Unpleasant Truths: Reagan was for the Buffet Rule - Page 3  

Nonsense. The Democrats took both the House and Senate in 2006 running on fiscal responsibility, and PAYGO. Obama was elected declaring he would end the wars and spend the peace dividend at home in part, to lower the deficit. The entire tea party, which are clearly the same Perot type folks that have been around forever want the budget balanced. Bill Clinton bit his lower lip, raised taxes, was reelected and can claim to be the only modern president to have had balanced budgets. (Though in my view the House Republicans still deserve the largest share of that.)

In short it isn't hard to gain credibility to raise taxes when you will make credible cuts.


Total share of change is going to be skewed in part because zero skews everything. The reality is that most of the lower quintiles pay nothing and that is going to skew numbers in terms of change because you cannot go below zero.


BRussell, seriously that is the best that can be said to defend Mr. Hope and Change? The man could have done nothing and added literally 75 times that tax increase. You've explained the paradox yourself. You can't say the Bush tax cuts all went to the rich and then offer gimmicks to raise them on the rich when you could have done nothing and raised taxes on the rich. Obama's proposals go no where even with his own party. They are worse than gimmicks. They are nothing more tham manipulation. They are shallow attempts at wedge issues to keep people like yourself in line and thinking within your box.

"Oh Republicans wouldn't even support a tax increase of $5 billion, what will they ever support then?"

He could have raised taxes almost $400 billion by doing nothing and didn't even need the Republicans....

What is the answer to that.... he didn't want to lead? He didn't want a result that was almost exactly what he wanted... he didn't want to be credible... what??


The point about CBO is that they are only allowed to add up what they are told to add up. The final report showed that the stimulus cost of future growth so in that regard there was no multiplier effect. There is no borrowing our way to prosperity. All it did was borrow from future growth. If you and all your neighbors are upside down on your houses because no one can afford to purchase them. All of you taking out second mortgages to pay people to put in pools on your upside down houses won't solve the problem.


This recession much like the Great Depression, was caused by federal monetary policy.

[QUOTE=BRussell;2096582]Hmm? Obama's Buffett rule is gimmicky, not those tax cuts.


Are you suggesting that the poor and middle class are getting hit by paying capital gains and other similiar taxes?


Obama says to share and hold hands. It is a ridiculous claim that is not supported by facts. Even the example with Buffett and his secretary clearly had her making a salary well above the norm.


For numbers to be credible, they have to be predictive in all directions. Gravity cannot suddenly not be a constant for example. The claim is that they stimulus worked, but that they just didn't know how bad it was at the beginning. That means their initial numbers were wrong. Clearly someone like you has heard the term GIGO. If their initial numbers were wrong, how can what flows from them be accurate?


That is because a tax "cut" isn't always a tax cut. For example $5 billion of the "tax cuts" were increases in eligability for the EITC. That isn't a tax cut.


I hate to break it to you but clever is thinking a bunch of wedge issues will distract from one's record.


First polls about favorability mean little in terms of votes. People are going to have to vote for someone. So far generically it trends towards Republicans and when it did in 2010 we saw the result there as well. Democrats are utopians and it is easy to think someone unfavorable for being the asshole who doesn't endorse utopia.


Here's the reality. In 2012 Obama will no longer be "historic." He will be a guy trying to get reelected who can't run on his record. Screaming that a 30 year old woman attending an expensive law school complains that she has to pay out of pocket for her contraception, or even declaring that some women have to use $9 Walmart contraception isn't going to get you far. Most women know what trade-offs they make in terms of distance to work, flexibility of hours, and time away from work and they are fine with them. The gender gap is increasingly about SINGLE women who want the government for a husband and Republicans didn't have much of a chance there because they don't endorse that view of dependency.


The point is at best, the stimulus can be shown to have had some sort of positive short term effect but the long term effect was negative. It stole from future growth. Most recessions end PERIOD. This one has as well but the recovery on this one, even when spending literally trillions extra in terms of overall government spending has been the weakest in modern tracking. The point is that we should be seeing above average job generation for coming out of a recession because we spent so much more to bring this one to an end and also because of multiplier effects. The numbers have to be predictive. They have to actually match their promise or they are not credible. GIGO is GIGO.

It's actually much worse than that as this points out:


Which brings us back to something said in BRussell's link:

"CBO's new report closely resembles its initial estimates from March 2009, shortly after Obama signed the bill into law."

Of course it does, it was pre-ordained to do so.

Other examples similar to this are things like "Cash for Clunkers." There's no way that was ever going to be admitted to be a failure. Never. Or the TSA and "war on terror"...these will always have the inbuilt presumption of success and necessity. They will never be admitted as failures.

Very nice find!

One other point should be noted to BRussell on the polls. Given the actual voter registration make up, these poll are becoming more and more weighted towards Democrats. The liberal media compliex is going to extraordinary lengths to get Obama to 50% with the last poll I saw having a +17 Democratic swing. Reality is going to be quite ugly.

That's an interesting take. However, one would have to prove a negative, essentially. What we do know is that AIG was into everything. They were the company that insured everything from other insurance companies to financial firms assets to real estate loans to mortgage backed securities to God knows what else. I don't think it's a hard case to make that if AIG went under, we might well have had Armageddon.

I realize you won't accept that, because you think the bailouts were unnecessary and possibly even fraudulent (e.g. they were nothing but a massive theft of taxpayer dollars). I guess we'll never know for sure. On my end, my conclusion is that bailouts were highly undesirable, but probably necessary in most cases due to scope of the crisis. That said, I did not and do not support the bailouts and virtual takeover of the auto companies. Those companies were likely to go through bankruptcy while continuing operations and restructuring. In the end, we gave them tens of billions, then took them over, then gave them to the unions--all while screwing the secured bond holders. It's not as much money, but to me this is the real moral travesty.

Then someone shouldn't have a hard time making that case. And yet...

Well that's the point. The case was never really made. It has yet to be made. There was no evidence before the fact and there is no evidence after. "Possibly" isn't good enough when we're talking about mortgaging our children's futures to bail out crony capitalist corporations with money we don't have.

I know. The exact same things happened in the following cases:

- Airline bailout after 9/11
- Formation of the TSA
- PATRIOT ACT
- The "stimulus" package
- The UAW..errr...GM/Chrysler bailout

And so on and so forth.

It works as follows:

1. Something bad happens
2. The government must do something (IMMEDIATELY!) or else things will get much, much worse (FAST!)
3. Don't question 2
4. Goto 1

And here is why they'll never get the money from the rich. Worse though, all that energy spent in tax avoidance could be avoided if they simply lowered taxes.

\

Indeed. What many fail to realize is that most people who become wealthy do so because they understand how money works. Wealthy people don't work for money, they make money work for them. They understand the system and how to use it to their advantage. Obama is a prime example of this.

But how fair is taxation (if taxation can even be called fair) when in 2010, only 85 million people paid federal taxes.


And in perhaps the most blatant display of hypocrisy on the subject of taxes:

Exactly!

And...instead of trying to drag them down, we should be a) freeing them up, and b) helping everyone else to rise to the same level of comprehension and effectiveness.

Our government is addicted to debt. WE as a people are addicted to debt.

It makes no sense to raise taxes on anyone until we get our spending and borrowing under control, because no matter how much we take in, we will always spend more.

You don't help an alcoholic break his addiction by giving him more alcohol, and you certainly don't help the government function within its means by raising taxes.

When stuff like this is going on, it's time to fundamentally rethink the way things are being done.

Riiiiight. I'd like to name this Nick's first law of politics: Tax increases are the path to victory. Other laws include pardoning murderers and sleeping with boys.

How about this: Maybe Republicans could be the responsible ones for a change. Instead of cutting taxes and saying maybe someday we'll have some unspecified cuts that might eventually happen I'll get back to you on that, they actually pass some cuts to real programs, if that's what they believe in. Instead, for the time Rs controlled things, we got large spending increases on wars and Medicare benefits, combined with large tax cuts. Both things are the opposite of what you do if you believe in fiscal balance. Not just part of the equation wrong, but both sides wrong.

Again, it would be politically difficult to be blamed for tax increases, whether you think so or not. We'll see what happens when the same issue is up again at the end of the year.

And BTW, I feel no need to defend Obama. I think he's been Cheney X 2 on national security-related civil liberties issues, and it makes me sick because I know Cheney-Obama-ism is now an ingrained part of our government. Obama could have changed that, but he didn't, because he thought it would be politically difficult, and so instead he has cemented it. I'm trying to argue what I see as the truth, not defend a team.


I don't disagree with this. I'd just add that it was the worst recession since the Great Depression, and that's not Obama's fault. In fact things have steadily improved since Obama took office. Whether that's due to his policies or not (mostly not, of course), that's still a fact.


And I want to make another point: There is a good argument against the stimulus. It's the "tough love" approach that says yes, things will be worse, but we'll eventually bounce back and we won't have the additional debt. It's Romney's "let Detroit go bankrupt" argument. I don't agree with that, and I think it's a politically unpalatable argument, but at least it's a legitimate argument. What's not a legitimate argument is to say what SDW and so many Rs have been saying, that the stimulus "hasn't created one job" or that it hasn't worked at all. That's just making up facts to fit them with an ideology.

Moral relativism is a slippery slope.

When I read this post, I thought I remembered seeing conservatives gleeful about a report that the CBO had downgraded its estimate of the positive effects of the stimulus, and in fact there were a ton of stories from the end of 2011. Here's one example from a conservative paper:

I'm sorry, but you can't both be gleeful that the CBO says the stimulus isn't helping as much as they earlier thought, AND complain that the CBO doesn't ever change its estimates. In addition, there are the other estimates from independent economic analysts that I cited earlier that are similar to the CBO's.

This whole line of argument is an attempt to fit facts to ideology, instead of starting with facts and then debating from there.

Quote me where I said that.

Well, your complaint is with those folks I guess.

Way to completely miss the point.

The $4.7B in tax increases will quickly be spent by the government culture that says that your ministers can spend $800k on private jets or that your bureaucrats can use taxpayer funds to splurge on lavish vacations and private parties.

Any deaths that result from this culture of government corruption lie on your hands. Your defence of these idiots (and yes, when you carry water for the establishment like this, you are part of the problem) creates the very Tea Party you hate.

Nobody would be complaining about tax hikes if they really thought that they were paying off debts that would otherwise be left to their children and grandchildren.

When you want to retrofit a house to use alternative energy, the first thing you do is ensure that you stop wasteful and inefficient energy usage before you go out and install solar panels. When you want to ask citizens to contribute more in taxes to fight the deficit and debt, it is incumbent on the government to show that the extra money will not be wasted.

And the Obama administration hasn't shown any such discipline. Quite the opposite actually.

We did it here in Canada, and got our debt situation under control. If you stop reciting talking points to win an election with this class warfare nonsense and concentrate on streamlining your government for the modern age, your social safety net would actually improve - even with funding cuts.

That's cute.

Tax increases ON THE RICH are the path to victory. Obviously Democrats just need to redefine rich to mean, anyone with a pulse. They have no qualms about raising taxes as long as they feel comfortable calling you a fat cat. Sure you might only be a $250k a year fat cat but you are still a fat cat per them.


We did get significant Republican cuts in the 90's. The government was shut down over them. Welfare reform was passed three times to get past the Clinton Veto pen. Bush did not do as well but again, he was considered "illegitimate" by some, buildings actually did come crashing down, people including Democrats did actually vote to support that war, and those bills were easily bipartisan. For example No Child Left Behind passed 91-8. The Medicare Drug benefit passed the Senate UNANIMOUSLY. That Senate was even controlled by Democrats (Jefford party switch) for two years.

The point is when the spending and wars started, it was nothing like now. There was no party of NO trying to slam the breaks on. The Democrats voted for all these things.


You get credit or blame based on how things go and that is pretty much the rule of politics. It isn't like Bush asked for the towers to come down or the dot com bubble to pop. I'm sure Obama didn't want the Housing Bubble to pop just before he was taking office (though I'm sure he was glad it helped him get elected) but the point is you can't say elect me for leadership and point fingers everywhere else.


I think you were away for some of my posts on this but if you look up me and Pax Americana, you will see we are in agreement.


It didn't start out as the worst recession. It has become that in part due to length. I'd argue that Obama policies exacerbated the problems and that relates to your bit down below.


Recessions are caused by imbalances in the economy attempting to right themselves. This no/limited pain approach has caused several problems. First it tends to simply plant the seeds of another looming bubble. Second we have created ever riskier moves because each time there is a problem we create various types of regulations and federal insurance type initiatives that then mitigate the risk on an institutional basis and allow it to finally show up when it becomes systemic.

Obama's measure largely attempted to sustain these imbalances and thus, in the view of myself and many people much better qualified than myself, extended the pain. Obama measures like home purchase credits, cash for clunkers, etc do not fix the reallocation that needs to occur.

Thanks for declaring it is legitimate argument though. Let me ask you this. If there were no Fannie, Freddie and Sallie for the banks to sell loans to, how many fewer bad home loans would there have been? How much more restraint would those banks have shown? How many people would keep their money in such banks engaged in such measures if the federal government were not insuring their deposits for them? Some point to ponder for you I hope.


Perhaps I'm reading it wrong but it doesn't suggest the CBO did anything different to their model which clearly was not forecasting accurate outcomes nor was the model set up to presume anything other than jobs saved, sustained or supported. Rather they just ran the model repeatedly with certain numbers every quarter. That doesn't make it an accurate model though. Again take this outside of the stimulus and it would be easy to see. GIGO updated with certain variables every three months is still GIGO.

Let me get this straight. You're claiming there was "no evidence" AIG's failure would have disastrous consequences? None? I suppose that is why the bailout was done on a bipartisan way and by 2/3 branches of government?

I love how you "argue."

I am saying that the risk was greatly over sold and that the consequences of "doing nothing" were not discussed with any degree of seriousness.

You've repeatedly claimed that it would be disastrous even "Armageddon". It seems the only "evidence" you've ever provided was that you saw some movie that said it would be and that the powers that be (who had a lot of power to gain by doing so) said so.

But, back to the point:

Then someone shouldn't have a hard time making that case. And yet...

OK, but I thought you were talking about just letting the whole thing expire. And Ds did have majority votes in both houses for what you suggest, but apparently you need a super-majority for everything now so it didn't pass.


Now wait a second. That Medicare expansion did not pass the Senate unanimously. And that was one of those votes in the House that failed, time was reversed, and then some people voted in favor of it after it closed. If you look at the votes link from that wikipedia article, almost all the Ds voted against it and almost all the Rs voted for it, in both houses.

But I want to make a broader point about spending. We spend a few %/GDP more than we take in, but that's been pretty continuous for decades. Even our big-ticket items like the war in Iraq and the stimulus go away very quickly and don't leave much of a dent, because they're temporary and the economy grows to make up for it.

We have ONE big spending problem, and only one: Health care. That's the only category that keeps growing and growing, much faster than the economy. Anyone who claims to be serious about spending should forget about everything else. They're all distractions, except health costs.

On this I agree, though I'd say it's a bit more broad to include entitlements and welfare generally.

But even if just healthcare...this is the huge debate: How is this rising cost issue to be dealt with?

I was talking about that. I was just highlighting the paradox within your reasoning there. You claim the Democrats would be lambasted and take losses for advocating for tax increases. Yet they took the losses anyway and are still spending all their time advocating for tax increases but just focus them as being on the rich. Since the Bush tax cuts were always argued as benefitting the rich disproportionately, their actions and message haven't changed at all.

So in short they've gone from taking losses and now spending their time, efforts and energies arguing for a $5 billion dollar tax increase on the rich. They could have taken their losses and spent no time, effort and energy arguing for tax increases on the rich and have taken $350 billion for their troubles. It doesn't make sense. Class rhetoric is class rhetoric and if they are going to engage in it, they are getting a terrible return on their efforts.


You are right on the vote out of conference. My mistake in that I looked at the initial vote out of the Senate.


Also the government engages in quite a bit of inflation but your point is largely true.


We are going to disagree on this one. There a dozens of problems and health care is certainly the largest but it is not one big one while the others are all minor. The point is that with Medicare, the promised benefits are clearly several times larger than the entire U.S. economy so there is no possible way to debt finance or inflate that obligation away. However this is also true of Social Security, pensions, bond obligations, etc. as well just not to such a ridiculously unimaginable degree.

I know in the past you've dismissed these claims declaring that it doesn't really matter because it is over 50 years or so but the reality is that when you are talking $60-70 trillion in unfunded obligations with a $10 trillion a year economy and the government borrowing a trillion a year, going long doesn't fix it. It's sort of like going long with cancer.

The airlines were in dire straights. You can argue that we should have let them fail, but not that they wouldn't have.


Agreed.


The PATRIOT Act is pretty much universally despised by libertarians, liberals and moderates alike...along with some conservatives. However, it was a direct response to the intelligence failures surrounding 9/11.


Agreed on the point of government thinking it needs to "do something," hence this. However, I do think we should have done something: Cut spending and taxes.


That one was a disgrace and completely unnecessary. We agree...there was no good reason to bail out these companies (on top of which, said bailout was horrendously flawed in structure).



I just don't think the TARP/AIG bailouts fit the mold. These were unprecedented and massive problems that posed a risk to the entire financial system, not just "bad" events where the government intervened.

You're right, it's the one exception.

Yet the only "evidence" you have of this is the rantings of politicians and the fact that 2/3 of our crony-capitalist government supported the bailouts.

List the provisions in the Patriot Act you find objectionable and unnecessary.



I'm not sure what you're rolling your eyes at. I don't support bailouts in general. I did support the TARP/AIG bailouts.




Lehman Brothers failed. Bear Sterns failed. Merrill Lynch failed. Washington Mutual failed. Wachovia failed. RBS failed. Credit markets, which businesses use to fund their day to day operations, were FROZEN. Car dealers were starting to not be able to get loans to finance consumer purchases and inventory. Even General Electric said that within days it was going to start having trouble funding its operations.

Massive numbers of bank failures and frozen credit markets is "no evidence?" Your claim is really that it was all some sort of scam dreamt up by our crony capitalist administration and congress? Dude, get real.

Yes. As I said, this is the one exception to the pattern I outlined.



Simply not true.



It's not evidence of Armageddon.



Dude, you get real.

This was the perfect opportunity for a power play. It happened. I doubt seriously that Rahm Emanuel is the only one who subscribes to the philosophy "Never let a serious crisis go to waste."

The bank failures and frozen credit markets were signs that the market was trying to correct itself in spite of the interest rate manipulation and money supply inflation going on at the Federal Reserve (which has never been held accountable for anything it has done).

Rather than let the market correct itself and let interest rates go up to discourage borrowing and encourage saving, the Fed pumped trillions of debt-based dollars into the economy - into these huge financial institutions, effectively "kicking the can down the road" instead of allowing the market to self-correct.

A massive correction is still coming, and it will be for all intents and purposes a severe economic collapse. All these bailouts have done is delay the inevitable and increase its severity and length when it finally does arrive.

But there is a way to prepare. It will be painful, but not as painful as it will be if we keep fooling ourselves that we can just continue doing the same things we've always done and expect different results.

It will require drastic cuts to government services that many depend on. It will require drawing down our overseas military presence and bringing our troops home. It will require living within our means. It will be difficult and painful, but it will be possible, and certainly less destructive and crippling than a total economic collapse.

 

 

Right.  The credit markets were not in dire straights at all.  It was all a lie...a power play.  Got it.  

 

 

The problem was that this was way beyond a market correction.  The bank failures threatened to take down the entire system because of their sheer size and number of banks collapsing.  Unlike you, I do not think economic Armageddon is a certainty, nor do I think it's all due to the Fed.  

 

By the way, the Paulites always love to throw in "drawing down our overseas military presence" in this discussion, because it fits your agenda.  The fact is that our military budget is not the problem.  It's far less as a percentage of GDP than it has been in the past.  The issue is overspending on government itself as well as unsustainable entitlement programs.  

 

 

I didn't claim there were not issues in the credit markets. You claimed (repeating the claims at that time) that they were "frozen". There are is evidence that this claim was simply not true.

 

You have no way to know this was way beyond a market correction" that is pure subjective conjecture. Period. You have no idea what amount of market correction was needed. You also say that like it is actually a valid counter-argument. You also keep repeating the same statements about the entire system coming down without providing any real evidence other than repeating what was claimed at that time.

 

 

Do we get to call you a "Romeny-ite"? 

 

Anyway "It's a far less percentage of GDP that it has been in the past" is a bullshit statement and I think you probably know why. I think you're trying to be clever here, but we'll see.

Edited by MJ1970 - 4/20/12 at 10:35am

 

 

You don't grasp the full extent to which our foreign policy affects everything else. The military industrial complex is pervasive and integrated into just about every aspect of our economy. "Military spending" is only a fraction of the money and resources we pour into maintaining our overseas empire and ever increasing "security measures" at home. Do the "military spending" figures include contracts granted to 3rd party and private firms? "Defense" spending?

 

The "unintended" consequences of our foreign policy are being used as justification to trample on civil liberties at home with ever-growing authoritarian bureaucracies such as the TSA. Money is required to fund these bureaucracies that only exist to "keep us safe" from the "terrorists" that arise (or are being fabricated) as a result of our aggressive, reckless, destructive foreign policy.