Tax Cuts Create Jobs...

[JohnStOnge]

All of this kind of thing is observational. It can't be used to infer cause and effect. Also, observational study is extremely vulnerable to bias on the part of the investigator. An investigator can try different things and different ways of looking at things until he or she gets what she wants. And that would be true whether such a study says what this one does or whether is says the opposite.

The reason for cutting tax rates on the rich is that the current situation is immoral. It is wrong to latch the wagon to a small percentage of the population so that politicians can dispense services to the majority of the population while isolating and exploiting a small percentage of the population along with using credit to pay for it.

It's wrong and culturally sick to have 60 percent of the population getting to vote for politicians who are going to spend money on what they want it spent on when they contribute only about 13 percent to total Federal tax collections while another group consisting of only 20 percent of the population basically carries the load by contributing about 70 of total Federal tax collections.

To me the problem with such a system, whereby most of the people in the country get to demand services they don't have to pay for while making a minority pay for it, is obvious and it's incredible to me that anybody who truly contemplates what's going on would support it. If you want government to do something YOU should be willing to pay for it. It shouldn't be "Oh I'll vote for it then the rich people will pay for it."

[Chizzang]

You skipped the part where he talks to her tits you effete
, Western WA metrosexual.

[kalm]

All of this kind of thing is observational. It can't be used to infer cause and effect. Also, observational study is extremely vulnerable to bias on the part of the investigator. An investigator can try different things and different ways of looking at things until he or she gets what she wants. And that would be true whether such a study says what this one does or whether is says the opposite.

The reason for cutting tax rates on the rich is that the current situation is immoral. It is wrong to latch the wagon to a small percentage of the population so that politicians can dispense services to the majority of the population while isolating and exploiting a small percentage of the population along with using credit to pay for it.

It's wrong and culturally sick to have 60 percent of the population getting to vote for politicians who are going to spend money on what they want it spent on when they contribute only about 13 percent to total Federal tax collections while another group consisting of only 20 percent of the population basically carries the load by contributing about 70 of total Federal tax collections.

To me the problem with such a system, whereby most of the people in the country get to demand services they don't have to pay for while making a minority pay for it, is obvious and it's incredible to me that anybody who truly contemplates what's going on would support it. If you want government to do something YOU should be willing to pay for it. It shouldn't be "Oh I'll vote for it then the rich people will pay for it."

According to which morals? And please tell me more about the exploited wealthy. Seriously...I want to hear about their plight.

Please cite some specific cases where the wealthy are getting a raw deal.

[JohnStOnge]

BTW there was a Congressional Research Service study that reached the same conclusion back in 2012. Here is a CATO institute rebuttal of it. Yes I know the CATO institute has a philosophical bias but I picked it because it has an extensive literature review. The point is that you can look at that literature review and see that there is a lot of historical literature purporting to support a point of view different than that reflected by the study that is the subject of this thread.

I also noted that the CATO rebuttal criticizing the CRS study includes a claim that the CRS study does not control for other variables that could impact growth. That reminds me of doing modeling of observational data that is particularly problematic is you're the consumer. You can often get the results you want by controlling for certain variables as well as not controlling for certain variables. Another thing you can do is transform variables so that they either have or do not have "effects." Also you can include or not include "interactions," include or not include a polynomial approach, etc. Meanwhile, with today's computer and software technologies, you can try a whole bunch of different models in hopes of getting one that supports what you believed doing in if you want to.

There's no way you can ever know if somebody did those sorts of things so, to me, you ALWAYS have to take observational modeling studies with a grain of salt; ESPECIALLY when they bear upon things that involve controversial political and/or philosophical content.

[JohnStOnge]

According to which morals? And please tell me more about the exploited wealthy. Seriously...I want to hear about their plight.

Please cite some specific cases where the wealthy are getting a raw deal.

To me it should be according to ANYBODY'S morals and it's incredible to me that anybody who really thinks about it can't see that. We each get one vote. And what we have is a bunch of slackers who contribute next to nothing to the system voting in ways to have the government spend a bunch of money when they're not the ones contributing the money. They've created a system whereby "somebody else" pays for it.

Amazing to me that you don't see that as morally wrong.

I don't think I need to cite a specific individual case. If you do the math, households in the top 1 percent of income households pay about 1200 times on average what households in the bottom 20 percent of households pay on average. When you've got one group of people living in the same country as another group and each member of each group gets one vote but members of one group have to pay 1200 times as much in taxes on average as the other that's a raw deal for every member of the group that's getting its blood sucked so politicians can buy votes from the lower 60 to 80 percent of the population with government spending.

[kalm]

According to which morals? And please tell me more about the exploited wealthy. Seriously...I want to hear about their plight.

Please cite some specific cases where the wealthy are getting a raw deal.

To me it should be according to ANYBODY'S morals and it's incredible to me that anybody who really thinks about it can't see that. We each get one vote. And what we have is a bunch of slackers who contribute next to nothing to the system voting in ways to have the government spend a bunch of money when they're not the ones contributing the money. They've created a system whereby "somebody else" pays for it.

Amazing to me that you don't see that as morally wrong.

I don't think I need to cite a specific individual case. If you do the math, households in the top 1 percent of income households pay about 1200 times on average what households in the bottom 20 percent of households pay on average. When you've got one group of people living in the same country as another group and each member of each group gets one vote but members of one group have to pay 1200 times as much in taxes on average as the other that's a raw deal for every member of the group that's getting its blood sucked so politicians can buy votes from the lower 60 to 80 percent of the population with government spending.

Who's this "they" you speak of that created the system and how did they accumulate such power? And what's they're game?

[JohnStOnge]

Who's this "they" you speak of that created the system and how did they accumulate such power? And what's they're game?

The "they" is the critical mass of the bottom 60% of the income distribution who support the idea of paying for things by soaking the rich. Maybe even the bottom 80%. Not that there aren't those among the top 20% and even the top 1% who buy into that as well.

And they accumulated such power by virtue of development of the system by which they each have a vote that is equal regardless of how much they contribute to the system. So a person who pays $0 in taxes has as much direct say in the direction of the country as a person who pays $1,000,000 in taxes.

[kalm]

Who's this "they" you speak of that created the system and how did they accumulate such power? And what's they're game?

The "they" is the critical mass of the bottom 60% of the income distribution who support the idea of paying for things by soaking the rich. Maybe even the bottom 80%. Not that there aren't those among the top 20% and even the top 1% who buy into that as well.

And they accumulated such power by virtue of development of the system by which they each have a vote that is equal regardless of how much they contribute to the system. So a person who pays $0 in taxes has as much direct say in the direction of the country as a person who pays $1,000,000 in taxes.

If the bottom 80% who developed and control the system worked harder and were more productive would they have a better case?

What if Paris Hilton was rich by virtue of luck rather than what she morally deserves?

[Aho Old Guy]

"Tax Cuts Create Jobs" is as big a lie as "Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves"

[YoUDeeMan]

What if Paris Hilton was rich by virtue of luck rather than what she morally deserves?

Careful...you start to sound like a hard core, right wing, nut job when you bring up morality.

[kalm]

What if Paris Hilton was rich by virtue of luck rather than what she morally deserves?

Careful...you start to sound like a hard core, right wing, nut job when you bring up morality.

I'm glad you're paying attention.

[JohnStOnge]

If the bottom 80% who developed and control the system worked harder and were more productive would they have a better case?

What if Paris Hilton was rich by virtue of luck rather than what she morally deserves?

You know, first I need to say that it's more the politicians than the bottom whatever percent. I don't even think most people realize how large a share of Federal taxes is paid by the top 20, 10, or 1 percent. It's just that over the years the Federal government has implemented more and more spending to provide more and more in terms of government involvement while the overwhelming majority has not "felt" what it costs to do that because the politicians are going to the "soak the rich" well.

So in 2010 dollars (i.e., inflation adjusted terms) the bottom 20 percent of Households paid an average of $1,290 in all Federal taxes in 1979 vs. $362 in 2010. For the next for people in the 20th to 40th percentile range it was $5,075 in 1979 vs. $3,182 in 2010. For the 40th to the 60th it was $9,923 vs. $7,521. For the 60th through the 80th it was $15,265 vs. $14,898. So the bottom 80 percent of Households were all paying less in all Federal taxes at the end of the 1979 through 2010 period in absolute inflation adjusted terms. And it's not because household incomes were lower in 2010. They were higher for each one of the bottom four quintiles. So they did not "feel" what politicians were doing with increasing spending.

So who was getting stuck with at least some of the bill? The inflation adjusted liability for all Federal taxes for the top 20 percent of households went from $36,450 in 1979 to $57,384. While taxes went down in both in absolute inflation adjusted terms for the bottom 80 percent of households, they went up by an average of over $20,000 per household for those in the top 20 percent.

That and the politicians borrowed a bunch of money because even soaking the rich like they were soaking them wasn't enough.

It's just incredible when you look at history that is readily available on the CBO site that people get away with saying that the "rich" are paying less of their "fair share" now than they were in the past. Also incredible that they're telling people that their incomes have generally been going down when the general trend has been upward over any reasonable time frame. And it's the politicians that are doing that. Mostly Democratic politicians being demagogues playing to the vilest of human emotions and natural resentments against people who haver been successful.

The numbers I presented can be derived from an Excel file that can be downloaded by clicking the "Supplemental Data" link at http://www.cbo.gov/publication/44604" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.

By the way there is a tab on that workbook that shows inflation adjusted median household income both in gross terms and adjusted for household size during the period. Both numbers were lower in inflation adjusted terms in 1979 than they were in 2010. I think the most telling one is that median household AFTER TAX income adjusted for household size in 1979, again in inflation adjusted terms, was 25,500 in 1979 vs. $37,800 in 2010. If you're wondering about them dividing by the square root of household size II don't think I can get to what would happen if you just divided straight by household size. But the average square root of household size was smaller in 2010 than in 2007 so you're still going to get the average per person per household income being higher in 2010; probably by a substantial degree. And that's median so it's a true estimate of central tendency that is not biased upward by people with very high incomes.

Bottom line is that the whole line about incomes for the "typical" American going down over time is a bald faced lie and so is the idea that the "rich" don't pay their "fair share." It's everybody else that doesn't pay their "fair share." As I've said it's REAL easy to vote for politicians who are going to expand the Federal government and what it does when you're not the one paying for the resulting increases.

Mitt Romney was basically right when he said that unpopular thing even if he didn't have the numbers quite right.

[JohnStOnge]

If the bottom 80% who developed and control the system worked harder and were more productive would they have a better case?

No. Under no circumstances is there a legitimate case for making 20% of the population carry 70 percent of the Federal tax load. To me that's morally wrong and beyond that it distorts the culture so that most people don't really have (as the cliche goes) "skin in the game." That's especially true when taxes for the bottom 80 percent have actually been going DOWN in both percentage and absolute terms as government increases spending.

Again: If you want more government spending YOU should be willing to step up and pay your share for that.

What if Paris Hilton was rich by virtue of luck rather than what she morally deserves?

I think luck plays a role in success but I think ability does as well. Some people might be where they are mostly because of ability. Some people may be where they are mostly because of luck. But however they got there, their being successful does not justify the kind of distortion we have with "progressive" taxation where we soak people that are successful so we can have government programs without being the ones that have to pay for them. I don't care if the only reason they have money is they won the PowerBall. We shouldn't be doing it. Again, you and I should not be supporting government spending unless WE are willing to step up and pay for it. And if we don't want to pay our share of what it takes then we should demand that government eliminate a lot of the things it's doing.

And I think that would happen if everybody in this country had to pay anything CLOSE to their equal share of what it costs to run it as it's being run.