Oh. There were a couple comments I wanted to respond to as well:
Atomicflea wrote:
The idea that he wouldn't know that you get a tax break when you move jobs overseas is ridiculously disingenous.
Except he's right. There is no specific tax deduction for moving jobs overseas. Obama has been trotting this line out for so long that he apparently forgot that it's made up rhetoric. This, and many other mistakes Obama made last night, are the direct result of far too long without having to actually defend anything he says when there's another person in the room with a microphone and equal time.
trickybeck wrote:
I could only stand about 25 minutes of the debate before I got terminally bored. One thing that pissed me off was Romney kept saying "I promise no tax cuts that will raise the deficit." And never explained what the fuck kind of tax cut he was going to implement that wouldn't raise the deficit. And furthermore, if his tax cuts are going to be so subtle that they won't increase the deficit, then he's hardly delivering on the low-tax utopia he's promised to his base.
You should have paid more attention to the latter parts of the debate then. While he only touched on it during the tax portion, he expounded on it during the deficit section. He said there are three ways to deal with deficits: Cut spending, raise tax rates, or grow the economy. The first is pretty obvious (and Romney said clearly that this is a priority for him). The second and third are both methods of increasing revenue, one by increasing the amount of each dollar of economic activity that the government taxes, and the other by increasing the total amount of economic activity itself (thus more dollars in the tax base). Romney's argument is that by promising to keep taxes low, and removing regulations which make it harder to hire people (like say Obamacare), more of the profits left in the hands of businesses will be invested in jobs. With more jobs comes more growth, which means you both get to tax that increased growth *and* you get to tax the incomes of the people contributing to it.
He argued that trying to do this by raising tax rates (which is what Obama wants to do), you create a negative feedback effect. You're taking from the profits which might be used to hire more people, thus losing out on that increased economic growth and employment and the increased revenues you could have gotten by just taxing at the current (or even lower) rate. He was very clear about this, so if you missed it, you just weren't paying attention. Of course, I loved that portion because it's the exact same point I've made many times on this thread. Just a few weeks ago I showed the math of how this works and that, everything else staying the same, tax rates are inversely proportional to job creation rate. The higher the taxes, the lower the job creation from whatever segment you're taxing. If you additionally acknowledge that we'll have greater total economic growth if we're at 5% unemployment than at 8%, then this will also increase that. End result is a lot of additional tax revenue without having to raise tax rates. Basically, he's arguing for the opposite of what happened in 2008/2009. Revenues didn't drop because tax rates dropped during that time period, but because economic activity decreased and unemployment increased. Reverse those things and you can increase revenue without touching tax rates at all. But if you raise tax rates while you're in that condition, you make it harder to do this. Hence why he twice did the little twirl with his hands showing how Obama's plan would just consume the benefit it was trying to get in terms of deficit reduction. Again, not sure how you missed this.
That's how Romney intends to cut the deficit without raising taxes. And he actually did a pretty good job dumbing down the argument so that the typical voter at home could understand.
Then again, I guess I can start somewhere. I did start off further left then I am now.