by publius
I’ve made a lot of snarky references lately about how various Republican policies are really about helping rich people. As I plan to continue this line of snark, I should probably back it up with some substance. And the surtax debate gives me a good opportunity to do that.
Before I do, I should tell you about the ridiculously awesome iTunes U section, which I've recently "discovered." For those unfamiliar, this service allows you to essentially audit various college classes by downloading the lectures (MIT/Berkeley/Stanford have good collections). And it’s free! I’ve been listening to Professor Charles Anderson’s political philosophy class (which is very good thus far, though I’ve only listened to Hegel and Marx – Karl, not Richard).
Listening to the Marx lectures reaffirmed my take on him. Basically, I find his descriptive critiques of capitalism and ideology very persuasive. And I find his normative recommendations to be loopy and dangerous.
His ideology critique, though, is especially interesting. Marx didn’t necessarily say that ideology was a conscious strategy to deceive. As Anderson explained, Marx saw it in more Darwinian terms – a given ideology was adopted because it was useful to the people currently in power. It is “selected” for its usefulness, like any other biological trait. Thus, the ideology of “divine rights of kings” was useful to justify power relations in feudal society.
That’s basically how I see modern anti-tax ideology. It’s not so much that I think people are lying, or are making conscious efforts to deceive. Instead, I think people aren’t seeing the extent to which anti-tax narratives are useful in defending extreme concentrations of wealth and income.
Think about the reality of the surtax debate. Think about what’s really at stake. The actual policy debate is whether to increase tax rates on the top 1.2% of households by a few percentage points. There’s not much there there.
And that’s true of the larger tax debate. Although we need more tax revenues, it’s not like we’d be ushering in a socialist society even if, say, Crazy Communist Publius Hilzoy got to decide the appropriate tax rates (I’ll taunt her until she’s forced to return).
If progressives had their way, tax rates on the very rich would go up by maybe 10 or 15 percentage points. The “merely rich’s” rates would go up somewhat less, and most people’s rates would be essentially unchanged or up just a bit (in exchange for offsetting benefits like health care coverage). Them’s the stakes of our tax debate. It’s not exactly Russia 1917.
The anti-tax ideology, however, obscures the reality of this debate. To listen to Chris Wallace today interviewing Orszag, you would think that a massive redistribution is at issue. But it’s not – the tax debate in our country is about whether to shift the marginal rates on the fairly well-to-do by a few points.
In this respect, the anti-tax ideology – essentially everything you hear about “raising taxes” or “hurting small businesses with taxes”, etc. – is obscuring reality. It's not that I think people are consciously lying. They’re just not seeing how this ideology is really only useful to protect massive concentrations of income.
That’s what burns me about Ben Nelson and Susan Collins and Evan Bayh. They act like they’re populist crusaders defending yeoman farmers from socialism or something. What they’re really doing is preventing those people from getting valuable services by treating tax hikes on the wealthy as something other than what they really are.
To sum up, there’s a debate about how to fund things in this country. The anti-tax ideology expressed so loudly in conservative and “centrist” circles doesn’t really protect the middle class from significant tax increases – that’s not really on the table anyway. What is on the table is redistributing money from those most able to bear it – ones who most benefit from "bailouts" – to ensure that no American will ever again toss and turn at night worrying about pre-existing conditions. It’s not all that much to ask.
All that said, maybe you think concentrating wealth is the best way to go about spreading welfare, etc. That’s fine – but let’s at least be up front about it. Let’s not pretend that taxes on the very very rich are somehow the same as taxes on middle America.
You should also check out the Open University’s lecture series on political philosophy. Some brilliant discussions by Quentin Skinner and Jeremy Waldron on Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and more.
This makes little sense: Traits get selected for adaptive advantage, in regular evolution it’s success at reproduction, in politics it’s success at being elected. So you’ve skipped a step: Even assuming that the ideology that’s being selected for aids defending extreme concentrations of wealth, why would that help you get elected? Because it would inspire Soros to give you money? Oh, wait, we’re talking about Republicans…
Try this out: Being opposed to taxes helps Republicans politically, because their base doesn’t like taxes. Just like being in favor of government spending helps Democrats because THEIR base likes lots of government spending. And, contrary to your expectation that the voters (should?) act like amoral maximizers of short term self-interest, Republicans don’t much like taxes even when somebody else is paying them, while Democrats really like government spending, even when somebody else is getting the money.
The ideology at the top is a reflection, (Quite warped, of course!) of something like an ideology at the bottom.
How much taxes are ‘enough’ for the poor, the middle class, and for the wealthy?
How much?
15% of income?30%? 50%?
Exactly how much is enough? And ‘more than yesterday’ is not an acceptable answer.
How much taxes are ‘enough’ for the poor, the middle class, and for the wealthy?
Well, back when I was a kid, and Eisenhower was president, things seemed to work pretty well. So, 90% for the very wealthy.
I like Brett’s view on contrasting ideologies where ideology is what’s in play. I wonder what percentage of voters are actually in some significant way ideological or principled in their views about government. I know plenty of people who really liked what they heard from Obama during the campaign but when I try to talk to them about what is going on now their eyes glaze over – they just don’t have much understanding of these events and what kind of change we face if he gets the legislation he is pushing. In the Republican camp (dems as well but not to the same extent), anti-tax has more than a single focal point. There are those who are principled and view taxation as a taking of private property and thus evil (a necessary evil until abused and then an absolute evil), and then there are those who oppose taxation, not from a governing philosophy standpoint but just because they are into wealth accumulation for its own sake, sometimes called greed. We have witnessed a lot of this in the events leading up to our current economic malaise. This view may be an ideology but it is not a political or governing ideology.
I observe behaviors within families (my own included) that I personally think gives me insights into how philosophies or ideologies can work. In one case, one or both parents, operate with a view to controlling the direction of events in the lives of children with varying degrees of effectiveness depending on how the emerging personalities of the children react to this control. Of course, these parents would not view that they are doing anything that could be viewed negatively, and they would rarely recognize or concede that they are exercising dominion or power over these children. Other parents handle these responsibilities in a more laissez-faire fashion and create a different atmosphere. Most people fall somewhere in center and may not actually sense these contrasts.
One more point to complete the thought of my last comment. The anti-tax position as an ideological position is more directed at avoiding increased government control over the individual than it is at avoiding a reduction in individual wealth. For the greedy, the opposite.
Good Ole Boy: The anti-tax position as an ideological position is more directed at avoiding increased government control over the individual than it is at avoiding a reduction in individual wealth.
Yes, but this position – insofar as anyone actually holds it – is just complete garbage, held only by people who prefer not to actually think about politics in any logical way. You’ve got to remember that these are just simple Republicans. These are people who like to call themselves libertarians. The common clay of the new right-wing. You know… morans.
Personally I’d prefer to see wealth distributed more equitably up front, rather than trying to increase taxes on the wealthiest after it’s been distributed in order to raise funds for social programs.
Policy proposals along those lines would, of course, cause far more heads to explode than any tax regime ever will.
When folks talk about the evils of raising top marginal rates, I find myself coming back to this:
The US economy has expanded enormously in the last 35 years. Nearly all of the increase in household income created by that expansion has gone to 1/5 of the population.
And the inequality of household wealth dwarfs that of income.
The top marginal tax rate was 91% in 1963. It was 70% until 1980, and 50% until 1986. It was just shy of 40% for nearly all of the go-go 90’s.
People built enormously successful businesses. Lots and lots and lots of people grew enormously wealthy. Nobody’s personal liberty was compromised in any meaningful way that I’m aware of.
If taxes bug you, then work on spreading the wealth created by the economy more equitably. Otherwise, we should probably just accept a progressive tax regime as the price we pay for the opportunity to become absurdly, obscenely wealthy.
‘Yes, but this position – insofar as anyone actually holds it – is just complete garbage, held only by people who prefer not to actually think about politics in any logical way. You’ve got to remember that these are just simple Republicans. These are people who like to call themselves libertarians. The common clay of the new right-wing. You know… morans.’
Every time you post, you make me laugh. What are morans?
Agree in part: those who select these ‘cover stories’, and those they select to publicize & promulgate them are in fact lying (my opinion).
Those who bite, and who spread these cover stories as if they were true are – while not, in their own minds, lying – nonetheless are every bit as dangerous as the liars. Moreso, in fact, as they argue for the lie with the passion of true believers. The same worm lies at the heart of such evangelists as is found deep within true believers of any stripe: the worm of fear, fear that they are wrong – fear that they are in fact making a terrible, terrible mistake.
This is why the conversion or demonization of contrary opinion is so important. It is this gnawing, ever-hungry worm of fear that breeds fascism…and causes otherwise sane, well-meaning people to believe things that can’t actually stand up to scrutiny.
russell,
You correctly identify the conditions that create the state we are now in and I pretty much agree with your outline of the facts. Kevin Drum has an article titled ‘Conservatives and Healthcare’ where he reaches a conclusion that the conservatives can see that we have a healthcare problem but can find no free market solution. Something similar may be the case for income and wealth distribution.
@ GoodOlBoy – “Blazing Saddles” reference – with “moron” tragically misspelled (too bad Jes!)
Dear Rich Folks:
Remember “Freedom Isn’t Free!”
So shut the fuck up and pay your goddam taxes, dickweeds!
with “moron” tragically misspelled
are you not aware of all internet traditions?
This goes along with the operational approach I (mostly) endorse. What’s the proper response to a budget surplus? Tax cuts. What’s the proper response to falling revenues? Tax cuts. If you want to encourage home ownership/charitable giving/civic virtue/patriotism what’s the best way to do so? Tax cuts. When the response to just about every circumstance is ‘tax cuts’, you get the impression that modern ‘conservatism’ is, at its core, about tax cuts. Well, to be fair, it’s also about eternal vigilance and being able to respond to the Yellow Peril/Godless Communists/Terrorists.
Notice how the concerns of the Thinking Conservative haven’t changed all that much since, oh, 1900? This is still the idea that either the Proles or the Furriners are coming to Take Their Money.
It’s been a while since I looked at Marx, but my understanding was that ideologies in his sense essentially limited debate. There are the options we debate about. Then there are the options we never even consider, the unproven assumptions we appeal to in debating, etc. That, as I understand it, is ideology. (But correct me if I’m wrong!)
We are actively debating about whether or not to raise taxes, however. Being anti-tax isn’t obviously ideology. I don’t mean this point to be pedantic. I think it points in favor of Brett’s claim: we’re having a debate about taxes, and people vote for anti-tax politicians because what those politicians say makes sense to them. People are conscious of why they are supporting the policy they are supporting, rather than the rival policy.
There might still be unconscious stuff involved. But this should show up in assumptions both sides of the debate appeal to, or options they both refuse to consider, or facts that neither side will bring up even though they are relevant, because it just strikes them as too unbelievable. Maybe the claim that lowering taxes increases revenue, if that’s being made a lot and no one is challenging it, would count. I don’t know, I haven’t been following this debate very closely.
I am, of course, aware of ALL internet traditions – having first gone online in the Eighties…but lacked a link to that particular pic (which, sadly, contains no “Blazing Saddles” reference.
An acceptable alternate to ‘moran’ would be ‘maroon’ (cf Bunny, Bugs)…but still no “Blazing Saddles”….
I don’t know .. I think Chris Wallace IS consciously lying, because not to do so would jeopardize whatever concentration of wealth he has garnered by working for Rupert Murdoch.
I think Ronald Reagan was the only person who quit his job because of the high tax rates during the 1950s, when he consciously turned down movie work.
Then again, Bonzo may not have wanted to work with him again, following Jane Wyman’s lead, and Donald O’Conner already had the “Francis” franchise in the bag.
On second thought, I think he made that up on on the fly during the Presidential campaign — not a conscious lie — consciousness being something not particularly useful to the John Birtchers of Southern California.
Warren Buffett started Berkshire Hathaway about the same time Reagan’s career (along with Huntz Hall’s and Leo Gorcey’s)
gave up the ghost.
True, Berkshire’s structure had some tax advantages, but then Buffett was both conscious and imaginative.
If this thread continues on, which I think it will, we’re probably going to rehash some arguments we’ve seen before. So I’m going to start with my strong belief that the extremely wealthy benefit most from the institutional framework in place in this country. (The same can be said for those in other countries, too, but let’s just talk about the US.)
That framework must be maintained at a cost. Someone has to pay for it, and historical marginal tax rates have been covered. Things worked out previously with higher rates at the top. It’s nothing new. I’d also say that the people who believe that extreme wealth (or any wealth to one degree or another) must be protected from taxation are wrong for two reasons.
One is that, as I wrote, the wealthy benefit most from our institution framework (courts, police, markets, banks, etc.) and that, were that framework to weaken for lack of funding, those same people would suffer the most in terms of lost wealth, if not actual sufferring like homelessness and hunger that poorer people would. But it’s wealth we’re talking about here, so that matters.
Another reason I think we need to tax extremely high income at higher rates is that I think it would be a good thing to disincentivize earning those last marginal dollars more and more as they pile up. Given the recent bubbles we’ve had and the few people who made bundles of money at the expense of others without producing anything, I’d say that disincentivizing making the next few millons on top of the last few millions might curb the willingness of major players to game the system. And I’d say that the truly creative and productive top-earners wouldn’t really care either way. They’re in it for it and not the money. The money comes to them, but that’s not what motivates them. So I think that higher marginal rates for very high income levels would do much more to reduce bad behavior than reduce good behavior on the part of our economic elite.
Well, yes, you can tell just what flavor of anti-tax most people are by the other stuff. A lot of anti-tax people, for example, also think the government should provide certain services they deem essential, and for which there is obviously enough money if one simply eliminates wastefraudandabuse. They’re typically the ones who are against foreign aid, thinking it should be ‘lowered’ to ten or twenty percent of the Federal budget. These are the cadres of sincere front line soldiers who protect the steely inner core.
These are the anti-taxers who think that government shouldn’t be in the business of much more that Protecting Their Stuff. So they want their taxes to go to the military, police, etc, but pretty much everything else is either wastefraudandabuse, or encroaches on their ‘liberty’.
If you look at any table of nondiscretionary spending, you can see who is pretty much having it their way; in fact, their way is 2/3 of this spending, despite their relatively puny numbers.
There may be a chicken and egg problem here in Marx’s analysis of ideology — assuming that what we think is determined by our circumstance (e.g. who has power), and our ideas serve little more than justifications of what already exists.*
But that seems to assume that we as human beings, or as a society, didn’t construct this system in the first place — or, if we did, we did so blindly and stupidly, with ideas unable to guide us, as they come only after the fact.
Yet, as I understand it, the US had a pretty progressive tax rate — so they knew what it was like — which Reagan more or less explicitly campaigned against. So the idea — anti-tax ideology — was itself the cause of our current predicament.
(tbc)
*With the exception of Marx himself, and the ideas he was drawn to.
Personally I’d prefer to see wealth distributed more equitably up front, rather than trying to increase taxes on the wealthiest after it’s been distributed in order to raise funds for social programs.
Policy proposals along those lines would, of course, cause far more heads to explode than any tax regime ever will.
Yeah, the anti-tax folks are always up for a good discussion on raising the minimum wage.
Woody – take that elsewhere. Next time, you’re out.
These are the anti-taxers who think that government shouldn’t be in the business of much more that Protecting Their Stuff. So they want their taxes to go to the military, police, etc, but pretty much everything else is either wastefraudandabuse, or encroaches on their ‘liberty’.
Maybe even narrower: police where they are themselves. Whether the police is funded where the have-nots are is of less importance. The logical conclusion is privatized police as afaik can already be found in the context of gated communities. Let’s call it blackwaterization.
I think a more fruitful debate would concern whether a “surtax” for a particular program is the right way to go. Especially when the surtax is unrelated to the program being funded.
If the government needs more tax revenue to fund all the stuff they are spending money on and they clearly do; that’s what a deficit is), then they ought to be honest enough to say to the people “we need to raise taxes to pay for all the stuff we are doing for you.” Should taxes be progressive (which is what the Republicans object to in principle)? Yes. As anybody with two brain cells knows, you cannot effectively tax people who don’t have enough income to eat regularly (to take the obviously extreme case). So you have to be progress at some level. So the real question is, how progressive?
The arguments I have mostly seen for not going more progressive is that it removes incentives for people to work harder for more income. But is that really true? At some point, you are making more money that you can spend on anything that you really need enough to justify working longer and harder. Except for the need to score points off those who are not making quite as much, which you can do equally well regardless of what your tax rate is.
A similar argument goes for whether to tax some forms of income (e.g. capital gains) at lower rates than other forms. Anybody want to argue that, if all forms of income got taxed the same, someone would choose to spend their money rather than invest, and make up the difference by digging ditches? I sure wouldn’t!
As rea noted above, America did quite well building the economy during the 1950s and 1960s, with top tax rates far, far above what they are today. Granted, I think a 90% marginal tax rate is a bit much. But it does suggest that the world would not end (economically) if rates were higher than 35%.
When people talk about the wealthy benefiting from institutions, I get the sense that this rather abstract formulation is what they mean. May I suggest that they also in a very tangible ways get much more from the government than the commoners.
Right now, there is a large apparatus devoted to putting out the message that ‘the rich’ are sticking five dollars into the kitty for every one dollar us non-rich contribute. Well, that’s not really true, but it’s also beside the point. Let me illustrate with an example:
Suppose I have lunch with a coworker at a restaurant, and he blows $90 on a five-course spread, plus drinks while I have a grilled cheese and tea. When the check is presented, he’s ten dollars short, and doesn’t even tip. I sigh, fork over the $10 as well as paying for my own lunch and tip as much as I am able to cover for both of us.
Back at the office, he tells his buddies that when we went to lunch, he spent $80 and I only spent $20, with the strong implicit suggestion that I was being carried, and they all congratulate him on being such a generous fellow. I’m going to be just a little bit hot about this attempt to deploy such misleading propaganda.
And so it is with government services. As far as I can tell, I’m not benefiting very much from government spending; in fact, there’s a big chunk of my tax dollars that are going to the accommodation of people much wealthier and better connected than I.
(con)
Broadly speaking, there are three things pretty much everyone wants from a government budget — spending*, tax cuts**, and deficit reduction. The problem is they can’t have all three.
There are two questions we could ask — which “good” is most important? And, given that, which one do we need to cut the most to get these things?
If you’re a like me, you think we need to spend more on services (like HC, infrastructure, etc.), and the best way to pay for them is to return to a progressive tax system, which involves raising taxes. (Thus I am referred to as a “Tax and Spend Liberal”, which, for some reason, is also an epithet.)
If you’re like many hard line conservatives, you see tax cuts as the greatest good — the less government involvement in the economy the better — and you want to see less spending in general to pay for them. (Or, if your the Bush Administration, you just think “deficits don’t matter”.)
But there are stranger versions of this still…
(note to follow, then tbc)
*Even those opposed to military spending would, it seems, feel less strongly on it if we didn’t need to tax or borrow to maintain it^ — if the Pentagon were eliminated tomorrow, some would want the money to go to spending on other things (e.g. fixing health care), others would want to pay down the debt, and others still would just call for a bigger tax cut (“fine, we’ll buy our own damn bazookas!”).
**I realize many here would like to see higher tax brackets for the sake of reducing inequality, but if social spending didn’t need tax money^, I’m thinking that would be a minority view.
^(Yes, it’s an economic fantasy, but to make a point — that spending on something, anything, is almost always only seen as bad because that spending has to come from somewhere, and we generally only want to tax ourselves or others for the money).
“And I’d say that the truly creative and productive top-earners wouldn’t really care either way. They’re in it for it and not the money. The money comes to them, but that’s not what motivates them.”
This rings pretty true to me as well.
From my experience and observation, the most productive and creative people are productive and creative because they enjoy Doing Interesting Stuff. Everybody likes to make lots of money if they can, but the most creative and productive folks like to get a lot of money on the table because it means they can do bigger and better interesting things.
After a certain point, more money, as a practical matter, is just noise. Some folks enjoy it as a “mine is bigger” marker but after, frex, your third house it’s hard for me to imagine having five more houses making your quality of life that much different. On the contrary, you end up having to pay people just to deal with it all.
Productive people will always be productive. Creative people will always be creative. People with excess money to invest will always invest it.
Maybe under a system like Soviet Russia those things might not be so, but nothing *remotely* like that is on the table here.
“That’s basically how I see modern anti-tax ideology. It’s not so much that I think people are lying, or are making conscious efforts to deceive. Instead, I think people aren’t seeing the extent to which anti-tax narratives are useful in defending extreme concentrations of wealth and income.”
He thinks they are stupid. That they just don’t realize. Why can’t they get a clue, he wonders.
(con, to end)
The weirdest thing about modern conservative economic thinking is to think that the balance I described somehow doesn’t apply to them — that tax cuts on the wealthy pay for themselves, through dubious (at best) economic ideas such as the Laffer Curve.
It is this central delusion — more than any other class dynamics — that made and makes anti-tax ideology so destructive. It’s one thing to argue for a minimalist government — but to say that a budget without trade offs is possible is to take the entire debate down to the depths of human ignorance. It is the most destructive of BS.
Anyway, that’ my (long*) point.
*Sorry about that — guess it’s been a while, and the bug itched.
The arguments I have mostly seen for not going more progressive is that it removes incentives for people to work harder for more income.
The most ridiculous aspect of this appeal is that, in the real world, it holds up less and less well as the incomes in question are higher and higher. The fact is, the richer you are, the *less* hard you have to work to make more and more money (‘it takes money to make money’). If you have $20 million, you don’t have to do anything at all to produce a very nice income. If you have $200 million, your only hard work is trying to decide how to spend it faster than you’re making it. If you have a billion or two, your ‘hard work’ is figuring out how to give it away fast enough.
And this is aside from the fact that, for most people (normal people) there is no direct correlation between how hard people work at something and the precise dollar amount they earn from that work. Clearly, it’s a ratio of enjoyment/satisfaction vs pay vs need.
I once had to hire a drummer who had the reputation of a ‘monster’ (a good player). I was warned, though, that he was expensive – expensive but worth it. When I called him to ask his rates, he said, ‘For $200, I bring TWO drums; for $300, I bring THREE drums..’etc. I hired him that once, because I was desperate, but never again. He had technique, but was, in fact, a bad ensemble musician. He was also an exception, which is why I remember him.
Imagine if every worker had the attitude ascribed to capitalists in the rationalization above: ‘for $10/hr, I’ll be on time 3 days per week; for $12/hr I’ll smile at customers once per day; for $15/hr I’ll concentrate 70% of the time…’. the direct correlation is for me but not for thee…
One is that, as I wrote, the wealthy benefit most from our institution framework (courts, police, markets, banks, etc.
I actually have a different take. I think what the wealthy benefit most from, and in fact, what makes them wealthy, are the values of the society they are located in. Put Rush Limbaugh, Brad Pitt, or A-Rod in any one of 150 different countries, and even in a free market, their skill set would render them welfare recipients. But in America, they’re worth millions. If a Burger King and a 5 star restaurant open in the same town, my bet is the 5 star restaurant goes under before the Burger King. And it’s not because the BK franchisee is a better business man necessarily than the owner of the 5 star restaurant. It’s because people would rather eat crap.
And to my way of thinking, if someone is the beneficiary of a society’s values to such an extent, then they should consider themselves extremely fortunate and contribute more to the overall well being of the society that put them where they are. But that’s just me.
@ Brett Bellmore: “Try this out: Being opposed to taxes helps Republicans politically, because their base doesn’t like taxes. Just like being in favor of government spending helps Democrats because THEIR base likes lots of government spending. And, contrary to your expectation that the voters (should?) act like amoral maximizers of short term self-interest, Republicans don’t much like taxes even when somebody else is paying them, while Democrats really like government spending, even when somebody else is getting the money.”
Try this instead: Republicans are opposed to taxes because conserving the wealth and privilege of old – and huge – money is what keeps getting them elected; the base agrees with them because they have been intentionally misleading whoever would listen since the early 60s. In other words, in order to gain and stay in power, the Republicans decided they needed their base to vote against their own self-interest and *for* the self-interest of the extremely rich.
We’re talking ancient, hereditary money – the kind that doesn’t buy stuff, but the kind that buys people, and industries, and political parties – and legislation. Over time, this extremely-tiny, extremely-wealthy slice of the US population has bought pretty much *every* nationally-elected Republican, and has set their agenda; it has also set the stage with the base through an incessant virtual carpet-bombing via talk-radio & Fox News, until “the base” is thrilled to feel like they know which side to be on, and are never permitted the opportunity to actually examine the proposals – or the behavior of the people they’re giving their (uncritical) allegiance to. Even now, Republicans are busily circling the wagons in order to prevent calls for Ensign, Sanford, et al to “walk it like they talk it”. Their conscientious willingness to distort every issue into terms the bast has already been prepared for is just one example of the basic dishonesty of Republican “principles”.
Of course, “Republicans don’t much like taxes, even when somebody else is paying them” – they’ve been conditioned not to, by professionals, over decades. For these poor souls, “taxes” aren’t how we pay for parks and traffic lights and roads, “taxes” are theft at gunpoint by a government that hates the people that voted it into office. Fortunately for the people who own the Republican Party and its politicians, the media apparatus required to keep this level of conditioning in place is readily-available – and already operating at near-capacity. As any practiced brainwasher knows, once the targets of the brainwashing begin to defend the brainwashers and the brainwashing itself from charges that they’re brainwashing people, success has been achieved.
All this can be overturned, broken up by one single question, seriously considered: “WHAT IF I’M WRONG?”
Publius wrote:
Marx saw it in more Darwinian terms – a given ideology was adopted because it was useful to the people currently in power.
So by your definition, Obama and the Democrats are raising taxes because it is “useful” to them (they are in power).
Surely, you will be equal in your application of Marx’s words.
There are those who are principled and view taxation as a taking of private property and thus evil
seems odd to call blinkered selfishness a principle. but, i suppose “principle” is a morally neutral concept. anyway…
and if you think the economy begins with your own paycheck, MINEallMINE is a reasonable way to think about things. but, as many people above (and on previous threads) have pointed out, everyone who earns money in the US does it inside a framework that’s guaranteed in part by the work the government has done using taxes paid by previous earners. yesterday’s taxes maintain the roads used for today’s earning; and today’s taxes keep things in shape for tomorrow’s earnings.
only a “conservative” would see himself as an island, laboring apart from the rest of society, distilling money directly from the sweat of his brow.
So by your definition, Obama and the Democrats are raising taxes because it is “useful” to them (they are in power).
Surely, you will be equal in your application of Marx’s words.
The power being discussed is the power of wealth in this case, and the Democrats (as a mind-hive) are probably less willing to raise taxes than they should be because of the phenomenon Publius describes. So, yeah, the Democrats are just somewhat less beholden to wealthy corporate interests than the Republicans now are, but I’m not sure that is somehow inconsistent with anything Pubius wrote.
Publius — for another great source on a Marxian’s reading of Capital, you should check out David Harvey’s online lectures.
Actually, there’s another word for those who “view taxation as a taking of private property”: thieves. If you use something, you pay for it. It’s that simple. So ‘tax and spend’ is just a perjorative way of saying, ‘pay for what you use’. Anything else is just trying to fob off costs onto other people.
“As rea noted above, America did quite well building the economy during the 1950s and 1960s, with top tax rates far, far above what they are today.”
Oh for the ability to have concrete experiments in macro-economics. The rest of the world be destroyed by WWII helped a lot too.
Publius I think you are close to the problem about taxes, but it is much broader than just Republicans.
People want government to do more, and they want lower taxes. These are all the same people, but there is enough overlap that both those who want more stuff out of government and those who want lower taxes can simultaneously have a majority in the US.
The thing I don’t like about the surtax is that it is just a continuation of exactly the same problem, but by liberals. No one wants to admit that increasing government services on the magnitude contemplated will involve noticeably higher taxes on the middle class. Trying to get everything we want out taxing the rich just won’t get enough money (and really will hit the Laffer curve problem at some point) because there aren’t enough of them.
I’m not opposed to this particular surtax. Go for it, I guess. But I’m firmly opposed to the idea that we can or even should try to fund much of government through taxes exclusively aimed at the rich.
It isn’t wise to have the majority of people believe that they can have far reaching policies where the costs can be forced on to other people. People just don’t make wise cost-benefit choices when they believe that the benefits come to them and the costs can be made externalities.
BTW, the parts of Marx you seem to like aren’t particularly good criticisms of capitalism per se. They are criticisms of nearly all human institutions. Which is why his normative recommendations end up being crazy–he doesn’t seem to realize that most of criticisms he identifies still operate even when not in a capitalist setting.
“So ‘tax and spend’ is just a perjorative way of saying, ‘pay for what you use’. Anything else is just trying to fob off costs onto other people.”
What is voting for very expensive programs and voting for other people to pay for it?
Brett Ballmore:
“Being opposed to taxes helps Republicans politically, because their base doesn’t like taxes. Just like being in favor of government spending helps Democrats because THEIR base likes lots of government spending.”
This may largely explain how Congress and the Executive campaign, but crucially it doesn’t explain how they govern. In a thousand and one ways, centrist Democrats and Republicans govern in the interests of the top 1% of the population that has 40% of the nation’s wealth.
But of course, no politician runs on “I rigged tax laws to help multimillionaires” and no pundit proudly asserts that “I only happen to find evils in regulations that impinge upon the liberty of large, very wealthy corporations”.
Free-market, anti-tax ideology is selectively employed by politicians and pundits during elections, and then selectively employed when governing: all in such a way as to uphold the interests of a dynamic class of elites.
Sebastian: What is voting for very expensive programs and voting for other people to pay for it?
Being a Republican, isn’t it?
Republican administrations habitually spend like drunken sailors on shore leave after Jack Aubrey captured a fleet of quicksilver merchants, and habitually vote for other people to pay for their spending: passing regressive taxes that cause the poorest to proportionally pay more, and going massively into debt to ensure that their children and children’s children will still be paying for what the Republicans voted for.
Isn’t that what you meant, Sebastian?
Nope, that is unneccesarily reductive. Republicans certainly did it. And Democrats are about to…
I just got back from 5 miles walking on the trail. Trying to stay in good health, you know.
While I was walking I was thinking about the wealth and income gap that russell and others, including myself, believe is a big part of our problem. One of the taxes that anti-tax advocates have pushed to reduce or eliminate in recent years is the income tax on corporations. What would be the effect if, instead of eliminating corporate income tax, a corporation could reduce that tax, dollar for dollar, for amounts paid out in profit-sharing to employees of the corporation, with stipulations on how that distribution must occur, frex, no higher income employee could get a higher percentage of income as profit-sharing than a lower income employee and some upper limit beyond which such payouts would cease to offset tax liability, say twice the median salary? Is this the kind of thing someone suggested would make heads explode?
GOB: That’s very intriguing.
GOB — that’s the kind of stuff people would constructively engage on.
Suppose there was a proposal on the table to CUT taxes ONLY for people making under $100K per year. Would an anti-tax ideologue who makes $1M per year support, or oppose, that proposal?
I’m trying to figure out what “anti-tax ideology” means, here. Surely, “ideology” must mean something different from “self-interest”, or else we would not bother with the distinction. If you’re making $1M a year, my hypothetical tax cut does not directly affect you one way or the other. Your self-interest doesn’t come into it, to first order. You can support or oppose the “under $100K tax cut” on straight ideological grounds.
So: do you? If yes, say no more. If not, why not?
–TP
GOB: I’m feeling rather cynical today, so I’m going to vote for head-explodey.
That or it’d just die in comittee or have a loophole written in to create executive “sunob”s that count as some new kind of thing that’s “profit-sharing”, and not a bonus or regular salary.
It certainly wouldn’t get any support in the anti-tax faction, I’m betting, for all the reasons publius mentioned in his initial post.
What is voting for very expensive programs and voting for other people to pay for it?
it’s one of the many possible outcomes of a democratic government.
What would be the effect if, instead of eliminating corporate income tax, a corporation could reduce that tax, dollar for dollar, for amounts paid out in profit-sharing to employees of the corporation, with stipulations on how that distribution must occur, frex, no higher income employee could get a higher percentage of income as profit-sharing than a lower income employee and some upper limit beyond which such payouts would cease to offset tax liability, say twice the median salary? Is this the kind of thing someone suggested would make heads explode?
Gosh that sounds awfully familiar.
I think the effect of highly-unequal incomes on creativity and productivity is much worse than neutral, actually. The first problem is that very-unequal incomes tend to cause bidding wars among those with high incomes – who after all don’t have much else to do with it – which drives up the prices of those things for everyone else. The #1 example of this is housing, and anyone who lives in a very expensive area knows how that works: housing in the most desirable areas is massively bid-up, which would be fine (just live in the next town/neighbourhood over) except that it radiates from the most expensive areas outwards. In order to keep up, people who are not making those very high incomes have to either leave the area, spend a huge percentage of their income on mortgage payments, and finally, and this is the part that particularly hurts creativity/productivity, they have to look for jobs that pay well enough to buy a house, rather than jobs that might be more creative, or being able to take a chance on starting a new business or spending a year or two working on an idea.
The result is what you saw on Wall St, with physicists and other very smart people working on financial maneuvering of very little real-world value. But it applies up and down the scale; there are mid-level employees at those companies who would rather be teachers or nurses, but who know that choosing those routes in a big city means living in very modest circumstances or commuting for hours every day.
I think the corrosive effects of this bidding up and the pressure to keep up are significant factors in favour of heavily-progressive taxation on its own merits (that is, without even talking about what you’d do with the money). Contra what seems to have taken root as Obviously True, people do not tailor the amount or quality of their work to what they get paid, nor are industries that bring a lot of personal income necessarily “wealth-creating” for anyone else. (e.g. bank robbery is highly-paid but socially unproductive.)
The other big problem with low taxation is that it encourages the accumulation of large fortunes that make the bidding-up problem still worse. It’s bad enough having to compete with overpaid investment bankers for a house, it’s much worse when your competition is inherited wealth with extremely deep pockets.
By flattening the income curve sharply, high marginal rates greatly decrease the bidding-up effect, because the difference between the amount that bankers and teachers get paid becomes maybe 10-20x instead of 100-200x. And by reducing that bidding-up problem, you also reduce the amount of rat-race stress on everyone, including high-income people. Of course, what you don’t do is drive up the price of real estate (and other assets) to the degree you would otherwise. If you happen to be an owner of large amounts of real estate that might not seem so appealing; unfortunately a lot of mere homeowners have been deluded into thinking that house-price appreciation is always a good thing and they mustn’t do anything to slow it down. (I always wonder what they think their kids are going to do for housing if it always appreciates 10%+ a year; perhaps they think it would be okay for the next generation to live in cardboard boxes, but I’d like my kids to be able to buy a house on a moderate salary without too much stress.)
Another effect of higher marginal rates is a decreased incentive to wreck the long-term prospects of corporations in search of short-term gains. If you only get 10c on the dollar by doing so it isn’t going to be as worthwhile as it is when you can expect to keep 80% of the gains. It pushes executives to compete in other ways than purely income. You know, old-fashioned ways, like putting money into R&D, and making the highest-quality goods on the market, or even that old standby, producing good returns for shareholders. There used to be more to American corporate values than just having the highest-paid CEO.
“What would be the effect if, instead of eliminating corporate income tax, a corporation could reduce that tax, dollar for dollar, for amounts paid out in profit-sharing to employees of the corporation”
Sounds promising to me. I’d extend it beyond profit sharing to equity.
I’d further say that if you want to fire someone other than for clear and obvious cause, you have to buy out their share of the business.
My general position is that the people who work for a company generate an enormous amount of the value that, in a well run business, turns into wealth. They should get some of that wealth.
Any fair way to make that happen is fine with me.
We need to get out of the “labor market” model and into a model where labor is seen as a partner. That also ought to incur additional responsibilities on labor, but there needs to be an incentive on the table.
Right now there is not.
“When I called him to ask his rates, he said, ‘For $200, I bring TWO drums; for $300, I bring THREE drums..’etc. “
Dude, I want to know where you live. I regularly play local club gigs for $75.00, and I can introduce you to a lot of guys with serious resumes (like “formerly played with Sir Paul McCartney”) who will do the same.
Seriously, what market are you in? I wanna move there.
All of my musings immediately upthread to the side, I think GOB’s idea is excellent, and is the kind of idea that would make a real difference. It also gives businesses a concrete incentive to play, which is necessary for “good ideas” to turn into “reality”.
Thanks GOB
What would be the effect if, instead of eliminating corporate income tax, a corporation could reduce that tax, dollar for dollar, for amounts paid out in profit-sharing to employees of the corporation … ?
Intriguing indeed. I assume “profit sharing” is different from just plain higher wages (which also reduce taxable corporate “profit” dollar-for-dollar) because wages are fixed in advance but profit sharing is variable, and after-the-fact.
But what’s in it for the stockholders? The corporation has, say, $100M taxable profit. It can pay $35M to the IRS, and distribute $65M to the stockholders as a dividend. If I read GOB correctly, the corporation could choose instead to distribute the $35M to its employees as profit-sharing instead. The stockholders would not get any more money, but they would have a happier workforce. So far so good.
Now, how about the Treasury? It collects taxes, from the stockholders, on the $65M in dividends either way. It loses the $35M in corporate income tax. Sure, it collects income tax, from the workers, on that $35M. Given GOB’s sensible rules about distribution of the profit-sharing, that $35M of income ends up getting taxed at maybe 20%, so the Treasury gets about $7M. Net loss of revenue: $28M.
If the goal is to reduce government revenue, GOB’s suggestion is a winner — and certainly preferable to, say, cutting the tax rate on dividends. If the goal is to nudge the nation’s income distribution a bit toward flatness, maybe the suggestion helps.
But if we need to make up that lost $28M in tax revenue somehow, we need more suggestions.
–TP
I should probably temper my pessimism above with an observation that GOB’s idea is a pretty good one, for all I think it’s both too radical to pass in our politics and not really radical enough. It’d definitely be a step in the right direction.
“What would be the effect if, instead of eliminating corporate income tax, a corporation could reduce that tax, dollar for dollar, for amounts paid out in profit-sharing to employees of the corporation”
Forgive me, I don’t know much about corporate accounting, but isn’t this exactly what they can already do by just paying people more? If you pay people more you reduce the net income of the corporation by a “dollar for dollar” amount, thereby reducing any income tax paid. No?
But most corporations don’t pay run-of-the-mill workers a decent share of the profits. And when the workers demand more of the profits by striking, corporations generally start wishing they could still call out the Pinkertons to start bashing people’s heads in.
I think most businesses should be run more like (partial) co-ops; I think it’d be better for both shareholders and employees. But doing so means going against the ingrained MBA mindset that workers are the enemy of the corporation’s interest, instead of people who have a big stake in its continued success.
I’m hopeful (because I’m an optimist) that the reformed GM & Chrysler, with large chunks of them owned by the worker’s union, may wind up showing that a semi-employee-owner structure can be effective.
I believe it was a poster around here recently who neatly made the old point about why CEOs are paid so much: they’re paid a lot because they’re the people who decide how much they get paid.
For TP,
Note that my scenario was an alternative to eliminating the corporate income tax so the revenue result comes out positive for the treasury when compared to eliminating the tax. The so-called anti-tax group does not get exactly their druthers but some of those people (me) will be pleased to see the money in the hands of consumers (workers) instead of the government. All other things being equal, businesses that avail themselves of this would be more competitive for labor. Somebody with a lot more insight than me will have to figure out the downside or how this could be gamed to negate the apparent benefits.
What GOB describes is much like what we have today except that (a) it appears he’s replaced the deduction for contributions for an employee’s share of profits with a $ for $ tax credit, in which case as Tony P. notes much of cost of the plan has been shifted to the US treasury, and (b) the employee would be entitled to, and pay tax on, the earnings now rather than having them deferred in, e.g., a 401k.
“Forgive me, I don’t know much about corporate accounting, but isn’t this exactly what they can already do by just paying people more?”
I work for a company that has a pretty good profit sharing plan. The basic idea of profit sharing vs just paying more is that (a) you don’t know if you can afford to pay the higher amount until you see how the numbers turn out, and (b) providing some compensation as profit sharing is a pretty good incentive for employees to work harder to make the company profitable.
Net/net it’s not a bad way to go.
Here is a pretty useful site on the general topic of employee ownership, which can take a few different forms. I know folks who have worked for employee owned companies, and have done very well, as in “can send their kids to college, own their own home outright, and retire at 55 and have a second career if they like”, where, in one case, “second career” was piano tuner, just because the guy thought it would be fun.
The labor market model is a screwed up, adversarial way of managing what ought to be partnership toward a common goal.
There’s enough money flowing even in the current economy so that most folks should be able to lead a decent life, without having to live day by day with intense financial anxiety. It’s perverse that so much of the wealth that is created by the productive sectors of the economy goes so disproportinately to so few people.
Oh I see: you’re not talking about a dollar-for-dollar reduction in net income, you’re talking about a dollar-for-dollar reduction in tax paid.
I am sure this idea is meant in good faith, and I think it’s pretty much just as important to think about ways to distribute income from corporations more fairly as to look at ways to reduce income inequality through taxation.
But, the net effect of this would be that the employer would get a government subsidy for paying their employees. A reduction in $1 of tax liability is worth more than $1 in pre-tax income to a corporation. So the obvious dodge would be to reduce salaries and compensate by increasing this subsidized profit-sharing, at the expense of corporate income tax revenues.
I think some kind of mandate on paying profit sharing would be a better approach. There’s no lack of money. There’s a lack of will to pay it to run-of-the-mill employees.
Obviously, the reason I broached the subject of corporate income tax is that this has been a recent favorite area for the anti-tax types. Points they make: (1) the US businesses are at a disadvantage globally because we have one of the highest corporate tax rates, (2) results in double taxation for amounts paid out to shareholders as dividends. If we think in terms of revenue neutral, i.e. a way must be found to make up the lost revenue to Treasury, we seem to be back to the notion of whether or not we believe government is the better choice to spend our money. On the other hand, maybe there are other sources for the lost revenues that work better.
Forgive me, I don’t know much about corporate accounting, but isn’t this exactly what they can already do by just paying people more? If you pay people more you reduce the net income of the corporation by a “dollar for dollar” amount, thereby reducing any income tax paid. No?
No, it would be a tax credit, not the corporate equivalent of a deduction, which paying people more in salaries would be.
Dude, I want to know where you live.
russell: This is a market nobody can move into – Minneapolis in the late 70s (and it was a private party, which kind of gig always paid well). Yes, there was a time when you could make a modest-or-better living being a non-famous working musician. Quaint idea, isn’t it? I gave up playing for a living (but not for love!) many years ago.
Speaking of Marxist crit., I remember complaining on another thread about this sort of thing, and being informed by another commenter that creative people, teachers, et. al. *should* be paid very little because they are ‘compensated with satisfaction’ – and some ‘centrist’ types sort of agreed, or at least acceded to it. That this spiritually squalid, puritanical view of work is really fairly mainstream – perhaps not liked, but accepted as CW – is a stark indication, to me, of how much has changed since the pre-Reagan days. Americans foolishly think that ‘crackdowns’ are for other countries. Ho ho ho. I wouldn’t say things were *rosey* pre-80s, but there was a little wiggle room. Everything is monetized now – ‘factored-in’. Anyway, that world is utterly gone.
‘I am sure this idea is meant in good faith, and I think it’s pretty much just as important to think about ways to distribute income from corporations more fairly as to look at ways to reduce income inequality through taxation.’
Actually, in the long run, I think a different corporate model for reducing the income gap will be far superior to trying to accomplish it through tax policy. You correctly identified how a corporation might behave to take advantage of the ‘subsidy’. Another consideration if they did that is if there were no profits or low profits, there would be no tax liability to offset but the business might be operating paying less than competitive labor rates which is probably not sustainable.
I spent much of my life being led to believe that a corporate entity is essentially legally equivalent to a natural person and have always thought of this as pretty much OK. Maybe this is not even close to the truth but INAL so I don’t know. But my thought now is that maybe this should get another look because of the level of abuse we have had often involving corporate executives and government officials. Anti-trust concepts and some enforcement have given some protection to the marketplace but our recent experience with the notion of ‘too big to fail’ shows that somewhere along the way we missed the boat.
Note that my scenario was an alternative to eliminating the corporate income tax so the revenue result comes out positive for the treasury when compared to eliminating the tax.
Got it. And if the choice were between your suggestion and eliminating the corporate income tax altogether, you’d have my vote.
I can be persuaded, BTW, to consider abolishing the corporate income tax altogether coupled with taxing dividends and realized capital gains at ordinary income rates. We’d have to haggle over what ordinary income rates should be, of course.
I also feel the need to point out that the self-employed are the ultimate in “employee-owned” businesses. The “employee” has 100% profit-sharing, and 100% of the risk. What self-employed people do not have is a decent mechanism for income averaging, year-to-year. The tax code cannot make the risk of a couple of bad years in a row go away, of course. But it could be better about letting the self-employed “manage their risk” across the years.
–TP
“Yes, there was a time when you could make a modest-or-better living being a non-famous working musician. Quaint idea, isn’t it?”
Dude, you’re gonna make me cry.
“I remember complaining on another thread about this sort of thing, and being informed by another commenter that creative people, teachers, et. al. *should* be paid very little because they are ‘compensated with satisfaction’ – and some ‘centrist’ types sort of agreed, or at least acceded to it.”
IMVHO, people rarely have any idea how freaking hard it is to make any remotely creative thing happen, at any level, in any field.
Also IMVHO, people rarely have any kind of mental model for understanding the value of people who can do that.
“But my thought now is that maybe this should get another look because of the level of abuse we have had often involving corporate executives and government officials.”
Amen to that.
There’s an even better word: imbeciles.
With regard to Marx’s views on ideology, I’m not an expert there, but at face value the argument is not convincing to me. Ideology does not need to be counter-rational, but it frequently is–and people hold all sorts of irrational belief systems that have a net negative effect on their survival–whether biological or social.
Similarly, I think it’s too simplistic to reduce conservative shibboleths like “taxes bad” to one source, such as “[b]eing opposed to taxes helps Republicans politically, because their base doesn’t like taxes”, or to a caricature of evil or mendacity.
Some are all about the “small government”, and pretty much at that level of detail. Taxes are the government taking from you, a symbol of government power, therefore more taxes = more government, less taxes = less government. Many conservatives really don’t think about or understand the issue any deeper than this, and there’s really no need to dwell on it. Some do–and I’m not sure whether or not this is actually to their credit–some do attempt to map their small-government philosophy onto an actual understanding of the issues and laws, and the result of this is discredited nonsense like supply-side economics.
Now in fairness, there is some truth behind the theory that tax cuts raise revenue, just as it is true to say that in orbit you need to slow down in order to speed up. But in both cases, that simplistic description only gives you part of the truth, and someone ignorant of the math behind the principle might assume that it is always true. If you keep slowing down in orbit, eventualy you’re going to reenter the atmosphere, and you will indeed be going fast–up until the point where you burn up or hit the ground. And if you reduce taxes, you will eventually reach a point–zero percent–where no revenue is generated. Long before then you’ll reach a point where things like the police and military–and civilization–cease to exist.
So the question for these people, as has been posed many times before: tax rates of 0% and 100% are unserious non-starters. The question is not whether to levy taxes, and never will be again–the question is, what is the appropriate rate?
For some, it comes down to “I got mine.” This caricature of conservatism holds some truth. When you hear arguments that begin with “why should my tax dollars pay for X”, where X is a non-military expenditure, you are listening to someone whose self-centered view of government gets in the way of comprehending that everyone’s tax dollars pay for /something/ they don’t like, and that “I don’t want my taxes to pay for this” is not a serious policy argument.
The same people who don’t think they should pay for other people’s health care are frequently silent about paying for other people’s roads, police or military. Oh, if you bring those up they’ll regurgitate all sorts of reasons why butthatsdifferent, all of which hold about as much water as a tea infuser. Or, if they prefer, a tea bag.
Those aren’t the only reasons the anti-tax jihadists have behind their views. But these are the most common sincerely-held beliefs that I’ve seen. I take no position on the deliberately dishonest.
IMVHO, people rarely have any idea how freaking hard it is to make any remotely creative thing happen, at any level, in any field.
Agree, but it isn’t as if anyone thinks teaching school isn’t hard; nonetheless, the same rationalization obtains – teacher’s satisfaction is ‘factored into’ their compensation. The idea is that the less you hate your job because of its meaninglessness, the less you should get paid. It’s perverted! I don’t think all truly wealthy people think quite this way; it’s more the pov some in the resentful-semi-upper-middle-hoi-polloi-who-think-they’re-elites believe they *ought* to have. Rich people, OTOH, often value beautiful things/creative exponents (e.g art, teachers) and pay a lot for them.
Catsy,
I read through your comment and there is no special exception I would take. I do consider myself to have an anti-tax attitude but I acknowledge the need to pay taxes to be a responsible member of our society. I’ve been in the workforce for over 50 years and I’ve paid taxes, federal, state, and local, income, property, sales and other, I would guess in excess of a million dollars in current dollar value, and as far as I am aware I have paid all taxes legally due. I don’t have a problem with this. Biggest issue I have is everything having been moved to Washington. I’ve expressed this many times here but I don’t get very far with these one person, one vote majoritarian democrats. Anyway, that has a lot to do with my anti-tax attitude, too much government at the wrong level.
Now that we have a few states in budget difficulty, we should have a nice show. California has never impressed me as a state not able to pay for its public needs but look where we are. And we already have some saying they should look to Washington for help. I believe that would be wrong. I believe many things done with the involvement and money from Washington are wrong and more wasteful than they need be. But I’m in a losing battle. I just hope I’ll be gone before we try to move to one world government. That seems to be the logical end game. I don’t think I would like that at all.
Johnnybutter: “This is a market nobody can move into – Minneapolis in the late 70s (and it was a private party, which kind of gig always paid well). Yes, there was a time when you could make a modest-or-better living being a non-famous working musician. Quaint idea, isn’t it?”
And it wasn’t the evils of the capitalist system that killed this, unless you want to count the innovation of cheap recording devices as an evil of the capitalist system. (Which I suppose you can if you insist on a very strong anti-innovation position).
Catsy:
And for some, being a liberal comes down to “I can feel really good about being generous…with your money”. This caricature of the left holds some truth.
But if we don’t want to caricature sides, there is a common thread: that lots of people are willing to foist responsibility off onto everyone else. Stereotypical conservatives do it by trying to keep the money from being spent. Stereotypical bleeding heart liberals do it by trying to make sure lots of people outside of their own class pay for it (see charity figures as well as tax-the-rich schemes).
If you want change you have to work to convince people that a large portion of it has to come from them. Then we have a chance.
@ GOB: Relax on the one-world government – it’s vastly more likely to be imposed from the top down by Bushes and Harrimans and Kissengers than to be demanded by dat ol’ socialist ACORN.
Or have you not noticed that all this is top-down stuff?
‘@ GOB: Relax on the one-world government – it’s vastly more likely to be imposed from the top down by Bushes and Harrimans and Kissengers than to be demanded by dat ol’ socialist ACORN.’
Well, I have noticed the top-down stuff, but I have to say it looks equally likely to me regardless of who’s in Washington.
I’m not sure I’m reading this right. It sounds like we’re saying you have to convince a large portion of people that they have to pay for a large portion of it. While I don’t entirely disagree, I’m not sure what you’re suggesting in this context, and I don’t know that emphasizing the cost of anything is a winning political strategy.
As far as caricatures go, I did qualify my statement with “some”. I realize that’s something of a weasel word, but I don’t really know how else I can describe the existence of an attitude that does in fact exist among “some” conservatives without having hard numbers or needlessly speculating about how many hold that view.
In addition, I think you’re drawing an inapt equivalence here for the sake of false balance. I have had actual conversations with many actual conservatives whose actual arguments against various social services, when pressed, boil down to “I don’t want to pay for something that I don’t think benefits me”. As in, real people–plural–have spoken the words to me, “I pay for my own health insurance, why should I pay for everyone else’s?” They are apparently unaware that they are already doing so.
This isn’t a caricature, although “I’ve got mine” is a caricature of that attitude and that’s why I noted it as such. These are actual arguments of real people I know personally. That’s not, except in the most general sense of the term, “foisting responsibility off onto everyone else”. It’s just cherry picking which parts of our nation’s social contract they feel apply to them, based on whether or not it benefits them. There’s nothing noble or principled in that.
On the other hand, I’m having a hard time identifying very many grains of truth in the liberal caricature you mentioned. I don’t even know what the “outside their own class” argument is even supposed to mean–you mention charity and progressive taxation as if either supports the stereotype. But you’re surely aware, if you’ve examined the demographics of charitable giving, that the real positive correlations are with religiosity and wealth (not ideology per se), both of which skew decidedly conservative and have no connection to tax policy. And I have a hard time credibly linking “tax the rich” with the idea of shifting the burden to those “outside” one’s own class, given the social class in which 99% of the people enacting these laws live. There may be some liberals who think that way, but I have yet to meet any or see that argument put forth.
And it wasn’t the evils of the capitalist system that killed [being able to make a living as a musician]
I’m not against the capitalist system; I’m against capitalism-as-religion.
I was going to add in my previous comment (but relented because I thought I’d ventured too far off topic) that a big reason for the demise of paid live musicians in the US is technological changes, and that a lot of the ‘professional’ musicians from the days of yore were actually pretty bad anyhow. But someone who aspired to something better could at least learn their craft and survive. Now? Forget it. These days the MUSICIAN pays, quite often.
Other countries have technology too, but some in those countries don’t feel the need to put an industrial value onto everything – music, feelings, pride, satisfaction, etc – in a word, culture. They value, for example, live/original music enough to pay people to make it.
I honestly think things will change in this country when artists figure out their network marketing schemes, when micropayments on the web are viable, etc. But the old industrial model still holds sway now, and it’s nothing
to be very proud of. Good things may have happened by accident in the old days, but they happened. Pretty bleak right now, culturally.
Stereotypical conservatives do it by trying to keep the money from being spent. Stereotypical bleeding heart liberals do it by trying to make sure lots of people outside of their own class pay for it (see charity figures as well as tax-the-rich schemes).
Interesting here how “liberal” gets the modified “bleeding heart,” while “conservative” gets no modifier at all.
I’ll also point out to you, as I have to others, that when it comes to “charity figures,” that — as you are so fond of pointing out! — just throwing money at a problem doesn’t fix it. Quite often, “bleeding heart liberals” are the ones out there doing the actual work that leverages the money given and turns it into something. And they do so uncompensated.
Anyway, we don’t even have to go very far to find an example of the kind of “I’ve got mine” conservative that Catsy is talking about; we only have to read the comments of our very own d’d’d’dave, as this is his exact argument against pretty much everything.
“On the other hand, I’m having a hard time identifying very many grains of truth in the liberal caricature you mentioned.”
Look at nearly every mention of necessary tax hikes on this blog over say the past month–posts and comments. From the liberal side of the game you will almost always see a focus on tax hikes on ‘the rich’. You don’t see similar talk about tax hikes on the middle class, though they are equally necessary to get anywhere near the kind of money we are talking about for say comprehensive health care reform much less anything else you want to add on top of that.
I have a hard time finding examples where the caricature I mentioned doesn’t have a large measure of truth in it. And that is here, at a fairly reasonable blog.
Externalizing costs leads to poor cost-benefit analysis. That is as true in taxing and spending decisions as it is in mortgage loans or environmental issues.
BTW Seb, I was complaining about the Reagan Revolution, not capitalism. I’m pretty sure we had capitalism in this country before 1980. We just didn’t deify the Market as the One Universal Truth and Perfect Model for Everything.
No argument on any of that–but then, I’m something of a contrarian when it comes to music, and my reaction to a lot of things that are cherished by lovers of classic 20th century music is, “what is that godawful noise?”
I think you’re fairly on target with blaming technological changes for the decline of music (and other art forms) as a viable career, but not because of MP3 piracy–I actually think the MP3 format is one of the best things that ever happened to the music industry. No, music as a career is suffering from its own accessibility: it is easier than ever in history to make music and share it with other people. This has created a market glut, in that the kid with a garage band or a computer older than he is can now reach the entire world–there are more than 7 million bands on MySpace alone.
Music is a product, a commodity, and a career in music is subject to market forces.
Sure, I never said there wasn’t. What I said was that the description of this as coming from a desire to soak those outside of one’s own class–e.g. shifting the costs onto others–was inaccurate.
There’s a reason for the emphasis on the “rich”, here. I’ll give you a hint: it has nothing to do with class.
“I’m pretty sure we had capitalism in this country before 1980.”
We arguably even had it under the Eisenhower administration, and those 90% top marginal tax rates.
Music is a product, a commodity, and a career in music is subject to market forces.
Culture is not a commodity in the normal sense of that word. Of course cultural artifacts, once they’re released, are indeed commodities, but their value is not measured by supply and demand in the same way pork bellies are. A pork belly is a pork belly, but a piece of art isn’t interchangeable with any other piece of art. Culture is not simply about bulk, Catsy.
I am not implying that the music of the 20th century is all great and the 150 million diy bands out there now are all crappy. I’m saying that if you don’t care about excellence as a value unto itself, and disregard it (or even fear it) for long enough; and if your culture is strictly moderated by accountants for long enough, you end up with – in our case – everyone having the means to make technologically-competitive work, but no one having much of anything to write about (exaggeration to make a point!). Everything gets comoditized when it gets put onto the market, but in the past, not everything was completely comodotized before it was even written. Some was and some wasn’t. The stuff that was, and is, is almost always forgettable, and is indeed forgotten very quickly. It’s actually *designed* to be forgotten after the money is made. Accountants don’t like ‘mistakes’.
As I said before, I don’t think the future is all gloom and doom. This is a transitional time, probably.
Certainly, and I don’t disagree with much of anything you said, but it’s kind of orthogonal to my point. In order to meaningfully answer the question of why it’s so hard these days to make a successful career in music, you have to look at it as a product competing in the free market–because ultimately this is what determines the success or failure of a musical career, as a self-supporting career.
Catsy
“The same people who don’t think they should pay for other people’s health care are frequently silent about paying for other people’s roads, police or military. Oh, if you bring those up they’ll regurgitate all sorts of reasons why butthatsdifferent, all of which hold about as much water as a tea infuser. Or, if they prefer, a tea bag.”
I think this is not exactly true. The current political debate is about adding a health care program and adding taxes to pay for it. With or without the new health program there is already a baseline tax regime that pays for roads, police or military. Obviously there is a deficit and the baseline tax regime may not be sufficient but that is another matter. It is entirely reasonable to argue that roads, police, and military are another matter because they are an EXISTING matter that is more or less funded while a new healthcare program and it’s supporting taxation do not currently exist.
Also in the context of people saying this: “I pay for my own health insurance, why should I pay for everyone else’s?” you said this: “It’s just cherry picking which parts of our nation’s social contract they feel apply to them, based on whether or not it benefits them. There’s nothing noble or principled in that.” Again, I think this is not exactly true. The current political discussion is whether to have a new healthcare program and how it should be paid for. While it may be true that in your circle there is no question of whether it should be done. As of now the healthcare program has not become law. It is still in the realm of debate and as such it has not yet become part of the nation’s social contract. In that light, one who say “I pay for my own health insurance, why should I pay for everyone else’s?” is not cherry picking. He is asking a question which is fair to debate still.
Phil,
If you think I am against all taxation you have not read me correctly.
(1)And one of the lowest personal income tax rates. If you want to shift from one to the other, say so. If you just want to lower taxes by ratcheting them down at one end while refusing to look at the other . . . ain’t gonna happen.
(2)This makes no sense; you aren’t taxing people, you’re taxing corporations. So there is no such animal as ‘double-taxation’ in this scenario. Insisting that this is the case is tantamount to saying you want to give up limited liability.
Iow, you’re not allowed to switch definitions when it’s convenient.
In order to meaningfully answer the question of why it’s so hard these days to make a successful career in music, you have to look at it as a product competing in the free market….
Of course you’re right. My point is that intention matters. We’re in an awkward moment where the marketing *is* the product, or at least the greater part of it, and the product itself (at least in terms of music) is kind of an afterthought, at least in terms of quality. When there is a developed, network-aware free market for music or any other art, there won’t be much demand for 300k bands (say) which all sound basically the same, since they will be hard to tell apart. I believe there will be a market for sincere – and yes, even excellent – work, because it will stand out.
It’s hard to figure out how to get ‘aggregated’ nowadays. I really think that will change, but it’s tough at the moment.
So, Seb, you got any quotes from posts of yours from a while back complaining that ‘the rich’ got more of a tax break than the middle class? Something tells me you weren’t complaining then. So why complain now when the reverse holds? Does this make you a caricature conservative?
In other words, wanting to raise taxes on the wealthy isn’t a particularly liberal idea. In fact, I see a lot of popular sentiment for just this thing.
You don’t get to declare by fiat that wanting to raise taxes on the rich is something particularly weird or ‘liberal’. Wanting to do so, though, is pretty much boiler-plate conservatism.
Publius wrote:
“That’s basically how I see modern anti-tax ideology. It’s not so much that I think people are lying, or are making conscious efforts to deceive. Instead, I think people aren’t seeing the extent to which anti-tax narratives are useful in defending extreme concentrations of wealth and income.”
From my point of view, the purpose of taxes is to finance services that the citizenry jointly need and use. It is NOT to either defend or attack ‘extreme concentrations of wealth’.
Sometimes I wonder, Publius, if you have taken note of the changes in the concentration of wealth that have taken place since the time of Marx. In the 1880’s, 93% of the land in Scotland was owned by 1,758 individuals. And In the British Isles as a whole, 66% of the land was owned by only about 11,000 individuals. [Table 1.1, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy]. Similar concentrations existed across most of europe at that time. Such concentrations were mostly gone by the end of WW2. Sure, new rich appear all the time. But they disappear nearly as fast. It is now rare for family wealth to last more than three generations. In the time of Marx most countries had rich aristocratic families who had held wealth for many hundreds of years.
In recent times, let’s say since 1975, the middle and lower classes of america have not pocketed much of the increase in national income. Does this mark a return to times of old? No. For during the same time, vast numbers in the rest of the world have moved from poverty to middle class status for the first time in hundreds of years, if not forever. The economy has gone global. You can’t look at the american lower class as lower class anymore. It is part of the global middle class.
So. Marx. In my view, class warfare is dated. I know that he is about more than class warfare. In his time, capital, land, and political power were all concentrated in the hands of the few old family aristocrats who kept it to themselves. It is just not true anymore. Capital, property, and political power are now in the hands of and accessible to the people. In the case of capital: how easy has it been over the last 15 years for 18 year-old programers to raise millions for goofy tech startups. How easy has it been for people with no down payment and little income to buy property.
Please recognize that the world is different.
sov said:
in recent years “‘the rich’ got more of a tax break than the middle class”
I don’t accept that this statement is true even though it is a well worn mantra of some. I didn’t go double check in the last few moments, so my memory could be wrong. But, as I recall, the after tax income distribution immediately after the Bush tax cuts was flatter/more favorable to the lower brackets then it was immediately before the Bush tax cuts. Sure, maybe the top guy saved more actual dollars then the bottom guy. In my view, the cuts caused a more progressive tax regime, not a less progressive one.
Whether tax cuts should have occurred at all in the face of deficit spending for a war is another matter.
Sigh. Typepad is eating my post with charts. I’ll try breaking it into multiple posts.
This is largely nonsense.
See here.
See here.
Next:
See here.
Second chart:![](http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/blog/Blog_Chart_2_-_top_10_percent_us_income_share_into_three_groups.JPG"/)
“In my view, class warfare is dated.”
Your view is factually incorrect in light of the facts and numbers I have just cited. I suggest taking the actual facts into account in your view, rather than just imaging a view of a different reality than we actually live in.
If you’d like to make the argument from authority, show us your John Bates Clark Medal, which was awarded to Emmanuel Saez for producing the work which I above cited facts and charts from his studies.
This is an incredibly insightful post on the way the Democrats couch the debate. The Republicans don’t want this or don’t want that. Marginal tax rates of just a few points shouldn’t matter, etc.
This debate is always about more than that. The Republicans do want something, less increase in government spending. Even after setting record debt and deficits, the last two Republican budgets significantly reduced the deficit.
I am happy to discuss whther they have been good at it or not, not as good as I would like, but it is not correct to say they only say no.
This debate should also be about what government spends its money on. The original discussions were around a budget neutral solution, now they are around a deficit neutral solution. The difference in those two things is 580B in taxes.
That is a discusssion that, in President Obamas words, is the kind of discussion that families have around the kitchen table when economic times are tough. Not “who do we get more money from”, it’s “where do we spend less so we can afford something different”.
Let me offer that, given that mandate, we could take 25B a year out of projected defense spending and then find 250B a year in ineffective programs and then worry about the rounding error of 80B each year. That would be a proposal that I would back.
As for the addition of the marginal tax rates across those people who can pay, let me say that is a huge generalization.
Fo a 55 year old father of 4, let’s say, who worked thirty years at middle income wages and none of his pension plans ended up being worth anything it is a big deal. Lets assune you take 10% more of his income(he finally makes (260k for the first time in his life)but he has the debt from sending 4 kids to the college and is just now at a point where he can save for retirement, that marginal tax difference means he can retire at 70 or not.
Where is that tax difference going? Well right now it goes primarily to 100k workers who could be 30 years old with a lifetime to save for retirement.
These are just examples of how unfair it is to just take an income number and say anyone that makes that can afford more.
“In my view, the cuts caused a more progressive tax regime, not a less progressive one.”
Again, this is total fantasy, and utterly factually wrong. You don’t enhance your credibility by making statements that are so definitively factually wrong.
The charts above all have their right sides cut off as produced here; this is important; please click on the original links to see the full charts. Thanks.
“Let me offer that, given that mandate, we could take 25B a year out of projected defense spending and then find 250B a year”
Typo 250B ayear should be 250B.
“Even after setting record debt and deficits, the last two Republican budgets significantly reduced the deficit.”
Actual figures.
Gary,
As you and I have agreed before, the top 1% have increased dramatically. I would like to see the difference in those making that money from regular income. I think the charts you have above reflect all income(?). I believe the difference would be much less in wage earners.
“These are just examples of how unfair it is to just take an income number and say anyone that makes that can afford more.”
Why is it unfair to say that if someone has an income of $100,000,000 a year, that they can afford to pay a higher tax rate than they are currently paying?
How about if we “just take” an income of $10,000,000 a year? Why is it unfair to say they can afford to pay, say, 7.5% higher marginal tax rates, compared to someone earning the median income?
If we take someone “merely” making $1,000,000 a year, and compare the median income:
How, then, is it unfair to suggest that the million-dollars -a-year income earner can better afford to pay more than those earning from from $33,437 to $45,113 a year?
“Fo a 55 year old father of 4, let’s say, who worked thirty years at middle income wages and none of his pension plans ended up being worth anything it is a big deal. Lets assune you take 10% more of his income”
But no one is proposing anything remotely like that; this has nothing whatever to do with reality. It’s completely a straw man argument about a “proposal” no one is making.
“I think the charts you have above reflect all income(?). I believe the difference would be much less in wage earners.”
I’m not following what point you are making: why should we not look at total income, when the rich largely don’t make their money from “wage-earning.”
Back to the Wikipedia cite: “1.93% of all households had annual incomes exceeding $250,000.” That’s income of every variety. Counting only wages winds up with an even tinier proportion of tax-payers earning that high an income.
Meanwhile, “Households in the lowest quintile had incomes less than $19,178 and the majority had no income earner.”
I’m just a little more concerned about those people, who number 22,629,000 Americans.
Who don’t have many lobbyists in Congress.
Hell, 2,566,000 American households earn $2,500.00 a year or less! A little over 7,000,000 American households — that’s households, not individuals — earn under $10,000.00 a year.
Why should we worry about the problems of millionaires having to pay a few thousand more dollars, by comparison, and saying it’s unfair, and not focusing on the unfairness of not helping those in the bottom quintile achieve the ability to support their family with minimal needs of housing, food, and medical care?
In response to Gary at 9:48
You are correct, I should have referenced the last two before the economic downturn, but as your chart shows it was the last 4, which surprised me.
Gary
Your 9:33-9:38 comments are not inconsistent with my 9:15 comment. I did say that the rich have not done well lately. I was saying that the world’s income, capital, and property have been getting less concentrated since the 1880’s Until 1975 one could look within individual countries and see this trend. Since about 1975 one must look at the entire globe as one to see it.
Sure, US tax policy has probably had some (but not much) effect on the rising inequality of incomes in the US. The largest cause of the stagnation of incomes in working and middle (non-capital) classes has been competition from overseas.
And I don’t see what a John Clark medal has to do with it. I’m not denying that income inequality has risen. I’m denying that it’s primary cause since 1975 has been the near monopoly of land, capital and power that may have existed in prior times. In my view it has been more about the absence of trade barriers which left our working classes open to being undercut by increasing foreign competition. The capital class was not as vulnerable to the foreign competition; and in fact probably has benefited from it.
In my view, the position that you seem to take is that the cure for foreign competition is to make taxes more progressive and impoverish the capital class along with the non-capital classes. While I think a better cure may be something more in the direction of protecting our industries a bit more.
Marty, that chart only went up to 2007. WASHINGTON, Feb. 12, 2008:
The Monthly Budget Review
A Congressional Budget Office Analysis; January 8, 2009:
Hope this helps.
type
my first line at 10:32 should say: “I did NOT say that the rich have not done well lately.”
It makes a difference.
Gary’s 9:40p (first he quotes D’d’d’dave)
//”In my view, the cuts caused a more progressive tax regime, not a less progressive one.”
Again, this is total fantasy, and utterly factually wrong. You don’t enhance your credibility by making statements that are so definitively factually wrong//
I beg to differ with two links. First a theoretical proof. Second, a brute force proof.
Once you have digested these please correct your statement about my fantasy life and grasp of facts. And pleas also make a statement about your own.
Marty, about your 55 year old father of 4 making $260K:
How much extra does he pay, in the House Ways and Means proposal? Give me a number, in dollars. I’m not asking you to “do homework”, since I myself don’t know offhand whether it’s $2,600 or $100. But pick the number you think (or know) is about right.
Then, consider a 55 year old father of 4 making $2.6 million. Same thing as before: how many extra dollars does he pay?
Now: suppose you had to vote between: sticking with those numbers; or collecting a little less from your guy and a little more from my guy. Yeah, I know: false dichotomy, those should not be your only choices, etc. But I’m not asking about your general philosophy; I’m asking you to make a specific binary choice.
You’re a Congressman; we’re marking up the bill. The amendment currently up for your vote is to reduce the hit to your guy by soaking the guy with 10 times his income a bit more. After we vote on this amendment, then we’ll vote up or down on the amended (or not) bill.
So, the clerk is calling the roll. It’s your turn to vote on the amendment. Yeah or nay?
–TP
I know this music thing is a tangent, but it is an interesting one.
“In order to meaningfully answer the question of why it’s so hard these days to make a successful career in music, you have to look at it as a product competing in the free market–because ultimately this is what determines the success or failure of a musical career, as a self-supporting career.”
Hard these days compared to what? It has never been easy to make a successful career in music, and I’m not at all certain that it is harder today than it was 50 years ago, and I’m virtually certain that it is easier now than it was 100, 300, 500, or 1000 years ago. Most of the historical music that we now think of as great came either from rich personal sponsors, or because of sponsorship from the church. Careers in music were incredibly rare.
Maybe you’re talking about semi-pro? Music as a night job?
“Of course you’re right. My point is that intention matters. We’re in an awkward moment where the marketing *is* the product, or at least the greater part of it, and the product itself (at least in terms of music) is kind of an afterthought, at least in terms of quality. ”
This has been a complaint since at least J.S. Bach.
Posted by: Gary Farber | July 20, 2009 at 10:06 PM
All of those are good things to worry about, I worry about them regularly. There are many people who have worked diligently all of their lives to not be included in those statistics.
They want to keep enough of their income so that when they can’t work anymore they won’t join those numbers. It is arrogant to assume they don’t need or deserve the money they earn everyday to pay the taxes and the bills. When you talk about millionaires you are talking about wealth not income. It is just a different list of people, which is why I ask about how the income is earned.
Just adding taxes to anyone who makes more than x is making lots of assumptions that aren’t fair.
There is a 2.6 trillion dollar pool of money. Republicans, us real live everyday Republicans, think the money is enough, spend it more wisely.
Sorry last post should have said reference post by Gary
REPOST
Gary’s 9:40p (first he quotes D’d’d’dave)
//”In my view, the cuts caused a more progressive tax regime, not a less progressive one.”
Again, this is total fantasy, and utterly factually wrong. You don’t enhance your credibility by making statements that are so definitively factually wrong//
I beg to differ with two links. First a theoretical proof and second a brute force proof.
I trust that after you digest these you’ll retract your statements about my fantasy life and grasp of facts and that you’ll substitute a statement about your fantasy life and grasp of facts in it’s place.
“So, Seb, you got any quotes from posts of yours from a while back complaining that ‘the rich’ got more of a tax break than the middle class? Something tells me you weren’t complaining then. So why complain now when the reverse holds? Does this make you a caricature conservative?”
My archives are here for your perusal. Feel free to look and find them yourself. My view on tax policy has been pretty much the same for about 10 years. I don’t feel like spending an hour or so looking through old posts, especially since you are normally quite resilient to adverse evidence.
Marty (and, incidentaly, your posts have become much more coherent, as a rule: kudos): “When you talk about millionaires you are talking about wealth not income. It is just a different list of people, which is why I ask about how the income is earned.”
In that specific case, no, I was specifically referring to people whose income is over $1,000,000,000 a year, not people whose assets were over $1M.
“It is just a different list of people, which is why I ask about how the income is earned.”
I still don’t understand why you seem to be arguing that income that isn’t from wages shouldn’t be counted as income. Distinguishing between assets and income as regards what should be taxed is a perfectly reasonable distinction. Suggesting that we should only tax wages, but not income from other sources, I completely fail to understand the reasoning of.
D’d’d’dave, your claim was: “Such concentrations were mostly gone by the end of WW2. Sure, new rich appear all the time. But they disappear nearly as fast”
I refuted that claim by pointing out that concentrations of wealth in American have only risen since the famed “Gilded Age,” that, for exmaple “in 2006, the top 10 percent earned 50 percent of national income, a higher share than even in 1928, the peak year of the ‘roaring twenties’ stock market bubble.”
What the details of whether the tax rates have become faintly greater or lesserly progressive in recent years has to do with the vast increase in income equality and the vast concentration of wealth in the hands of the top 1-2% of Americans, I don’t follow.
Overall, you seem to feel that it’s “unfair” to tax such people at any rate higher than we should tax people making the median income. If I don’t misunderstand, you and I certainly have vastly different ideas of what’s “fair.” You think it’s fair to let poor people suffer so people with tens of millions of dollars don’t have to part with a few more thousand per year, and I don’t. We seem to have established that we disagree on this point. Do please correct me if I have any of this wrong.
“Suggesting that we should only tax wages, but not income from other sources, I completely fail to understand the reasoning of.”
Actually, I was suggesting that defining rich people by income is not accurate. Someone who works for 250k a year isn’t rich, someone who makes 250k from investment income alone probably is wealthy.
A 30 year old making 150k is generally much more financially secure than a 55 year old making 150k a year, current debt load being equal.
Peoples choices and lifestyle in all strata impact this generalization of course.
However, lumping all of those people into the general category of “who can afford more or less” is imprecise was my point.
I don’t know about ‘unfair’, I think it is unwise to tax richer people at much higher rates. People who think they are paying for something make better and more informed cost/benefit decisions than people who think they can stick daddy with the bill.
Marty, you keep talking about people earning $150K and $250K as if they’re somehow in the same category as people making $1.5M or $25M. They don’t have to be.
I asked you, above, whether you’d consider giving the hard-pressed $150-250K crowd a tax CUT by raising taxes on the $1.5-25M crowd. I would vote to do that. Would you?
–TP
“I asked you, above, whether you’d consider giving the hard-pressed $150-250K crowd a tax CUT by raising taxes on the $1.5-25M crowd. I would vote to do that. Would you?”
I suspect, without even going to Gary’s stats, that there are few enough of them that raising 500B by taxing them isn’t realistic. That is why all of this makes little sense to me. The cut offs for the Dem tax plans are 150k or so because that includes enough people to make the increase broad enough to actually increase tax revenues by a significant amount.
Would I tax those rich people at a higher rate? No, I think it becomes counterproductive as they have less to invest in starting and growing businesses and doesn’t add enough to tax revenue to make up for the downside.
I would rather give them tax incentives that are targeted at creating middle class jobs.
“Marty (and, incidentaly, your posts have become much more coherent, as a rule: kudos):”
Thanks. I quit posting when I was too rushed. It helps. I still think more conversationally than technically, so I meander sometimes.
“Actually, I was suggesting that defining rich people by income is not accurate. Someone who works for 250k a year isn’t rich, someone who makes 250k from investment income alone probably is wealthy.”
Okay, I understand the point you’re trying to make there, now, and it’s a distinction worth making in some contexts.
But.
“Rich” and “wealthy” are purely subjective terms, and purely applied from a subjective POV; although I may fall into using them at times, I shouldn’t, and it’s not helpful, as a rule, for any of us to, either.
As I’ve pointed out, the reasonably current median household income in America is $50,233 (for the whole household)./ As I just got through quoting:
Now, you feel that someone who works for 250k a year isn’t rich, and I’m perfectly willing to grant that any such people may be working very hard indeed for their income. But the fact is still that their income, worked for as hard as it might be, is in the top 1.93% of all American households.
Now, if the top 1.93% of income-earners in the U.S. aren’t “rich,” where, exactly, do you draw a line at what percentage of top income-earners to call people “rich”? Only the top 1%? Only the top .5%? Only the top .01%?
If someone makes more money than 98% of the citizens of the United States, than why, exactly, aren’t we entitled to call them “rich”? Because you don’t feel you’d feel rich if your household earned that?
If subjective feelings are enough, I’d feel very rich to earn $20,000 in a year; I’ve never made that much. So subjective feelings may not be terribly relevant here, given that they’re you know, purely subjective and relative, whereas percentages and quintiles are things we can, or should be able to, agree upon without dispute or resort to inarguable claims about our feelings.
Meanwhile, the bottom 20% oof U.S. households earned less than $19,178, and most of them work damned hard to earn that much, too. And the median of all households that earn $50,233 per household are still five times more poor than the earners of $250,000 a year that you don’t feel are rich. So something strikes me as somewhat unreasonable about your measure, and out of touch with the way that the majority of U.S. citizens regard such measures, regardless of your personal feelings about $250,000/year not making someone “wealthy.”
So I prefer to talk about the actual numbers.
“I quit posting when I was too rushed. It helps.”
That’s an excellent general rule.
“I still think more conversationally than technically, so I meander sometimes.”
There’s nothing wrong with some meandering; the main thing is that it be interesting meandering. 🙂
Please don’t suspect, just look up facts. It is not that hard to use Google. Simple fact:
Some helpful resources for you and everyone on information on all this.
More.
Specifically:
So, Marty, you “suspect” that there are “few enough” of the “$1.5-25M crowd” that “that raising 500B by taxing them isn’t realistic.”
But (footnote #11):
Back here we learn that:
Recapturing some of that for general tax purposes seems quite reasonable, and that there’s quite enough of such money in the hands of the top 1% of income-earners for them to come up with that much money.
Specifically, from the same source, the Top 1% of incomes in 2006 was above $382,600.
Now, math isn’t my strong suit, but I’ll note that Tony didn’t ask if we could raise “500B” from these people. He asked: “”I asked you, above, whether you’d consider giving the hard-pressed $150-250K crowd a tax CUT by raising taxes on the $1.5-25M crowd. I would vote to do that. Would you?”
Your answer was pretty much non-responsive.
Meanwhile, back in real politics, it seems that:
So the Ways and Means Committee, for what it’s worth, disagrees with you, Marty.
Marty: Would I tax those rich people at a higher rate? No, I think it becomes counterproductive as they have less to invest in starting and growing businesses and doesn’t add enough to tax revenue to make up for the downside.
From WWII until 1964, the top federal income tax rate in the US was 91%. In 1964 the top rate was decreased to 70%. In 1986, the top rate was reduced to 28%.
Now please remind me, Marty: the US economy did badly between WWII and 1964? And was in the tank between 1964 and 1986? I got these facts, you see, in five secs from Wikipedia: so I presume that when you say that you think a high tax rate is “counterproductive”, you were basing this on at least the same level of investigation I just did, and you’re prepared to show by reference to historical data that between WWII and 1986, the US was a country with a counterproductive, sinking economy, without new businesses being started and without much economic growth, compared to what it is today.
Please. Show your working.
@D’d’d’dave:
We’ve been over this before. At length. At least this time around you have citations to show that your method is not strictly your method… but. But, but, but. It is not the commonly-held measure of measuring progressivity. It is, by contrast, a marginally-held measure. Remember back in February when I couldn’t find any economists using it? Yeah, that. Now, I understand you’d like for it to be the commonly-held measure of progressivity, so you could play your darling semantic game of giggling at the leftists as they stutter and splutter over your misappropriating “their” term. Bully for you. ‘Tain’t gonna happen. One or two non-peer-reviewed whitepapers published by ideological think-tanks will not in and of themselves change this. Academic study simply does not work like that, and for good cause. Words have commonly-held meanings. Get over it. Please.
Wish I had more time to type about this now, but briefly:
Seb.: ” It has never been easy to make a successful career in music,”
True. But we were originally talking about making a living playing *live* music, rather than what a ‘successful career in music’ might be. Most musicians I know – including myself – would be happy to make a mere living playing live for people. That that is much harder now than it used to be is not inevitable or just a matter of technology. It’s a matter of what we value. As I said earlier, other countries have technology too, but still value their own ‘folk’ music enough to support it, if not lavishly.
We’re in an awkward moment where the marketing *is* the product, or at least the greater part of it, and the product itself (at least in terms of music) is kind of an afterthought
Seb. This has been a complaint since at least J.S. Bach.
It may have been a complaint, but I don’t think it’s true in the sense I meant. That the rather mediocre Telemann was much more popular as a composer than was Bach (as a composer) doesn’t change the fact that Bach had the space to do his work, not starve, be as avant garde as he in fact was, draw from sources all over the world as well as back in time, etc. There is a commercial *literalism* now which is fairly new.
Some quick comments:
If you’re 55 with four kids and you’re making $260K a year, you’re at about the 97 or 98 percentile, income-wise.
You’re doing pretty damned well.
You’re worried about retiring at 70? Other folks are worried about whether they will be eating cat food, and where the hell they will live.
Mazel tov and all that, but I’m not sure our public policy should be determined by your particular situation.
Folks who want small government are going to have to tackle Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the Department of Defense. Those are the big ticket items, and I doubt there’s really all that much fat in the rest of the budget.
The first three are enormously useful and popular programs. Not because Americans are lazy slackers who should get off of their @sses and stop sucking on Uncle Sam’s teat, but because they make a basic level of necessary services available to a lot of people. And, in the case of Medicare and especially Social Security, they are funded by either flat or highly regressive taxes, which people who are highly paid or who live off of investment income pay at vanishingly low rates.
If you want to control the growth of government spending, the places to focus are health care cost — not the cost of insurance, but the cost of actually providing health care — and American foreign policy.
Finally, it’s always been tough to make a living as a musician. I know a large number of folks who are professional musicians, either exclusively or well beyond the hobby level.
All of them do a variety of things. They teach privately or in schools, play piano for dance rehearsals, work as audio engineers, sound techs, or tour support. One guy scrimped and saved the money he made playing weddings and bought the multi-family house he lives in and now lives an extremely modest life off of his rental income, which allows him to spend the 3, 4 or 5 hours a day of practice and other homework it takes to be a competent journeyman jazz musician.
It takes a unique combination of talents to actually make a career as any kind of artist. It’s comparable to running a small business, plus you have to actually be able to play well, which depending on the style of music you’re trying to play can require a constant, lifelong investment of at least a couple of hours a day.
Most folks I know who play for a living put in 60+ hour weeks, emphasis on the “+”, all the time. If you include travel time and “hang” time, which basically means the time you spend hanging out, going to other folks’ gigs, networking online, etc etc etc — all the things that keep your name and face in front other people and generate your next gig — it’s more like 70+.
If they’re very successful they can make a modest middle class living.
So yeah, there’s some satisfaction, but you work your @ss off, and put up with an astounding level of BS, not least from folks who have no freaking clue whatsoever about the level of work, commitment, and sacrifice involved, who generally view you as the paid help, and who view your work product as some kind of lifestyle accessory.
Most folks would, and do, pack it in an find an easier path through life. When I was in university, the percussion professor commonly recommended law school as an easier alternative to trying to make a living as a player.
Also: my wife and my combined household income puts us at about the 95th percentile. We live in a pretty expensive housing market, so for us that translates to a ranch house on a small lot, 10 year old cars, and modest and infrequent vacations, but all in we’re doing well and consider ourselves damned lucky.
So when I talk about raising tax rates it will likely be money out of my pocket.
And if raising the rate on the middle class is what’s needed, then that’s what we should do.
Larger government does not translate automatically into oppression. Government is one of the few institutions that has the scale to operate at regional and national levels, and among those that do it is absolutely the most responsive and transparent.
If the money’s not there, it’s not there, and we’ll all just have to deal.
But there’s a f**k of a lot of money in the pot in this country. It just doesn’t make it’s way into regular folks’ hands.
Hey, I just looked through all of them. Couldn’t find a single post where this was the case. So it appears that you don’t complain when taxes on the rich are preferentially dropped at a higher rate, but you do complain when they are preferentially raised. This was in response to your
In other words, it really does look as if your concern here is that taxes on ‘the wealthy’ are not raised, that in fact, they are cut whenever possible. In still other words, publius’ observation is dead on.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the bald idea of keeping taxes on the wealthy low, and frankly, I don’t see why you’re running from it.
Yet another ‘conservative’ who thinks that it is enough to say that he wants to be civil and argue in good faith, despite the fact that he is anything but. Seb, this is why conservatives get such bad press. You can’t just talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk.
Of course, if you’ve got evidence for your accusation . . . let’s see your quotes 😉
One last observation: raising taxes on ‘the wealthy’ is not a particularly liberal idea. Simply declaring that this is the case, though, is most definitely a conservative tactic.
Dang. Hope this fixes the tag.
“One last observation: raising taxes on ‘the wealthy’ is not a particularly liberal idea.”
The classic argument for a progressive tax scheme is Adam Smith’s.
He notes that an incremental increase of taxes deprives poorer folks of necessities, but deprives wealthier people of luxuries, and so concludes that a progressive tax scheme is better because the total pain caused is less.
Take it up with Smith, it was his idea.
Running a (very)small business is hard. As russel notes, you’ve got to sort of be a jack-of-all trades. When our floors were getting redone about two years back, I’d listen to the workmen on their smoke breaks talk about (a) their ‘leet skills, and (b) how they were going to start their own business Real Soon Now. Sorry guys, you may be A1 floor refinishers. But that alone isn’t going to get you going, never mind building your startup into a viable business.
russell, I just look at what people around me prefer. Most of them would like some of that ‘liberal’ Socialized Medicine, even people who voted for Bush . . . twice. The same with raising taxes on ‘the wealthy’. Trust me on this one: when a guy who wears a Roundup cap and listens to Limbaugh while he’s working, when this guy and his friends say they don’t like ‘Ayfirmative Action’, ‘Welfare Queens’, etc, and opine that the wimmin’s should be mostly in the kitchen, and when they get drunk on the hard likker they bring out when the wimmin’s aren’t around and start telling ‘classic’ racist jokes ‘that you aren’t allowed to tell any more’, when this guy says he wouldn’t mind at all seeing taxes raised on ‘the rich’ – especially on the bankster types – well, I don’t think you can call raising taxes on ‘the wealthy’ a particularly liberal idea. I know these guys, btw; I grew up with them after all. The same for my daughter’s mother.
To claim that wanting to raise taxes on the wealthy is some sort of ‘liberal’ idea isn’t just wrong; it’s sidesplittingly, roll-on-the-floor hiccuping with laughter wrong.
SOV — I hear you. My comment was meant to be supportive of your post, rather than not.
ScentOfViolets, if you think you’ve made an interesting point, more power to you. (Hint you should try looking in the comments). (Hint 2, I didn’t write THIS post either). I would think someone of grace and intelligence would prefer to deal with the message rather than repeatedly attack the messenger, but your dealings with me and von and Slarti seem to suggest otherwise.
Thanks for your usual level of courteous contribution to the discussion.
Oh, sure, I got that. I just wanted to be clear that I wasn’t being twisty with some sort of weird, nonstandard definition of ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’.
Also, I got real sick of being called a ‘liberal’ a couple of years back merely on the fact that I opposed any sort of invasion of Iraq. The fact that I opposed this because I saw no evidence of Saddam possessing any WMD’s was apparently completely beside the point.
You’re being rather vague here, so I’m having trouble parsing out any sort of meaning. The topic of this particular posting happens to be conservatives and their anti-tax ideology. If you happen to say things that supports this thesis, I’m perfectly free to use them. So no, going from the general to the particular is not a ‘personal attack’ . . . particularly when the observations made are correct. If you think they are incorrect, feel free to point out how and why – I’m certainly open to the idea I may have made a mistake, may have misinterpreted something you said.
I’m curious, btw, as to why you would think that is wrong – you’re certainly free to use anything I say that happens to be relevant to a particular discussion as evidence for any points you would care to make. I would expect you to.
Your observations are incorrect. My tax observations about how to go about fairly taxing people have been the same for more than a decade.
But that is irrelevant.
If YOU believe that my view is wrong, talk about my view. If YOU believe that YOU have evidence that I have changed my view opportunistically, AND if for some reason you believe that is relevant, YOU ought to provide that evidence.
As it is now, YOU merely assert that I must have had some other view and then insist that I find evidence to contradict your assumption.
I see no reason to search through years of discussions to provide evidence to debunk a throw-away assertion that you have no evidence for.
If you find evidence that I’ve changed my views, and if that evidence is relevant to the discussion, please feel free to bring it forward.
Otherwise you are merely being a conversation disrupting troll, which is against the posting rules, and for which I will ban you.
This is your last warning on the subject from me.
Nombrilisme
if “It is not the commonly-held measure of measuring progressivity.” then what is? Or better yet, what is the definition of progressivity that you use.
Nombrilisme
if “It is not the commonly-held measure of measuring progressivity.” then what is? Or better yet, what is the definition of progressivity that you use.
I’m not Nombrilisme, but I’d measure progressivity by how high and quickly marginal tax rates rise over income levels. Does it need to be more complicated than that?
We went over this in February, D’d’d’dave. Once again, look here, for example. I’ve wiped my hard drive since then, so I can’t just grab the papers I referred to then, nor do I particularly feel like re-spending the hour or so I recall spending to get a decent grasp of the matter five months ago. If the Wikipedia article isn’t enough of a push in the right direction, there’s always Google.
Hairshirt.
I agree with you. That is the definition I’ve been using. When I point to evidence that the federal income tax regime after the GW Bush tax cuts was more progressive (by that definition) then it was before the GW Bush tax cuts then Nombrilisme Vide says I’m using the wrong definition.
“Those are the big ticket items, and I doubt there’s really all that much fat in the rest of the budget.”
No place to cut, nothing to reduce. That is the mantra. 25-30% of the budget is discretionary. Out of 2.6 trillion dollars that is 650B dollars or so not counting the 600B(approx) in the defense budget in which some is definitely discretionary.
Lets add it all up to 700B (per year) and assume we need 70B a year to pay for aall of this over 10 years.
My expectation is that Congress, showing leadership can find those cuts to cover the cost.
McCain talked about 18B in earmarks, President Obama agreed but said the number was trivial, that would get us 20% there.
I believe Congress should do the work to make it revenue neutral. It is a forever program that 20 years from now will be on your list of Medicare, Social Security and Defense as untouchable. I think that makes it important enough to do right.
“It is a forever program that 20 years from now will be on your list of Medicare, Social Security and Defense as untouchable. I think that makes it important enough to do right.”
I agree with this whole-heartedly.
McCain talked about 18B in earmarks, President Obama agreed but said the number was trivial, that would get us 20% there.
The problem with earmarks is that some of them are very necessary – for instance, some of the aid to Israel is technically disbursed through the earmark process. Technically, an earmark. So when you started going through the individual earmarks one by one, McCain actually opposed cutting many of them.
It sounds great to decry “earmarks” but you have to check under the hood.
One of the MOST annoying claims in debates about tax rates for the top 1% of Americans are the people who claim “Oh, we can’t tax them! They’re the ones who start the new businesses!” Which is a pile of crap. Most people who start businesses aren’t rich when they start them, and many crash and burn. Those that do go on to success can reach good amounts of income for the business, which doesn’t always translate into lots of money for them. But even if it did, and they paid slightly higher marginal tax rates on their income beyond $250,000, they wouldn’t suddenly then sell the business or close it down, because they’d still be doing very well for themselves.
And to the extent it is rich people who start businesses, it’s often true because the only people who can afford to go start their own businesses are either a) independently wealthy, or b) they have a spouse who’s working and whose benefits can cover them both.
Our crappy employer sponsored health care system is one of the biggest drags on people starting new businesses in the US. Many many people end up in jobs they hate but can’t afford to leave because then they’ll lose their health insurance and then be denied for “pre-existing conditions”.
So let’s not pretend that “the rich” are the chief innovators in this country, and let’s not pretend that saving them a few percentage points on their income above $250,000 is really providing a lot more innovation for the country than all the things that could be done by orders of magnitude more people if they were able to do things without having to panic constantly about where their food and would come from and if they can afford to go to the doctor for that broken foot.
And the whole “this is too important to do wrong, so let’s stall and delay and stop things and then not do anything about it for 20 more years” crap coming from the Republicans, conservatives, and self-described “moderates” is crap too. It’s just another attempt to keep any kind of health care reform from happening and I wish the people who are going “Oh, it’s an important goal, but not important enough to actually support any progress towards” would either be honest or be quiet.
” It’s just another attempt to keep any kind of health care reform from happening and I wish the people who are going “Oh, it’s an important goal, but not important enough to actually support any progress towards” would either be honest or be quiet.”
“So let’s not pretend that “the rich” are the chief innovators in this country, and let’s not pretend that saving them a few percentage points on their income above $250,000 is really providing a lot more innovation for the country than all the things that could be done by orders of magnitude more people if they were able to do things without having to panic constantly about where their food and would come from and if they can afford to go to the doctor for that broken foot.”
So we come full circle:
ANYONE who doesn’t just say yes is a bad guy trying to stop any reform and EVERYONE that makes over $250K is rich.
Sigh, I am done with this topic. But don’t EVER talk to me about anyone generalizing about liberal tax and spend ever again. Having an open mind has to work two ways.
Marty, the Republican party has explicitly stated their goal is to stall and try and stop health care reform of any kind. Just as in 1994. von and sebastian and others here say they support the goal of universal health care, but they’ve never pushed for any action on it, and their comments have consisted entirely of “Oh, well of course it’s important, but it’s too expensive/too socialist/not perfect, therefore we shouldn’t do it.” None of them have presented any suggestions on how to either a) improve the bill in ways that might actually pass, or b) some other plan that might actually pass, especially given the political realities of Republicans who are determined to kill any kind of health care reform.
So yes, I don’t believe the Republicans, or the supporters here are actually interested in anything other than killing reform. Care to present evidence to the contrary?
As for people making $250,000 a year? They’re in the top 1.93% of income in the entire country. If the top 2% of income can’t be counted as “the rich”, who ARE rich? 500K? A million? Where do you draw the line?
But that wasn’t the point I made, as you haven’t read what I said. I said most businesses aren’t started by the rich, and the people who create successful businesses that earn them more than $250,00 a year are not going to stop working because the tax on the money they make over $250,000 a year goes up slightly.
So, no, I didn’t say “ANYONE who doesn’t just say yes is a bad guy trying to stop any reform and EVERYONE that makes over $250K is rich.” I said the people enabling the Republicans who WANT to kill any kind of reform are effectively helping kill reform, and I said that people whose businesses have done well enough to earn them more than $250,000 a year aren’t going to stop because the taxes on the portion above $250,000 a year go up.
And I would argue that $250,000 a year, being less than 2% of the people, is not an unreasonable cutoff for saying “The Rich”.
Given some of Marty’s previous comments, I think he’s thinking of the distinction between wealth and income when he brings up the $250k/yr figure, since some people making that much may have very little net worth and major basic family expenses. It’s not a worthless distinction to make. I’m just not entirely sure how it applies to a discussion of marginal income tax rates, unless he’s suggesting a wealth tax of some sort. (Not to mention that it’s only taxable income that people are taxed on, and most basic expenses are accounted for through exemptions and deductions before calculating taxable income.) Anything to add to that, Marty?
“No place to cut, nothing to reduce. That is the mantra. 25-30% of the budget is discretionary.”
The total discretionary portion of the 2009 budget is $1.21 trillion. Take away DoD and GWOT and you’re left with discretionary spending of about $550, or about 17% of the total budget.
Out of that we run more or less all of the operational functions of government, excluding only defense.
Maybe you can squeeze 10% out of that. That will net you $55B, which is a lot of money. In context, however, it’s less than 2% of the entire federal budget.
In contrast, SS alone is $664B, and the medical entitlements are about $632B. SS is reasonably sound financially, but the medical entitlements currently are about 20% of the budget and are likely to grow quite quickly because of the rise in cost of medical care.
Hence, my statement that you’re unlikely to get much bang out of the discretionary part of the budget excluding DoD and entitlements, and the biggest bang for the buck in terms of limiting the growth of government spending is going to be curtailing health care costs and reining in aggressive foreign policy.
No mantra, just math.
“But don’t EVER talk to me about anyone generalizing about liberal tax and spend ever again”
People come here to talk. If you don’t like what they say, don’t hang out.
I’m not wishing you away, I’m just saying that if you want to hang out you should be prepared to deal with other folks’ opinions.
“Maybe you can squeeze 10% out of that. That will net you $55B, which is a lot of money. In context, however, it’s less than 2% of the entire federal budget.”
But if you net 55B out of that and take 50B out of the Defense budget you get a trillion over 10 years, thats a great down payment on healthcare reform.
If you actually reform healthcare, not just implement universal coverage, you can save what ever else you need out of ongoing costs and Medicare.
“None of them have presented any suggestions on how to either a) improve the bill in ways that might actually pass, or b) some other plan that might actually pass, especially given the political realities of Republicans who are determined to kill any kind of health care reform.”
I have, here and in other comments on this subject.
Marty: My expectation is that Congress, showing leadership can find those cuts to cover the cost [of 70B per year]. [Emphasis added]
OK, I’ll bite: wtf does that mean?
“I’m just not entirely sure how it applies to a discussion of marginal income tax rates, unless he’s suggesting a wealth tax of some sort. (Not to mention that it’s only taxable income that people are taxed on, and most basic expenses are accounted for through exemptions and deductions before calculating taxable income.) Anything to add to that, Marty?”
Great summary of my point, I would only add that after we raise taxes on the wealthy and upper middle class(my definition of 150-250, just mine)enough, then we risk those people becoming part of the statistics of the needy when they actually can’t work.
Then there is no place else to get more money. So I don’t think we should wait until there is simply not enough to fund what we have on the books to start making real choices.
“showing leadership ”
Someday, someone in the Congress will decide that being a leader is explaining why you can’t do everything, and LEAD in making tradeoffs rather than following the whims of the polls.
I get asked a lot what I am for, I am for the most valuable things the government can provide with the money we have. I don’t read every line item of the budget. I am sure it is like my families credit card bill, everything there was important to someone. When they spend more than the budget I step in and tell them what isn’t important to all of us.
i’ll get that
“If you actually reform healthcare, not just implement universal coverage, you can save what ever else you need out of ongoing costs and Medicare. “
Fine with me. Let’s do that.
The problem here is going to be that “reforming healthcare” in any meaningful way is going to mean that lots of folks who make a lot of money now are maybe not going to make so much money.
Plus it’s hard to see how reform is going to happen without tinkering with how actual care — as opposed to access to care — is delivered.
If you think a surtax is generating a lot of pushback, both the above will generate more.
I’m curious to know what “healthcare reform” looks like from your point of view.
just FYI, when there’s runaway italics, 99% of the time you can kill it with this:
[/p][/i][/p][/i]
(using angle brackets instead of square.)
you need the /p to close some paragraph tags that the ObWi comment template opens.
aha!
I tried that a couple of times with just the /p/i sequence. didn’t think of doing it twice.
thanks cleek!
Marty: I’m curious what “healthcare reform” looks like to you, also.
I reviewed the thread, and all I’ve seen you mention was hypotheticals about things like cutting $250 billion from unnamed domestic projects, and unnamed defense projects. I was going to say something about cutting from defense being a pipe dream, since we can’t even kill the extra F-22s, but I just saw the Senate voted for it, so I’ll downgrade that to “Incredibly Unlikely But a Good Idea.”
What cleek said. Though I would add that when explaining to people how to do HTML tags, you can use the < (less than) and > (greater than) entities to show the < and > symbols (respectively) in your comment without having them parsed by the browser as tags.
Bless you, cleek. I was wondering how you’d killed those wretched things.
Sebastian: This is your last warning on the subject from me.
Can someone please cite for me where it says in the posting rules that it’s a banning offense to ask front-page posters to cite past posts that the front page posters claim they made – which past posts they claim prove they have “always” held the same views as they now hold?
If Sebastian has made these posts, decrying the Bush administration tax cuts, as he claims, I don’t see how it’s being a “conversation-disrupting troll” to ask him to cite them. If, on the other hand, he has never made these posts, he should not claim that he has done so.
If it is now a banning offense to ask Sebastian or anyone else to provide a cite to a past post of their own writing, I think that needs to be explicitly in the posting rules.
Marty: Great summary of my point, I would only add that after we raise taxes on the wealthy and upper middle class(my definition of 150-250, just mine)enough, then we risk those people becoming part of the statistics of the needy when they actually can’t work.
Yeah, because in the 1950s and 1960s the photos of the Americans being taxed at 91% made headline news all over the world, as they begged in the streets because they actually couldn’t work. Didn’t change much till 1986, when suddenly Reagan’s tax cut got those people out of the armies of the needy and they could now actually work.
Good god, Marty, do think about what you’re trying to say, please? People who get taxed at 91% may cry poormouth, but that usually means something like “I couldn’t afford to run my second yacht, and we’ve got to quit having two-week house parties every other weekend!” To these people this may mean being “needy”, but to most people, you and me… not. And it’s outright insulting to people who are in genuine need – who don’t worry about yacht repairs, but where to buy a decent pair of second-hand shoes.
I’m curious to know what “healthcare reform” looks like from your point of view.
I know this wasn’t directed at me, but I’d say more inexpensive preventive care, reducing the need to treat avoidably progressed conditions expensively. I’d also say we put a program together to grow the ranks of primary care physicians at the expense of specialists to provide just that sort of care. And, yeah, a bunch of people are going to make less if it works the way I think it should. That’s fine. They can become not-famous musicians.
No it is a bannable offense to disrupt or destroy meaningful conversation for its own sake. ScentofViolets has been flirting with it for weeks, and I am not the only one of the posters to think so.
You’re missing the point, Jes.
Asking anyone to provide cites to support their assertions is not, in and of itself a posting rules violation.
Asking for cites to prove that someone holds the same opinion on a matter today as they did in past years is an attempt to discredit that person’s argument by proving that they have changed their mind.
It’s an ad hominem attack that has nothing to do with whether or not their argument today is sound, and you know it perfectly well because it’s been explained to you many times.
So let’s drop the pretense that you’re just nobly pursuing the truth here and stick to challenging the facts in Sebastian’s argument instead of chasing the distraction of whether or not he’s ever changed his mind about the subject at hand.
“von and sebastian and others here say they support the goal of universal health care, but they’ve never pushed for any action on it, and their comments have consisted entirely of “Oh, well of course it’s important, but it’s too expensive/too socialist/not perfect, therefore we shouldn’t do it.”
Nate, this is incorrect. For example I have repeatedly stated that it would make sense to extend Medicare to cover the currently uninsured. Which is not only ‘a’ solution, I think it is a better one than many currently on the table.
“Good god, Marty, do think about what you’re trying to say, please? People who get taxed at 91% may cry poormouth, but that usually means something like “I couldn’t afford to run my second yacht, and we’ve got to quit having two-week house parties every other weekend!”
You are right Jes. In that paragraph I mixed the wealthy and the upper middle class. I only meant the upper middle class folks in the dropping into the stats part. I have first hand knowledge it happens.
The combination was meant for referral by the point on once you have all that money, where do you go next?
Yeah, because in the 1950s and 1960s the photos of the Americans being taxed at 91% made headline news all over the world, as they begged in the streets because they actually couldn’t work.
I’m going to play translator for Marty again. (I hope you don’t mind, Marty.) I think his point is that, if we tax people in the $150-250k/yr income range too heavily, they won’t have much left to put towards retirement and will become needy in old age. I don’t see where anyone is proposing such a high tax rate on this group, but I think that was his actual point.
“Marty: I’m curious what “healthcare reform” looks like to you, also.”
Please, this is what it “looks like” to me, the numbers aren’t available yet although there is great work being done on starting it by the administrations new team. While they are currently focused on universal EMR and the “meaningful use” definitions to support the money already allocated, there are many areas we should be focused on.
It looks like modernization of hospital systems that have been historically one of the slowest industries to modernize non care technology. It looks like meaningful tort reform. It looks like streamlined protocol review so the latest developments are available universally. It looks like less insurance fraud by standardizing review of claim information. It looks like less red tape to get doctor recommended procedures (after tort reform impacts defensive medicine).
I am only involved on the technology and process end of healthcare so there may be other key steps that I am not familiar with.
ScentofViolets has been flirting with it for weeks, and I am not the only one of the posters to think so
I’ll back sebastian on this. There is a better way to move the discourse forward, and being disruptive and over the top in your criticisms helps no one. Try this: instead of assuming the worst about every one that disagrees with you, try granting some benefit of the doubt, accept that there are various valid view points and argue in a respectful way about why yours might be better.
Advice that I admit I need reminding of myself from time to time.
Sebastian: That is a good idea. I suspect it would very very quickly turn into universal single-payer insurance for everyone, or something damn near that. Which I think would be a good thing, but unfortunately got left off the bargaining table from the beginning. Or, more pessimistically, it’d get demagogued as welfare for the poor, and short-changed, cut, means-tested, and delayed to the point of ineffectiveness. Either way, it would, of course, get precisely 0 votes from the Republicans in Congress (at least the Senate).
The primary question in regards to that though, is do you think, if the current efforts toward health care reform die due to obstruction from “moderates” and Republicans, will your preferred outcome happen? Will Obama, or more importantly, the Congressional Democrats, having already lost on a health care reform bill, come back to bat with something like that? If they do, will the Republicans, having just beaten one bill, decide that yeah, this one’s okay, and it’s not socialism at all, so they can vote for it? And then the bill will pass and things will be better?
Or do you think that if the current reform efforts die, there’ll be another 20 years before we can even think about trying again? If the Republicans get back into power, do you expect them to propose something like that, given the proposals they’ve already made? Or will the Democrats, after having one bill die, decide that health care reform is toxic, and Not To Be Tried, rather than learn to tell the @$!#ing grandstanding “moderates” to sit down and act like adults, instead of grandstanding on cutting things to round numbers, rather than what might work?
Frankly, I figure if this bill fails, the result is a lot more likely to be a great big ball of FAIL for years, rather than any kind of idealized better solution. That’s what the stakes are here. The Republicans are specifically trying to delay to kill the bill. If this dies, both parties will learn all the wrong lessons from it, and I expect we’ll go at least another decade before we try again. That’s the stakes here, and why people arguing this bill should die in favor of a better solution at this stage of the process are helping the Republicans kill health care reform, not make it better.
How about Democrats modify the bill to be something pretty darn good and we don’t have to play lesser of two evils. You posit that the Republicans are pretty much going to vote against anything. Ok. So make a good bill and pass it. Don’t make a crappy bill and pass it. You only need to hang on to the more conservative Democrats. You can’t blame Republicans for the fact that Democrats are being half-assed and weird about health care reform.
And why do we always have to pretend that covering the uninsured is the same issue as providing health insurance for everyone in the nation? It isn’t the same question at all. Why do we spend so much time analyzing it as if it were?
I can blame Republican opposition for the fact that the grandstanding “moderates” can demand cuts to make bills less than they should be and get their way, because if some of the Republicans weren’t in crazy-lock-step, maybe Obama’s ideas about working with your opponents and negotiating to produce something acceptable to both sides might work. But because health care reform is “SOCALISM!!eleventyone” to the Republicans, that gives all the power to the grandstanding “moderates”. And because Obama tried to negotiate with the Republicans who had no intention of negotiating, just screaming to try and kill it with fire, we ended up with a worse bill than we could have, to START with. Which the worthless grandstanding “moderates” (At least two to four of which are NOT Democrats: Lieberman, Specter, and the two “moderate” Republican senators). If you have a dysfunctional system where a minority of crazies is big enough to make passing anything require literally unanimous agreement (or some stones to use procedural tactics like making them actually fillibuster, or using budget reconcilliation, or getting rid of the fillibuster, or…), the grandstanding
wankersmoderates are the ones that matter. And damned if I know why Reid (well, aside from being worthless) and Obama won’t lean on them. Believe me, I’ve got plenty of anger at the incompetents in the Democratic Senate leadership.As for covering the uninsured, there’s a bunch of reasons it gets combined with insurance for everybody. 1) it’s a hell of a lot simpler system to just cover everybody, rather than have a patchwork system that would have to pick up when people lose their insurance, then drop them when they get a new job with new insurance or whatever. 2) Our health insurance system, even for people with insurance, sucks in all sorts of ways. 3) If it’s just for the uninsured, it’ll be demagouged as handouts and welfare for those damn welfare queens, and be target 1 for Republicans forever. If it’s for everyone, then it’ll be much harder for that to happen (See: Social Secuity, Medicaid, etc). 4) There’s a lot more efficencies in administrative costs, premiums, etc, when you cover everyone.
But of course, most of those benefits were off the table at the beginning, since the “moderates” and Republicans would have screamed “SOCIALISM!!!!eleventyone” at the merest thought (which didn’t stop them, which many people could have told Obama) and Obama thought he might get something constructive out of the Republicans if he tried to negotiate with them (which many people ALSO could have corrected him on).
So yeah, when the Republican party has made dysfunctional obstruction literally their entire plan for EVERYTHING in Congress, it makes the entire legislative process dysfunctional. Yes, the Democrats should have started with a really good plan, and then let the “moderates” grandstand it down to merely pretty good, or at worst okay, so then the “moderates” could get their grandstanding, and we could have gotten something decent. But we go to Congress with the timid, useless Senators we have, not the ones we would like.
And do you agree or disagree with me on the likely outcomes if this bill is killed? If this bill dies, do you think we will get a better bill, or another 25 years of FAIL and hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and trillions extracted from useful purposes and into insurance executive paychecks?
How about Democrats modify the bill to be something pretty darn good and we don’t have to play lesser of two evils.
Yeah, it’s that idiotic bloc of “centrists” plus Lieberman (and the blue dogs) that are kind of screwing up the whole process (that, and the lockstep GOP opposition of course). But the current bill is still better than none, and since the GOP is not offering support on better alternatives, it’s all we’ve got to work with.
It depends on how the bill gets killed (if it does, which is a bit cart before the hourse). If it gets killed because Democrats can’t come up with a sensible plan to appeal to their moderates, and then refuse to do so ever then I guess it would be the end of health care reform.
Which is one of the reasons it would be wise to separate dealing with the uninsured from coming up with a scheme for those who have health care already.
A huge political problem is that lots of people (quite possibly a majority) have pretty good health care now. As such they aren’t thrilled with jumping to a new possibly sketchy government health care system.
So why not just extend Medicare to the uninsured instead? It deals with the uninsured problem and it doesn’t generate resistance from those who prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know.
You talk about “better than what we have now” as an excuse not to fix this bill. But why isn’t that an explanation for why you should support my kind of proposal?
Seb: I like your proposal. Now how do you and I go about getting it passed?
You’re the Democrat, can’t you get it done? 😉
Seriously though, why do we have to have an enormous omnibus proposal instead of something like that? I mean I guess you have to maintain current rules about not dumping patients or all the sick ones end up in the public plan, but other than that, what’s the problem?
It deals with the biggest moral problem–the fact that a noticeably large portion of the popoulation currently doesn’t have regular access to health care.
Sebastian: Again, talking about the actual current reality, with the grandstanding “moderates” in the Senate, who want to make a show of cutting money and/or juice from any bill to show how they’re not DFHs, and grandstand about how powerful they are, and the Republican party has no interest in allowing Obama and the Democrats to pass ANYTHING that might work, and are banking on killing health care reform as a great win, like they portrayed it in 1994.
In this existing political reality, do you expect that if this bill dies, a) Harry Reid and the Democrats will make a second try with some new plan, which will then win over the “moderates” who won’t grandstand and help the Republicans obstruct it and/or Republicans will actually vote to pass it, b) The Republicans will see this as a victory and prove “The People” hate that durn gubbmint, and get even more vicious and obstructionist, since it already worked, and another ten years (at least) will pass with our crappy status quo, or c) Aliens will suddenly beam down and make everyone in perfect health forever.
Personally, I think C is slightly more likely than A. Given that, opposing the current bill, AFTER it’s already passed the House, and has been debated in the Senate, as it is now, will NOT help replace it with a “better” bill, it will help the Republicans kill the bill. And health care reform, of any stripe, including your reasonable (though flawed, as mentioned before) suggestion to expand Medicare. Just like in 1994. And just like in 1194, I fear we’ll end up at least 15 years later, and with that many more people dead, sicker, bankrupt, and stuck in dead-end jobs because otherwise they’ll never get health insurance.
If you disagree with that scenario, I’d like to know why. I really would, I HATE being so pessimistic and cynical, but the last eight years kept proving I wasn’t cynical enough.
More condensed, in four parts. 1) Do you think our current health insurance system is acceptable, yes or no? 2) Do you think the current bill is worse than the current system, yes or no? 3) Do you think a better bill than the current one has any chance of passing in, say, the next ten years, if this bill fails, yes or no? 4) Do you think the current bill is worse than the deaths, bankruptcies, sicknesses, etc, that would happen under the status quo until a new bill were able to pass?
“Seriously though, why do we have to have an enormous omnibus proposal instead of something like that?”
Because, of course, all the Republicans and libertarians who scream that “government health care is SOCIALISM!!!” would be on stronger grounds for making such a claim with such a proposal.
I’ll make you a deal: you get the Republicans and libertarians who object to “socialism” to stfu, and I’ll get all the Democrats to support extending Medicare to everyone who is uninsured.
We’re equally likely to succeed.
“I’m going to play translator for Marty again. (I hope you don’t mind, Marty.) I think his point is that, if we tax people in the $150-250k/yr income range too heavily, they won’t have much left to put towards retirement and will become needy in old age.”
You know, I realize we all travel in different circles, and stuff like this is all kind of relative anyway, but I’m having a really hard time getting my head around the concept of somebody who’s been working for thirty years at an at-least-middle income level, is currently making a quarter of a million bucks a year, and who has no meaningful net worth and is at risk of not being able to retire fifteen years from now if we bump the marginal tax rate a couple of points.
I’m not saying we should or should not do that, I’m just saying I don’t get the example in any kind of realistic scenario.
Is there a substance abuse problem involved here? Gambling?
Or are we talking four private school tuitions from K-12 straight through grad school?
Cause otherwise it doesn’t add up. To me.
Extending Medicare to anyone who lacks insurance sounds fine to me. I agree with Gary that it would be a political non-starter, but I could be wrong.
“And because Obama tried to negotiate with the Republicans who had no intention of negotiating, just screaming to try and kill it with fire, we ended up with a worse bill than we could have, to START with.”
Sorry, Obama lost all credibility on this in his first act, the stimulus, and it’s gone downhill from there. He made it clear he was willing to just run over Republican opposition and ideas, cut a few moderates from the herd and get it done at the expense of any facade of bipartisanship.
Now he has achance on something that doesn’t have to be passed tomorrow, his move now, not theirs.
Just to put a point on my immediately previous comment:
I don’t have a cite, but I’m pretty sure the number of people who have been driven from the middle class into bankruptcy, poverty, or both due to health care costs pretty much dwarfs the number of folks who’ve made the same trip due to an incremental increase in the top marginal tax rate.
And that’s not even talking about the folks who are on the fringe to begin with.
Just saying.
Gary: “Because, of course, all the Republicans and libertarians who scream that “government health care is SOCIALISM!!!” would be on stronger grounds for making such a claim with such a proposal.”
So instead we have to have a universal program that includes everyone? That doesn’t seem to put down the socialism question very well.
“I’ll make you a deal: you get the Republicans and libertarians who object to “socialism” to stfu, and I’ll get all the Democrats to support extending Medicare to everyone who is uninsured.
We’re equally likely to succeed.”
This is interesting. You don’t believe that Democrats would support extending Medicare to everyone who is uninsured? Why? Don’t Democrats care about people?
BTW, all of you who are big on other voting plans with more fractured party systems–the ‘blue dog’ Democrat thing you don’t like is exactly the kind of thing you’re advocating for more of. They would just have a different party name. Just remember that next time.
Marty: The Republicans weren’t interested in anything other than obstruction and half-assed “plans” that included no numbers, or were just tax cuts for the very rich, again, in the stimulus debate. Even after Obama spent weeks asking for their opinions and suggestions, and cutting many of the items from the stimulus that the Republicans and grandstanding “moderates” complained about. And still got exactly 0 votes from the Republicans.
Which is when he SHOULD have learned to roll over Republican opposition and ideas, and actually pass something good, since the Republicans were only interested in trying to sabotage and block anything. But AGAIN, he tried negotiating with himself beforehand and took single payer off the table and tried to craft a plan that met many of the things Republicans claimed they wanted. We’ve seen how well that’s worked so far.
The reason Obama can’t get any bipartisanship is the Republicans aren’t interested in anything but obstruction and lock-step opposition. Which is why we’re where we are now.
Oh come on, Marty. Your arguments in this thread have been getting better and better, but this one just bears no resemblance to the reality we live in.
In the real world, which is documented extensively, Obama wasted a lot of time bringing Republicans to the WH, reaching out to them in both houses of Congress, and the Democrats in Congress kept making the bill worse and worse in order to try to get the GOP on board–and in a highly publicized stunt, after exacting a number of concessions in exchange for their support, rejected it in a party line vote.
“In the real world, which is documented extensively, Obama wasted a lot of time bringing Republicans to the WH, reaching out to them in both houses of Congress, and the Democrats in Congress kept making the bill worse and worse in order to try to get the GOP on board–and in a highly publicized stunt, after exacting a number of concessions in exchange for their support, rejected it in a party line vote.”
Actually, not really. As I opined here giving someone multiple opportunities to agree with you is not negotiating.
“This is interesting. You don’t believe that Democrats would support extending Medicare to everyone who is uninsured? Why? Don’t Democrats care about people?”
No, I believe I could more or less succeed in getting the Democrats to go ahead and do that if you can get your part done first, so as to clear the way for the Democrats to then not be equated with communists.
And I also meant to imply that each of us had somewhat less than absolute control over the votes of the members of the respective members of Congress. That’s all.
“As I opined here giving someone multiple opportunities to agree with you is not negotiating.”
Marty, your cite goes to an “opinion” of yours with not a single citation of a single fact.
I thought we’d already disposed of what unsupported assertions are worth in a discussion.
If you’d care to provide some actual cites of actual proposals made by actual elected Republican members of Congress as to what they would have liked to see changed in the stimulus bill to improve it, in return for which they would agree to vote for the bill, I’m sure we’d find that all extremely educational, given that no one engaged in journalism or blogging, so far as I’m aware, seems to have ever noticed any such proposals being made. (There was considerable discussion of this here, as well as on every political blog in America, at the time.)
But, go ahead, and give us some specific examples.
Meanwhile, the notion that the Republicans might have, and did, decide en mass that it was better for their party to try to sink any stimulus bill, seems simply unimaginable to you, no matter how much evidence that this is the case is in the historical record.
And please quit offering assertions that are simply completely unsupported, and which completely lack substance; they don’t help you out. Thanks.
“So instead we have to have a universal program that includes everyone? That doesn’t seem to put down the socialism question very well.”
If they’re going to scream no matter what we do, then we might as well do it right, since half-measures aren’t going to win any votes either.
“BTW, all of you who are big on other voting plans with more fractured party systems–the ‘blue dog’ Democrat thing you don’t like is exactly the kind of thing you’re advocating for more of. They would just have a different party name. Just remember that next time.”
Perhaps there’d be Blue Dogs. But there’d also be Greens, and Social Democrats, and Libretarians, and Monster Raving Loonies, and the like. The political world and the Overtron window would be less limited than the current “Republicans are conservatives, Democrats are liberals” nonsense that currently limits debate mostly to center-right to crazy reactionaries. Like how single payer Medicare for everybody wasn’t even an option in the health care debate.
“If you’d care to provide some actual cites of actual proposals made by actual elected Republican members of Congress as to what they would have liked to see changed in the stimulus bill to improve it, in return for which they would agree to vote for the bill, I’m sure we’d find that all extremely educational, given that no one engaged in journalism or blogging, so far as I’m aware, seems to have ever noticed any such proposals being made. (There was considerable discussion of this here, as well as on every political blog in America, at the time.)”
Opinion written in response to
this
If that is the case, then you should have no problem producing posts where cried foul when taxes on the rich were preferentially reduced. And no, it is not irrelevant. It goes to consistency. You’re not allowed to say whatever is convenient to the matter at hand with no reference to what you have said in the past. Doubly so, given that the subject of this post is the anti-tax ideology.
Uh, Sebastian? Just how am I supposed to produce posts of yours that don’t exist? If in point of fact you have never said anything critical of the preferential tax break the rich received, just how am I supposed to ‘produce’ anything?
Now, as I have said, I’ve looked through things you’ve posted in the past, and I haven’t seen anything. That is my evidence. Frankly, I’m wondering why, if these posts exist, you don’t simply produce them.
Do you have a reason why you don’t? Especially when we all agree – even you – that consistency is important? And doubly so when I’m replying to some rather nasty remarks you made about liberals? Let me quote it again:
So, are you now saying you were out of line with this one? Or how about this:
Oh, I see, that wasn’t being ‘insulting’, that was just telling it like it is, even though you haven’t exactly been forthcoming with evidence for this one either.
But somehow, asking you for evidence of your claims, asking that you be consistent in your opinions is somehow wrong. That about the size of it?
No, I don’t, and don’t try to make yourself out to be the victim. I said that if you were being consistent, then you should be able to produce posts from the past where you said that the preferential treatment Bush gave the rich when it came to tax cuts was wrong.
This isn’t anything world-shaking. And again, if you have made such comments, why don’t you simply produce them? It seems to me that being consistent would strengthen your case, if anything; not weaken it.
Uh, I’ve got to ask: is there any way to throw a strike against Sebastian here? This is nasty in the extreme.
Notice, btw, that Sebastian will not, even now, say that the rich should not have been given a preferential tax break by Bush.
Even now.
That’s pretty much it. Being of the mathematical persuasion, I am comfortable with having the givens change on me. That’s not a problem. What is a problem is inconsistency. Note btw that my response was to this bit of doggerel:
My thinking was that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, even if the premise is wrong: if liberals obsess over tax hikes on the rich to the exclusion of the poor, and this is a bad thing, then surely it would be just as bad for conservatives to prefer tax cuts for the wealthy over tax cuts for the poor. Which was the case with the Bush tax cuts, and which leads me to believe, following Sebastians logic above, that he must have complained about this at the time.
Note that I disagree with the premise; I am just arguing on consistency principles.
“Opinion written in response to
this”
That’s nice. Could you answer the question I asked you, now, please? Thanks.
Let me guess who the others are. No, Seb, strangely enough, I think that being consistent is very important to the issues being discussed. If one always supports tax cuts on the wealthy, for example, and the reasons are different each time, and in fact, conflict with each other, one suspects that the person finding these reasons not to tax the rich just might be dead set agin’ em, period. Again, as publius notes, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. But at least be up front about it.
SOV
“Notice, btw, that Sebastian will not, even now, say that the rich should not have been given a preferential tax break by Bush.”
Good. Because the rich WERE NOT in fact given a preferential tax break by GWBush. Here.
“Opinion written in response to
this”
That’s nice. Could you answer the question I asked you, now, please? Thanks.”
Sure, in twenty years of negotiating deals a key lesson is don’t spend a lot of time making a counter offer when the other party is not going to deal. A focused tax cut based stimulus package was proposed and dismissed out of hand. There was no more reason to negotiate at that point.
No one was listening.
What the?!?!?!?!?
You know, Catsy, assuming that Sebastian can’t produce these posts, he can say – explicitly – that Bush’s tax cuts were bad policy because they preferentially cut taxes on the wealthy. He can say that he has changed his mind since then, and here is why he did. Any of a number of possibilities. I merely ask that he be consistent. Or – here’s a thought – he could repudiate that crack about ‘liberals going after the rich on tax hikes even though they know that taxes need to be raised on the middle class as well.’
Just so long as he remains reasonably consistent.
Let me guess who the others are.
If it helps, which it almost certainly doesn’t, I’m one. You seem to have a permanent bug up your ass about Sebastian, and go from 0 to “persistently outraged” in about 4 seconds.
Blink. No, as it happens, I don’t. Do you have any posts that would lead you to think this?
“Sure, in twenty years of negotiating deals a key lesson is don’t spend a lot of time making a counter offer when the other party is not going to deal.”
In other words, when asked if you can “provide some actual cites of actual proposals made by actual elected Republican members of Congress as to what they would have liked to see changed in the stimulus bill to improve it, in return for which they would agree to vote for the bill,” your response is no, you cannot.
You were asked to do so in response to the assertion that: “”In the real world, which is documented extensively, Obama wasted a lot of time bringing Republicans to the WH, reaching out to them in both houses of Congress, and the Democrats in Congress kept making the bill worse and worse in order to try to get the GOP on board–and in a highly publicized stunt, after exacting a number of concessions in exchange for their support, rejected it in a party line vote.”
We can provide you with endless cites to the actual acts of all this, in great detail. As many cites as you would like, to actual meetings, and actual facts.
You deny this reality merely by saying “Actually, not really,” and then agreeing that you cannot cite a single fact or citation to support your assertion.
Your original claim was and is: “He made it clear he was willing to just run over Republican opposition and ideas, cut a few moderates from the herd and get it done at the expense of any facade of bipartisanship.”
But you admit you cannot factually support this claim in any way.
In other words, you wish to persuade people that actual citable facts are irrelevant, but your imagination, which cannot be supported with a single cite to a fact, is instead relevant.
Best of luck with this technique of persuading people of the factual correctness of your assertions.
You lose major credibility points here until such time as you are able to actually support assertions with citable facts.
Once again, I refer you to this.
I also suggest not engaging in this common logical fallacy. You cannot demonstrate your conclusion by assuming it. Again, people who demonstrably engage in illogic lose credibility points.
Gary,
This one was a little over the top. I can’t imagine that you have the nerve to lecture me on citable facts when neither of the people I have discussed this with have cited a one. Just said they could.
Well, yes I can.
I don’t doubt you can, your point though is about as weak as any I have ever seen from you. I guess this struck a nerve. The Republicans had proposals and ideas, documented in small measure here
“He made it clear he was willing to just run over Republican opposition and ideas, cut a few moderates from the herd and get it done at the expense of any facade of bipartisanship.”
My previous link supports this, if you don’t think it does disagree, don’t say I didn’t respond.
What does it mean to “extend Medicare to the uninsured”?
Medicare charges premiums to its 65-and-over recipients. Would the under-65 uninsured be offered the chance to buy in at the same premiums?
Medicare will not turn away anybody over 65. Will an under-65 Medicare recipient who suddenly lands a job with great health insurance be dropped from Medicare? How about if s/he lands a job with crappy insurance?
What are the rules for defining “uninsured”, anyway? If Blue Cross decides I’m too expensive to cover, can I buy into Medicare right away? Or do I have to prove that I tried every other possible insurer first?
How about if Blue Cross keeps raising my premium and reducing my coverage. Can I decide to drop them and go on Medicare?
These are sincere questions — and not just for Sebastian, necessarily.
Incidentally, fellow libruls, given any healthy insurance reform plan: how confident are we that a future GOP administration won’t do its best to run it badly?
–TP
“The Republicans had proposals and ideas”
Marty, a “stimulus” is spending; to say that you want more stimulus with less spending is to say you want a colder hot, or a shorter tall. Now, if your argument is that you don’t believe in Keynesian economics, fine, or you want to therefore claim that you believe a stimulus bill wouldn’t be helpful, fine, but in that case I don’t understand how you can be arguing that the Republicans were trying to get a “better” stimulus bill, rather than, as we’ve been saying, either wanting to make the stimulus as small as possible, or simply not have one at all. If you want to say that you and the Republicans opposed a stimulus bill, fine, but please don’t try to make the nonsensical and contradictory claim that you want a better, more non-existent, stimulus bill.
“My previous link supports this”
In what way? With what facts? Quote the facts you claim you are supporting with your link, please.
Which specific phrases in the following do you deny and need cites to?
Explain in actual words what actual facts in this link you cite contradict the claim you are rejecting.
“I guess this struck a nerve”
It struck my irritation that you want everyone else to do your homework for you, rather than bother to actually look up facts and cite them for yourself. I have better uses of my time.
“Marty, a “stimulus” is spending;”
Well, yes, you are correct. The discussion was over who got to spend it, who was likely to spend it and what created the economic capacity to maintain that spending.
That’s the difference in raising taxes so the government can spend or lowering them so everyone else can.
I didn’t ask you to do any research, everything I have said would certainly be common knowledge to everyone of the knowledgeable posters and regular commenters on this blog. I had no intention of recreating what was surely an interesting discussion at the time.
“Uh, Sebastian? Just how am I supposed to produce posts of yours that don’t exist? If in point of fact you have never said anything critical of the preferential tax break the rich received, just how am I supposed to ‘produce’ anything?
Now, as I have said, I’ve looked through things you’ve posted in the past, and I haven’t seen anything. That is my evidence. Frankly, I’m wondering why, if these posts exist, you don’t simply produce them.”
I know you think this is logical argument, but as Catsy pointed out, it isn’t. I have a multi-year history of posts and comments spanning thousands of instances and hundreds of thousands of words. I am not required to spend hours searching through them to satisfy your suspicion that I haven’t been consistent.
You are trolling. I am banning you for 24 hours pending review from the other members of the blog.
“You are trolling. I am banning you for 24 hours pending review from the other members of the blog.”
I’m just a lowly commenter, and I have at times found SoV quite annoying, and I certainly agree that SoV has a number of times made unfair accusations of you, Sebastian, but I don’t see where the quotes you are responding to are “trolls.” I can see them perfectly well as annoying, but it seems to me that, in this case, the appropriate response would be for you to simply restrain yourself to saying that you feel you’ve explained enough, and don’t feel any need to produce further quotes. If SoV then became abusive, that would be grounds for banning. But as of now, and as of this specific exchange, I’m not seeing it.
“Being annoying” does not equal “trolling.”
Characterizing the passage of the stimulus bill that way is a complete distortion of history.
Wikipedia:
The Republicans in Congress were encouraged, repeatedly, to bring their ideas to the table. None of them had a plan to counter-offer. We accepted many of their proposed amendments to the bills, but the alternative “stimulus bill” that they proposed was a fantasy wish-list composed of steep tax cuts and slashed social programs–in other words, the same answers they’ve been giving for decades regardless of the circumstances or state of the economy, the same things that helped run up the current deficit and that Americans soundly rejected last fall.
This was delusional. It was not a serious proposal, it was a poke in the eye, the response of a party which had no new ideas for how to deal with the crisis.
And then, after thoroughly watering down some of the better parts of the stimulus in response to the concerns of the Republicans and conservative Democrats, the Republicans in Congress voted nearly along party lines against the bill anyway.
These are the facts of what happened. It was passed with zero Republican votes in the House and three in the Senate because most of them refused to behave like grown adults and participate seriously in the process.
Gary, I think that the definition of trolling has expanded, but, in any event, we are taking into account SoV’s history since he/she first appeared on or around March 25, 2009.*
If SoV is subject to a permanent ban, it will not be solely because of my and Sebastian’s votes. I will count as “on the right” to avoid any appearance of impropriety.** SoV will also have a right to appeal, per the banning rules, should a permanent ban be instituted.
*Yes, I know nearly the exact date of SoV’s first appearance under that name. That’s because there has been concern about the wheat-to-chaff ratio of SoV’s posts from nearly the get-go.
**The posting rules hold: “One writer (but only one) from the other side of the fence must agree to the ban for it to move forward (Von can vote as either side of the fence as he wishes).”
“And then, after thoroughly watering down some of the better parts of the stimulus in response to the concerns of the Republicans and conservative Democrats, the Republicans in Congress voted nearly along party lines against the bill anyway.
These are the facts of what happened. It was passed with zero Republican votes in the House and three in the Senate because most of them refused to behave like grown adults and participate seriously in the process.”
This is your opinion based on the facts presented in Wikipedia. None of those facts support the conclusion that the bill was watered down or the “best” partss were reemoved. It is a factual representation of the publicly disclosed changes to the bill, which were not enough to make it a good bill. IMHO
I would suggest this is not a valuable back and forth as we are interpreting the same facts differently.
Oh, good grief, it isn’t that hard. The Republican “stimulus bill” consisted almost entirely of tax cuts and steep cuts to programs that Republicans have long opposed anyway. Regardless of politics, it’s an abuse of the English language to call that a “stimulus”.
When given a chance to put forth a viable alternative bill, Republicans chose to offer the same answers they give no matter what the economy is like. Economy is down? Tax cuts! Economy’s doing great? Tax cuts! Depression? Tax cuts! Housing bubble? Tax cuts! 1980? Tax cuts! 1990? Tax cuts! 2000? Tax cuts! Oh look, it’s 2009 and regardless of whether the top marginal rate is 35%, 28%, or 90%, the answer is still: tax cuts!
News flash: when your proposed solution is always the same regardless of the circumstances, decade after decade, sooner or later people figure out that you don’t really have any ideas, and stop paying attention to what you have to say.
“News flash: when your proposed solution is always the same regardless of the circumstances, decade after decade, sooner or later people figure out that you don’t really have any ideas, and stop paying attention to what you have to say.”
I agree, when the answer is always “give the government more money and they will take care of it”, then eventually people quit listening. I can certainly dismiss your position as easily as you dismiss mine if we want to use the demagogue tactics of our politicians. Neither is correct.
These are the symptoms of a larger discussion on the role of government. I have a different and more narrow view of that role than you. The new ideas are always in the details, which the headlines don’t get to on either side, as a rule.
But Marty: Are you really suggesting that Bill Clinton wasn’t business friendly? That he didn’t enact many biz tax cuts? That he didn’t rewrite the rules on financial regulations (with many terrible consequences) because that’s what Wall Street wanted? Are you suggesting Clinton didn’t sign welfare reform into law?
The difference is, the modern Democratic Party is NOT only about government solutions. Quite the opposite: the party is very interested in free market solutions first and foremost. When those fail, then it’s time for the government to step in – as with climate change and health insurance (where the private sector’s incentives run contrary to public good).
But the GOP has indeed recommended, and when in power, enacted a series of tax cuts and argued under the rationales outlined by Catsy. That’s not opinion, that’s fact.
When Bush came into office, he argued that a surplus meant you had to cut taxes. When the surplus turned to a recession, he argued that a recession meant you had to cut taxes at first. When that recession dragged on, he argued that you had to cut taxes on a prolonged recession. When the situation leveled, he suggested it was a perfect time for a tax cut. Then when the crisis hit, the GOP argued that…you had to cut taxes as a stimulus.
Those, again, are facts.
Marty: As several others have pointed out, the Republican “stimulus plans” were a joke. They were entirely tax cuts, like “cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%” and similar items. Of course, tax cuts are among the least effective kind of stimulus, as was discussed many many many times during the stimulus debate. On this very blog, even. Food stamps, extended unemployment insurance, aid to states to prevent budget collapses, and infrastructure spending all have much more bang for the buck. (here for one example of the chart.) The only part with a major benefit would have been a payroll tax holiday, and an across the board tax cut might have broken even. Most of their proposals, including the one you linked to, didn’t have an actual payroll tax holiday, nor did they have much across the board tax cuts, they wasted space and money with corporate tax cuts, depreciation, etc.
And yet, the bill that was passed STILL had a huge chunk of tax cuts in it. Almost a third. And…0 House Republicans voted for it. And many of the beneficial things that were in the bill, like state aid, were cut or shrunk to negotiate with the “moderates” and Republicans. Which still got…0 votes in the House, and 3 in the Senate (one of those is now a Democrat, nominally).
So, of course, obviously, this is the fault of Obama and the Democrats. Or not.
Marty, I appreciate that you’re trying to be fair-minded here, and on general principles I would agree that oversimplifications of your opponents positions aren’t helpful. But you’re indulging in the same kind of false balance that infects so much of our political punditry.
That wasn’t an oversimplification of the so-called alternative stimulus bill the Republicans put forth. That’s really all there was to it. A freeze on capital gains. Tax cuts targeted at business owners. Locking in the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Across-the-board tax cuts.
That sort of thing is all. There. Was. It’s not an oversimplification to note that the GOP counter-proposal was nothing but a laundry list of the things they always demand no matter what the circumstances are. That’s just the reality of it. I can understand that you would have a different view if your primary news sources are propaganda peddlers like Fox or Rush, but that ignorance is not my responsibility and I refuse to play along with it for the sake of argument.
I’m sure you thought it was somehow cute or clever to try to balance “your answer is always tax cuts” with “your answer is always to give the government more money and they will take care of it”, but when it comes to the actual policies behind each of these summaries of the other’s position, in the last few years Americans have stopped listening to one and affirmatively embraced the other. I’ll leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
“When Bush came into office, he argued that a surplus meant you had to cut taxes. When the surplus turned to a recession, he argued that a recession meant you had to cut taxes at first. When that recession dragged on, he argued that you had to cut taxes on a prolonged recession. When the situation leveled, he suggested it was a perfect time for a tax cut. Then when the crisis hit, the GOP argued that…you had to cut taxes as a stimulus.”
That is true but ininformative on the subject.
Tax cuts really are good at certain points in the economic cycle right? Your problem with Bush is that you don’t like the fact that he proposed tax cuts in all circumstances–even inappropriate ones. But there are appropriate cases in the business cycle.
So ignore the question of when Republicans support tax cuts, and instead focus on when tax cuts are actually good. You’re Keynesian, right? That is why we are talking about stimulus in the first place right? You want to pick good policies for the situation, right?
That’s right seb.
But this was not the time for tax cuts ala the GOP proposal.
“They were entirely tax cuts, like “cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%” and similar items. Of course, tax cuts are among the least effective kind of stimulus, as was discussed many many many times during the stimulus debate. On this very blog, even.”
I am not surorised that that was the conclusion on this blog. It certainly doesn’t make it a fact.
“And yet, the bill that was passed STILL had a huge chunk of tax cuts in it. Almost a third”
And yet only half of the original 300B in tax cuts in the original 1 trillion dollar bill, because to get it down to an acceptable number to Democrats and closer to the Republican view the tax cuts, which are the FASTEST stimulus were drastically cut.
The republicans believe in spending on critical programs also. So, NO spending was approved for social programs under Bush?
That is just not true either.
According to your understanding of the business cycle and interaction with stimulus, Eric, which times are the right times for tax cuts or rebates?
Marty, did you read the link I posted? It wasn’t just the conclusion of this blog, it has been the conclusion of many studies. And tax cuts aren’t the fastest stimulus, and they’re among the least effective. What good is a tax cut to people who have lost their jobs?
“I am not surorised that that was the conclusion on this blog. It certainly doesn’t make it a fact.”
Actually there was a pretty significant amount of debate on the topic, and a pretty generous amount of evidence was presented for both sides of the argument.
This isn’t a knee-jerk liberal site, and it’s kind of annoying to have assumptions made about what “conclusions” were made on “this blog” asserted in the middle of a debate.
There are damned few “conclusions” drawn here because people hold a pretty wide range of opinion.
And for the record, your opinion doesn’t establish facts either.
Nate makes reference to a discussion that predates your participation here. If you’d like to contribute to it, have at it. If you’d like to dismiss it, expect to have your point of view treated the same way.
Thanks –
“Marty, did you read the link I posted?”
If he did, he gives no evidence of having done so.
According to your understanding of the business cycle and interaction with stimulus, Eric, which times are the right times for tax cuts or rebates?
That’s a serious question seb. Generally speaking (though the particular circumstances matter), some dips and recessions can be treated with tax cuts – although it depends on how you target them. Generally, if you want to stimulate demand and consumption, you’re better off targeting the bottom side of the economic scale for a few reasons: they will spend the money right away (not save or invest), they will spend it domestically (not on attractive overseas investments), the money will flow toward the builders of the better mouse traps – not luxury items that create fewer dispersed positive effects.
Surpluses could merit a tax cut if the economy is slowing down, but not if it’s chugging along. Especially when there is a lot of debt to pay off in the meantime.
And when things are level, you’re better off leaving well enough alone. Of course, when fighting two wars, and when there is enormous legacy debt, cutting taxes is a bad idea due to the deficit exploding potential. No other nation in history has cut taxes while fighting a war. We did it multiple times while fighting two.
Sebastian: Very little would justify anything other than perhaps temporary tax cuts for small recessions (not targeted at the rich, either) until such time as the deficit is gone and at least some of our debt paid off. Because before then, any tax cuts now are just tax increases, with interest, in the future. And there is a good bit of stuff (infrastructure rehab, health care, for example) that should come on the spending side before more tax cuts.
Now, streamlining the tax code, that could be very useful. Most of the government paperwork most people have to do is for taxes, and the current mess of credits, deductions, etc, makes it more about hunting loopholes than anything else. A good place to start would be to look at statistics, find what the ACTUAL rate paid by the median family is, and then get rid of the current mess and implement a tax around that rate, with no deductions etc. You could make exceptions, but that starts back down to the place we are now, which would be better delayed. And then take that base rate, and curve it so it’s progressive, probably something resembling a geometric or exponential curve, rather than linear, but that’d be a matter of details.
“Marty, did you read the link I posted? It wasn’t just the conclusion of this blog, it has been the conclusion of many studies. And tax cuts aren’t the fastest stimulus, and they’re among the least effective. What good is a tax cut to people who have lost their jobs?’
I did read the link, amid several other things I was doing. Sorry I didn’t respond directly to the conclusions of that source. Some of which I agree with whole heartedly.
I don’t, and haven’t, dismissed anyone’s point. I wasn’t here for the discussion so recreating it seems not quite right, and simply agreeing with the conclusion doesn’t either.
And tax cuts aren’t the fastest stimulus, and they’re among the least effective”
I think the efficacy and time nature are discussed well here
“The mix between spending increases and tax cuts is roughly right,” Zandi says. “Spending packs a bigger economic punch, but tax cuts are helpful because even though they’re not as economically efficacious, they do work more quickly.”
The common Kensyian economic wisdom is that middle to lower class tax cuts/refunds are somewhat less effective per dollar than certain other forms of recession fighting, but still much more effective than most government spending because it can happen immediately–and speed is incredibly important. That point remain true especially in larger economic downturns.
“Now, streamlining the tax code, that could be very useful. Most of the government paperwork most people have to do is for taxes, and the current mess of credits, deductions, etc, makes it more about hunting loopholes than anything else. A good place to start would be to look at statistics, find what the ACTUAL rate paid by the median family is, and then get rid of the current mess and implement a tax around that rate, with no deductions etc. You could make exceptions, but that starts back down to the place we are now, which would be better delayed”
I’ve written it many times, but I figure I’ll throw it in here just because it has been a while. My ideal tax code would look something like: the bottom 1/3 exempted from taxes with an EITC-like structure easing into what I would call the basic rate. The basic rate would be set by the money the government needed to bring in from 2 years before (I originally thought 1 year but the need to know your rate is important). The basic rate would be shared by at least 50% of the population. It would be then scaled up progressively at whichever slope you like but to a maximum of about 10-15 percentage points more than the basic rate. There would be no deductions or other tax incentives. If we want to subsidize something, we do it through the much more transparent method of actually paying out money directly. This kills off much of the enormous tax avoidance dead-weight loss. This method preserves an exemption from crippling taxes for the poor, no incentive to stay poor, a common understanding that increased spending will hit your pocketbook, and a degree of progressivity that isn’t just class warfare or attempts to avoid paying for new proposals. It reconnects the link between spending and taxing. Overall it would be a pretty darn good policy.
The common Kensyian economic wisdom is that middle to lower class tax cuts/refunds are somewhat less effective per dollar than certain other forms of recession fighting, but still much more effective than most government spending because it can happen immediately–and speed is incredibly important.
So what is the most effective?
By the way, Keynsian or not, recent studies indicate that food stamp and unemployment insurance increases are the most effective in terms of speed and dollars converted to consumption.
but tax cuts are helpful because even though they’re not as economically efficacious, they do work more quickly
I don’t think anyone’s ever managed to show any evidence that tax cuts work at all, let alone “more quickly”. What right-wing pundits who are paid to promote the “tax cuts are stimulus!” theory of economics say is no more relevant than are the opinions of right-wing pundits paid by the oil industry to fulminate against global warming.
If you actually want a serious and knowledgeable economist’s view on tax cuts in a stimulus package, you only need to read this: but if you just want punditry that will back up your It Stands To Reason, you’ll ignore it.
You have not yet shown your working for your assertion that the US was hopelessly poor and undeveloped from WWII to 1986 due to the high tax rates. Given that you apparently still assert that the US just can’t cope with tax rates as high as 70% or the economy will nose-dive, I really have to ask you: show me what historical sources you’re basing your idea that the US economy was in the tank, bottomed out, completely crappy, until Reagan cut taxes to 28% in 1986…?
How do tax cuts help the hundreds of thousands of people per month who are getting laid off?
What problem are you trying to solve?
“By the way, Keynsian or not, recent studies indicate that food stamp and unemployment insurance increases are the most effective in terms of speed and dollars converted to consumption.”
Yup, but I presume we are talking about the other things (like government projects). They are very effective in speed and consumption, but self-limiting in scope. There is only so many food stamps you can give out. And you can only make unemployment benefits so large before the incentive to quit your job kicks in (for arguments sake that might be 110% of salary or whatever, but it isn’t amenable to just dumping down any money beyond that point).
“They are very effective in speed and consumption, but self-limiting in scope.”
Seb, the same limits apply to tax cuts.