Ron Paul Wins 2010 CPAC Straw Poll

Mitt Romney? But he's a socialist, right? I mean, his Massachusetts health care plan was very similar to Obama's, wasn't it?

 

Unless, of course, the VAT tax passes...then everybody pays more. So much for the "no increase in taxes on anybody making less than $250,000" that Obama promised repeatedly during the campaign.

If Obama would like to know how that type of broken promise works out, just ask George H.W. Bush.

 

Obama hasn't proposed a VAT tax, though.

 

i would love to see glen beck run for prez

that lying coward would exposed as such a fraud.

 

it must be something about massachusetts. romney flip flops more than this guy.

 

The hypocrisy is just astounding. In this post you whine about budget deficits while in the rest of the thread hail Bush as a genius for cutting your taxes and everyone elses.

Well where do you think that budget deficit came from? Here's a concept, deficits don't just come from spending they *gasp* come from cutting taxes as well!

Oh I know you live in fairytale land where cutting taxes increases tax revenues.

For example, of the increase from $600.6 billion in 1983 to $666.5 billion in 1984, $26 billion is due to inflation, $18.3 billion to corporate taxes and $21.4 billion to social insurance revenues (mostly FICA taxes). Income tax revenues in constant dollars decreased by $2.77 billion in that year. Supply-siders cannot legitimately take credit for increased FICA tax revenue, because in 1983 FICA tax rates were increased from 6.7% to 7% and the ceiling was raised by $2,100. For the self employed, the FICA tax rate went from 9.35% to 14%. The FICA tax rate increased throughout Reagan's term, jumping to 7.51% in 1988 and the ceiling was raised by 61% through Reagan's two terms. Those tax hikes on wage earners, along with inflation, are the source of the revenue gains of the early 1980s.

Oops you only thought Reagan cut your taxes and that increased tax revenue. How about the AMT?

The tax was created in 1969 to prevent the very rich from using the many loopholes then available to avoid all federal income taxes. How did the tax's reach expand? In 1986, when President Ronald Reagan and both parties on Capitol Hill agreed to a major change in the tax system, the law was subtly changed to aim at a wholly different set of deductions, the ones that everyone gets, like the personal exemption, state and local taxes, the standard deduction, certain expenses like union dues and even some medical costs for the seriously ill. At the same time it removed and revised some of the exotic investment deductions. A law for untaxed rich investors was refocused on families who own their homes in high tax states.

Every year, Congress has typically passed what's become known as the alternative minimum tax ''patch,'' which shields millions of taxpayers from paying the more onerous A.M.T. by increasing the amount of exempt income.

At the insistence of Senate Republicans, nearly $70 billion of the $787 billion economic recovery plan, enacted in February 2009, reflected the bookkeeping cost of adjusting the alternative tax for a year. Democrats said they would have preferred to address the A.M.T. separately, as the patch was seen as having little stimulative effect.

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/alternative_minimum_tax/index.html

Wait you mean Reagan expanded the AMT to hit the middle class and now Congress has to pass a patch every year? And last years patch was the single largest part of the "porkulus"? Republicans would never try and stick it in the stimulus plan to drive the cost nearer to a Trillion dollars, that's not politically motivated towards an uneducated public.

What about those Bush tax cuts McCain said they increased tax revenues.

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain has said that the major tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 have "increased revenues." He also said that tax cuts in general increase revenues. That’s highly misleading.

In fact, the last half-dozen years have shown us that we can't have both lower taxes and fatter government coffers. The Congressional Budget Office, the Treasury Department, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers and a former Bush administration economist all say that tax cuts lead to revenues that are lower than they otherwise would have been – even if they spur some economic growth. And federal revenues actually declined at the beginning of this decade before rebounding. The growth in the past three years that McCain refers to brings revenues back in line with the 40-year historical average as a percentage of gross domestic product.

A May 2006 report by the Federal Reserve Board did not find that the 2003 dividend tax cut had a major impact on stock prices.

Federal Reserve Board authors: “We do not find any imprint of the dividend tax cut news on the value of the aggregate U.S. stock market. On the other hand, high-dividend stocks outperformed low-dividend stocks by a few percentage points over the event windows, suggesting that the tax cut did induce asset reallocation within equity portfolios.”

That contradicts President Bush’s pronouncements. In May 2006, when the president signed an extension of tax relief legislation, he said: "The cuts on dividends and capital gains are reaching families and businesses alike.... By cutting the taxes on dividends and capital gains, we helped add about $4 trillion in new wealth to the stock market."

The CBO analyzed data to uncover the causes of revenue growth since 2003 in response to a request from Sen. Kent Conrad, chair of the Senate budget committee. In a letter to Conrad, CBO Director Peter R. Orszag says that overall receipts increased by 1.9 percentage points as a share of GDP and that the increase “disproportionately” comes from a rise in corporate income tax revenues.

Orszag attributes two-thirds of the bump in corporate taxes to an increase in corporate profits. The rest he pins to tax policy. For instance, when provisions allowing partial expensing of investment in equipment expired, tax revenue increased. In other words, revenue declined when the provisions were enacted and bumped up again when they expired.

Orszag says there was growth in capital gains realizations in individual tax receipts, but measures such as lower rates on dividends and an increase in the child tax credit, as well as a drop in job wages, caused a reduction in revenues. A CBO chart in Orszag's letter shows that legislation (not counting an impact on capital gains) had a total negative effect on revenue growth.

The impact of the tax cuts on economic growth is a matter of debate among economists. We're not voicing a view on whether the tax cuts should have been enacted; that, too, is a separate discussion. But it is clear they did not "increase revenues."

http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/supply-side_spin.html

Watch your step there is Republican talking points laying in pieces everywhere.