Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....
BTW - the idea of "revenues go up after tax cuts" is a stupid and easily disproven one. Revenue goes up as [or "if"?] the economy tends to grow year over year. Hence they are unrelated occurances.
Huh? you say it is "easily disproven" in one sentence and then say in the next sentence that revenue
does go up after tax cuts because the economy grows? Some might call that correlation.
I've never argued "direct causation" I've limited myself to "correlation." Others
do argue that the tax cuts lead to economic growth which leads to increased revenues, as you describe.
Also, you completely misrepresent what I've been consistently saying. I'm not saying and never have said we need to reduce taxes any further; I've said that tax policy based on non-economic goals such as revenue redistribution, however noble the idea, is ineffective in practice. I've said even more clearly that the problems are all on the spending side, and this goes to both parties' lack of consistency, and both parties' desire to pander to their respective bases.
Most people don't realize that the so-called "rich" are more an artifact of prior year tinkering with the tax code. At one time, most small businesses were organized as C-corporations, so that corporate income did not appear on individual tax returns. However, tax code manipulation then drove many small business owners to re-organize as "pass-through" entities for tax purposes instead. Suddenly, corporate income is appearing on the owners' personal tax returns instead of on a separate corporate tax return. Economically, nothing has changed, but suddenly, overnight, "the rich"
appear to be a lot richer, even though nothing has changed. I will bet everyone here however much they want to bet that as soon as the top personal tax rate is increased, while corporate tax rates are decreased (Obama has already signed off on the latter, you know) "the rich" will re-organize their businesses and business income will no longer appear on the owners' tax returns, it will again appear on the separate corporate tax returns instead. The personal income of "the rich" will then decline, and tax revenues will decrease instead of increase. Meanwhile, those of us who are wage slaves and don't have the opportunity to reorganize our cash flows will disproportionately bear the burden. I will give you a double-or-nothing bet that when the anticipated revenue increases from raising taxes on "the rich" fail to materialize, taxes on the rest of us will go up.
Now, just because I can look at the world in a hard-headed way does not also make me hard-hearted. I agree that a skewed income distribution is unhealthy for society. I merely think that government compulsion is the wrong way to fix it because you can be sure we will merely have government overlords as the new rich. That trend is as old and as predictable as human nature.
Now I don't mean for this to sound like I am saying you are well-intentioned yet naive, because that doesn't quite convey what I mean to say. I am not as adept in English as many of you, and so my formal stilted attempts to express myself in English do not always adequately capture what I am trying to communicate.
