IllegalContact

point of contention....Bush did not lower them in 1997, the republican held house and senate forced it down the throat of an embattled clinton. it is the 1997 tax cut that triggered the stock market madness and the budget surplus that clinton claims credit for......

libbies love to spin garbage

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—Hank Bullough, who installed one of the first 3–4 defenses with the New England Patriots.

PatriotsReign

I stand corrected....and it was actually in the link I provided.

PatsFanInEaglesLand

This might be the best ******* post I've read here.....EVER!

The problem is that neither of the political parties would ever go for anything but the repulsive income tax we have now. Why? What would they have to argue about if it wasn't taxes.

Nothing wrong with a national sales tax that includes maybe 1% on groceries and clothing and goes up on other things from there. It something clean and easy, so it'll never happen as long as we have the lesser of 2 evils mentality.

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shmessy

George W. Bush didn't become President until January 2001.

What alternate universe are you living in?

And it was not an income tax rate cut in 1997. The biggies were in 2001 and 2003. We saw the results of that.

And tax INCREASES of the 1990's actually started under George H.W. Bush (the Good One), thus setting the table for positive economic performance and decrease of the government debt in that great decade.

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"They (Patriots) may be the greatest team ever" - Chris Mortenson, January 18, 2005 on espn.com

IllegalContact

you don't know what you are talking about....and it is obvious there is no point in explaining it to you

__________________
“ I think good coaches will coach with the personnel they have, and if you only have one (good) linebacker, you’re not going to play a 3–4. ”
—Hank Bullough, who installed one of the first 3–4 defenses with the New England Patriots.

wistahpatsfan

Thanks, man.

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PatsFanInVa

Yeah Shmessy, what do you even do for a living?

Oh that's right

Look, IC, everybody's hip to the presto-chango pubbie talking points: everything good in the Clinton administration is because of pubbies in congress, everything bad is because of a dem in the white house.

It's really tiresome.

You want to grow jobs and the economy? Elect a Democratic president. It's pretty much the verdict of the last few decades.

PFnV

shmessy

Everything written in that post is fact.

Guess what, Illegal Contact, George W. Bush was NOT President in 1997. No amount of obfuscation on your or PR's part will turn that into fact.

Further, Ronald Reagan RAISED taxes. George H.W. Bush RAISED taxes. Bill Clinton RAISED taxes. W. Bush CUT taxes. What were the results??????

Taxes alone mean nothing, however. The biggest drunken spender for no good reason at all was George W. Bush. I'm not a big fan of raising taxes. I am a big fan of cutting spending. However, we are going to have to do BOTH in this situation if we are going to right the ship.

Just because you want to state that the Earth is flat does not make it so. Evidently you learned nothing from the recent election. Facts won, bloviation lost.

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PatsFanInVa

I've been saying for years now -- yes, this recession was that deep -- that for most purposes, it's nuts to talk about most spending cuts.

Everybody is basically looking for something for nothing. The only time you get that is if you really have unnecessary expenses.

When I say unnecessary, I mean expenses from the government that do not have some stimulative effect.

But they do exist. The trouble is, they're the opposite of the expenditures we say are big fat wastes if you ignore the details of what the programs actually get done. Defense is probably the biggest make-work program we have. It's the biggest budget item we have, and our defense spending is greater than the next 13 countries at the top of the list -- mainly, our allies. But, right now, the stimulative effect of over-the-top defense spending is front and center. In a better economy I could wave the hippie-dippie flag way more happily, and beat the drum for defense cuts. Hell, even now I can be convinced -- but I'd want some kind of economic conversion to go along with that. Right now, any time jobs are on the line, I'm a tough sell.

On the social side, we've been talking about "trimming fat" and trotting out stereotypes about welfare queens for 30 years. But the "fat" in social safety net spending has been repeatedly trimmed.

However, there is a ton of corporate fat built into government spending as well. That's the low-hanging fruit. Maybe that's an area for bipartisan agreement -- if not in Congress, at least on Pats Fans.

For example, Medicare Advantage was drafted to make it illegal for Medicare to negotiate down prices from the pharmaceuticals. Well, the VA can negotiate prices -- why can't Medicare?

We probably all know this answer: because palms were greased. Let's not even assign blame (it would go to the Bushies for me, and the Cons here would find some way it should all go to the Dems, who were in the minority in both houses and did not have the white house. Whatever.) Let's just think about where we are now: if there's a feature to Medicare advantage that does not help patients (i.e., citizens,) but juices corporate profits, why the hell shouldn't that go the way of the dodo? The difference between negotiating and not negotiating is evidently worth some $150 billion. Pretty big chunk. A lot more than bloody big bird.

This is the sort of thing people mean when they say "scalpel not sledgehammer." To me, the kinds of cuts we need throughout gubmit health legislation are cuts to corporate largesse, not cuts to benefits. I'm a big fan of bending the cost curve rather than denying care.

I'm a fiscal conservative at heart, in the purest sense. I believe in the free market, with a recognition that we need a first-world social safety net. I'm not a fan of austerity measures in down markets -- look what they've done for Europe. Like Shmessy (and contrary to characterizations I've seen here from the ideologues,) I don't think taxes are a great big fun time. I don't like mine, and I don't like when they go up in general. I do think -- check that, I know -- that taxes are how governments get revenue. I agree with our founding fathers that taxation and borrowing have to be available as tools of state. I disagree with Grover Norquist. I count myself as having the better part of that bargain.

And above all, in the context of this discussion, I recognize that there is a level of taxation far in excess of zero that is the "right" amount. This mindless purism that says "all taxes are bad" doesn't cut it when it comes time to balance the books. We did have a balanced budged for a few years, with higher tax rates. You have to pay the bills.

We have a $16 trillion debt. This is not new spending. This is old spending. We have to pay it down, and the only way a government can pay for anything is through taxes. The good news is we don't have to pay it all at once, and that revenue grows with a growing economy.

Now we see the local Cons embracing the local Peak Oil Theorists to yield the much-beloved zero sum game where all growth is over forever. Yeahhhh, think that one through. It's slower growth than in the 1950s or 60s... so cope. You still double your GDP in 25 years with 3% average growth. Get over the "measuring from the a severe recession" mindset. We're going to grow again.

This does two things for us: a growing economy, as all sides agree, means the same cut of the pie equals more revenue. It also reduces the debt to GDP ratio -- 16 trillion bucks is way worse when it's over 100% of GDP than when it's about half.

So my point here is that yes I'm a fiscal conservative. We've got to hold spending in the long term, while growing the economy. No argument. But the notion that we've got to embrace this plan in a procyclical way is insane. It's got to be contracyclical or it's dead in the water -- you just end up tanking growth.

But in focusing on debt right now we're insisting on such a procyclical approach. Let's stop borrowing when the cost of borrowing is cheapest. Let's withdraw all stimulus from the economy when demand is still fragile and unemployment is still high. Let's do the opposite of what every previous leadership cadre has done, and decrease public sector employment when private sector employment is weak.

It's like a textbook on how not to recover.

So, given that we've chosen to embrace a procyclical argument regarding debt -- "Pay it all down now at the worst possible time!" -- I find myself looking for the least stimulative spending, the spending that serves only to juice corporate profits. I find myself rooting for a level of revenues commensurate with our fiscal goals -- and that means higher taxes somewhere.

It's not like you can sit down and make a deal with yourself, so you can't very well say "You know, just can this bullstuff until the time is right." Plus, people get the bright idea that yay, happy days are here again, we can just ignore the problem.

So maybe, just maybe, this fustercluck that frustrates the hell of us is actually the way our process is intended to run. Maybe we have to make these mistakes, like procyclical austerity, so that the "happy days are here again" mindset doesn't derail the purpose.

However, if we go after debt now, we should go after the least stimulative spending, while returning taxes at least something like historical norms, starting where we should start, at the top where the impact decreases demand the least... and incidentally, where people can actually afford to pay.

For God's sake, particularly as employment picks up generally, let's get our defense spending under control.

And when you talk about entitlements, let's cut out gifts to the wealthy before going after heart of the program (guaranteed services or in social security's case, guaranteed income). Those are middle-class programs we've all paid into.

You want to get anywhere cutting poverty relief? No matter how much you complain about some imagined welfare tycoon, the outlays are just not there to do much to affect the deficit.

PFnV

alvinnf

While I enjoyed reading the above post. We aren't backed into a corner by a long shot. So before we raise taxes on anyone we need to discover places to save or cut spending. Your points are very good and well articulated. The fiscal cliff will come and go. What is the path we are going to be on going forward. Frugality or credit card, I for one am in no rush to jump to solutions. I think the one thing we have all gotten out of this is, that spending is out of control and our tax code needs fixing. Or updating if you will. We should start there and see where we end up.