I agree with this but considering the vagueness of the commerce clause and the general welfare clause does greatly empower the Federal Government in many areas which were originally in the purview of the states. The 14th Amendment also empowers the Federal government into issues that also once were state issues. For example on the issue of marriage. While there is no Constitutional stated power of marriage and marriage licenses are left to the states under the 14th Amendment unequal application of marriage by the states does become a Federal issue. A countrywide and now globalized trade and supply chain has greatly empowered the federal government and things like e-commerce are only increasing that. Commerce that are completely internal to a state are very rare now. If I buy a donut at my local cafe even though that transaction is solely within the state of Minnesota. I could be paying for it with a credit from a bank incorporated in Delaware with funds I earned from a project in California. The donut might've been made in a bakery in Wisconsin with eggs from Iowa and wheat grown in Nebraska. The nature of commerce now might never have been envisioned by the Framers but part of the genius is that there is enough vagueness in the Constitution to allow for it to deal with these type of issues.
It also inhibits business spending because they are anticipating large tax increases. There is a school of thought that some use to support such policies...Modern Monetary Theory. Many use this to support essentially unlimited government spending...the government spends to keep the economy level. Two flaws. A) even the theory itself doesn't lead to that, as under MMT, one of the inhibitors the government then uses to restrict economic growth is...issuing debt. So, the spending and the debt essentially cancel out. The second flaw is that it doesn't really work, in practice. Particularly if we are required by law to issue debt to cover deficits. Probably the best example of MMT in action is Japan, which has been stuck in economic stagnation for a couple decades now. Not really the standard we should be seeking. Here is an excellent, and lengthy, discussion regarding MMT from another forum. No, you can't stop it. We shouldn't even try to. Being anti globalization, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, is like being anti glacier. You can be against it all you want, but it keeps moving down the valley. What this has caused is some economic upheaval as economies adjust to this new model. This happens in any economic transformation, and will work itself out in time. Government can assist in this, BUT government has a strong tendency to cause more harm than good when it tries. First, government usually addresses symptoms, not problems. Second, it usually ignores all the other issues that their 'fix' is likely to cause, creating additional problems, while generally not really even addressing the initial one. I would disagree with the premise...I think more job loss occurs from globalization. But, the problem still stands, even if the percentages differ. We are undergoing two transformations, both of which hit manufacturing jobs the most. One is globalization...labor is cheaper elsewhere, and can often do the same job. The other is automation. We have been switching to a service economy for quite some time now. Service, and knowledge. If you don't have a unique skill or knowledge, your job will be automated or shipped overseas. We shouldn't have this education gap..again, this has been occurring for a few decades now. So, a big part of the solution, I would think, would be a campaign getting people to understand that they need to educate themselves to compete in today's market. I'm not necessarily opposed to government actually assisting in the retraining, although I do have the above mentioned caveats. Government programs often tend to now work, and therefore just bloat the budget even more, increasing problem #1. Further, flooding the market with a glut of highly trained people will do just that...flood the market. Wages, even for highly skilled jobs, will plummet, and many won't get hired. Another fundamental shift in outlook that needs to occur is that all workers need to understand they are entrepreneurs in this new economy. They need to be constantly evaluating the market, their value, and articulating how they add value, and seeking to improve that value by developing new and marketable skills. Simply being a worker isn't a marketable skill--that is a commodity, and will be outsourced to wherever it can be sourced the cheapest. Increasing the capital gains tax rate will decrease business, causing both a drop in tax income and a drop in the overall economy. Our capital gains taxes are right at about the optimum rate currently. Corporate taxes are very high here. So, lots of reasons to think they should be reduced. The issue with taxes is that it is far more a political discussion than the economic one it should be. In another forum, I had this discussion, and provided lots of studies and data showing the adverse impacts of raising the capital gains tax rate. It was simply discounted, because it didn't match with his view of what should happen. Making such decisions with this mindset is economic folly. 5. Health care costs are outpacing inflation dramatically hitting everyone hard particularly SMB's and average people. The reason for this is two fold. The number of options to treat people have increased dramatically and these new treatments, therapies, drugs, etc - are often very very very expensive. Pharma makes a killing as do medical device companies. Furthermore there is a shortage of doctors creating scarcity and driving costs up because it's incredibly expensive to become a doctor. And our system maintains this by now allowing qualified foreign doctors to practice here easily. So to become a doctor you have to pay huge sums of money and do it to make coin. 6. Housing: There once was a time where a person who operated a machine press could buy a house for his family. The idea of that is laughable now. A one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn cost $800k and even a house in the suburbs of most American cities pushes $200k. The real household income has increased 6% in the last 30 years. Real home prices for the U.S. have increased nearly 200%. Think about that. These problems have nothing to do with Obama or Bush or Clinton or Bush or Reagan - it has to do with ALL of them and Congress. Because people are fighting over politics instead of reality and economic facts. You want to fix these problems and put this country on track? Then fix the tax code and make the rich pay more because they are sitting on more cash than the history of the planet and they aren't creating jobs for anyone inside the U.S. but they sure are helping the rest of the world grow. And cut spending and limit entitlement programs to control the deficit and get it back to under 50% of our GDP (right now it's near 100%). Eliminate most tax breaks for the wealthy. Find a way to make it more affordable for people to become doctors. Period. Make patents expire sooner on drugs that immensely valuable to the health of a nation and are priced high Use corporate tax codes to STRONGLY incentivize businesses to: 1. Use labor here. 2. Keep a CEO to average non-executive employee pay under 100 3. Reinvestment into capital within the U.S. Eliminate tax breaks for any corporation that makes more than 50 million in profit. Make the capital gains tax progressive. Create national universities that are free of charge to anyone who commits to 4 years of service to the gov't at minimal compensation (room and board) after they graduate. This should includes doctors. You want to get people off of Food stamps and gov't housing, you want to get rid of medicaid? Then freaking educate the population so they can get jobs and turn them into tax payers. Do something with the education system, I have no idea on that one.[/QUOTE]
The impoverished don't get much in social security since they don't contribute much. So this is a lie and misrepresents what I am saying. Sucks that you go full partisan all the time
They generally receive more than they ever paid in. I know people who receive more per year than the total amount they ever paid in during the time they were paying in to the system. Either way, it's a massive tax that the population would be better off if it was completely overhauled.....but old people are easily frightened and they are more loyal voters than anyone else, so it'll never get changed and it will eventually become more and more of a burden on society while still not really helping that many people.
I just don't understand how he can be that socialist. He thinks all rich people should give their money to poor people. He thinks homeless people should be doctors.
The purpose of social security is to given old people who don't work but have contributed to the country an income to live on. People who are rich don't need it and just pass it on to their kids - this is what my mother does with it. She doesn't need it and I don't think she should get it if it means keeping it solvent. That's all I am saying. You don't need to overhaul it just fix it so people who need the benefit gets it.
Crap, spontaneous posting above. (I wish I could edit posts...) First and foremost, everyone needs to understand we don't have a health care system, we have a pill dispensing system. But that is probably a separate topic. India provides very high quality, low cost care, to the point where very complex surgeries, like heart transplants can be done there, at hospitals more resembling resorts, and with higher patient success rates, than they can be here. Everyone assumes this is because doctors are so cheap there...but that isn't really true anymore. They are cheaper, but not that much. What turns out to be the case is that India actually runs their health care in a free market, and capitalism has led to dramatic improvements in both health care quality and health care costs. Ironic that we don't run our system that way here. Health care costs should be DECREASING, not increasing. That's what happens in a free market. Everyone is constantly finding ways to do things better and cheaper. Our system lacks that. See above regarding globalization, capital gains taxation, switch to a service/knowledge economy, etc. YES!!! Could not possibly agree more! If you asked most politicians to actually explain the economics of anything they are advocating, they couldn't do it. So, a bunch of really bad decisions get made, and implemented. The deficit we have is a direct result of this disconnect. Spending money is always an easy way to get reelected. But, it generally is not a good way to run a government focused on economic growth, which is what any government should be focused on. You want to fix these problems and put this country on track? Taxes on the rich is neither the problem, nor the solution. As this video clearly shows. it's a bit dated now, but the problem is just all that much bigger now, making the point even more applicable. Think about that....our debt is equivalent to the entire output of the entire country for a whole year. That's outrageous. Further, consider that such ratios for the USA are similar to the ratios for Greece, Iceland (before declaring bankruptcy) and other countries that were derided as examples of totally out of control spending which would lead to economic disaster. Why wouldn't the same be true for us, then? So, we can probably raise taxes on the rich, but not that much, and doing so isn't really going to address the fundamental problem of excess government spending, or the corresponding deficit, that much. Spending needs to be reduced. The problem with this is that just looking at spending already on the books for future years, in our entitlements, what is going to happen is that spending is going to drastically INCREASE. We have unfunded liabilities of around $20 Trillion for Social Security, and several times that for Medicare and Medicaid (and those increased significantly under Obamacare). So, we have tens of trillions dollars of additional funding we need to provide already on the books. Why this isn't a daily topic of concern amongst all voters is baffling to me--we are looking at economic ruin, and pretty much nobody gives a @#*#! Which points out that the problem isn't really with our government. It is with the voters. We keep voting in people who just make this problem worse, and we therefore get exactly the government we asked for. It's like candy to 2 year olds. Some adults need to keep them from consuming it all the time...but in our system, there are no adults, or they are just ignored. At some point, the US government will have to either just print a whole lot of money (like Germany did after WW1), or default on its debts. Both of those have a lot of really bad consequences, but not only are we doing NOTHING to prevent it, we are doing lots of things to accelerate its onset. And no one seems to care. It's scary, or sad, or both. See above about actually making health care work as a free market system. The problem isn't really how much it costs to become a doctor, fwiw. It is how much it costs to BE a doctor. Liability insurance consumes half or more of a doctor's revenue. How would anyone here do if half their your income went to just paying for insurance you needed to have your job? I suspect...not very well. See above regarding pill dispensing system. The industry is geared to funnel money to the pharmaceutical companies. The approval process is onerous, and not that effective. Just look at the side effects of drugs that are approved. If we are going to allow drugs on the market where the side effect is death...what really is the point of such lengthy approval processes? Also, why not allow foreign drugs into the market? The reason isn't patient health, it is pharma profits. Again, need to be careful what we wish for, but workable solutions around these are probably possible. Why? Tax breaks are a political issue that people don't really think through. They are usually put in place for a reason. The main reason usually being to create jobs. So, if you want to take away those tax breaks, you are really saying you want to take away the jobs those breaks create. Is that really what you want? See above regarding the adverse impacts of raising the capital gains tax rates. This will create a glut of educated people without corresponding jobs to put them in, driving down wages to where minimal compensation might be all anybody gets. Plus...what jobs? The government already has full employment...so what jobs are all these people going to do? Not necessarily opposed to this...but the education for this is already available, and lots of programs exist to provide the funding. Plus see above regarding the impact of flooding the market. It, like health care, needs to become cost competitive. Educations costs should be going DOWN, not UP. When funds are made available regardless, there is no incentive for efficiency. Same problem as health care. The government can perhaps institute programs requiring universities to demonstrate increased effectiveness prior to being able to increase tuition. We need to spur educational innovation and the free market around education. The current system has no incentive to reduce costs. Lots of public universities now charge around $60,000 a year for tuition, room and board. That is outrageous! I think tuition my first semester was around $225...but had risen to over $1500 when I graduated. Did education improve by a factor of 7 in those four years? Or by a factor of 20 since then? Hardly.
Because of the definition of the word discretionary maybe? Anyhow, even going by your chart, the 16% military spending is absurdly high when compared to any countries today and virtually all nations ever. Still you are not safer than them, and they are not safe because of you. More importantly, and I know this is what really matters to the foreign policy, almost no Americans are getting a return on investment from this, not even a moral return on investment if that makes sense. Money goes out, gets into the pockets of already very wealthy people who are hoarding money, most of it gets stashed abroad, some of it gets into the pockets of elected representatives back home, and they repeat the cycle of giving you the middle finger. On health and labor you are getting benefits, even if you are unhappy with the efficiency of it. On EDUCATION, SCIENCE and TRANSPORTATION (think about what big chunks of human society these are) you are spending just 6%. This is mind blowing if you think about it. I understand you are against a big government, but just think that you spend more than double on military as you do on those 3 things combined. Without talking about whether all should be increased or reduced, the mix is insane. It's also very indicative. So whatever your solution is, it would make sense that education, science and transportation should make up larger than a 6% proportion of government spending even in a much smaller government. 6% is a joke, and you are losing out on benefits that can help grow the economy. I think you and fellow Americans on here can at least agree to that baseline idea. Mix it up a little, get a better ROI. The idea that the military spending is what's keeping enough money in your pocket to buy a house and car and a tv is a total lie bro. You are getting a piss poor return on that 16%. A much worse return than the "inefficient" health and labor spending. MUCH worse. If you wanted to funnel money out of the tax system into your pockets, military is the #1 way to go. Is it a coincidence that this is rarely ever talked about by your or democrat party leaders? They know what they're doing. They're keeping you busy arguing about a lesser issue which is the efficiency/inefficiency of the health/labor which could, yes, easily be much better if they wanted to make it better.
So you focus on the 16% that is national defense instead of the 68% that is interest on debt and welfare which largely aren't working. I wonder why that is.....lol.
Hell if the government just paid down the debt and kept taxes at the same levels they could double the budgets of science, transportation, and education, instead they have to pay that much in interest. Also, when you think about over 60% of the total government spending being on entitlement programs and you think that the US pays for the most advanced military in the world with 16%.....maybe we should be a LITTLE bit more upset about how little we get for that massive amount of money we are taking from the people in order to fund those largely ineffective programs. Just maybe.
This is why it's impossible to really fix all of these problems. One, people can't agree on basic facts and root causes and two, the problems are so incredibly interconnected that any real solution has no prayer of coming to fruition.
Case in point, the US debt is $18 trillion and we spent an estimated $4-6 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone, a largely ineffective program, but it's entitlements y'all. In 1980, anyone making $215k+ paid a 70% tax rate. In 2013, it was down to 33%, 39% for anyone making $450k. But entitlements.
If the 16% investment is getting you 5% ROI, and the 68% investment is getting you 50% ROI - where do you start? You don't have to focus on one thing. But if there's an easy step with widespread agreement, why not do it? Everything belongs to all of you. It's not a matter of who's game you play first. Maybe by getting rid of some tap-ins you'll generate some goodwill between you and your fellow Americans. They're your brothers and sisters, believe me. No matter what you may think, they got your back. People from their side of the politics put on uniforms and go defend the country too. They are your people. Meanwhile you want to reduce health and labor... ok cool, keep pushing for that. It doesn't change the fact that you can unlock tens of billions of dollars and EVEN in your horror scenario, that money would go from having a ****ty ROI to a less ****ty ROI... is that such a terrible thing?
Actually, it wasn't. The purpose of SS was to provide supplemental income to such people. One of the reasons it has become insolvent is because that difference has been lost. That and that at the time it was implemented, it was available for people who had outlived life expectancy. Were the same concept in place currently, people would collect SS at about age 85 or 90. Which is why when originally implemented, the ratio of people it took to provide for each person on SS was like 20 to 1, and it is getting around 2 to 1. It is hard to look at those trends and numbers, and see that this isn't sustainable. One thing they could do to help with this, and it should soothe the 'tax the rich' crowd, is collect SS tax for everyone at every income level. Currently, SS tax is capped at somewhere around $130,000 or so. Income above that is not taxed for SS. I don't know what impact this would actually have (how much of today's income falls above that threshold), but it would help.
No the purpose should be to make sure every hard working American can have some semblance of security when they are old.
I agree with removing the cap. But why should millionaires collect social security? It's been 20+ years since I studied economics so I can't have that kind of debate with you - but the school I thought I come from - if you know taxes are going up you will want to realize profits today, but once they have gone up you will shift to more capital investment and increase benefits since you make your company better and lose less in taxes. Globalization nets less income for workers, but it's productivity increases and poor education / skills that result in lost jobs. Not necessarily. I am saying you make it progressive. So the lowest capital gains tax should be 15%, but it should go up with increasing profits. That won't hurt small businesses at all since most of them will still be at 15% or less (since they normally draw a salary as opposed to realizing a profit), and incentivizes individuals to rather see a company's stock grow through reinvestment vs. paying out dividends. [/QUOTE]
Not sure I can explain it..but I will try. it's not their job only but it seems like it or this what they've been Only doing for decades. Fed. Members by law are the "legal insiders ", they are the backbone of every step moving forwards . -they represents their own perspective parties interests which is by proxy means : big private business ,Banks as they should be take care of their prevailed clients or they will run out of business , the irony their clients demography is distributed throughout the Globe. Slow Biz in the usa , is not a concern when they can make more profits somewhere else , funny how last year the Fed members made a profit of over a 100 billions while the country run into a few trillions of deficits ! This show how things is not aligned perfectly a win/win situation take for instance the Gold Cover of currency , though the $ has no relation with Gold, private possession of Gold is historically high ,and very profitable Or the Housing crises ! banks knew how much cash they had , and how much they could lend, under the Fed supervision and regulations watch , even those big banks that were dissolved ,they sold their successful units to other banks which was more of a merger without the accompanied integrity of penalty so this in my opinion explain partially why building high ways ,hospital ,creating true job, mitigating market,globalization risks are off the table, just a headache of extra work/low returns and benefits more of those charter banks than Fed.members Banks, or why super rich becoming richer, or a big chunk of the solution is always ...unachievable it's just a conflict of interest
