I am a poor student, and I got back all of my federal income tax and a $400 de facto welfare check from Obama. From a purely self-interested perspective, that might seem great. But when considered more holistically, it is unjust. Not only am I allowing the wealthy to shoulder my part of the tax burden, but I am accepting nothing short of a wealth transfer from those whose efforts contribute to the GDP and buttress the value of the dollar and the national account from which Obama is drawing. In short, Obama (and Bush, with his tax credits at the end of his second term) is very generous in giving what is not his to give.

"[A democracy] can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury." - Alexander Tyler

Sounds like a go-wait, did you say taxes?!?!?!?!

SLAVERY!

TYRANNY!

SOCIALISM!

GLOBAL WARMING IS A LIBERAL HOAX!

Actually, I agree. I'm not picky about carbon tax vs. cap & trade, but I think a key way to help sell it to people would be for the taxes collected to be put into tax credits for everyone.

Liberals should probably wave something like "if you want to abolish the income tax some day, you need to get behind environmental impact taxes" in front of Republicans and see what happens.

It's probably the only way you'd convince the left to give up progressive income taxes and go towards a consumption tax.

Of course we need a stronger safety net, but this is a shitty way to construct the safety net. Unemployed people should be paid to to learn vocational skills from general treasury money from a single progressive income tax. Unemployment Taxes, sales taxes, social security taxes, medicare taxes, etc are not adequately progressive, and harm the poor. Employers should be free to hire and fire anyone they please for any reason they please with no strings attached. All the restrictions on firing make employers ridiculously circumspect about hiring so that it is actually much harder to get a job and much harder to start a business.

The sheer amount of time people waste figuring out if they qualify for benefits A through Z and filling out the paper work for each one wastes time that could be spent doing something productive. All this shit needs to be consolidated. I'm tired of seeing pages and pages of shit like a $50 tax credit for one-legged zebras on my 1040.

Fuck all the little deductions and pork. Just make annual personal income after taxes = 10k + 0.6*(income before taxes), including capital gains, employer benefits, inheritance, gifts, and absolutely every other source of income in the same pool for that "income before taxes". A 1% annual net worth tax would be fine too.

Subsidies are always rife with waste and contrivances to conform to the letter but not the spirit of the regulation. So instead of giving tax credits to barely efficient cars, just tax fossil fuels themselves. Instead of tax credits for people who bought well-insulated houses, tax the builders in proportion to how shitty their insulation is.

Absolutely retarded, the only reason this crap was even adopted by California companies is because of "green" tax credits of almost 50% and hippie-ass public relations.

Noam himself is a Social Libertarian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

Do not let the media fool you into believing that the original Libertarians were Republican hacks.

There was a time when there were no Republicans in the T.E.A movement. The movement, as I was told, spawned from End The FED. To which it promptly grew into a hack convention for the Conservative Right, all of which thought it was a good platform for their candidates. When it was highly televised by Fox News is when it became a rampant goat fuck. Agent K said something like the following about people as a group.

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow. -Agent K

My problem is, I'm sick of forking over 2,000 dollars at the end of every year to cover programs that I'm not even benefiting from.

Married? There's a tax credit for that! Own a house? There's a tax credit for that. Have children? There's a tax credit for that! You name it there might be a tax credit for that.

Own a house? There's a tax for that. Own a car? There's a tax for that. Have a school in your neighborhood? There's a tax for that! You name it they probably have a tax for it.

Hey! You have a job? There's a tax for that! Whooo doggie! We got taxes for everything! Just you wait! Next we plan on taxing your existence!

Maybe it's me, but I'm sick of paying all of these taxes and servicing the country's debt.

One important note: Yes I know that a government cannot function without taxes. But when that government is a major source of jobs it has grown too powerful.

>> ^gwiz665:
Marriage is an outdated institution, which only exists as a remnant of the dark ages, where women where slaves. It should just be dismantled altogether.


There are good things tied to marriage -- Visitation rights and certain tax credits, for instance. One can make a decent case for placing those things in the realm of civil unions, but the word and concept of "marriage" is pretty powerful. There was an interesting piece done for On The Media about marriage specifically covering some of the concept's history and the battles fought over it. Interested parties can find the transcript here:

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/11/14/02

>> ^EndAll:
I at least contributed more than an "Exactly." and offered my opinions and perspective in a respectable manner, while you go the route of mocking me with snarky sarcasm and evade any real response to what I said.


Because I don't generally see any point in debating empty rhetoric with anything other than snark. Otherwise I'd be on LGF all day trying to convince people that Obama isn't a secret muslim, and Soros doesn't control the media.

This flourish of "the worlds wealthiest and most powerful people" is either misinformed, or just empty rhetoric. It's so easy to be willfully ignorant of actual achievements people make when you already hate them.

Here's a few things Obama has done thus far, that I'm not sure how they benefit the "most powerful":

• $19billion for electronic medical records
• Stopped the anti-missile defense plan in Poland
• The Obama administration and Russia announced plans to begin talks on a new START treaty to reduce nuclear arsenals to approximately 1,500.
• Signed an executive order to close CIA secret prisons.
• Signed an executive order to ban torture and subject all interrogations to Army Field Manual Standards that conform to the Geneva Conventions.
• $2,500.00 tax credit for college students
• $2billion for advanced car battery R&D
• $2 billion for Byrne Grants, which funds anti-gang and anti-gun task forces.
• Public Land Management Act of 2009 has put under federal protection more than two million acres of wilderness, thousands of miles of river and a host of national trails and parks. The conservation effort - the largest in the last 15 years - came with the stroke of a pen
• Obama's meetings with Turkish and Armenian officials, Turkey and Armenia announced plans to normalize relations.
• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attended Gaza aid conference, pledging $900 million in aid in order to "foster conditions in which a Palestinian state can be fully realized."


There's more, but it apparently doesn't matter to a lot of people. Unless he's ended both invasions/occupations of Afgh/Iraq, personally kidnapped and murdered those responsible for the economic clusterfuck, landed Bush/Cheney in the Hague for war crimes, and given everyone a beautiful pony, he hasn't done shit!

Kudos for Fran Drescher for being active in any sense and having more civility than Hannity. But, I don't see the problem with tort reform and HSAs. Tax credits for one is a tax on another. "faux new..." blah, blah, blah...very tiring. I don't need to watch Fox news; it runs here constantly. I guess I should be watching Keith Uberass and the rest of the msnbc clowns...where the real truth is.

Rep. Jenkins: I think we can agree we need reforms, again it’s just how we gonna do it. I believe people should be given the opportunity to take care of themselves with an advancebale tax credit to go be a grown-up and go buy the insurance.

Oh, so then you're in favor of the Obama plan which mostly just gives people a subsidy to buy private insurance, along with consumer protections that guarantee eligibility?

No? Is it the fact that it's using the word "subsidy" instead of "advanceable tax credit"? We can change the language to use the Republican name for entitlement programs, but it won't make a bit of difference in terms of the effect.

I do taxes for a living, have done 35 years (I started young.) It is, indeed, horrible how complex the system has become during my lifetime.

Being on the "inside" so to speak, I also see WHY it has gotten so complex. A tax law is written, the smart folks figure out how to use it to avoid tax. So that "loophole" is plugged, the smart folks figure out how to work around that, and new laws are generated.

Some of those tax laws that are written were indeed intended to "socially engineer," a complexity that then begats more complexity. I don't think that is a bad thing, necessarily. My uber-conservative brother installed solar panels on his roof because the cost was offset by state and federal tax credits. He is now a net-producer of energy, rather than a consumer of energy (California buys back his unused energy produced.)

Some of the complexity is indeed region specific or industry specific and is a boondoggle of the worst ilk-- you can tell. I can't remember the details, but there was something that was passed a few years back -- some credit for airplanes (or something) built (or sold) for the very specific period of time. It was clearly crap, clearly designed for one company in a Congress member's district.

Can you say line item veto? That would cut down on a huge number of abuses on all levels, and make it clear some of the more egregious backroom deals that are going on.

As far as a flat tax, that is just insane. Example -- a family of four has wage income of $25,000. 10% flat tax is $2,500.

Or you have a family of four with wage income of $250,000 and interest and dividend income of $25,000. Their 10% comes to $27,500. That $2,500 is a much much bigger number to the first family of four than the $27,500 is to the second. How much in savings and stocks do you think $25,000 in interest and dividends represent???

What they don't say in the video is that most tax payers get the lower rates, too. The first chunk you make is taxed at 10%, the next at 15%. So most taxpayers enjoy the lower rates.

What pisses me off right now -- sorry to change the direction of the argument -- is the bowing down to capital at the expense of labor that is embodied in the current code. The last stage of Bush's tax cuts became activated this year.

I ran two scenarios through the tax software at work.

First scenario -- married couple, no children, $80,000 in wages, no itemized deductions (social engineering embodied). Their tax - including payroll taxes -- was $14,000 if memory serves. I know it was 18% of gross -- a tax rate that would be the envy of most other countries.

Second scenario -- married couple, no children, $80,000 in dividends from corporations. Same cash inflow, but from millions in stocks rather than going to work every day for 50 weeks out of the year. Their tax for the year? $200. TWO HUNDRED MEASLY BUCKS. I can't hardly stand it.

Bowing down to capital. Poor poor rich people who are taxed twice on dividends -- once at the corporate level and then again on a personal level. Let's spare them that horrifying situation, poor poor rich people.

Flat tax is horribly regressive. Sales tax is horribly regressive. The current code -- horribly complicated.

But remember, you folks who hate taxes so much -- remember where the internet started. It wouldn't be here without having been developed at the government level first. Roads. Schools. The university you went to.

Before I get into a more serious commentary, I just want to point out that blankfist, supposed proponent of Austrian economics, upvoted this comment:

>> ^deedub81:
More about the Merril Lynch investment bankers I met with today:
In short, they felt that we don't need to worry too much about inflation unless a few more things go wrong. As things stand, we shouldn't worry. Because of all the debt that is being absorbed and written off through the bailouts and the slack that has been created in the economy due to the trend toward smaller leveraging raitos, the amount of money that the government is creating is balanced out.

Which leads me to wonder, blankfist, why are you now upvoting someone who's using Keynesian theory to say inflation won't be a problem? You're supposed to declare that the Fed, and everything the government does leads to inevitable ruin!

>> ^deedub81:
I just spent the last 3 hours (I just walked in the door) with Merril Lynch associates and had the whole economic mess explained to me in great detail. I think I get it pretty well now. I'm all good with the whole AIG bailout. I'm clear that the government's hands were pretty well tied there. I'm all for re-instating some of the restrictions that were loosened in the 90's and in 2004.

This is good news. I'm not sure why you believe it when it comes out of Merrill's mouth, since it's government action that stands to directly benefit them, and not the governments' when it said the exact same thing, but I'll try not to look the gift horse of common ground in the mouth.

(I would quibble slightly about the necessity of bailing out AIG vs. bailing out their counterparties, but it's water under the bridge now)

I'm not so sure about bailing out GM, Cap and Trade, Health Care (horrible timing is just one reason), and no help for the small businesses.

I'm not so sure about GM either, but really the "bailout" is just government providing credit for them to go into Chapter 11, rather than having them be forced into Chapter 7. When you look at it that way, it makes a lot more sense. Fewer people lose their jobs, and lots of small businesses that supply/support the auto industry's infrastructure get to keep their businesses as well.

Health care is probably worthy of it's own full-length discussion thread, but here's the short version of why I think it's desperately necessary, and the timing is perfect for it. We pay more per capita for healthcare in this country than any other. However, our healthcare outcomes rank somewhere down below mid-pack for industrialized nations. In countries with a more intrusive government plan for healthcare, people never go bankrupt for the care they receive, and never have an incentive to avoid getting treatment or preventive care. There are lots of different systems out there, and all of them combine government and private programs in varying degrees (including ours). Most of what's different in other countries is that they have made explicit changes to try to keep a lid on costs, and to remove perverse incentives from the system (such as a profit motive for denying care).

The key pillars of the Democratic proposals are a) an employer mandate to provide insurance (small business excluded), b) laws against denying insurance coverage, c) a public option, where essentially the government sells medicare to people under 65. I bolded the word sells, because it will not be taxpayer subsidized. There would be a separate subsidy for people with low incomes, but they are free to purchase a private plan with the subsidy if they so choose.

This is already longer than I wanted, but lastly the reason why it's important now is because if we don't do anything, the costs will just continue to increase, and more and more people will lose their coverage as their employers drop their plans. Also, we have a huge number of people who've lost their jobs, and are unlikely to be able to afford COBRA payments for very long. There's also the problem with medicare and medicaid -- if costs keep rising like they are, we're headed for a huge set of tax increases in the future, or a huge cut in benefits (and no one will want either). If we fix the cost problem, we may have fixed our long-range deficit issues. There's also the matter of Democrats having the House, 60 votes in the Senate, and the White House, and who knows when there will be a better chance to finally get this done.

Cap and trade I'm worried about the timing on. The plan as it is now is very weak though, and most of the carbon "credits" are being given away for free. CBO says the current plan will cost people an average of $175/yr over the next 10 years. That's about the price of mailing a letter a day. In return it will reduce emissions by 20% by 2021. There's a bit of progressive wealth distribution going on in terms of who pays for it, the bottom 20% income group will receive a tax credit which should actually more than offset the costs of the cap.

As for small business, the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act (the cap & trade bill), yours may not get special treatment, but there will be subsidies offered to businesses who will work on clean energy technology (e.g. carbon offsets, wind, solar, battery tech, etc.).

Personally, I think it's a shame we didn't put that in place 30 years ago, and I don't think we can put it off any longer, but the timing will definitely work against it.

Large corporations use auctions and corporate bonds to increase liquid assets, small businesses use credit card and bank loans. Because of the bailouts, large corporations and banks are starting to thaw and we're seeing movement and lending between banks. What we don't see is increased loans and cash flow to the lifeblood of America: small businesses.

Why do you think we aren't seeing that happen?

How can you not see how terrible Obama's timing is? How can he promise that he won't raise taxes on people who make under $250,000/year with all of the government expansion that he's heading up? How can you not see that congress is out of control?

I've already given my answer on timing, and the "out of control" bit too. The problem with the accusation of "expansion of government" coupled with concern about taxes is a bit misplaced. The goal with healthcare is to make it revenue neutral, and stave off large future expansions. Ditto for Cap and trade. We'll see if Obama can keep his tax promise, but remember, us under $250k people have had our taxes go down so far under Obama.

Knowing how this goes, Obama will almost certainly be accused of breaking that promise by 2012 (The "OMG, he raised taxes on cigarettes!!!" is already making the rounds), but I suspect that he's going to bend over backwards to keep it.

I feel like we've got a bunch of ignoramuses and corrupt punks running the show. They act in behalf of the highest bidder. They cheat on their wives, they cheat on their taxes, they lie through their teeth, and they're stealing food right off of my family's table!

So find better politicians and get 'em elected. In the meantime I would suggest that Republicans have Democrats beat on ignorance, corruption, influence peddling, cheating on wives, cheating on taxes, lies, and theft (from us and other nations).

>> ^NetRunner:
I wonder how one claims that tax credit.


Start by tipping 25 cents on all bills.

Continue by interrupting people midsentence.

Finalize by denying climate change.

I wonder how one claims that tax credit.

Enoch is right. The health insurance industry/lobby is failing and abusing us dramatically. In large part, this is because they fail to acknowledge what "insurance" is. Insurance is supposed to be for when something goes badly wrong. Car insurance companies do not pay for maintenance tune-ups, new wipers, signal lights and brake pads, even though those can all prevent accidents. Why then does health insurance cover those? Answer: it makes them more money. The more they get their dirty fingers into our health care, the more money they make. But that's more money that goes to a middle man and is spent on bureaucracy instead of into doctors' pockets. This is causing rising prices and decreasing numbers of doctors due to higher workload for less pay.

Let's be clear. Insurance is for alleviating the cost of *problems* by spreading risk across a population. Insurance is NOT for checkups, vaccinations and allergy meds. You can try to rationalize that those reduce later costs, but the evidence i'm seeing out there is rising costs and reduced physician availability. The proof is in the pudding.

So, what to do? I'm fine with the government financing health insurance and even regular health care. No issues. I'm not fine with the government running both of those through greedy insurance companies and complicated bureuacracies. I like their compassion for the poor and sick. I despise their need for control. I do believe the free market can do it better. But for that to happen, we have to do a few things:

1) finance it via tax credits (deductions for the rich, rebates for the poor) so that individuals maintain control of spending, but have at least a portion of it ultimately paid by the government. thus we have both freedom AND compassion. oh, and this must include Medicare/Medicaid.

2) ending the employer tax breaks for providing health care. this is sand in the free market gears, as it reduces the number of choices happening.

3) educate people that the "we pay for every little thing" plans are not financially sound. because, they're not, especially if #1 is put in place.

oh, and the whole abortion debate is handled on preposterously unscientific grounds most of the time. it's plain as day that unborn "fetuses" are very much human children long before they are born. my son was born at 24 weeks. would he really have been "just a fetus" that my wife had some "right to kill" for the next 16 weeks were he not premature? Heck, i saw my daughter on ultrasound at 8.5 weeks. She already looked very human (just with an oversized head) and was moving around. Where on earth do we get the idea that human rights should only start at birth? Maybe that seemed sensible 30 years ago, but it's seems scientifically ignorant given all we've learned about life in utero since. I would much rather see the "right to abortion" at least end at a more sensible stage of development, like 8 or maybe 12 weeks. That's plenty of time to make a choice.

We already have half-socialized medicine, with Medicare and Medicaid. The prices and incentives for doctors (esp. primary care physicians) are already totally out of wack. The government created this problem, and ironically are claiming that more government involvement is the solution.

If the government really wants to fund health care, they should do it via tax credits. Make all health care expenses deductible. This makes health care vastly more affordable and yet maintains free market forces on prices. It also greatly reduces bureaucratic overhead dramatically, thereby lightening the workload of physicians and patients alike.