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But the really surprising thing about the no-more-tax consensus is how much of an outlier it makes the United States compared both with the rest of the world and with itself in recent history. When it comes to foreign policy or to global economic dominance, American exceptionalism may indeed be in jeopardy. But when it comes to taxes, the United States is quite different from most other Western industrialized economies.
"October 2011 marks two events in the Republican Party that political observers from ten years ago would have claimed were utterly impossible: first, an African-American man is leading in the polls for the Republican nominee for president. Second, the same GOP frontrunner openly admits he wants to hike taxes on most Americans."
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No, the new conservative religion is the cult of Objectivism. GOP legislators and even conservative Supreme Court members force Rand's books on their clerks and staff members. A John Galt who has never held elected office currently leads in the polls--the second such dalliance Republican voters have already made with a corporate CEO this cycle alone.
"The Congressional Research Service found that 200,000 millionaires — almost two-thirds of taxpayers with taxable income above $1 million — paid a lower tax rate (combining income and payroll taxes) than the typical taxpayer making less than $100,000."
"The real jaw dropper is this person’s proposals about the benefits of big business: Big business creates products, jobs, and wealth. How can anyone who has watched the last fifty plus years of deregulation believe this? What fantasy world are they living in? Under deregulation we’ve seen the massive disappearance of jobs as they’re shipped elsewhere where production is far cheaper (meaning that it is of little help to either the people who take over those jobs nor, obviously, to those that lose them). In the United States we have seen massive wage stagnation for decades. We have also seen a significant growth in unemployment. We have also seen a massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Finally, we have witnessed recurrent unstable markets that endlessly go through boom and bust cycles. All of these phenomena are a direct consequence of “pro-business” policies premised on the idea of trickle down economics where it is assumed that deregulation, lower taxes, etc., will produce jobs and wealth for all. The exact opposite is true."
"But mostly what happens, what the Republicans expect to happen because they work to make it happen, is that people either don’t allow themselves to think about it or they scapegoat.
They don’t have to think about their kids, don’t have to worry about them. Their kids are going to be fine. Their kids and grandkids are going to be among the winners. It’s their kids who’ll suffer. Them. Those others. The losers."
"This liberty-order distinction is instructive, but it got me thinking: it’s simply incorrect to imply that American conservatism tilts unequivocally in “live free or die” directions. Here I would call attention to David Sehat’s book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, about the rise and fall of the American Protestant moral establishment. Sehat points out that, insofar as the Christian Right has mobilized since the 1960s to reassert a moral establishment in the midst of an increasingly secular and individualistic public sphere, it is hardly libertarian. "
The pseudo-economists of the Tax Foundation, likewise, propose a radical alteration of the world as we know it, but fail to explore, appreciate or allow for the implications of that alteration. They propose a world without taxes, which is to say a world without government. Yet in their very next breath they suggest that this alternate reality -- this world without any taxes, without any government -- would be so utterly similar to our current reality that easy comparisons can be made.
That's insane.
Nonetheless, we can draw some conclusions. High top tax rates did not create tax havens.
Many will argue that tax havens arose as a response to high taxes. Tax havens came into play after top rates had fallen significantly. To argue that 50% tax rates or higher--say 70% or even 90%--forced the wealthy to go elsewhere is not exactly persuasive.
For the rich, effective federal tax rates fall throughout the century. The top one percent was paying around 45 percent in 1960, and that's fallen to around 37 percent. But the real action has been in the subgroups above the top one percent: The top hundredth of a percent was paying above 70 percent of their income, and now they're only a touch above 40 percent
Their data makes government spending look a lot more effective than tax cuts. You can see that even with the tax cuts, those that are most effective are those that target low income, rebates for those don’t pay federal income taxes or payroll tax holiday.
in list: Economic Crisis
I only wish she had been asked: “Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed? If it isn’t from tax revenues, there are only two ways to pay for those big projects — printing more money or borrowing more money. Do you think borrowing money from China is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?” That is not putting America first. That is selling America first.
The problem is this: a tax cut that provides a million dollars to a single individual or a single dollar to a million individuals still pumps a million dollars into the economy. So what justifies giving so much of it to one rich guy instead of spreading it across a million regular people?
Only the conservative belief that the rich acquired their money by exercising greater virtue than the rest of us. While trickle-down economics theory can be used to mask a raw power grab, it is also a philosophy of moral superiority which many conservatives have come to truly believe. It credits the wealthy not only with financial savoir-faire, but with character excellence: the rich are not just financially wise, but morally good, because they use their resources in ways that promote, instead of harming, the general welfare.
in list: Economic Crisis
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