O'Reilly vs. Palin on Tea Party

Here is another one.

The best estimates are that the Bush tax cuts (yes, the ones that the Teabaggers want to make permanent) generate about 17 cents of revenue for every dollar lost. In order to achieve that sort of savings, you'd have to do a whole lot more than rein in discretionary spending. Unless we're ready to talk about drastic cuts in defense, homeland security, medicare, medicaid, and social security, all this talk about tax cuts and reducing the deficit is just muddleheaded demagoguery.

Paleocon wrote:

Unless we're ready to talk about drastic cuts in defense, homeland security, medicare, medicaid, and social security, all this talk about tax cuts and reducing the deficit is just muddleheaded demagoguery.

If you add getting rid of the departments of energy, education, agriculture, commerce, health and human services, homeland defense, housing and urban development, and labor, and you got yourself a deal.

The very idea that you can increase revenue by cutting taxes is anchored in the Laffer Curve (the idea that extremely high marginal tax rates for the very rich encourage folks to cheat and, thus, lowering taxes from 99% to 50% will make people pay their share rather than skip).

Do you even know what the highest marginal tax rate is today?

Answer: 33%.

Where in the world is your tidal wave of honest taxpayers going to come from by cutting that from 33% to, let's say 25%? Where is the extra revenue going to come from? Show me where the math makes any kind of sense at all.

Paleocon wrote:

This article goes into the laughability of tax cuts creating more tax revenue.

That article proves absolutely nothing, except that the Bush tax cuts didn't increase revenue (although no one here is claiming that they did). In fact, it gives no hard facts at all, just logical fallacies, mostly appeal to authority like "If there's one thing that economists agree on, it's that [claims of tax cuts increasing revenues] are false." They give no data to support this, only a single interview with a single economist in the Bush administration claiming that those specific tax cuts didn't raise revenues, which, again, no one is debating.

Worst of all is their claim that Reagan's tax cuts were "big money losers". Really? Because revenue went up. You can't argue that. Sure, deficits went up, but that's because he increased spending by a huge amount. Claiming that they were "money losers" is—if they mean deficits—the fallacy of four terms (tax cuts, revenue, Reagan, and deficits). If they don't mean deficits, it's just a flat-out lie.

I never claimed that every single tax cut, ever, raises revenues. I simply gave several examples of where they did, quite dramatically.

It is worth noting that the greatest period of economic growth in American history also coincided with the highest marginal tax rates in American history.

Yes, but in macroeconomics it's pretty hard to have a "control group". Usually, people try to contrast policies of other countries with a similar system in a same time frame. This isn't to argue your conclusion is wrong or right, but what examples to use

Also 89,000 average is pretty nonsense. It doesn't compare to the 6 digit salary fiasco CA got themselves into, but still.

Show me how ANY tax cut in the current day can generate more revenue than it costs.

Paleocon wrote:

The very idea that you can increase revenue by cutting taxes is anchored in the Laffer Curve (the idea that extremely high marginal tax rates for the very rich encourage folks to cheat and, thus, lowering taxes from 99% to 50% will make people pay their share rather than skip).

Do you even know what the highest marginal tax rate is today?

Well, that's rather insulting.

Where in the world is your tidal wave of honest taxpayers going to come from by cutting that from 33% to, let's say 25%? Where is the extra revenue going to come from? Show me where the math makes any kind of sense at all.

Again, you're putting words in my mouth. I never claimed that. I do think taxes need to be lowered, by a very significant amount, but I don't think at this point they'll really increase revenue. As I have mentioned many times, even just on the last page, you have to cut all spending as well. They need to be lowered because they are too high, not because I think they'll give the government more money. I don't want the government to have more money. It has far, far too much as it is.

EDITed for clarity.

Then we can agree that the tired line of cutting taxes will increase revenue is complete and utter hogwash.

Paleocon wrote:

Then we can agree that the tired line of cutting taxes will increase revenue is complete and utter hogwash.

Under current circumstances? Yes. But can it work? Certainly.

mooosicle wrote:

Also 89,000 average is pretty nonsense. It doesn't compare to the 6 digit salary fiasco CA got themselves into, but still.

that includes health care, though, right? So really these are people making about 40 grand a year.

Unless you think being a cop on 24 grand a year with no health insurance is fine.

Seth wrote:
mooosicle wrote:

Also 89,000 average is pretty nonsense. It doesn't compare to the 6 digit salary fiasco CA got themselves into, but still.

that includes health care, though, right? So really these are people making about 40 grand a year.

Unless you think being a cop on 24 grand a year with no health insurance is fine.

Cops in India and Mexico make way less than that a year. They also kidnap and torture folks for money too.

That's the "market based solution".

One of the most efficient ways to ensure that you'll have a paralyzingly corrupt system is to pay your public servants less than a professional wage.

Minarchist wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

Unless we're ready to talk about drastic cuts in defense, homeland security, medicare, medicaid, and social security, all this talk about tax cuts and reducing the deficit is just muddleheaded demagoguery.

If you add getting rid of the departments of energy, education, agriculture, commerce, health and human services, homeland defense, housing and urban development, and labor, and you got yourself a deal. :-)

Recall that the Department of Energy manages our nuclear arsenal.

Minarchist wrote:

Worst of all is their claim that Reagan's tax cuts were "big money losers". Really? Because revenue went up. You can't argue that. Sure, deficits went up, but that's because he increased spending by a huge amount.

I don't know the numbers and I barely know the history so I'm not going to challenge this. I will say that correlation does not equal causality and that for any event in history it's impossible to know exactly how it would have turned out if handled differently.

LobsterMobster wrote:
Minarchist wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

Unless we're ready to talk about drastic cuts in defense, homeland security, medicare, medicaid, and social security, all this talk about tax cuts and reducing the deficit is just muddleheaded demagoguery.

If you add getting rid of the departments of energy, education, agriculture, commerce, health and human services, homeland defense, housing and urban development, and labor, and you got yourself a deal. :-)

Recall that the Department of Energy manages our nuclear arsenal.

Minarchist wrote:

Worst of all is their claim that Reagan's tax cuts were "big money losers". Really? Because revenue went up. You can't argue that. Sure, deficits went up, but that's because he increased spending by a huge amount.

I don't know the numbers and I barely know the history so I'm not going to challenge this. I will say that correlation does not equal causality and that for any event in history it's impossible to know exactly how it would have turned out if handled differently.

In point of fact, a better correlation could be made between the economic expansion and the increase in government spending of the same time period. Increasing spending resulted in an explosion of high tech jobs and, unsurprisingly, high wage taxpayers.

Minarchist, what level of income taxes is acceptable? That is, if taxes are "too high" now (and they are lower now than they have been in my lifetime), what percentage would you say is right for Federal income tax?

.

The entire concept of tax cuts without including massive reductions in government spending is just stupid.

If you don't believe me, try this: blow half of your paycheck at a casino then buy dinner at an expensive restaurant every night. Within a month you'll have an intimate understanding of how our government views basic accounting.

Robear wrote:

Minarchist, what level of income taxes is acceptable? That is, if taxes are "too high" now (and they are lower now than they have been in my lifetime), what percentage would you say is right for Federal income tax?

Zero?

I don't like the 16th amendment. I think it should be repealed. But even when it was enacted in 1913, the top rate was a mere 7% on any income over $500,000 (about $11 million in today's money), and only around 2% of individuals payed any taxes at all. Direct taxation wasn't allowed in the original Constitution and I think there was a good reason for that. Taxation has become absurd. We don't need a government even remotely as large as the one we have, and we clearly can't afford one even half the size of what we have now, judging by the size of the deficit.

Bear wrote:

The entire concept of tax cuts without including massive reductions in government spending is just stupid.

If you don't believe me, try this: blow half of your paycheck at a casino then buy dinner at an expensive restaurant every night. Within a month you'll have an intimate understanding of how our government views basic accounting.

If you hit the jackpot, that isn't a problem now is it?

7% huh? Well, you're out of luck. The lowest they go without being in Somalia or another anarchy is about 10%.

Bulgaria and Kazakhstan welcome you.

1913? Are we really looking at the period in American life where women couldn't vote, men could legally rape their wives, the mentally disabled were forcibly sterilized, minorities were little more than cattle, and dachshunds were stoned in the street due to their german sounding name as a golden age?

Seth wrote:

1913? Are we really looking at the period in American life where women couldn't vote, men could legally rape their wives, the mentally disabled were forcibly sterilized, minorities were little more than cattle, and dachshunds were stoned in the street due to their german sounding name as a golden age?

Some of those are unfair, but I think it is entirely fair to say that asking to turn back the clock to a time before the Interstate Highways, US Air Force, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Food and Drug Administration seems to be where this argument is headed.

Here's an exercise. Stop using the Internet, avoid driving on the Federal and State road system, and eat only uninspected meat for the next two weeks. I'll let you have your mail delivery, potable water, trash pickup, and electricity because I'm just a generous and kindhearted guy.

That's a tiny, tiny, tiny taste of where this "zero tax" nonsense is headed.

Seth wrote:

1913? Are we really looking at the period in American life where women couldn't vote, men could legally rape their wives, the mentally disabled were forcibly sterilized, minorities were little more than cattle, and dachshunds were stoned in the street due to their german sounding name as a golden age?

1st: huh?
2nd: what?
3rd: I'm not sure what any of that has to do with taxes.

Paleocon wrote:

Some of those are unfair, but I think it is entirely fair to say that asking to turn back the clock to a time before the Interstate Highways, US Air Force, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Food and Drug Administration seems to be where this argument is headed.

Here's an exercise. Stop using the Internet, avoid driving on the Federal and State road system, and eat only uninspected meat for the next two weeks. I'll let you have your mail delivery, potable water, trash pickup, and electricity because I'm just a generous and kindhearted guy.

That's a tiny, tiny, tiny taste of where this "zero tax" nonsense is headed.

What makes you think that couldn't still exist? There were still taxes levied before the 16th amendment, but they were mostly excise and the like. Of course, back then, the government was a mere 2% of American spending, whereas now it's between 25% and 45% depending on how you categorize things like interest on the national debt. I'm not an anarchist, as you well know, but the vast majority of the government's spending doesn't go for anything structurally- or otherwise functionally- related. As to your specific points, I would be fine without the CDC or FDA (in fact I think the FDA, in particular, is a huge drag on the health of America; but that's a topic for another day). I think you and I would both agree that the Air Force, along with the rest of the military, is waaaaay larger than it needs to be for actual defense, as opposed to nation-building or whatever we're up to now. As for private roads, most of the ones I've driven on are maintained much better than public roads, although it's difficult in the current climate to really compare the two.

The FDA has demonstrably taken thousands of fraudulent and danger treatments off the market. Walk the halls and look at the electric wands, the bottles of opiate baby calmatives and the like. So what mechanism do we use to fill that void, if not government?

Minarchist wrote:
Seth wrote:

1913? Are we really looking at the period in American life where women couldn't vote, men could legally rape their wives, the mentally disabled were forcibly sterilized, minorities were little more than cattle, and dachshunds were stoned in the street due to their german sounding name as a golden age?

1st: huh?
2nd: what?
3rd: I'm not sure what any of that has to do with taxes.

My point is that it's quite easy for a country to excel in a low (or zero) tax environment when your citizens represent a tiny minority of the populace of the country who are living for the most part on the efforts of the unpaid, who don't have to pay for such things as mental health clinics, and don't need to have the structure in place for battererd women's shelters.

In other words, when white men are the only people earning money and voting, and every other person in the country is second class, the need for taxation is greatly reduced.

I honestly wouldn't mind a repeal of the income tax, but that's because I think it's unfair to the poor and middle class. i'd prefer to see a luxury tax levied on whatever the hell I wanted.

(but then, I'm a monarchist...Minarchist. :))

Robear wrote:

The FDA has demonstrably taken thousands of fraudulent and danger treatments off the market. Walk the halls and look at the electric wands, the bottles of opiate baby calmatives and the like. So what mechanism do we use to fill that void, if not government?

Yup. And for the Food part of the FDA, read Upton Sinclair's masterpiece.

Robear wrote:

The FDA has demonstrably taken thousands of fraudulent and danger treatments off the market. Walk the halls and look at the electric wands, the bottles of opiate baby calmatives and the like. So what mechanism do we use to fill that void, if not government?

I don't know about you, but I'll slip my kid a little opium now and then. Keeps 'em quiet. Seriously, though, they've also prevented many lifesaving treatments from coming to market for more than a decade. They make food more expensive. How do you weigh those lives saved versus those lives lost? What about the voluntary gradings and inspections that pig farmers, among others, go through even though not mandated by the government? That's probably a tangent of a tangent of a tangent, though.

Seth wrote:

My point is that it's quite easy for a country to excel in a low (or zero) tax environment when your citizens represent a tiny minority of the populace of the country who are living for the most part on the efforts of the unpaid, who don't have to pay for such things as mental health clinics, and don't need to have the structure in place for battererd women's shelters.

In other words, when white men are the only people earning money, and every other person in the country is second class, the need for taxation is greatly reduced.

I see your point, but I don't think it works. You presume that the government provided no services to 2nd-class citizens, but also that they took no taxes for them (if, as you say, white men are the only people earning money). Even taken to its logical extreme—as in, only white land-holding males have services provided to them—remember that only 2% of workers had to pay even a single cent of income tax when it was first implemented. I don't have statistics for that time period, but I'm going to go ahead and guess that white males were a significantly larger part of the workforce than a mere 2%. So you likely had a much smaller ratio of worker floating services for a greater ratio of non-taxpayers by ratio than you do now. Of course, really divining those numbers would probably require much more data mining than you and I care to partake (if they even exist), but hopefully you see my point. I feel like I wrote it in a muddled way.

Re-gank to be semi-on topic:

There has been some discussion about how easy it is for grass roots organizations to form and affect politics on a national level... what would it take for such organizations to seriously threaten the major parties? Obviously a combination of factors, but maybe just to mention the things I've heard in this thread so far...

Desire to change tax policy
Desire to change gov't monetary policy
Desire for government spending on specific programs (health care, defense, etc)
Latent Xenophobia (a diving factor for at least one party in most multi-party states)
Anger at incumbents
Celebrity personality

At the moment, I would say Celebrity personality and Latent Xenophobia are the most likely to form a cohesive group of people around the country. But should economic disaster truly strike the United States of America, Taxes, Money, and Spending might start to pull people together.

The largest problem with these groups forming is that it's all talk until something actually happens. And the main parties are very good at co-opting talking points from any successful outside influence (see: Ross Perot). As much as I would like to see the first 3 points above form a party, in such an atmosphere I can only imagine the last 3 points truly causing a breakaway party to form.

Jolly Bill wrote:

There has been some discussion about how easy it is for grass roots organizations to form and affect politics on a national level... what would it take for such organizations to seriously threaten the major parties? Obviously a combination of factors, but maybe just to mention the things I've heard in this thread so far...

A move away from plurality voting would do it. Of course, you'd have to get that by Congress first, and that's something both Democrats and Republicans can agree won't happen.