Further Light and Knowledge

Here's how, with no tax increases:

1. Social Security: Implement aggressive means-testing and other reforms to cut 20 percent of spending for $150 billion in savings.

2. Medicare: Ditto, for $100 billion in savings.

3. Reduce Medicaid and other health-care services spending by 10 percent: $33 billion.

4. National defense:There’s room for a 10 percent cut to all national-defense spending. That nets $74 billion in savings

5. “Other income security.” That’s the welfare state bits and pieces not included in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, etc. Eliminating it entirely saves $159 billion.

6. Welfare for bureaucrats: Making federal-employee retirement and disability systems totally self-funding saves $123 billion.

7. Eliminate federal education spending entirely: elementary, secondary, and higher-ed. Leaving it to the states and to the market saves us $106 billion. The Federal Government had nothing to do with Education for most of our history; and schools were better then.

8. Eliminate “community and regional-development” spending, a.k.a. boondoogles and slush funds, except for disaster relief: $15 billion.

9. Get farmers off welfare: $19 billion.

10. Foreign aid, international development, international-security assistance, etc. Quit meddling abroad and propping up Third World potentates, and save $44 billion.

11. Cut all the “energy” spending on “energy information,” “energy emergency preparedness,” etc. — all the energy spending that doesn’t actually produce any energy. And throw federal energy-conservation spending on the fire, too. Saves $12 billion.

12. “Advancing commerce” doesn’t. We’re looking at you, SBA et al.: $23 billion.

13. Federal law enforcement: Cut spending by 10 percent. Legalization saves us $3 billion.

14. Space flight: We aren’t flying in space anymore. Staying grounded saves $17 billion.

15. Downsize Smokey the Bear: Cutting land-management, recreation, natural resources, etc., by half saves $21 billion.

16. Quit subsidizing suburban sprawl: Cutting transportation spending by 10 percent saves $10 billion.

17. Save $36 billion by cutting health research and training. Let Pfizer do it.

18. The real-estate market isn’t going to make a comeback. So eliminate federal housing assistance and save $60 billion.

19. Cut food stamps by 10 percent, save $11 billion.

20. That's just over $1 trillion in savings. No. 20 is a bonus tax hike: Eliminate the stupid and destructive mortgage-interest deduction and have the national debt paid off by the time the kids being born this year graduate from college.

_________________
"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."

- H. L. Mencken

I disagree with every point on your list, beginning with not raising taxes. I won't bother going into a point by point analysis, because disagreement is futile.

Just a thought:

Whenever someone asks me for money, the first response is: Why? What are you going to use it for? I think this is pertinent question to ask the federal government. And of course we can see. They have squandered our money in some very wasteful ways. So why in the world would we now believe that giving them more of our money will solve anything. They have a enormous budget. Much of it goes to war and to war related fun times. I'm pretty sure raising taxes would A) Give the government more money to spend. B) Not fix the current problem we are in.
Raising Taxes on corporations would have just the effect we think; consumers would be fed the increase of their cost at the check out counter.

I don't see raising taxes as a viable option, if for any reason because the government can not be trusted with the money they currently have, giving them more will result in more of the same.

**EDITED for awful grammar and spelling.

Oh come on figaro, that's ludicrous. Didn't I just get done saying the stupid fuckers should fix the tax code so that all the billion dollar enterprises will have to pay taxes? That all the loopholes won't go to the wealthy and the congress people who are bribed by lobbyists? We don't live in a democracy. The electoral college proves that to the entire world. We aren't the healthiest nation on earth, and we don't necessarily have the smartest doctors. We need to come down from our redneck ladder and look at what they are doing to decimate our middle class. Admit it. There won't be one in 10 years. And fuck the notion that we need to take everything off the backs of the poor, head start, food stamps, social security, and medicare. Fuck fuck fuck it. These things can be fixed very easily if the fuckers who are conservative will just actually read the fucking tax code for themselves, and stop acting like they are pro-life. They aren't. They are willing to sacrifice millions.

I am in favor of raising taxes only so that our national debt can be paid down as I believe we can make things work with the current revenue stream and cuts. A simple example(maybe too simple), I owe $1000 debt and have decided that to help pay down that debt I will start a part time job. All of that extra income will go directly towards the debt and no where else. This is how I believe an increase in taxes and closing loopholes should resemble. All of the collected taxes should go directly towards the debt and no politician should have any discretion over that money. Plus, the people should be able to see the amount of money collected and it being applied to our debt as to make things transparent, which D.C. seems to dislike.

_________________
Lead me not into tempation
I can find it myself

Polly: For what it is worth, the U.S. never claimed to be a Democracy. It is a Republic, with strong overtones of Democracry, but a Republic neverthelesss.

Thank God.

I could live with those changes. In fact there are plenty of approaches that could get us where we need to be, but all of them require significant spending cuts and/or robust growth in the economy. Unfortunately reality has been completely suspended. Raising taxes will be deleterious to growth and the revenue will never materialize as hoped--but it will impose more "fairness.".

The top 1% of income earners who pay 38% of the taxes can be made to pay even more, but even if you confiscated their entire income we would still be running a deficit. Given this fact why is it sacrilege to suggest the gluttony must stop?

Raising taxes is not deleterious to growth.

If I paid the same rate that the 1% did, I'd probably pay less than 1/2 my current tax level. Why doesn't the GOP cut my taxes? Oh, right, I'm not rich. I just create jobs by spending money, so lets take some away from me.

Bin Laden should've just been a republican—he wouldn't have needed 9/11.

_________________
I reject your reality and substitute a Star Trek episode of my own choosing.

Such a bold statement with no qualifications is meaningless. I can think of a scenarios where you are right. (I.E. the tax increase is needed for new roads which improves commerce.) And scenarios where you are wrong. (I.E. the money goes to expand the Elvis Presley museum).



I seriously doubt this. Considering the highly progressive nature of income taxes. But leaving nothing to chance I would encourage you to open this link and look at table 8. A small extract in 2008 the top 1% paid about 23% of their AGI as income tax whereas the bottom 50% paid about 2.6% of their AGI. In fact in 2008 every jump in income level saw a significant jump in percentage of AGI paid as income tax except the highest where it went down slightly.



You're just being a jackass now.

I disagree strongly with both of these points. At a minimum if this is done then people who are denied benefits because of means testing should be dropped from paying payroll taxes, and the money they contributed to it should be returned to them.

As far as tax increases. I'm ok with certain types of increases. Ones like you mentioned eliminating the mortgage interest deduction. I would also favor eliminating charitable deductions and various other loopholes for individuals and corporations. And after doing this I would also like to see the tax brackets looked at and perhaps lowered a point or two to not increase tax revenue too much. Before I would make changes like this though I would like to see large spending cuts enacted. I think if the spending cuts just enacted in the recent bill are finalized, then I think it would be appropriate to look at starting to close loopholes, and start making some revenue gains. But I still believe the bulk of the effort to bring the budget in balance is going to have to come from spending cuts and hopefully spending restraint in the future coupled with strong economic growth. These last two factors were crucial in the budget balancing at the end of the Clinton adminstration.

From what I was reading on CNN this weekend, so take that for what it's worth, S & P stated that if the Bush Tax Cuts were allowed to expire, it would generate an additional $950 B a year in tax revenue.

Please remind me of why we're allowing the rich to not pay their taxes?

_________________
"To those seaching for truth - not the truth of dogma and darkness but the truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline is required. For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction - faith in fiction is a damnable false hope." - Thomas Edison

The rich pay their taxes. The overwhelming share of income taxes paid are paid by rich people. (Not surprisingly of course since they have the largest share of income.) The trend has been shifting the income tax burden from lower income to higher income taxpayers for a while. So if you think that the higher income brackets should see their taxes rates increase that's certainly a valid opinion, and if coupled to rock solid large spending cuts and future spending restraint, it's something I would support. But this bit of "allowing the rich to not pay their taxes" is wrong.

I keep hearing that we can't raise taxes on the rich because they are the "job creators." Bush cut their taxes at least 5 years ago (I can't remember when his historic taxes went into effect and I don't want to waste my time looking it up). So where are all the jobs these "job creators" are supposed to be creating? Does it take longer than 5 years to create them? I don't think our country can stand any more of this type of job creation.

I guess I should clarify.

I understand that everyone pays taxes. One of the biggest issues I see is that entities such as corporations are allowed to exploit the loopholes in tax law. We see corporations such as GE post huge numbers, yet receive multi-billion dollar tax returns. Companies such as Microsoft are allowed to have less than a10% tax burden, which is a lot money, but because of the way that tax law is written, they are able to circumvent the need to pay taxes on a lot of their revenue.

The thing that pisses me off, which is pissing a lot of people off, is that this notion of capitalism is going to bankrupt the middle class.

There's a lot of things we can do to fix it. I don't agree with much of anything that Figaro posted; however, what I will say is that our current state is not beyond repair. The first thing we need to do is get rid of these yahoos we have in the current government and replace them with people that get it.

_________________
"To those seaching for truth - not the truth of dogma and darkness but the truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline is required. For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction - faith in fiction is a damnable false hope." - Thomas Edison

And I certainly don't claim to be some brilliant economist or statistician. But I am a thinker and what i think is that the system we have in place does not work. So long as greed is allowed to make the rules, those of us that actually work hard for our money are going to go bankrupt.

_________________
"To those seaching for truth - not the truth of dogma and darkness but the truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline is required. For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction - faith in fiction is a damnable false hope." - Thomas Edison