Obama should give back his tax refundFollow

Oh, sure. I'm assuming your little puppet-masters have been feeding you that excuse for years as they starved the beast to bring economic collapse. "It'll all be the Democrats' fault, honest!"

Yupyup, eat it up!

I read exactly what you wrote. My point is that you claim that you are *not* advocating simply increasing spending and increasing taxes, but since the reason we're in this debt crisis is because of increased spending, when you propose raising taxes to any degree to fix the current problem, you are, in fact arguing in support of a policy of increased spending and increased taxes.



Ok. I suspect you're just not getting what I'm saying. If we don't decrease spending to levels equal to or lower than they were 3 years ago, then the next effect is to "increase spending and increase taxes". I don't see how you missed this. I even gave you a specific example and showed how increasing spending by $500B/year then "compromising" by decreasing spending by $250B/year and raising taxes by $250B in order to balance the deficit has the net effect of increasing both spending and taxes by $250B/year.


You can do math, right?

Edited, Apr 21st 2011 4:57pm by gbaji

I'm not personally proposing raising taxes. What I am saying is that the democrats and the republicans want two different things. They can do one of two things:

1. Not compromise and gridlock so nothing passes.
2. Compromise and pass something

You should support raising taxes...if you think about it, what happens when a politician raises taxes? They get voted out in the next election. So if the dems raise taxes, then you get more republicans next time!

Really?




So there is no option other than to do what the Dems want? But you don't support their agenda, you just happen to think there's no other alternative! Has it occurred to you that the reason they spent so much even in the midst of a falling economy was precisely so that people like you would assume there was no option but to raise taxes?



But if the GOP does what you say and compromises by raising taxes, then doesn't that let the Dems off the hook? Now both parties raised taxes in bi-partisan agreement. One might even suspect that's exactly why the Dems are pushing for such a bi-partisan compromise in the first place! I'll repeat my earlier question: Are you aware of the deceptiveness of all of this, or are you just incredibly gullible?

Only due to Bush riding a bubble economy while enacting billions upon billions (hell , well over a trillion) dollars in new spending programs and slashing taxes with absolutely no attempt to lower spending to cover it.

Once the bubble broke and it was apparent that Bush had done nothing to build a real sustainable economy for America, it became all too obvious what a sham his policies were and Republicans crowed that this crisis could only be solved by carving out programs for purely ideological reasons.

Just as they planned.

Yes, I said that. What I meant was that I'm not a politician proposing a bill. Good one though.



Yes, there is another option...the one I said (compromise).

Also, they had to spend so much to fix this craphole economy they inherited. See Jophiel's post above.

You use a lot of words and proper grammar so you come off smart, I see the man behind the curtain now.

Edited, Apr 21st 2011 8:33pm by Ailitardif

The numbers don't support this claim. They do support the claim that even without making any attempt to cut spending to pay for the tax cuts, the resulting debt was not only sustainable but was decreasing. In Short, Bush was right that by cutting tax rates, we'd increase investment in private business, and revenues would come back up as a result of that increase. And I can only imagine that the nearly blind insistence that this isn't true in spite of data to the contrary is purely because the left just can't bring themselves to admit that he was right about anything, let alone something which so completely showed that their own economic ideology is flawed.

But hey. You continue to quote the talking points and I'll continue to provide actual data showing that you're wrong.



Even if we assume that every single dollar of revenue loss since 2008 was a direct result of that bubble collapsing (and if you remember your pretty chart from last week, we both know that's not true), that still only explains $400B/year in deficit. So how do we go from $160B/year deficit to $1.2T/year deficit if it was all the fault of Bush's "bubble" collapsing, when the total loss of revenue was less than half of the difference?

I'll toss the numbers out again:

$160B/year deficit to $1.2T/year deficit = $1040B/year difference, broken down the following ways:

$140B/year is increased military spending
$400B/year is decreased revenue
$500B/year is increased social spending



Um... And in case you're not remembering from last week, the pretty graph which showed the stimulus spending and you thought it was such an important point to show how much of it (about 1/3rd or more for 2009 and 2010) was in the form of "tax cuts". But as I've pointed out before, this was really spending increases labeled as tax cuts (or "tax credits"). So some of that spending was laundered through the tax code and therefore shows up as a loss of revenue instead of an increase in spending.

And when we account for those numbers in 2009/2010, what we see is that revenue didn't drop that much at all. So I'm curious how you assume that it was the bubble that caused all this? Even ignoring the whole tax credit BS in the stimulus bill, the bubble can only be said to be responsible for about 1/3rd of the total deficit. But you're claiming that it's all to blame? Yeah. Right!


The bubble created a temporary loss of revenue and risk to the financial industry. This required government intervention. Unfortunately, the Dems took control of the government right about the same time, so they used that need for intervention to justify massive spending increases having nothing to do with addressing the real economic crisis. As a result, they created a second crisis more harmful than the first. And that's exactly what they intended from the start. There's no other explanation for why you'd be looking at a drop in revenue, and failing financial industry and think that's a great time to increase social spending by several hundred billion dollars a year. It's about pushing the deficit so far that they hope there'll be no choice but to raise taxes. That way they get to keep most of their spending.

Except for that whole section I quoted which listed off what Congress is empowered to do. Even assuming that's not an exclusive list, there's nothing on there which suggests something like "provide poor people with housing and food" is among Congress' duties.

And the 16th amendment only modified an earlier portion of the constitution which limited taxation methodology. It does not eliminate the prohibition against the idea of taking property without compensation. All other uses of tax dollars listed in Section 8 are "common use" of public money. The concept of taking taxes from someone because they can afford to pay more with the specific intention of handing that money to someone else who doesn't have as much is certainly in violation of the principles at work within the constitution.



I'd rather vote for someone who is going to spend (and tax) less of it in the first place.

That has to be the most lame backpedal I've ever seen on this forum. I don't think anyone thought you were proposing legislation to the house floor or anything, but you are clearly "proposing" a solution on this forum. Which, given that we're on this forum, would seem to be relevant enough for you to take responsibility for. Don't you agree?

Or are you arguing that nothing you say really matters because you aren't personally going to be doing anything about it? One might wonder why you bother posting then?



That's not "another option" That's the one you proposed (to the forum!), and which the Dems want. Please tell me you understand that the Democrats want a "compromise" which results in a temporary tax increase and small immediate cuts to pay for the current crisis so that they can push the big spending cuts to another day when there isn't a crisis and the public has become more dependent on new spending and will thus be less inclined to swap those "temporary" tax increases for permanent spending cuts.

You don't honestly believe that'll ever happen if we push it off for another day, do you? I mean, if we can't cut spending right now when we're massively in debt, why do you think we'll be able to do it when we're not? I'll ask again: Do you say this knowing that it wont happen? Or are you really just that gullible?



No they didn't. See my response, and see the numerous posts I've made about this subject on this forum over the last couple weeks. There is virtually zero data to support that we needed any spending other than TARP to fix the economy, strong data showing that the bulk of that needed TARP money has been paid back, and some more data that suggests that the actual effect from that economic crisis was more or less eliminated by 2010. Everything we're suffering right now is a result of the over spending the Democrats did in 2009 and 2010. And almost none of that spending had any effect on fixing the economy. The economic crisis was an excuse for the Dems to push all the social spending programs they'd wanted to enact over the last 40 years but didn't have the numbers to get done.

Seriously, look at the facts. TARP was paid back. Financial industry is healthy. The markets have recovered. Revenues for this year are projected to be back to 2007 levels. Yet we are sitting at 9%+ unemployment and a projected $1.5T deficit (this year). None of that can be traced to the Bush tax rates, or to the mortgage bubble bursting.

There's no magic to this. The numbers just don't add up in a way that supports what you (and the Dems) are saying. Our current economic woes can be traced almost entirely to new spending increases enacted by the Democrats since taking control of the government in 2009. I mean, we're probably still a hundred billion or so short on revenue based on what the trend should have been, but that's just not even close to explaining the deficit gap.



I come off smart because what I'm saying is intelligent, logical, and based on facts, not rhetoric and scare tactics. There is no man behind the curtain here. I write what I believe and I base what I believe on the data that is available. And in this case, the data very clearly shows that the current deficit crisis we're in is the direct result of massive overspending by the Democrats. It's just amazing to me that I can post the actual numbers, which show this incontrovertibly, and some people are so blinded by their ideology that they still refuse to see it.

Its only blind if other people do it.

Who just said tax cuts? Are you ignoring Bush's unfunded wars and massive unfunded entitlement spending?

Or just ignoring it and hoping no one will bring it up?


By "actual data" you mean making things up and leaving out things that you don't like. Ok, understood.


You mean the one you still don't know how to read. Well, ok.

If the opposite were in effect, the same situation would be playing out.