The Republicans and America won huge today!!

archer wrote:

PrintSmith wrote: Total increase in spending required for Obama's signature: $156 Billion
Total increase in revenue from tax increases: $88 Billion
Total unfunded increased spending required for Obama's signature: $70 Billion

I dunno there SDS, it seems like all the increased spending was done as a compromise for Obama's signature to avoid raising income taxes. I'm not necessarily happy with it, but I understand that a compromise involving progressives is going to cost something in the way of increased spending.

no where do I see the cost of extending the tax cuts to the wealthy enumerated.......that's the cost the Republicans added to this spending bill and it dwarfs what the democrats brought. Or if you don't like the term "spending" consider it as loss of income, the result is the same. The gov't does not have this money to lose.

There is no cost associated with keeping things as they are. If you are expecting a raise that you didn't get, you haven't really lost anything now, have you. You are still being paid the same amount as you have been paid in the past, so there is no loss.

The same logic applies with the income tax rates. There is no cost associated with keeping the existing rates in place. There might have been an increase if the current rates set by law were allowed to expire and the rates went up, but the only way to know for sure would have been to raise the rates and then count the revenue once it had been collected. Sometimes tax rate increases actually reduce the total amount of revenue collected. Raising tax rates is not guaranteed to result in increased tax revenues so it would be a fallacy of logic to associate the failure to raise the tax rates with a specified amount of "lost" revenue that the increased rates would have generated. I know that logic isn't the preferred method of debate amongst progressives because so many of their arguments are destroyed when it is employed, just as it is in this instance.

Let me see if I understand this correctly. If the tax cuts were to expire, the government would take in an extra $900 billion over the next two years, which could be applied to pay down the deficit or at least help balance the budget.

Instead of that added income, we now have the same income as before, but the budget deficit remains the same. So, in essence, you are celebrating that we have given the government a pay cut (when it was expecting an increase), which will add to our deficit by $900 billion over the next two years.

You're calling this a victory, Viking? It's a good thing to increase the deficit? Aren't you the one who is constantly harping on fiscal restraint?

The cost began the moment the Bush tax cuts were enacted without a corresponding cut in spending. The budget surplus went from almost $300 billion to a deficit within two years. The deficit will most certainly continue to increase, particularly under the proposed Republican plan, as long as the tax cuts continue without a corresponding cut in spending. There is no way that Republicans can credibly pretend that their plan is fiscally responsible. The only credible argument that can be made is to provide the middle class with reduced taxes and the unemployed with benefits in order to improve the economy (as leading economists have stated), but the tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent will do nothing for the national economy. If the economy could support tax cuts for all, then I say go for it, but until the economy improves and the nation gets on a sound fiscal footing, it is irresponsible to increase the deficit without improving the economy.

Scruffy wrote: Let me see if I understand this correctly. If the tax cuts were to expire, the government would take in an extra $900 billion over the next two years, which could be applied to pay down the deficit or at least help balance the budget.

Instead of that added income, we now have the same income as before, but the budget deficit remains the same. So, in essence, you are celebrating that we have given the government a pay cut (when it was expecting an increase), which will add to our deficit by $900 billion over the next two years.

You're calling this a victory, Viking? It's a good thing to increase the deficit? Aren't you the one who is constantly harping on fiscal restraint?

Unfortunately Scruffy, you don't understand it correctly. IF (yes, a big if) income remained the same for the next two years and IF the taxes on everyone had been raised to the previous rates, then yes, there would be an additional amount of money in the treasury than there will be now. What you, and other progressives seeking to vilify their political opponents, fail to understand is that there are an awful lot of ifs in that equation that can't be guaranteed and thus the logic used to obtain that $900 Billion figure is as faulty as the progressive ideology has always been.

The tax rates would have had to revert to their former levels for everyone for that figure to be realized. The "cost" of keeping the tax rates the same for everyone making less than $250K, which is what the Democrats wanted, would have been in excess of $300 billion per year if all of the ifs in the equation were correct. What the progressives are now doing is taking that amount and attempting to lay it all at the feet of their political rivals. The "cost" of extending the tax rates for only the evil rich, accepting for the sake of argument all of the ifs in the equation, was affixed at $70 Billion per year. However, if all of the tax rates had gone up, the evil rich would have paid, in addition to the extra 5% being tacked onto the highest existing bracket, all of the additional percentage points on the lower amounts as well making their total tax increase much higher than the 5% that would have come to $70 Billion dollars if only the highest income tax brackets experienced the increase. To this the progressives have also attached the total amount of increased spending the president insisted upon to affix his signature and laid it solely at the feet of the Republican party in a feeble attempt to blame their political rivals for every cent and distance themselves from their share of the responsibility for the vast majority (about $760 Billion of the $900 Billion) represented in the bipartisan compromise. If the Democrats in Congress and the President had been able to cram down their plan as they had with Obamacare, the "cost" of their doing so would have been about $600 Billion for the extension of the Bush income tax rates for everyone making less than $250K a year, plus the 13 months of unemployment welfare extension, plus the 2% tax cut on the tax levied for the privilege of being employed and you would have heard one peep out of them about how they had just added $760 Billion to the deficit.

That's a lot of spinning to turn black into white, or is it red ink onto black?

Something the Dog Said wrote: The cost began the moment the Bush tax cuts were enacted without a corresponding cut in spending. The budget surplus went from almost $300 billion to a deficit within two years. The deficit will most certainly continue to increase, particularly under the proposed Republican plan, as long as the tax cuts continue without a corresponding cut in spending. There is no way that Republicans can credibly pretend that their plan is fiscally responsible. The only credible argument that can be made is to provide the middle class with reduced taxes and the unemployed with benefits in order to improve the economy (as leading economists have stated), but the tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent will do nothing for the national economy. If the economy could support tax cuts for all, then I say go for it, but until the economy improves and the nation gets on a sound fiscal footing, it is irresponsible to increase the deficit without improving the economy.

Ever seen a Laffer curve? Increasing tax rates doesn't always mean increased tax receipts. If Park County raised their sales tax to 50%, how many people would go shopping on the internet instead of brock and mortar stores.

SS109 wrote:

Something the Dog Said wrote: The cost began the moment the Bush tax cuts were enacted without a corresponding cut in spending. The budget surplus went from almost $300 billion to a deficit within two years. The deficit will most certainly continue to increase, particularly under the proposed Republican plan, as long as the tax cuts continue without a corresponding cut in spending. There is no way that Republicans can credibly pretend that their plan is fiscally responsible. The only credible argument that can be made is to provide the middle class with reduced taxes and the unemployed with benefits in order to improve the economy (as leading economists have stated), but the tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent will do nothing for the national economy. If the economy could support tax cuts for all, then I say go for it, but until the economy improves and the nation gets on a sound fiscal footing, it is irresponsible to increase the deficit without improving the economy.

Ever seen a Laffer curve? Increasing tax rates doesn't always mean increased tax receipts. If Park County raised their sales tax to 50%, how many people would go shopping on the internet instead of brock and mortar stores.

I did not suggest that increasing tax rates would always mean increased tax receipts. What I did suggest was that cutting tax rates without cutting spending would always lead to deficits. It happened under Kennedy, it happened under Reagan, it happened under Bush and it will happen under Obama. You could argue that Kennedy's tax cuts ultimately increased revenue beyond the tax cuts, but that was due to him eliminating loopholes to match the tax cuts.

Even Heritage Foundation economist and former Treasury Department official Bruce Bartlett has stated that tax cuts will seldom match the revenue loss, which the Bush administration acknowledged as well as many other economists:
"The fact is that it is only in very exceptional circumstances that there would even be the possibility of a tax cut that would so stimulate growth that it would pay for itself. Even the Bush Administration admits this. The 2003 Economic Report of the President (pp. 57-58) says, "Although the economy grows in response to tax reductions ... it is unlikely to grow so much that lost tax revenue is completely recovered by the higher level of economic activity."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... r_the.html

"Federal revenue is lower today than it would have been without the tax cuts. There's really no dispute among economists about that," said Alan D. Viard, a former Bush White House economist now at the nonpartisan American Enterprise Institute. "It's logically possible" that a tax cut could spur sufficient economic growth to pay for itself, Viard said. "But there's no evidence that these tax cuts would come anywhere close to that." [The Washington Post, 10/17/06]

The supply-side notion doesn't even work in responsible theory. In 2005, the Congressional Budget Office evaluated the effects of a 10 percent income tax cut on federal revenues, using a number of different assumptions. Here's CBO's conclusion, from a summary by then-director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a well-regarded conservative economist: "The budgetary impact of the economic changes was estimated to offset between 1 percent and 22 percent of the revenue loss from the tax cut over the first five years and add as much as 5 percent to that loss or offset as much as 32 percent of it over the second five years."

So under the most optimistic assumptions, the economic stimulus from such a tax cut would replace about one-fifth of the lost revenue in the first five years and about one-third in the second. In the worst case, there would be no longer-term revenue replacement at all, but rather an even greater loss.

Now, Holtz-Eakin believes there are good economic reasons to keep taxes where they now are. But as he told me in an interview, "You are not going to get tax cuts to pay for themselves." [Boston Globe, 12/07/07]

Bush's CEA Chairman Lazear: "We Do Not Say The Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves." During testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, Ed Lazear, the chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) stated:

LAZEAR: Will the tax cuts pay for themselves? As a general rule, we do not think tax cuts pay for themselves. Certainly, the data presented above do not support this claim. Tax revenues in 2006 appear to have recovered to the level seen at this point in previous business cycles, but this does not make up for the lost revenue during 2003, 2004, and 2005. [Testimony before Senate Budget Committee, 09/28/06]

The Laffler curve has largely been debunked and holds no credibility anymore.

Is that your modus operandi, Printsmith, to twist and obfuscate every debate so that you think you win by shock & awe?

Twist it how yo want, but extension of the tax cuts will increase the deficit, just like it has since Bush & his congress first rammed it through. How do the Republicans plan to pay for this?

Scruffy wrote: Is that your modus operandi, Printsmith, to twist and obfuscate every debate so that you think you win by shock & awe?

Twist it how yo want, but extension of the tax cuts will increase the deficit, just like it has since Bush & his congress first rammed it through. How do the Republicans plan to pay for this?

Scruffy, you are right. So why doesnt the lame dog dem congress which has a large majority let them expire for everone. It would be the only responsible thing to do. You know they want to.

$900 billion unpaid for! Where is the fiscal outrage from the right? You would think the teabaggers would be boiling with rage.