Point of diminishing returns ...
The perfect war would not cost anything.
Except the fact that 80% of the federal budget still goes largely to services, much of it social.
So even if you got rid of the entire defense of the United States, we wouldn't be doing much better.
The War in Iraq is not the perfect war. Over 400 Billion has been spent so far.
Which was virtually the same, immediate cost to the US economy when the towers were flattened.
That's not counting the trillions of dollars in loss in the after-effects.
People forget that.
No, the war in Iraq was not a direct result of the towers going down.
And I'm the first to admit that it's a huge deflection of the real issues.
But at the same time, it does put things into monetary context.
The cost of the US defense is not great compared to the other, financial costs we've had to deal with.
Especially not when you realize
how small it is compared to our GDP!
That's a huge difference between us and other nations -- how little our federal-based spending is to our economy, including even that subset of it when it comes to the military.
The source of funds is borrowing from foreign countries. I just love the war hawks who do not want to pay for the war.
Our debt has far more to do with W. not vetoing social services.
The Republican Congress wouldn't give W. the line-item veto like they did Clinton.
And that's part of the problem.
The other part is that during a war, every Senator and Representative wants "their cut of pork" in exchange for supporting the war.
That's the "real cost" that doesn't go mentioned, and it's number is over 1 trillion.
It's the same thing LBJ ran into with "Guns'n Butter," and he utterly cancelled "The Great Society" as a result.
This is the first war in history that has not been paid for by a tax increase,
Not true! Sounds like someone has been watching too much TV.
Understand that JFK
cut taxes and it
increased federal revenue.
Reagan did the same, and now W. has done the same.
It was
not defense spending that got Reagan, but the fact that for every $1 in additional defense spending under Reagan, he signed off on $3 on "new pork" to get support.
W. is running into the same thing, just like LBJ with Vietnam before him.
The current gain in corporate profits, with corporations paying far more tax, is a "double positive result," in lowering income taxes.
Because not only do people who earn income pay less tax, but they spend more, multiplying more "effective" money in the economy (
money is NOT fixed), which means more revenue for corporations, who then pay the taxes.
Win-win -- JFK showed it, Reagan showed it, W. showed it.
God forbid a tax increase for what you want. If you do not want to pay for something you really do not want it.
Alexander Hamilton proved the "point of diminishing returns" over 200 years ago.
There is a point in total taxation that the federal government will collect less.
Higher percentages is
never the answer, and it reaches a point that it causes strain and removal of cash flow.
Furthermore, he believed the US should always maintain between 2 and 4x its federal revenue in debt as an "ideal."
Unfortunately, we've been way past that since the late '80s, and it's been a poor balance.
At no time in US history did social services boom more than they did under Reagan and the Democrat Congress.
But just as W. has now proven, even a Republican Congress can be just as guilty, spending on pork to get other things ******.
No, this is about selfish Senators and Representatives thinking of their Constituents more than the good of the nation.
And now that the Democrats are in again, what changes?
Absolutely nothing!
Pork, pork, pork.
is very costly but no revenue to pay for it.
Macroeconomics 101: If you raise taxes, you do
not necessarily increase income collected!
Sure, you'll get an immediate boost because people have money, and there is already more money in private sector circulation.
And after a year or two of that, it drops -- because you've taken more out of private sector circulation.
The amount of money is
not fixed, and when people have it, save and spend it, we
get more as a result of the multiplier.
Bush’s policy is borrow and spent; let future generation pay for it.
No, that's the general attitude of the American Congress, and has been for far too long!
I mean, does anyone remember the "Balanced Budget Amendment"?!
People blame "Bush" or the "Right Wingers" only for spending money, yet they were the ones who proposed the Balanced Budget Amendment, and were chastized for it!
So which way is it?
The tax cuts are responsible a large part of the colossal run up in the national debt under Bush.
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Oh that is utter bull! No offense but you don't know the first thing about macroeconomics.
The reason why the deficit was reduced at various times has
nothing to do with the federal budget. It has to do with how much people are making, how much they are paying in taxes as a result of working, and how much they are
not taking advantage of social services as a result. In a good economy, people pay a lot of tax, and don't use a lot of social services -- win-win.
The deficit
capsized when people started losing their jobs and no longer had income. It's the opposite,
double-whammy of A) people no longer pay as much income tax and B) you now have more expenses in social services because people aren't working.
W. had to massively increase federal funding of various programs, including several, phased recession and then, post-9/11, compensation for those out-of-work, among other things. The debt piled up
because of that! Because the recession hit the first quarter W. was in office, with Clinton's 2000 year having 3 out of 4 quarters of massive, negative growth.
The tax cuts didn't come about until
years later, after the first half of W.'s first term was over. It's the same lie about "the tax cuts caused the recession" -- no, W. inherited the recession -- with the massive plunge in the surplus coming in the last 6 quarters of Clinton's administration, virtually eradicating it. The tax cuts wouldn't come for 3 years later.
Add in the corporate scandals, etc... that also rocked the GAAP world, and we finally realized that all those years were all about
false and phony wealthy that didn't exist! And that hurt even more!
No, it was the tax cuts that actually helped put the economy right. It helped reduce the federal spending for social services. And that was good. What was bad was that W. got us involved in this war, and that just causes the Congressmen and women to come around and say, "oh, you want support for that little war -- you're going to have to pay me for it!" Pork, pork, pork!
I mean, the stock market literally lifted up after the tax cuts went into effect, because it meant consumers had more cash. Not the "rebate" (that was stupid), but the actual reduction in percentages. That literally changed all the indicators overnight.
The tax increase is actually not extending the tax cuts for the very wealth.
The wealthy do NOT pay income tax!
The high income earners are the ones you are complaining about.
And in that case, we are in a progressive tax system, and that means when you give a $10,000 tax cut for someone middle class, you
at least give a $10,000 tax cut for anyone above them, including those who earn 6 or even 7 figures a year!
The Republicans' characterization of letting some of the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010 as the Democrats enacting "the biggest tax increase in American history" is, of course, a lie, both on the semantic point of what constitutes a hike and on the more concrete point that the Republicans drafted and signed those expirations into law in the first place.
Oh God, here we go, blame everything on the Republicans.
They (Democrats and Republicans) are both slime, they both treat us as stupid, and you're willlingness to show both your rhetoric-based, mathematical incompetency combined with ignorance of basic macroeconomies and progressive tax fundamentals is part of the problem.
When I see you spew the same, media-based crap that is in the fantasy work of a math that doesn't exist, I just want to shoot myself.
"Tax cuts for the rich" -- it's a progress income tax system, that is the
mathematical reality, they get at least as much too!
I do not like paying taxes but I **** increasing the national debt ever more. I hope fiscal sanity returns to Washington.
Yes, and that will begin when people realize that raising taxes doesn't necessarily increase federal revenue.
Only
decreasing spending always solves the deficit issue.
Because the federal government has
no control over how much tax will be collected, as it's more of a factor of earnings and money flow that they can't control than tax rate.
But the federal government
can control how much it spends, and that's the reality.
Just like any consumer -- they can't guarantee they will have an income, but they can limit what they spend when they don't have much of an income.
It's the big, massive lesson we American Libertarians try to teach both the "Liberal Left" and "Radical Right" who seem to want to put things in terms of "Taxes," instead of "Spending" -- and I don't mean the defense budget either (which is
not the biggest part of the big pie).
Pork, pork, pork, pork ... it never stops.
