So my buddy sends an appeal for action supporting Obama's ending of the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% the other day to a send list that included me, but also included at least one guy who, in the run-up to the Invasion of Iraq, emailed a military slide show of weaponry and big ships, etc, heading to the Persian Gulf which could only be described as "neocon-masturbatory."
I thought that that guy was going to respond with a broadside. Instead, the group got an email from someone I don't know but who is just as starboard-sided in his thinking as Slide-Show Bob is. Here's what he wrote:
...but there is a limit to how much taxes can be raised before they begin to create disincentives for work, saving, and investment that prove counterproductive. For example, revenue as a percentage of GDP has held relatively constant over the past 80 years regardless of the top marginal tax rate.
Arguing about what taxes should be raised is a distraction from the real issues
The president wants to spend over $1,000 billion more than revenue next year and raise taxes on the rich (so-called) by a measly $75 billion. You do the math.
When can we talk about the other 93% of annual deficit? How about the existing $16,000 billion of debit costing over $200 billion in interest annually?
I guess we'll wait to talk with our children and grandchildren about that. Meanwhile back to kicking the can and dividing the classes.
Do we have a revenue problem or do we have a spending problem?
http://www.cato.org/...
http://www.cato.org/...
http://www.mygovcost.org/
Merry Christmas and have a great day!
Don't trip on the rococo orange speed bump if you want to jump down to my response, penned this morning.
It might have been my viewing of the second Swedish film in the Dragon Tattoo series last night: I seem to have taken a bit of a Lisbeth Salander approach (sans axe and taser):
The Cato Institute had a name change back in ‘76. It was originally called the Charles Koch Institute. The Koch brothers are very (so-called) rich and very disinterested in anything except what makes them richer.
The last time taxes for the upper 2% were at the levels that the Obama admin is proposing, we had a run of annual budget surpluses - which were subsequently and promptly decimated by George W Bush’s irresponsible tax cuts and attempts to dominate the world militarily per the neocon New American Century plan - a plan that had us waging 2 simultaneous, extravagantly funded, and counterproductive wars (one of which was blatantly illegal, based on fabricated, shifting pretexts and hidden agendas) while refusing to fund them, for the first time in US wartime history, via tax revenues; in fact, they reduced taxes during the execution of their wars. They chose, instead, to fund our idiotic, immoral, and utterly failed hyper-militarism via massive deficits and raiding entitlements. Oh, and George W Bush and Dick Cheney lost the popular vote in 2000 (when they instituted this rolling financial and cultural catastrophe) by 500,000 votes.
You don’t just leap out of black holes like the ones those pricks dug, folks.
“Entitlements”, btw, are “so-called” because those of us who paid into the fucking “trust funds” that “funded” those federal insurance programs thought we were “entitled” to the benefits that we thought we were (so-called) “funding.” Instead, we found out that we were funding right wing boondoggles and corporate welfare, only to have the word “entitlement” become, via right wing propaganda organs like the Cato Institute, et al, a dirty word.
The classes were divided by rich assholes like the Koch Brothers and Richard Scaife and Donald Trump and Grover Norquist, just four of a very long list. They just call it “class warfare” when we in the lower 98% decide to fight back. Check out the tax rates under Republican Dwight Eisenhower if you want to see a really socialist approach to government funding, btw. Obama is proposing a less than 1/3 rate on top earners than was the case when Ward and June were raising Wally and the Beav.
To answer Joshua’s last question: we have both problems, revenue and spending. We are spending on unproductive things like stupid wars and petroleum subsidies and wall street backstops, while treating revenues as if they were dirty toilet paper. The Milton Friedman (so-called) Trickle Down Economics has been fully implemented, starting with Reagan and ending with Bush II, and it’s been an abject failure in every respect. Yet the Right continues to harp on it as if they just haven’t been given enough time. Enough “Trickle Down.” Getting pissed on by rich old white guys with prostate problems isn’t what I call a sane public tax policy.
So my question to this community is, was I too gentle in my criticism of the forces that have just about trashed our nation and continue to peddle their poison?