Oh goody, and ideological punch up. Or not. I'm not going to prattle about ideology, but I think this thread could use some more news articles.
It is a simple fact of math that a big part of why the federal state governments are in the hole like they never have been before is a huge drop in income over the past couple years. When you budget is based on tax revenue, and then lots of people go out of work or wind up with reduced pay, obviously tax revenue falls. Hence all the lip-service paid to "growing the economy", which makes perfect sense in that regard. The Republican party campaigned on that point, and insists it's still priority number one. The problem is, government money filtering its way through the economy keeps a lot of people employed, so when they plan to cut spending by $60ish billion,
it's likely to put most of a million more people out of work, and that's just at first glance. Note, that's analysis by Goldman Sachs, the people who make the money and no screaming lefties. Massive budget reductions to social assistance programs, and theoretical cuts to social security and medi-etc are just icing on the cake, of putting a greater economic squeeze on millions of people already at the bleeding edge of their money.
Ah, but surely if "the American people" didn't want economic policy like this, they wouldn't have voted for dozens of new Congressmen aligned to the party-message promising such? Yeah, turns out, most people are pretty reactionary, and frequently vote "against" what they actually believe you question them point by point. Cue the extremely politically
uncomfortable new poll from
The Wall Street Journal and NBC. (For the record, half of that name is owned by Rupert Murdoch, the other half by General Electric, who will be important later.) It's hard to get a clear graphic of the result, and you can tab over to "Documents" to see the technical results yourself. The highlights:
81% of people support raising taxes on millionaires,
75% are against reducing Social Security payments across the board. And that's just for starters. A lot of people are asking the obvious questions, about why a solid three-quarters of the country would espouse what are often regarded as
thoroughly "liberal" ideas when a scant quarter identify themselves by such a label, are why
Tea Partiers are hypocrites. I've got my own theories, but that's not really the point.
The point is, it's simply not possible to reduce government spending below government income without thoroughly obliterating discretionary spending (which a good chunk of the economy depends on), along with chopping up sacred cows like Social Security, Medi-whatever, and the military. Without being willing to do that, and I for one think it would be ridiculous anyway, the only realistic option is to look at government
revenue. Yeah, taxes, like the millionaire surcharge that 81% of the population supports. Which isn't surprising, since 95% of people will never see a million dollars in their life. And lest anyone think it's all deadbeat "liberals" saying the wealthiest of society should be asked to pay more, like
everyone else has had to, it's a dirty little secret of liberalism that quite a few American tycoons call themselves such.
The not the quite the hypocrites everyone wants them to be. The article makes a pretty good point - if the wealthiest 150,000 people in America, about 0.0005% of the population, were taxed at the effective rate top-income earners were under Eisenhower (the Republican Shangri-La), the government could expect to see an extra $280 billion dollars. "Expect" being a key word, since our tax policy is thoroughly screwed up, which makes a nice segue.
The government is already effectively "loosing" tens or hundreds of billions a year from
tax revenue not collected, mostly from the wealthiest individuals and corporations who can afford accountants and international-income shell games to keep the IRS from touching what they're making. And naturally, part of that big Republican spending-reduction involves cutting the IRS's tax enforcement budget by about $600 million. Enforcement aside, as long as I've raised the question of millionaire taxes, let's not leave out corporate taxes. "But Aqizzar you Bolshevik, corporations are the foundation of the economy! American taxes are already way too high; you want to plunge us off a cliff by talking about taxing big businesses!" According to Forbes again, no screaming lefties by any means (hence why I've been linking them),
roughly two-thirds of American corporations pay effectively no taxes, especially some of the biggest like General Electric (owners of previously mentioned "liberal media" like NBC). The point being, all the economic recovery in the world isn't going to generate more revenue when you're taxing at
zero percent, and it's kinda hard to further incentive business to operate in America when the crushing "tax burden" is
zero percent. Not that that doesn't stop us from trying of course, with "tax incentives" which is a fancy word for handing out free money, to already most-profitable industries in the world like ExxonMobile and Chevron to tune of $50billion a year. Consider - Chevron employs less than 100,000 people in America, and has been steadily shedding a couple thousand jobs a year for the past decade. No only is giving them billions in free money not keeping anyone employed, but just imagine how many other, more effective, ways that money could be spent.
The Republican party came into power promising $100billion in spending cuts; they've delivered a plan for $60billion, mostly on the backs people least able to afford a reduction in government spending, and meaningless culture-war grandstanding issues like PBS. And not only is that considered a "settled matter" by the public echo chamber, but now we're going around trying to convince ourselves that Social Security is somehow losing money. Meanwhile, a slight increase in tax burden on the wealthiest people in the country, cutting the completely ineffective corporate welfare being shoveled out the door, and straightening up tax enforcement and policy to collect what's already due could easily generate an extra $400 to $500 billion in revenue. But even when a huge majority of American voters gladly support ideas like that when presented with them individually, somehow when you actually
propose them as policy, everyone's hair catches on fire and they start quoting
Red Dawn. If I have a message in all this, it's pretty simple: America, get the fuck over yourselves and the feel-good rhetorical paranoia, and let's stop pretending that the only way to boost the economy and give the government a fighting chance at solvency is by squeezing the working poor and handing more money to already ludicrously rich. And even after burying myself to the neck in this debate for the last ten years, I'm no closer to understanding why this is such a distasteful idea.
Actually, I've got a pretty good idea, but it's totally unrelated to the question of deficit reduction, so it doesn't belong here.
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Topic: Government Shutdown... TV says it's bad. Is it? (Read 23319 times)