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June 18, 2013

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Letter to the editor:

Raising taxes? Send cash instead

I would like to own a new automobile, but I don’t have the money. I would like to vacation in Hawaii for a month, but I don’t have the money. I would like to remodel my house, but I don’t have the money. I would like to purchase jewelry and expensive gifts for my family, but I don’t have the money. I would like to obtain a law degree from Harvard, but I don’t have the money.

Perhaps everyone who strongly believes that the best way for the USA to reduce the national debt is by raising taxes could send me a check to enable me to fulfill my financial goals. Thanks for your support.

Discussion: 18 comments so far…

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  1. By RefNV (Re Freeman)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    2:38 a.m.
    Flag

    Robert,

    Since 2007, we have 17% fewer tax filers and the top 1% of wage earners make 34% less income. The income pie has shrunk and with it tax revenue. The big question is, do we create a stable government tax & spend environment for businesses to invest and consumers with means to spend or do we increase taxes and stifle long-term business investment? A key economic variable that correlates well with unemployment is private business investment. When private investment as a share of the economy is high, unemployment tends to be low. When investment drops, as it has in this recession, unemployment tends to be high (see link below chart #2). Current investment to GDP ratio is around 12%. In 2006, at approx 5.5% unemployment the investment to GDP ratio was 16.5%.

    Liberals want more taxes and conservatives want to spur business investment and consumer spending by creating a stable government tax & spend environment. If we rescind the Bush tax cuts on the top 1% of wage earners it would reduce next year's budget deficit from $1.30 trillion to $1.22 trillion. Is increasing tax revenue short-term the top priority or is business investment/job growth the best strategy? One increases tax revenue now and the other increases tax revenue long-term by adding jobs and tax filers. Hopefully, the voters in 2012 will tell us which approach is best.

    http://budget.house.gov/UploadedFiles/HB...

  2. By PISCES41 (Jim Weber)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    4:33 a.m.
    Flag

    Robert - A truly heart-breaking story. Too bad about the new car, but at least you have a car. Sorry about Hawaii, but California is closer anyway. Sorry about those gifts, but it's the thought that counts. Sorry about the home remodel, but at least you have a home and still live in it. Sorry about Harvard but if you weren't born with money who can afford that anyway.

    So, be grateful for what you have and that, at least, you have enough money to be paranoid about income taxes.

  3. By ressince73 (Gary Lind)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    5:29 a.m.
    Flag

    NEWS FLASH! Get ready for the payroll tax extension and the unemployment insurance extension to END. Boehner and his gang have decided to "postpone" the house vote on the Senate bill which was sent to them after being passed by the senate with 90% approval! Per Boehner, "the senate passed a bill...we disagree with it". Now Boehner and his herd of cats wants the Senate to return and haggle on and on until the end of the year. The senate has refused. End of story. So let's all tighten our belts another notch January 1st, and watch the Kabuki dance in the House as the Tea Party drones commit political hara-kiri.

  4. By mschaffer (Mark Schaffer)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    6:37 a.m.
    Flag

    Ref points to Paul Ryan propaganda showing he doesn't have the ability to know when he is being lied to. Is anyone who isn't a blind ideologue convinced by such vacuous arguments?

  5. By RefNV (Re Freeman)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    6:49 a.m.
    Flag

    Mark,

    Show us Obama's socialist plan of redistributing wealth.

  6. By staralioflundnv (Star Ali Mistriel-Kogan)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    7:06 a.m.
    Flag

    A little HOLIDAY HUMOR courtesy of our American boom and bust economy and TOO BIG TO FAIL handlers.

    Cheers!
    Star

  7. By mschaffer (Mark Schaffer)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    8:20 a.m.
    Flag

    Ref,
    I can't show you something that only exists inside the heads of paranoid right wingers.

  8. By RefNV (Re Freeman)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    9:21 a.m.
    Flag

    Mark,

    Just what I thought. Americans are most concerned about jobs, the economy and deficit spending while Obama and OWS want to redistribute the wealth to be our nation's priority. Obama adds a new entitlement we can't afford and wants to redistribute wealth. What a socialist. I didn't think he was one until last week when he channeled the OWS in his speech. Recently, on the Occupy Las Vegas website linked below, a writer referring to the Occupy movement stated: "For the first time since 1972, the spectrum of Left from liberalism to progressivism to socialism to communism to left anarchism has an audience (if not much of an organization)".

    I bet a majority of people didn't realize that socialism was a belief system here in America but it is and they vote democratic, hence, the reason Obama is channeling them......he's trying to rally his base, therefore, he can't create policies that help businesses because it would upset the anti-business socialists.

    http://www.occupylv.org/blogs/democrats-...

  9. By zippert1 (gerry hageman)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    9:24 a.m.
    Flag

    Give me your address. I'll send you some cash for Xmas and help you out.

  10. By mschaffer (Mark Schaffer)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    11 a.m.
    Flag

    Whatever you believe Reffy...Try taking a logic class and you may not fall for such "socialism is coming to take me away" nonsense in the future. Until then corresponding with you is less productive then talking to a wall. Meanwhile I wonder what the general welfare clause of the constitution means? Hmmm...http://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/art1frag29_user.html

    "Finally, in United States v. Butler,543 the Court gave its unqualified endorsement to Hamilton's views on the taxing power. Wrote Justice Roberts for the Court: "Since the foundation of the Nation sharp differences of opinion have persisted as to the true interpretation of the phrase. Madison asserted it amounted to no more than a reference to the other powers enumerated in the subsequent clauses of the same section; that, as the United States is a government of limited and enumerated powers, the grant of[p.155]power to tax and spend for the general national welfare must be confined to the numerated legislative fields committed to the Congress. In this view the phrase is mere tautology, for taxation and appropriation are or may be necessary incidents of the exercise of any of the enumerated legislative powers. Hamilton, on the other hand, maintained the clause confers a power separate and distinct from those later enumerated, is not restricted in meaning by the grant of them, and Congress consequently has a substantive power to tax and to appropriate, limited only by the requirement that it shall be exercised to provide for the general welfare of the United States. Each contention has had the support of those whose views are entitled to weight. This court had noticed the question, but has never found it necessary to decide which is the true construction. Justice Story, in his Commentaries, espouses the Hamiltonian position. We shall not review the writings of public men and commentators or discuss the legislative practice. Study of all these leads us to conclude that the reading advocated by Justice Story is the correct one. While, therefore, the power to tax is not unlimited, its confines are set in the clause which confers it, and not in those of Sec. 8 which bestow and define the legislative powers of the Congress. It results that the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution."544"

  11. By mschaffer (Mark Schaffer)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    11:09 a.m.
    Flag

    By the way...does the letter writer know about the idea of credit that most people use to finance remodels, vacations, expensive products, cars, etc. Or did he miss the fact that the vast majority of people don't have cash up front for large expenses? Likewise the public debt has existed since practically day one for the U.S. and I am still waiting for the calamities conservatives always tell us are just around the corner. Get back to me when the fantasies of conservatives have some correspondence with reality...which won't be in this universe.

  12. By RefNV (Re Freeman)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    11:31 a.m.
    Flag

    Mark,

    Obama had his sights set on pushing his "redistribute the wealth" agenda as early as 2001. Take a listen to this interview he gave with Chicago Public Radio.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iivL4c_3p...

  13. By zippert1 (gerry hageman)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    11:34 a.m.
    Flag

    If you add up public-sector debt, private-sector debt and then tack on future funded and unfunded liabilities around the world the numbers are so big calculators don't have enough zeros. Much of this will never be paid back. Zero chance!

    Kids alone have $1 trillion in school loans to pay back. Look inside the wallets and purses of young people today and try to find $1 trillion. They don't have enough money for gas. Throughout history debts have been dealt with through reorganizations and defaults. The same will happen over the next 50 years.

  14. By zippert1 (gerry hageman)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    11:40 a.m.
    Flag

    http://www.mcoscillator.com/learning_cen...
    I graduated from UCLA with my economics degree in March of 1981. The above is what I was dealing with back then. It was very similar to what's going on today. The Latin American economies are some of the strongest in the world today. Since the Latin American defaults there have been other defaults all over the world. Debts on a massive scale never get paid back. Germany was supposed to pay for World War I under the Treaty of Versailles. We all know how that went.

  15. By zippert1 (gerry hageman)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    11:57 a.m.
    Flag

    Look at my article above. Every country in the world that has gone through a massive debt default has seen much stronger economic growth. It's the debt that curtails economic growth. Not the default. The default causes short-term dislocations that are remedied by the markets very quickly. The interest payments on the debt cause an enormous drag on economic activity.

    It's very similar to a family declaring bankruptcy. When they are trying to pay back their million dollar hospital bill they have no money for anything else. Once they get rid of the hospital bill through bankruptcy they can begin to get their life back on track.

    Countries engage in debt financing so they can maintain very low tax rates and provide the massive entitlements that people want. Countless millions of people around the world are lined up for pensions, medical care subsidized housing and nobody wants to pay the high taxes needed to cover the liabilities. This is why countries run up big debts.

    Eliminating tax loopholes plus a 10% national sales tax put towards the debt would eliminate the debt in a few years. Nobody wants to pay it! People give eliminating the debt a great deal of lip service but nobody really wants to pay it off.

  16. By mschaffer (Mark Schaffer)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    2:01 p.m.
    Flag

    Reffy,
    That's odd that the audio recording you refer to has been heavily edited. If you were rational, doubtful as that may be, you would be suspicious of the validity and, far more importantly, the context and meaning of what was said. This is obviously beyond your abilities as it is for zippy and gogo.

  17. By RefNV (Re Freeman)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    2:41 p.m.
    Flag

    Mark,

    Obama's voice edited....nice try. Obama had his sights set on a little "WR" (wealth redistribution) way back in 2001. The article excerpt below describing Obama's community activist upbringing perhaps gives others a clearer picture as to the origins of Obama's redistribute the wealth philosophy:
    "His mother was an unabashed hippie from 1960s central casting. His father was an openly avowed Communist from Kenya. While his father wasn't around much, his devoutly progressive grandparents arranged for him to be mentored during his adolescent years by a dues paying member of the U.S. Communist Party, Frank Marshall Davis.
    When he went to college, he was attracted to the Marxist professors and student activists, according to his own published memoirs. When he graduated, he moved to Chicago and became an instructor for the left-wing extremist organization ACORN in the social manipulation methods of radical Marxist agitator Saul Alinsky. He attended for close to two decades the Trinity United Church of Christ, which practiced neo-Marxist Black Liberation Theology. That church was headed during those years by the openly socialist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who declared that the 9/11 terrorist attack on America was "America's chickens coming home to roost." He also famously preached from his pulpit, "Not God bless America, God damn America"."

    http://spectator.org/archives/2011/12/14...

  18. By mschaffer (Mark Schaffer)
    Dec. 20, 2011
    9:26 p.m.
    Flag

    Reffy,
    You really never did well on those tests asking what the paragraph you just read was about. Come back when you can pass reading comprehension tests and differentiate between good sources and mediocre ones. And the author of your propaganda piece: "Peter Ferrara

    Peter Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation, a policy advisor to the Heartland Institute, a senior fellow at the Social Security Institute, and general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is author of The Obamacare Disaster, from the Heartland Institute, and President Obama's Tax Piracy." And the "Heart"land institute: http://66.39.128.35/index.php?title=Hear...

    "Secrecy on funding sources
    While Heartland once disclosed its major supporters, it now refuses to publicly disclose who its corporate and foundation funders are. In response to an article criticizing the think tank for its secrecy, the group's President, Joseph Bast, wrote in February 2005:
    "For many years, we provided a complete list of Heartland's corporate and foundation donors on this Web site and challenged other think tanks and advocacy groups to do the same. To our knowledge, not a single group followed our lead. However, critics who couldn't or wouldn't engage in fair debate over our ideas found the donor list a convenient place to find the names of unpopular companies or foundations, which they used in ad hominem attacks against us. Even reporters from time to time seemed to think reporting the identities of one or two donors--out of a list of hundreds--was a fair way of representing our funding or our motivation in taking the positions expressed in our publications. After much deliberation and with some regret, we now keep confidential the identities of all our donors."[32]
    It has also claimed that "by not disclosing our donors, we keep the focus on the issue."[31]"

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