jmog;553664 wrote:Oh, I'd be ok with tax increases if two things happen.
1. We reduce spending first down to a balanced budget and THEN increase taxes to pay on our debt (only to pay on our debt).
2. We are out of the recession before the tax increases happen.
As I've said before I believed in keeping the tax rates low while the economy is still slumping. But I do want to question one of your points here.
Some in this thread are against the idea that "tax cuts cost money" because the government should match spending to justifiable tax rates.....and most on the right already think tax rates are unjustifiably high. But let's have a thought experiment.
Suppose you're a man who gets bored with women easily. Every 4 to 8 years you find yourself wanting a new wife and you get divorces. But, these wives of yours have used your credit card like crazy. Your current wife, you've only had for two years and you're really sick of her already. You tell her, "I already have a huge debt racked up by my previous wives so you can't rack up anymore!" Besides, you already work 2 jobs and you think you should only have to work 1 job so that way you can have more freedom. You'd like your family budget to match income that comes from one job.
One day your wife goes out and buys a ferrari on your credit card....an absolutely egregious purchase that you do not want! When she gets home you scream in her face and tell her that you're going to sell that car and replace it. But, in your own head, you know it's going to be tough to get rid of that car.
Even though you want to only have to work one job....because you already have all of this debt....and now you're going to have to make payments on this ferrari you didn't want...(and you certainly wouldn't want to put these payments on your credit card), don't you think the conservative thing to do would be to suck it up and sacrifice more of your freedom and work 2 or 3 jobs...bringing in more income....until you can knock some of this debt off your balance sheet and can sell off these bad purchases you've made?
In essence, what I'm saying is...why not increase taxes to make the budget balanced to match current expenditures....especially considering everybody has claimed that they will cut spending but his has never, ever happened....and then, from that balanced budget....reduce....down the expenditures and tax rate concurrently.
Sure, even if we accept that much of federal government outlaways are wasteful....and we'd definitely like to keep more of our money.....I don't see how it helps to continue adding on more debt while we wait for these programs that we don't like to disappear.
If Obamacare is going to cost trillions of dollars....it seems to me we ought to be preparing to pay for it; even if we don't want to; rather than putting all our cards into repealing it and letting more debt pile up...
The same goes for anti-tax, anti-war libertarians....they may hate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan....but it seems like, if we're going to have those "awful expenditures" that they don't want, they ought to let their tax rates go up to pay for the bad expenditures....rather than rack up debt while they lobby to end the wars...
low tax rates don't "cost money"....but the things we're deficit spending on do....and it just pushes the pain of tax raises down the road farther and makes it much greater. Seems to me we ought to start trying to pay for our irresponsible purchases while we try to get them off the books.
