Agreed. Muni bonds pay so little that it makes sense they should be tax free. You set the tax rate based on last year's spending plus 5%, so you would be pretty much guaranteed to be paying down some of the debt every year. If politicians go on a spending spree (like going to war, etc.) then the people feel it the very next year when tax rates go up. I think that tax multipliers for sin taxes and exempting food and medicine are far simpler to implement than the 5800+ pages of income tax code. What's more is that the system is perfectly transparent, everyone knows what the tax rate on everything is and everyone has the ability to avoid all taxation if that is the way they want to go. XOM's single biggest market is the United States. Are you trying to tell me with a straight face that they had to repatriate the dollars that you and I spent on gasoline. Do you realize how absurd that is? They kept their money through a process called transfer pricing. Basically, they have their foreign subsidiary charge a higher price than normal to get their product (crude from Iraq, Venezuela, Brazil, etc.) and allow their refineries in the US to run at a loss so that they can bilk the system. Agreed on this one too. The debt commission didn't even suggest enough cuts to eliminate the deficit. I want to retire the debt in my lifetime. In order to make it happen under our current tax system, we will have to raise taxes, mostly on the rich since they are the ones who have benefitted from the tax cuts over the last 30 years.
Yes, but I am not willing to make some of the cuts that you were. An earmark ban would drastically affect many infrastructure projects. Reducing the federal workforce by 10% (over 200,000 more people unemployed) seems a little draconian so that rich people can keep the Bush tax cuts. I would personally INCREASE space spending, though that increase could be offset by reducing the nuclear weapons stockpile (they were both part of the same option). I raised the retirement age to 68, which keeps up with the gains in life expectancy and similarly kept the Medicare age at 68. Seniors should not have to wait until they are 70 to retire so that rich people can keep the Bush tax cuts. Even if we cut everything you did, that merely eliminates the deficit. We need to pay down (and eventually off) the debt. We will only do that if we include increased taxes.
the joseph theory is solid - at its core, it is a belief that actions speak louder than words. what you do is more important than what you say. common sense...pure and simple. unfortunately, the same cannot be said for samuel theory! you remember the samuel theory, right sam? you advocated quite strongly for it in the "pirates on falcon lake" thread (yarghh!). the samuel theory states that if an event has never happened then it could never possibly ever happen. in other words, for any action to occur there must be a precedent for said action. now, i never went to no fancy pants "law school", but even i can see the fallacy in such a theory.
And yet, you didn't say that the budget couldn't be balanced making only the spending cuts you agree with, you said it couldn't be balanced only by making spending cuts. I proved you wrong. Wrong again. In the short term it creates a small (though still multi-billion dollar) surplus. In the long term it creates an almost $200B surplus. That would allow for the eventual retirement of the debt. If I were in absolute control I would actually raise taxes in the short term in combination with drastic spending cuts, specifically for the purpose of retiring the debt, with an endgame that has both drastically lower spending and drastically lower taxes. I don't support raising taxes under the current system because I have no faith that the increased revenue will be used to pay down the debt. Rather, I suspect that spending will simply be increase to take up the slack created.
I wasn't defending how they avoid taxes in the US. I don't know anything about their tax shelters and stuff. I just remembered that they made their money in other countries. Also I want to say that their effective tax rate was something obscene like greater than 50%. I'm posting on my phone so I don't feel like trying to research it on here, but maybe you remember since you seem to know more about their tax setup.
