Posted on 08/13/2007 11:06:54 AM PDT by traviskicks
Milton Friedman observed that if reducing tax rates makes revenues increase, you haven’t cut rates enough.
AMEN, Brother. Preach that simple truth!!!!
There is such a thing as a veto, but Bush didn’t seem to know this for about 5-6 years. He signed everything.
How come we could hold the rise in domestic discretionary spending to a little more than a 2 percent increase under Klintoon (with basically the same Congress) but once Bush came in, that rate of increase almost QUADRUPLED? Congress was basically the same. What was the big difference?
The principle that lowering taxes increases revenues should be well established by now. The problem is government spending. I can understand the increased spending in such things as national defense and security; however, the entitlements are going to kill our economy. The liberal utopia of a “nanny state” and the redistribution of wealth is a bigger threat to America than the terrorists.
thanks for that graph!
Deficit spending is held up as the bogeyman by whichever party wishes to use it as a talking point against the other, but it’s not near the big deal it’s made out to be. Still, it’s an incremental burden that adds to the misery of paying taxes, whatever the rate or amount that is paid.
But we ain’t seen nothing yet.
The deficit, nor current spending, is not what is going to hurt us in the end, but rather entitlements and especially Medicare and Social Security. It’s going to start getting real tight around the same time as I plan to start drawing it. A lot of people are going to have to wrap their brains around the truth that these programs are not, and have never been, an entitlement, but just another discretionary spending issue that can be changed by any Congress at any time, and by necessity it will be in one way or another. This is not a new development, but something that should have been well known for a long time.
I earn a little over the median household income, and I figure a little more than half of that goes to the government. For all of that, nothing has been done to stop or even slow the runaway train that has been barreling towards our economy for the last 50 years. It’s as if every past administration and every past Congress has been sitting on it’s hands, hoping the bomb will go off before the train comes through town, and cause it to fall into a big hole or something.
So - with the current administration and Congress, and all of the others since the baby boom who have just sat and waited for the bomb (or whatever they have been waiting for), all of America should be disappointed.
To Dubya’s credit, he’s one of the few to propose a workable solution, but he was, predictably, not forceful enough to bully Congress into bringing it about.
And it's almost too late.
Interesting graph. Notice it dips every four years like clockwork. And the largest peaks are (mostly) at presidential election years where the party in office is upset - like that really really big one at 2000.
And our current trend is slightly above the post-war average, but again we are in a war.
Still there's that other thing I mentioned a couple of posts up. We have about a year to do something about it.
It’s the Cato Institute.
“growth of spending on everything”
None of their ‘projects’ ever gets completed.
“Go to a flat tax of 7% and they couldn’t spend all that money”
That should be the Republican tax plan.
“He’s the executive VP of Cato and the favored guy to take over as President and CEO”
Well on his way to more Government funding.
“increasing revenue flow by lowering tax RATES on income and capital gains. “
There-by, increasing opportunities for all to earn a good life.
“Congress gets the idea ... and cuts out the illegitimate stuff”
‘illegitimate stuff’ that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Non-Federal spending on the Federal budget needs to be recuperated by taking back from those who passed it, i.e. seize their estates and pensions.
Well said.
Very well said.
You’re right on the mark.
It has reached the point where it can no longer be attributed to “spin”. It is clearly deceit.
Yep.
“....because he believed Bush was turning the GOP too far to the right, not because of his commitment to conservative principles”
I know that but that summer was when i noticed a major shift in Bush’s rhetoric.
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