federal governments job to assign these ridiculous expenses. Medicaid, Medicare, SSI, none of it. Using the ‘promote the general welfare’ clause is a joke. That was talking about facilitating trade between states.
You are wrong. I have seen much more intelligent people than you tear your theatrically long winded theory to pieces. Liberals, who are at the level of having to explain themselves to others, always revert to hyperbole, because the math is so easily dismissed.
… And use your real name, you damn weasel.
Your exhortations about how we can’t do stuff simply aren’t true. Sustained and increasing high taxes don’t drive the rich out and the rich does not destroy businesses and innovation.
Now as for the math. Big numbers are not math. Saying that the numbers are large does not mean anything. Why does their size matter? Why does welfare’s pittance in the federal budget matter? If you actually do end up doing the math, looking at GDP, what kind of taxes we can sustain, checking the effects on real disposable income that many government programs have even after taxation is taken out (I.E. if the govt takes $1,000 of your dollars to pay for $1,000 worth of health care then you are no better or worse off, and the tax has no negative effects)
Anyway, you seem to be confusing wealth with income. If we were to use a majority of the resources in the U.S. to pay off the debt rather than consume we would still have the same amount of resources available next year to do the same. This is why we don’t have to worry about paying off the debt immediately. Hell, if we can keep it stable, since interest rates are lower than GDP growth we can pay off the debt without doing anything.
As for having no right? Why not? Why is it not the job of the federal government to promote the general welfare? [Note, this is not the interstate commerce clause, this is in the preamble, they're talking about different things here] Why, as a citizen is it not your obligation to pay into the system which benefits you?
I have always been confused by the people who think “its their money”. Do they not know people? Do they not work with people? Do they not receive benefit from the workings of society? Is there not some price that is demanded for that society? At this point people say “but I didn’t choose the society” and I say “who cares?” And they say “but if its a price then i should choose to pay it for a society”. And I say “do you choose to pay for food in order to live?” And they say “yes, i choose what to eat all the time” and i respond. “But you do not choose to eat, you only choose what to eat. If there is a better product exercise your freedom of the market and go buy it” And they say “but there is no better nation” and i say “well too bad, I guess the market didn’t see fit to provide you with your ideal nation at your ideal price”.
That is a false premise. On so many levels. No I would not say at that point “but I didn’t choose the society” because, I like millions, was not born into the society that you describe. Your theoretical conversation is not the one you would have with an overwhelming majority of Americans. Sorry.
Collectivism is not what this country was founded on. Not only that, but the framework, not being created to manage said economic and moral systems, cannot correctly manage it.
I can see that you cannot understand this. You’re echoing someone else, it would seem. The saying, “practice makes permanent, not perfect” though not entirely correct, is fitting. You seem studied, but in the end, still wrong.
The overwhelming majority of Americans are not first generation immigrants(and many of those don’t come in on their own volition, but rather that of their families), so yes. That is indeed the conversation that I have with them.
Of course if this is the nation that you did choose this no way invalidates the rest of the points.
WRT: What this country was founded on. I am not sure you are using the right word here. I don’t know what you mean. Do you mean “collectivism” as in “society working together making things better”? Or do you mean communism?
Because if its the first, then yes, that is exactly what this country was founded on. Its why we have a federalist system. Hell, if you want to get all national myth about it, the slogan was “no taxation without representation” not “no taxation”, not “no taxation without laissez faire”. There was never in the formation of the United States the idea that there would not be a strong government. The question was whether that strong government was one in the States or one at the Federal level. This debate is academic at this point because we know that a weak federal government doesn’t work; not if the States are to be United.
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