shootersa, you write the way Republican politicians talk to each other when they don't think anyone else is listening. I wish you wrote campaign literature and campaign speeches for Republican political candidates. This is not because I wish them well. It is because I wish them ill. I want the voters to learn what they really stand for.

I do not want the government to raise taxes on working class and middle class Americans. I want the government to raise taxes on upper class Americans. So do most Americans.

poll + rich + rich - Search (bing.com)

When the top tax rate never got below 70%, and when it was often much higher, the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) declined from 114% in 1945 to 32% in 1980.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/02inpetr.pdf

https://www.thebalance.com/national-debt-by-year-compared-to-gdp-and-major-events-3306287

 

In other words, you haven't got anything to say about my fact ased and logical argument.

 

Avoiding the question does not resolve anything. Attacking only deplorables for the debt is typical avoidance/projection.
It also does not resolve anything.

The harsh reality is that right now, today, we are adding at least $2 TRILLION to the debt EVERY YEAR.
The interest on the almost $36 TRILLION in CURRENT DEBT is the third largest budget item in the Federal Budget. That amount alone is $1 TRILLION.
A year.
U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time (usdebtclock.org)

The options are simple; reduce expenditures, increase revenues.
According to you, reducing expenditures is not a real option since no one can agree what should be cut.
I do not agree. We can cut the budget expense, and we must.

Now, according to you, the solution is to "tax the rich".
So, we need an additional $2 TRILLION in revenue ANNUALLY just to stop debt spending.
Mind you, raising revenue by $2 TRILLION does not pay down any part of the existing debt, nor does it reduce the amount of interest we are paying. It only gives us (temporarily) a balanced budget.

You have not identified who "the rich" are that should pay this additional $2 TRILLION.
As an alternative, until you define exactly who these "rich" are that you speak of, we need to look at what the real cost of a balanced budget is.
To raise an additional $2 TRILLION amounts to an additional $20,000 in tax PER TAXPAYER.

So the question remains; will you be paying that by check, or credit card?

Or are you hoping brandon will forgive your tax debt as he has student loans?

Or do you want the ILLEGAL MIGRANTS to pick up that tab for you?

 

@Distant Lover

Shooter has previously identified some areas of Federal spending that can be cut to help lower the Federal budget.

1) The Federal Government holds the distinction of being the largest holder of warehouse space, and also they are the largest customer for office furniture. Much of the warehouse space leased or owned by the Federal Government is used to store used office furniture, even as Federal agencies order more furniture. The government spends roughly $3.3 BILLION a year on office furniture. Is it unreasonable to ask bureaucrats to first see what office furniture is now available in these warehouses, and use that furniture, rather than buy new? Are a few scratches/dents in the furniture unacceptable?

2) When Covid started President Trump initiated a BONUS $600/week unemployment payment IN ADDITION TO the regular unemployment benefit. This meant that ANY UNEMPLOYED PERSON WHO FILED received an ATTITIONAL $600 EACH WEEK. An amazing amount since the average weekly unemployment benefit amount just then was $278. This meant that anyone making about $30,000 a year actually did better financially on unemployment than they did working. However, the real waste was that state agencies paid out an estimated $60 BILLION in fraudulent unemployment benefits to identity thieves who filed fraudulent claims and collected several weeks of these bonus unemployment benefits before the agency was able to identify them and stop them. Only a few of these thieves have been caught.
It isn't a priority, you see.

3) A federal program that helps farmers avoid practices that cause soil erosion employes 2,500 Federal employees. A GAO study found that in all the years of the programs existence, not a single farmer has improved their practices relative to soil erosion as a result of this program. Why you ask? Because in every state there are extension services and College programs that also help farmers with good soil erosion practices. The Federal program, you see, is redundant. And still exists today. Employing 2,500 very expensive Federal Employees. Why?

And we've all heard about the $700 toilet seats the military has to have, and the $400 hammers. In a budget of $7 TRILLION there is waste. A lot of waste. The easy part are the examples Shooter cited above. Beyond this, we have to rely on the bureaucrats who actually spend our tax money to identify and eliminate the waste and fraud that goes on. They know where the cuts can be made, and most of them, if pressed, will do their jobs. Just now, it's too easy to order new furniture rather than search in a warehouse. If pressed, they'll look first in the warehouse. Or do with what they have.

And if there are bureaucrats who don't want to do their jobs, we can replace them with people who do want to do the job.

The bottom line is this; In America we should have the government we need, want, and deserve, for $5 TRILLION a year. More than that is certainly waste. In fact, we should have the government we need, want, and deserve for a lot less than $5 TRILLION.

The current US GDP is $25 TRILLION. Shooter submits that we should be able to have the government we need, want, and deserve for no more than 10% of the US GDP, or $2.5 TRILLION. That's half of what we currently get in tax revenue, and roughly 1/3 of the current budget.

We can do that, Shooter thinks.

So, if Shooter were president he would demand of Congress that they do their job and give him a balanced budget with no NEW TAXES OR REVENUE SOURCES. And he'd hold them in session until they brought him a balanced budget. If they brought him a budget that wasn't balanced, Shooter would veto it and let Congress explain to the folks back home why they couldn't do their jobs.

 

Republican presidential candidates promise to do that, but none of them can for reasons I have already stated in this thread.



You can always point to this or that program that seem unnecessary. Nevertheless, the largest and most expensive programs are the most popular.

 

Idiot.
Despicable presidential candidates don't even pretend to care, do they?

Shooter keeps laying out the plan to stop debt spending and all the dog can do is shout
BUT TRUMP! BUT DEPLORABLES!

Not even a remote sense of concern about the debt. Get trump is all he can focus on.

That and mein campfire.

TWAT

 

Increasing the national debt has been a clever policy for the Republican Party. It has been caused by Republican tax cuts for the rich. It has made it difficult for Democrats to promote domestic spending policies that help their natural constituencies. Republicans benefit when lower income whites think, "The Democrats never did me any good. At least the Republicans won't take my guns."

 

Just more twisted lies and repeated leftwing propaganda... The Democrats never propose or even try to raise taxes on the so called "rich" when they are in power. They don't need to, because low IQ poorly educated liberals such as yourself will believe any bullshit lies they tell you and vote for them regardless...

 

President Reagan reduced the top tax rate to 28% in 1988. President Clinton raised it to 39.6% in 1993.

P:\WILLIS\Spring02\Articles and (irs.gov)

Don't mess with the Master of Facts. Remember, he knows more than you do.

 

The master of facts loves to use cherry picked facts or twisted logic.

He often proves that while figures never lie, liars figure



And of course the debt is now over $35 TRILLION, almost double what it was when Obama left office.

 

Just more twisted leftwing lies and propaganda...Clinton didn't increase taxes on the rich, he increased taxes on the middle class and the poor...


The Dangerous Myth About The Bill Clinton Tax Increase

One of the most dangerous myths that has infected the current debate over the direction of tax policy is the oft repeated claim that the tax increases under President Bill Clinton led to the boom of the 1990s. In their Wall Street Journal Op-Ed last Friday, for example, Clinton campaign manager James Carville and Democratic pollster and Clinton advisor Stanley Greenberg write the increase in the top tax rate to 39.6% “produced the one period of shared prosperity in this past era (since 1980).”

While this myth is now a central part of liberal Democratic folklore, it is contradicted by the political disaster and poor economic results that followed the tax increase. The real lesson of the Clinton Presidency is the way back to prosperity lies not through increased taxes on “the rich,” but through tax and regulatory reform and a return to a rules based monetary policy that produces a strong and stable dollar.

The 1993 Clinton tax increase raised the top two income tax rates to 36% and 39.6%, with the top rate hitting joint returns with incomes above $250,000 ($400,000 in 2012 dollars). In addition, it removed the cap on the 2.9% Medicare payroll tax, raised the corporate tax rate to 35% from 34%, increased the taxable portion of Social Security benefits, and imposed a 4.3 cent per gallon increase in transportation fuel taxes.

If these tax increases were good for the middle class, then they should have been popular. Yet, in the 1994 elections, the Democratic Party suffered historic losses. Even though Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell had declared the unpopular HillaryCare dead in September of that year, the Republican Party gained 54 seats in the House and 8 seats in the Senate to win control of both the House and the Senate for the first time since 1952.

Second, Messrs. Carville and Greenberg are contradicted by their former boss. Speaking at a fund raiser in 1995, President Clinton said: "Probably there are people in this room still mad at me at that budget because you think I raised your taxes too much. It might surprise you to know that I think I raised them too much, too."


During the first four years of his Presidency, real GDP growth average 3.2%, respectable relative to today’s economy, but disappointing coming as it did following just one year of recovery from the 1991 recession, the end of the Cold War and the reduction in consumer price inflation below 3% for the first time (with the single exception of 1986) since 1965.

For example, it was a half a percentage point slower than under Reagan during the four years following the first year of the recovery from the 1982 recession.

Employment growth was a respectable 2 million a year. But real hourly wages continued to stagnate, rising only 2 cents to 7.43 an hour in 1996 from $7.41 in 1992. No real gains for the middle class there.

Federal government receipts increased an average of $90 billion a year while the annual increase in federal spending was constrained to $45 billion. That led to a $183 billion, four-year reduction in the budget deficit to $107 billion in 1996.

However, with his masterful 1995 flip-flop on taxes, President Clinton took the first step toward a successful campaign for re-election and a shift in policy that produced the economic boom that occurred during his second term.

• Welfare reform, which he signed in the summer of 1996, led to a massive reduction in the effective tax rates on the poor by ameliorating the rapid phase out of benefits associated with going to work.
• The phased reduction in tariff and non-tariff barriers between the U.S., Mexico and Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement continued, leading to increased trade.
• In 1997, Clinton signed a reduction in the (audible liberal gasp) capital gains tax rate to 20% from 28%.
• The 1997 tax cuts also included a phased in increase in the death tax exemption to $1 million from $600,000, and established Roth IRAs and increased the limits for deductible IRAs.
• Annual growth in federal spending was kept to below 3%, or $57 billion.
• The Clinton Administration also maintained its policy of a strong and stable dollar. Over his entire second term, consumer price inflation averaged only 2.4% a year.

The boom was on. Between the end of 1996 and the end of 2000:

• Economic growth accelerated a full percentage point to 4.2% a year.
• Employment growth nudged higher, to 2.1 million jobs per year as the unemployment rate fell to 4.0% from 5.4%.
• As the tax rate on capital gains came down, real wages made their biggest advance since the implementation of the Reagan tax rate reductions in the mid 1980s. Real average hourly earnings were (in 1982 dollars) $7.43 in 1996, $7.55 in 1997, $7.75 in 1998, $7.86 in 1999, and $7.89 in 2000.
• Millions of Americans shared in the prosperity as the value of their 401(k)s climbed along with the stock market, which saw the price of the S&P 500 index rise 78%.
• Revenue growth accelerated an astounding 59%, increasing on average $143 billion a year. Combined with continued restraint on government spending, that produced a $198 billion budget surplus in 2000.

Shared prosperity indeed! But one created not by raising tax rates on high income but not yet rich middle class families, and certainly not by raising the capital gains tax rate or by imposing the equivalent of the Buffett rule, a new alternative minimum tax of 30% on incomes over $1 million, nor by massively increasing federal spending.

Rather, it was a prosperity produced by freeing America’s poor from a punitive welfare system, lowering tariffs, reducing tax rates on the creators of wealth, limiting the growth of federal government expenditures, and providing a strong and stable dollar to businesses and families in America and throughout the world.

A shared prosperity can be achieved again. But to do so, the American people will have to overcome the envy feeding myth perpetrated by President Barack Obama and the spin-masters and leadership of the Democratic Party that raising tax rates on high incomes will somehow lead to more job creation, more opportunity and increased prosperity and security for the middle-class.

 

The rise in the national debt was minimal under Carter and Clinton. It grew under Obama and Biden because Congressional Republicans prevented the massive tax increases in upper class taxation that will be needed to turn the situation around.

On several occasions I have pointed out that tax increases for the rich and spending increases on specific domestic spending programs are popular with the voters. Why do I have to keep repeating the same facts?

 

You did not have the honesty to attribute this to the source:
The Dangerous Myth About The Bill Clinton Tax Increase (forbes.com)

I knew you were not capable of this, so I did a google search for the real author.

Reading through this word salad I did find this:

• "The phased reduction in tariff and non-tariff barriers between the U.S., Mexico and Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement continued, leading to increased trade."
• What do you think of Trump's plan to raise tariffs?

 

Trump's plan to raise tariffs on selective countries that have an unfair and unbalanced trade deficit with the US does not include countries covered under the 'North American Free Trade Agreement'....

So now that I have answered your question, you can answer one of mine.... What do you think of the Democrats plan to raise taxes on social security and other low wage earners?

Harris backs a social security proposals put forth by biden. This includes a recent call by biden for the 12.4% payroll tax to be reinstated on earned income wages and salary including tips.....

 

I have not found verification that Biden and Harris intend to tax Social Security for low income people.

 

Nearly everything that one can find in a department store was made in China. Raising tariffs on Chinese goods will raise the price of consumer items most Americans buy.

 

You haven't found verification Trump intends to lower taxes for the rich....

But that doesn't stop you from making false claims and posting leftwing propaganda.

 

Your love for China is noted....

People like you are part of the problem. You're hooked on cheap Chinese junk.

Besides, China has way more tariffs against US goods by comparison when you look at the US/China trade deficit.

How do you propose the US solve this trade imbalance problem?