President Bush has announced that he has a plan to restore fiscal discipline in Congress and halve the deficit. It’s about bloody time that Bush practiced a little fiscal discipline. From the disastrous Medicare prescription drug bill to farm subsidies to being unable to say no to any spending increase, Bush badly needs to get America’s fiscal house in order.
It will be interesting to see what Bush proposes and where he intends to cut the fat in the federal budget. The real question won’t be with Bush’s budget, however, it will be with the one that Congress actually passes and puts on his desk. If Bush intends to enforce fiscal discipline he needs to make it quite clear that he will veto any budget that includes unnecessary and wasteful spending. Given that Bush has been unwilling to use his veto power in his first term, the idea that he might use it in the second seems remote. However, if Bush is willing to stand as firm on the budget as he does on the defense they may yet be hope for some fiscal sanity in the budget.
Here’s a wild prediction. Whatever the specifics of Bush’s deficit reduction plan turn out to be, they will lower the quality of life for the two-thirds of Americans with the lowest incomes (with the most pain inflicted on those “lucky duckies” in the bottom quadrant) while those in the top third skate by with little or no sacrifice. Don’t expect to see an end to the three-martini lunch, tax breaks for the purchase of new Hummers or an increase in the cap of the Social Security payroll tax. Of course, the easiest ways to raise revenue would be restoring the income tax rates of 2000 along with the estate tax. Those options are off the table though because it would place the burden of budget-cutting on the Republican base rather than Democrats and lower-class GOP “values voters,” whose allegiance the GOP is gambling that they can depend on no matter how much they shit on them.
While conventional wisdom suggests that ANY tax increases are off the table, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Bush suggests a “willingness to consider” a massive federal tax hike on every pack of cigarettes….under the same canard that nurse Kelli was trying to sell two weeks ago about the non-existent millions society will save in health care costs if everybody quit smoking tomorrow. Clearly, a cigarette tax increase violates Bush’s “no new taxes” anthem, but like Governor Pawlenty here in Minnesota, there’s room for flexibility when it comes to taxes paid by those who earn less than $100,000 per year. After all, tobacco taxes don’t affect too many of the GOP’s most generous campaign contributors, who are ultimately the only people whose taxes Republicans really care about.
Yes, raising taxes would certainly raise revenue, just before the economy went back into recession. Tax increase act as an anchor on economic growth, and without economic growth, the government gets less revenue.
Thankfully the American people see through the hackneyed Democrat class warfare rhetoric and understand that more and more obtrusive government is not the answer. They understand that the Democratic Party’s tax and spend policies are nothing more than highway robbery – taking productive money and pretending to give a damn about the American people while taking that money and blowing it.
Of course, the Democratic Party itself remains so pathetically out of touch with the real America that their chances of regaining power remain slim to none unless they stop treating the American people with a combination of arrogance and contempt.
Taxes have been raised throughout the 20th century and the economy has exploded. The most recent example of this was 1993, when the usual ideological gadflies like you screamed your doomsday prophecies of impending economic collapse. Unfortunately for you, they never materialized, and the longest expansion of the U.S. economy in history followed the modest tax increases (er, “biggest tax increase in history”). Obviously there are limits to the level of taxation that an economy can sustain before imploding, but there is no evidence that the tax rates of 2000 (which I am advocating we return to) were counterproductive to growth.
I would think that after your 1993 predictions about tax increases devastating the economy proved patently false, you’d have been embarrassed right back into the holes that you slithered out of. Yet you continue to spout the same narrow-minded drivel out of your forked tongues every time the subject of taxation comes up, apparently oblivious to the fact that modern-day revenue theft from the U.S. Treasury will require such massive debt interest costs in the years to come that future generations will be forced to pay considerably higher tax rates that actually WILL meet the level of oppressiveness that you suggest the Clinton/Rubin tax rates did in the late 90’s.
Voting for the Republican Party is like picking up a $20 whore on the street corner. You may get some instant gratification, but come morning, it’s gonna hurt to pee.
It’s also curious that you mention the Democrats attempting to thrust “more and more obtrusive government” on the unsuspecting American people given the latest proposal by Minnesota State Representative Marty Seifert (Republican from Marshall FYI). Seifert is proposing to make it illegal for welfare recipients to smoke cigarettes. He’s not suggesting they be restricted from purchasing cigarettes with food stamps, mind you. That’s already illegal. He’s saying that we send pointy-headed bureaucrats door-to-door to administer blood tests on “suspected smokers” and revoking financial assistance to them and their children if nicotine is found in their bloodstream.
Funny how Republicans consider a progressive income tax “obtrusive government” but are fine with sending bureaucratic legbreakers to stick needles in the arms of poor people.
The 1993 tax increases had nothing to do with the eocnomic growth in the 1990s, and even Clinton cut taxes in 1993. Furthermore, your correlation between tax increases and economic growth is laughable and historically incorrect. Kennedy engaged in a massive tax cut leading to the economic expansion in the mid-60s. Reagan’s tax cuts led to increases in both economic activity and federal revenue. Of course, you’re never one to let the facts get in the way of some Coulter-esque vitriol. (Although I doubt you look as good in a miniskirt.)
And give me a bloody break, one dingbat state senator proposes some jackass bill and suddenly all conservatives want to break the legs of poor people?
Get a grip.
Nice try, Jay, but semantic bait-and-switches don’t work with me, particularly when done post-mortem after your original argument was shredded into so many pieces that it wouldn’t make a decent hamburger.
Your exact words… “Yes, raising taxes would certainly raise revenue, just before the economy went back in recession. Tax increases act as an anchor on economic growth, and without economic growth, the government gets less revenue.”
This statement is made as if it were economic law…that tax increases necessarily lead to recession and corresponding revenue reductions. The most recent example of a tax increase directly contradicts your theory, yet it doesn’t stop you from making the same illogical statement again because even when the hypotheses of free-market ideologues (and conservatives in general) fail, they refuse to accept their disconnect from reality.
For the record, nobody was saying that the 1993 tax increases (or any tax increases) CONTRIBUTED to economic growth, only that economic growth pressed forward despite tax increases in every civilized nation on the globe, directly contradicting Milton Friedman/Jay Reding orthodoxy.
Also for the record, John F. Kennedy’s 1961 tax cut trimmed the top tax rate from 90% to 70%, meaning that the tax cuts enacted by the guy the right wants us to now believe is the “original supply-sider” were still double what today’s top tax rate was and roughly 30% higher than the “oppressive” Clinton/Rubin era top tax rate. I’ll make a deal with you though. If you want to help recreate the JFK glory days of 70% top tax rates and a workforce with 44% labor union representation, I will agree with you that JFK was the granddaddy of modern-day Republican tax policy.
As for the “jackass bill” by the “dingbat State Senator,” would you honestly be surprised if this was one of the few bills that Minnesota’s split Legislative houses and Republican Governor could agree on this year? Given the bloodthirsty persecution of smokers and “welfare deadbeats”, and the corresponding public approval of thrusting additional misery on both, I sure don’t see this latest shift towards full-throttle police state status as being beyond the realm of possibility.
And one more thing….I can handle whatever jabs you choose to throw at me politically, but please have the decency to refrain from creating any more images of Ann Coulter in a mini-skirt. My worst fear is that one of these days, an untimely wind gust will lift that skirt up and reveal to everyone my suspicion that Coulter’s plumbing isn’t what we’ve been led to believe it is.