They did accomplish much. But the point is that without their parents being well off they wouldn't have had the opportunity to accomplish as much as they did. Nobody is saying the wealthy don't accomplish anything. Just that these guys don't exemplify some kind of rags to riches tale. They had the opportunities and connections they had which enabled them to use their considerable talents, intellect, and drive to do what they did. Many others don't have that same luxury. Not saying it can't happen, but just that when it does it is an extreme rarity, and that most of those that are in the top 1% came from a wealthy family or had connections that helped them get in the door.
This arguement is so stupid for every Gates there is a Madoff for every Michael Dell there is a Dick Fuld. The rich are not some white knight in shining armor whose sole reason for living is to create jobs and help everyone. They want to make money period and good for them. Sometimes it helps the general public and sometimes it hurts but the conservatives need to pull their heads out of Ayn Rands butt and realize that her ideas are childish fiction where conveniently the captains of industry only create Rearden steel and not Credit default Swaps. As for the cut spending versus raise taxes... the current debt is caused by four factors. One Bush tax cuts, two the non paid for Medicare Part D legislation of 2003 which created an entitlement program larger than the unfunded liability of SS by allowing Big Pharma to charge 30% more for drugs under Medicare then under Medicaid, three Iraq War, four decrease in tax revenues from the current recession which necessitated the stimulus which a large part of was funding to replenish state coffers. It's just not that hard to figure out. Imagine you had 2 jobs paying $500 a month each and your rent is $500. So after each month you have a $500 surplus. That was the US under Clinton. Then under Bush we quit one job (2001 Tax cuts) and move to a home where the rent is $1,000 a month (Medicare Part D, Iraq). So now we have a $500 a month deficit. That was the US under Bush. You can't cut your revenues and increase your spending without running huge deficits. We did it under Reagan and under W. Same result poor job creation and increase in the wealth disparity. This stop the spending mantra that the Cons continue to blindly bellow needs to stop or start pointing out where to cut. Defense, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt make up about 70% or so of the spending. SS and Medicare at least have dedicated funding sources. So that leaves defense or Medicaid. Here in NM despite the fact that 250M of the 400M deficit has been identified as increases in Medicaid spending the new Republican governor refuses to cut it.
Everyone is using middle class for their own agenda. Geez, who is this middle class? Lowering the net amount the wealthy pay? Are you sure about that? Do you know what rate is Warren Buffet paying now? According to himself, it's around 15% (I might get that number wrong off the top of my head), way below his secretary (in his own words). The wealthy people have way more means to get around the system to reduce their tax rate. With all those long term capital gains, most of the heavy option based bonuses were paid with very little tax. Burden on the middle class? How much tax is middle class paying right now? Federal, state, social security, medical, etc etc. How can you be serious when you say a flat 25% tax rate will be more burden for them? For the poor, I did mention there is a minimum salary, be it 20K or 30K. How's that going to put more burden on them? Complicated tax system and loopholes are made for the rich, NOT the poor who doesn't pay any tax anyways, NOT for the so-called middle class, who earns paycheck by paycheck having their taxes taken away automatically. NO, HK and US are different. Therefore, I just made up the number 25% vs HK's 15%. How about 30%, will that satisfy US government? Without providing any number or fact, you just randomly used this "protecting middle class" and claimed that flat tax rate will put more pressure on them. It's like lots of people against public healthcare don't even bother with facts, just claim "the big evil government wants to control all".
We can repay the debt if we raise taxes back to more responsible levels. Decades of irresponsible tax cuts have directly caused the budget crisis. Increased spending hasn't helped, but the worst of the unfunded mandates were not passed by Democrats, they were passed by Republicans.
I hear this claimed all the time, but in the one instance in modern history when marginal tax rates were raised, not only did revenues increase, but the budget went into the black. IOW, your assumption is flawed and not supported by factual data.
3% higher tax rates do not hinder their ability to make more money. That is a laughable suggestion. Are you really trying to claim that people will stop chasing an extra $100,000 per year because they would have to pay $3000 more in taxes than they do today? That just doesn't make any sense, but that seems par for the course for conservatives.
Which resulted in one of the worst periods of job creation in modern history. Compare that to the Bush and Clinton tax hikes, which resulted in the first balanced budget since before Reagan.
Negative. In one year under Obama our budget deficit quadrupled....$1.5 trillion....in one year. That's more than all 8 years of W combined. And it's not looking any better for the foreseeable future. But yea, it's probably only the Republicans' fault. The problem is not tax cuts. The problem is that government can not and will not live within its means. Again, there is a total disconnect now between inflows and outflows. It doesn't matter how much you tax, the government as it stands will still spend ore than it takes in. Do you think raising taxes back to the levels you want will stop the current administration from running massive deficits? You can bankrupt every American today by confiscating all of their wealth, and our debt would still not be paid off.
Do you know why? Because Obama put the wars on the books instead of hiding the costs with supplementals. seriously, pay attention
To be fair, the Democrats had a hand in most of the things that quadrupled the deficit... They helped pass Medicare Part D They helped allow the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan They helped pass the bailout I'll give equal blame for the Great Recession The problem is not entirely tax cuts, but the Bush tax cuts are a HUGE component of the current deficits. Yes, and a big part of the reason that we don't have the means to pay for government operations are the tax cuts given by Reagan and Bush, tax cuts that went almost entirely to the wealthy while raising taxes on the middle class. I think that raising taxes to a more reasonable level is the only way (when combined with spending cuts) to eliminate the deficit and begin paying down the debt. You don't have to take such drastic action right now, you just have to raise taxes to a more responsible level and reign in spending by doing things like... Reducing defense spending (get out of Iraq and Afghanistan is a big part of this) Reducing government waste Revamp Medicare Part D so that it isn't such a huge unfunded mandate Your red herring aside, we CAN eliminate the deficit and pay down the debt through responsible tax increases and spending cuts.
This whole scenario is based on the idea of failures in the actuarial system in terms of costs of healthcare and life expentancy. They both are results of the failed notion of guarantees in any system. The risk of upside and downside must be borne by all. The corporate world has gone away from these systems and not allowed itself to be strangled to death by Union demands, yet the governments are unable to. Lifetime healthcare and pensions are a thing in the past. Medical technology has advanced so dramatically that people are living longer than ever and there are procedures/technology that are extremely expensive but can keep people going. The cost of both these above issues create a failure of governments to see these changes and therefore over compensate their employees. Eventually there will be a day of reckoning which will ration care and pensions to the recipients to keep the cities/governemnts going.
How to Balance the Budget Without Raising Taxes The 19 Percent Solution Nick Gillespie & Veronique de Rugy | December 5, 2010 A value-added tax, a soda tax, a gas tax, banning earmarks, freezing a portion of federal spending at "pre-stimulus" levels - there’s no shortage of ideas being thrown out to fix the country’s disastrous balance sheet, which threatens not just near-term economic recovery but the possibility of long-term growth. Like last week's report from the president's Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, most of the current plans to fix the country's finances rely more on increases in revenues than on cuts in spending. In part due to its heavy reliance on revenue hikes, the commission, charged with balancing the budget by 2020, failed to win enough votes of its own members to present its recommendations to Congress. Which raises the question: Can America really reduce its debt and deficit without raising taxes to job-killing rates or cutting essential services to developing-world levels? The answer is not simply yes, it's that we have to. Raising government revenue - taxes - substantially is not only bad policy, it has proven difficult and ultimately unsustainable for any length of time in the past 60 years. Since 1950, annual government revenue, as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), has averaged just below 18 percent despite every attempt to jack it up or tamp it down. Our post-World War II experience shows that if the government is going to live within its means, it can't spend much more than 18 percent of GDP. Period. Uploaded with ImageShack.us Which is one reason to be happy that the debt commission's recommendations won't be presented to Congress anytime soon. The report assumes revenue equal to 21 percent of GDP and struggles to get spending to "below 22% and eventually to 21%" of GDP. That’s a recipe for disaster that would guarantee deficits and red ink. Similarly, former Sens. Bill Bradley, John Danforth, and Gary Hart, working with the Committee for a Responsible Budget, have offered up a plan to balance the budget by 2020 that relies on revenue hitting 20.8 percent of GDP, a level that hasn't been achieved once in the past 60 years. Republicans have not advanced any realistic near-term plans. Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Wisc.) Roadmap to the American Future does not balance the budget until 2063. The pre-election GOP’s Pledge to America is worthless since it fails to provide specifics (and to the extent it does, it is no good). The current situation is a bipartisan disaster that requires immediate action. Since Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001, total federal spending has increased by a massive 60 percent in inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars. In fiscal year 2010, which ended September 30, the federal government spent $3.6 trillion, or 25 percent of Gross Domestic Product. That’s the most spending, in terms of percentage of GDP, since 1946. Likewise, last year’s $1.5 trillion deficit, as a percentage of GDP, was the largest deficit since 1945. Most economists talk about a debt-to-GDP ratio of 60 percent as a trigger point that makes investors very nervous about a country's ability to pay its obligations. The debt to GDP ratio was 63 percent this year and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects it will be 87 percent in 2020. Just three years ago, it was 36.5 percent. Not good signs. So, what would it take to bring federal spending into line with plausible levels of revenue? The CBO, the non-partisan agency charged with estimating the effects of legislation on government costs, has produced a long-term budget outlook in which Bush-era tax rates remain unchanged. Their conclusion is that over the next decade, "government revenues would remain at about 19 percent of GDP, near their historical averages." That's actually a bit higher than the historical average, but is within the bounds of reason. A balanced budget in 2020 based on 19 percent of GDP would mean $1.3 trillion in cuts over the next decade, or about $129 billion annually out of ever-increasing budgets averaging around $4.1 trillion. Note that these are not even absolute cuts, but trims from expected increases in spending. To get a more concrete sense of what getting to 19 percent means, here is a table of projected major budget expenditures in total dollars, followed by the amount that needs to be cut each year from the expected budget to get an annual 3.6 percent decrease across the board. Looking at the chart below, the question becomes: Could you, say, find $129 billion dollars of cuts in a 2016 budget that squeezes through the door at $4.3 trillion? Congress hasn’t even begun real work on the 2011 budget, even though the fiscal year started in October (the government is currently being funded by short-term continuing resolutions; the next one expires on December 18). If they want to get serious about staving off the uncertainty, tax increases, and unrestrained spending that are sure recovery killers, they could put us on a path to a balanced budget right now. Are our leaders willing and able to identify and cut just $25 billion in waste and excess out of more than $700 billion in non-defense discretionary spending? Is reducing the $714 billion the Department of Defense received in 2010 by a paltry $25 billion impossible? Can Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that are infamous for waste and fraud and cost well over $720 billion in 2010, find $35 billion in efficiences? The specific cuts should be open to negotiation, but the historical record shows that the available level of government revenue is fixed. If these sorts of small but systematic trims are impossible over the next decade, then really nothing is possible and debt, deficits, and despair are here to stay. It just might be time to start thinking about moving to Greece.
The killer is unfunded mandates. Whether it be pensions or entitlements, we codify future spending into law without knowing if revenues will be available to match it (in fact we know it hasn't). We legislate deficits! That is insane and a recipe for ruin. When a company takes on too many unfunded liabilities, they go bankrupt (or get bailed out lol). A state government has no recourse other than to borrow or ask for a federal bailout. The feds can borrow (from China), but they can also print, destroying the value of all our private wealth. The left has lost because to implement their agenda requires the wealth of others, and there isn't any left to take. Chris Christie doesn't have to argue the merits of some bleeding heart social program, all he has to say is "I would love to do that, but we have no money." And that argument can't be refuted, because it's a simple statement of fact. We're broke. The one argument the left can make is that taxes need to be raised. But in a weak economy, this is not economically or politically feasible. The solution is to reform the system such that all entitlements and pensions and nonemergency spending is tied to revenues available. No more unfunded liabilities.
A couple of things that make that number inaccurate. Most of those expenditures come from programs of the Bush administration. Secondly as has already been pointed out, the wars are now on the budget. Bush refused to be the wars on the budget and funded them through supplemental after supplemental funding bills. The money was still being paid by the govt. but it wasn't going in as part of the budget. I doubt Obama will run zero deficit or a surplus. But raising the tax rates 3% on the richest Americans will reduce the deficit. That's simple. For the most part Obama has paid for every program he's asked for. It isn't 100% true but it is true to a large degree including the health care reform bill. Bush and the GOP never did that. Obama has.
