Tag: tax reform

Ryan’s Motivations (or: Pie-O-My)

jeffmiller:

lemkin:

Kevin Drum wonders what drives Ryan to produce such a uniquely partisan budget document…

There is this strange notion that Ryan should not have proposed the plan he actually wanted, but that he was supposed to compromise before the Democrats even come to the table.  This is insane.  You don’t go to the car dealer and figure, “Well, I’d like to pay $22,000 for the Prius, but he’d probably like me to pay more, so I’ll start at $23,000.”  Ryan proposed the plan he wanted; the Democrats are now free to counter with any plan of their choosing, and maybe the sides will meet somewhere in the middle.

So what’s the problem here?  The problem is that Democrats don’t want to address the debt problem because it means they will either have to sacrifice programs they like or greatly increase taxes on the middle class.  There’s nothing fun about that choice, but Paul Ryan didn’t put us into the position where that choice has to be made.

Perhaps I wasn’t sufficiently clear: of course Ryan should swing for the fences. My frustration lies with the traditional Democratic impulse to start from the position of compromise in response to said fence-swinging proposal. They’ve know he was developing this plan, and the outlines of it, for weeks. In response, they’ve been working on marking up the deficit commission’s plan. My contention is that this is bad strategy unless you want a rightward shift in funding priorities.

But, I don’t consider returning to Clintonian tax rates “greatly increasing” taxes on anybody. Let the Bush tax cuts expire. Period. In a stroke, you’ve corrected at least half of the deficit issue. You can legitimately plan to make reasonable cuts and adjustments and but also just grow your way out of the rest of it, as the economy should be in much better shape by the time of that expiry.

Your Federal Tax Receipt

This should be an automatic part of every single tax return. In fact, tax returns should be so simple that they can be entirely collected by employers with no further action on the part of the vast majority of taxpayers and then said receipt arrives in the form of a post card with your information, where the money is going, and basic information on how to proceed if you think the card’s data is wrong.

Naturally, it is in Congress’ interest to keep tax returns complex (the better to use internecine complexities such that they can make what appear to be juicy carve-outs for all parties) and in the GOP’s interest to maximize both the overall sense of taxpayer outrage at the difficulty and ridiculousness of it all, all the better to play their “ya done got robbed of your money, and for what?” broken record.

Your Federal Tax Receipt

[Tea Party activists and junior lawmakers] literally think you can just balance it, you know, [by cutting] waste, fraud and abuse, foreign aid, and NPR. And it doesn’t work like that.

Paul Ryan, letting a little truth slip out. Wonder how those people got crazy ideas like that into their heads?
Almost equally unbelievable is that Ryan also said: “Do I believe you can get slightly higher revenues without harming jobs, and get better economic growth? Yes, I do believe that.” Not the R-word! And from a Republican. Who knew?
Source: Washington Post

EXTRA: USA NOT BROKE, JUST RESTING

Bloomberg delivers some shocking, shocking stuff:

“The U.S. government is not broke,” said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy for Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York. “There’s no evidence that the market is treating the U.S. government like it’s broke.”

The U.S. today is able to borrow at historically low interest rates, paying 0.68 percent on a two-year note that it had to offer at 5.1 percent before the financial crisis began in 2007. Financial products that pay off if Uncle Sam defaults aren’t attracting unusual investor demand. And tax revenue as a percentage of the economy is at a 60-year low, meaning if the government needs to raise cash and can summon the political will, it could do so.

Print out in the largest type possible and stick to the teleprompter of every Serious Person currently inhabiting the media. Likewise, Obama and his proxies need to be talking about this. A lot. So often that we can’t stand it anymore, and then a few million more times on top of that. Then you can start a serious discussion about revenue, which is the only truly serious way out of this mess. Sorry, but it is.

EXTRA: USA NOT BROKE, JUST RESTING

Is It Time to Rein In the Super Bowl?

Lots of good stuff in this article:

The last great building binge in the NFL was from 1995 through 2003, when 21 stadiums were built or refurbished in order to create more luxury boxes, at cost of $6.4 billion. Know how much of that the public paid for? $4.4 billion.

The richest people in the richest, most popular sport in America. And you and I foot the bill for almost all of it in the name of “economic impact” that those eight home games a year supposedly have on a stadium neighborhood that’s inevitably parking lots as far as the eye can see. Hell, we’re even on the hook for the half-million dollar flyover. Absolute lunacy. Sally, the Superbowl, and the mega-arenas built to host it, can be any scale the NFL (and the owners running it) want it to be. Just so long as they are willing to pay for it.

But let’s not leave this quote on the floor:

the state of Texas [spent] $31 million to host the Super Bowl, even as deficits force public school cuts

Says it all.

(reblogged from wanderingreveries)

Is It Time to Rein In the Super Bowl?

The Republican Party is the party of K-N-O-W. We know how to lower the cost of health care. We know how to take care of the uninsurable. We know how to put patients in charge of their health care and have a market-based, patient centered health care system that’s not going to kill jobs like ObamaCare is going to do. And we know how to stimulate the economy. We know how to create jobs in the private sector. We know how to prevent this huge government takeover of health care as well as all of society.

But we are the party of N-O against socialism and that’s what Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama have been proposing is a greater take over of everything in human endeavor in America.

Paul Broun (R, GA) (of “spew venom” fame), has a host of apparently secret plans. Which is fine. But once, just once, the host needs to say: “okay, that’s great. We’ve got plenty of time here, so let’s start with item one. With program specifics, budget figures, and policy detail, let me hear how you plan to reduce the costs of health care? And I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to be more specific than simply parroting "market solutions” and other tropes; please, let’s discuss this like adults.“ And then spend an hour or four until he stops digging. Then: item two, economic stimulation. Pretty sure that one will be tax cuts for the rich. Where’s the money coming from. Specific program cuts, specific dollar figures, specific deficit projections.
Honestly, how many times do you get to speak the ”lie of the year“ without any friction whatsoever? A million times? A billion? MSM, I’m asking: when do we not just "leave it there”?
Source: thinkprogress.org

Random Thought #371

politicalprof:

It should be remembered that no one—and I mean no one, of any party—who advocates more tax cuts for Americans, whether businesses or individuals, is serious about solving the American national deficit. The only reasonable response to anyone who follows a statement about the need to reduce or cure the United States’ national debt with a statement about the importance of more tax cuts is to laugh at them until snot runs out of your nose.

That this isn’t already the widespread response and being ceaseless spread and solidified by Democratic operatives as politicians of all stripes take to the hustings come 2012 is precisely why the Democrats fail. Period.

Until they accomplish that one thing: lancing the festering boil that begins with the merely foolish Laffer Curve and ends now with the grade-A, unadulterated horseshit in which tax cuts never even need to be budgeted for, and then successfully turn all of that into a massive and truly, viscerally horrifying joke that all representatives of the Tea Klan and their GOP enablers must run, run from at each and every stop (see: “maximum acceleration on BullshitOne, Charlie, they’ve got the pitchforks out here too!”), well, until that day: we’ll get precisely nowhere in this country.

Beyond Medicare, the major drivers of the deficits are not talked about so much by the fat cats and demagogues because they were either responsible for them, or are reaping gargantuan benefits from them, or both. The country is drowning in a sea of debt because of the obscene Bush tax cuts for the rich, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have never been paid for and the Great Recession.

Bob Herbert, saying what so many others seemingly find so very hard to face or admit. This is who we are, and it’s critical that we face it.
Yapping about Social Security and the necessity of cuts to same is just that: yapping. The money is in Medicare (as in: controlling the costs of) and the Bush tax cuts (as in: all of them, even those marginally aimed at the middle class). Solve those two and get employment rolling and everything else that today seems utterly intractable will simply melt away. Even better: the Bush tax cuts will solve themselves if we can just muster the will to let them.

Ezra Klein points out what should be obvious, that all the folks screaming about deficit implications and the Affordable Care Act are, in fact, screaming about positive deficit implications (see: PPACA and red column) and, even if we simply take it on costs alone (as separate from any deficit impact), the ACA amounts to a rounding error when compared to the GOP’s tax proposals.

But it is best not speak of any of this. Ever.

Put it this way: suppose that from here on out we average 4.5 percent growth, which is way above any forecast I’ve seen. Even at that rate, unemployment would be close to 8 percent at the end of 2012, and wouldn’t get below 6 percent until midway through Sarah Palin’s first term.

Paul Krugman brings the optimism while not-so-gently chiding his fellow media travelers’ insistence that all focus be upon what are essentially made up problems of deficit and government spending. Employment is the problem. Fix that and you can work on wage growth and lessening income inequality across the spectrum, lard on some tax reform, and all these so-called existential spending issues and all the hooha over the “right” size of government will evaporate.
Even less clear is why the media forever focuses on the self-funded, no deficit impact at all for at least 40 years Social Security program when they do a story on the horrors of deficits. It’s a story for another post, but maybe (just maybe!) it’s because they don’t plan on needing it. Medicare, on the other hand, they know they need, know is a deficit ballooner, but just don’t care so long as they get theirs. Very Patriotic.