[quote]doogie wrote:
FightinIrish26 wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
FightinIrish26 wrote:
Couple questions. Why was the Clinton era balanced budget an illusion? I have not heard this before.
…
I forget the accounting trick they used but the deficit every day grew even while the budget was allegedly balanced.
Perhaps they ignored the debt payments when they “balanced” the budget?
It was a sad joke at the time but everyone ignored it because a balanced budget looked good for both parties.
I understand how it would. This may be the only time that I’m going to say “Where the fuck is Rainjack?”. I’m curious about this.
Tax season. He’s busy.
[/quote]
Your exactly right. He works very hard a few months a year.
[quote]Rockscar wrote:
grew7 wrote:
They’d be acceptable if we weren’t in a war, but can we really afford to just lower taxes and increase spending? I can’t help but feel that when I’m an adult, my generation will end up paying for this. So really, people are just stealing from their children, right? They get a tax break, but later their children will have to pay the debt.
I say we cut taxes and stop funding idiotic countries. Also, stop paying back monies we owe to other countries…they never fucking pay us.[/quote]
hey man, the government makes lots of money off bonds. Bonds and taxes. As far as I know, mostly Asian countries by the bonds. You don’t want them cashing in at the same time.
[quote]Rockscar wrote:
doogie wrote:
FightinIrish26 wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
FightinIrish26 wrote:
Couple questions. Why was the Clinton era balanced budget an illusion? I have not heard this before.
…
I forget the accounting trick they used but the deficit every day grew even while the budget was allegedly balanced.
Perhaps they ignored the debt payments when they “balanced” the budget?
It was a sad joke at the time but everyone ignored it because a balanced budget looked good for both parties.
I understand how it would. This may be the only time that I’m going to say “Where the fuck is Rainjack?”. I’m curious about this.
Tax season. He’s busy.
Your exactly right. He works very hard a few months a year.[/quote]
Haha. And he makes fun of the union’s for not doing shit
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
Rockscar wrote:
grew7 wrote:
They’d be acceptable if we weren’t in a war, but can we really afford to just lower taxes and increase spending? I can’t help but feel that when I’m an adult, my generation will end up paying for this. So really, people are just stealing from their children, right? They get a tax break, but later their children will have to pay the debt.
I say we cut taxes and stop funding idiotic countries. Also, stop paying back monies we owe to other countries…they never fucking pay us.
hey man, the government makes lots of money off bonds. Bonds and taxes. As far as I know, mostly Asian countries by the bonds. You don’t want them cashing in at the same time.[/quote]
Maybe not, but re-appropriation of funds to support the cuts is not a monumental task, but given how partisan everything is now it just may be.
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
Rockscar wrote:
doogie wrote:
FightinIrish26 wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
FightinIrish26 wrote:
Couple questions. Why was the Clinton era balanced budget an illusion? I have not heard this before.
…
I forget the accounting trick they used but the deficit every day grew even while the budget was allegedly balanced.
Perhaps they ignored the debt payments when they “balanced” the budget?
It was a sad joke at the time but everyone ignored it because a balanced budget looked good for both parties.
I understand how it would. This may be the only time that I’m going to say “Where the fuck is Rainjack?”. I’m curious about this.
Tax season. He’s busy.
Your exactly right. He works very hard a few months a year.
Haha. And he makes fun of the union’s for not doing shit
[/quote]
It’s called self employment. It’s a wonderful thing sometimes.
The 2003 Tax Cut on Capital Gains Entirely Paid for Itself
by donald luskin from nationreview.com
On Thursday the Congressional Budget Office released its annual Budget and Economic Outlook, and buried in one of its nearly impenetrable tables of numbers is a remarkable story that has gone entirely unreported by the mainstream media: The 2003 tax cut on capital gains has entirely paid for itself. More than paid for itself. Way more.
To appreciate this story, we have to go back in time to January 2003, before the tax cut was enacted. Table 3-5 on page 60 in CBO?s Budget and Economic Outlook published in 2003 estimated that capital-gains tax liabilities would be $60 billion in 2004 and $65 billion in 2005, for a two-year total of $125 billion.
Now let?s move forward a year, to January 2004, after the capital-gains tax cut had been enacted. Table 4-4 on page 82 in CBO?s Budget and Economic Outlook of that year shows that the estimates for capital-gains tax liabilities had been lowered to $46 billion in 2004 and $52 billion in 2005, for a two-year total of $98 billion. Compare the original $125 billion total to the new $98 billion total, and we can infer that CBO was forecasting that the tax cut would cost the government $27 billion in revenues.
Those are the estimates. Now let?s see how things really turned out. Take a look at Table 4-4 on page 92 of the Budget and Economic Outlook released this week. You?ll see that actual liabilities from capital-gains taxes were $71 billion in 2004, and $80 billion in 2005, for a two-year total of $151 billion. So let?s do the math one more time: Subtract the originally estimated two-year liability of $125 billion from the actual liability of $151 billion, and you get a $26 billion upside surprise for the government. Yes, instead of costing the government $27 billion in revenues, the tax cuts actually earned the government $26 billion extra.
CBO?s estimate of the ?cost? of the tax cut was virtually 180 degrees wrong. The Laffer curve lives!
This straight-A report card on supply-side tax-cutting was noted Thursday by Daniel Clifton of the American Shareholders Association ? the man who predicted that exactly this would happen when the tax cuts were first enacted. Clifton wrote on his blog,
a capital gains tax cut spurs the growth of new businesses, increases the wage of workers, enhances consumer purchasing power, and grows the economy at large, resulting in more overall gains to be taxed. When capital is taxed at a lower rate, any revenue losses are offset because there is more overall capital being produced, and thus more total revenue being generated.
Using the same kind of analysis, we can see that attempts to raise tax revenues by raising tax rates simply doesn?t work. Consider the massive increase in personal income-tax rates imposed by President Clinton and a Democratic Congress in 1993. Compare actual total tax revenues for the four years from 1993 to 1996 to what had been estimated by CBO in 1992 before the tax hikes took effect. Despite increasing the top tax rate on incomes by 16 percent to 28 percent, actual revenues only beat the 1992 estimate by less than 1 percent.
So what led to the gusher of tax revenues in the late 1990s that helped to put the federal budget into surplus? Simple: It was the capital-gains tax cut engineered by a Republican Congress in 1997. Compare actual total tax revenues for the three years from 1997 to 1999 to what had been previously estimated by CBO in January 1997. Despite cutting the capital-gains tax rate by 28 percent, actual total revenues beat the 1997 estimate by more than 11 percent.
These are the numbers. They don?t lie. It?s the Left that lies ? just like former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin did this week in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal when he said
The proponents of supply-side theory who assert that tax cuts will wholly ? or even significantly ? pay for themselves (through increased growth and federal tax revenues), appear to be no more accurate now than they were in the ?90s.
The numbers show that supply-side theory is accurate now and that it was accurate in the ?90s. With the latest evidence from the CBO in hand, as Daniel Clifton says, ?It?s time to make the capital gains and dividend tax cuts permanent. Congress has no excuse at this point.?
? Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your visit to his blog and your comments at don@trendmacro.com.
The tax cuts of the 90’s did produce a large increase in tax revenue, and the budget would have been balanced. But then they all got the stupid idea that if there were surpluses for the next few years, they could go ahead and spend those surpluses now, but use accounting to say the surpluses were still there even though it was spent.
They were not spending “today’s” money, they were spending “next years” surplus. Part of the government’s strange bullshit accounting ideas.
Why? This assumes that money generated will drop by an equal amount if taxes are increased. “Voodoo economics” as it is called actually only points out that taxes are too high. If taxes are cut, and revenue goes up, then taxes were placing an undo burden on business growth.
It seems counterintuitive, but taxes are not a linear thing. If you double the taxes, it does not mean that tax revenue will double. In fact this was seen in the 80’s when the capitol gains tax was dropped, effectively doubling those taxes, and this actually resulted in the revenue produced from this tax to drop by about half.
What is often not included in the projections is that people respond to tax increases and tax reductions. They will do things to avoid paying larger taxes, and when the taxes are reduced, they may not see the taxes as a burden, or find they can make more money taxably then they can tax free.
An example I have given before is a person I heard on the radio in the 90?s right after the capital gains tax was reduced. He purchased $40,000 worth of Pepsi stock in the late 70’s, and it was currently (at the time) worth $8,000,000. He just held that stock without “realizing” the profit, so his $7,960,000 in profit was never taxed. But with the reduction in capitol gains tax, he found it worth it to sell, creating tax revenue that would not have existed otherwise.
This is voodoo economics are work.
Overspending is a big problem in Washington. Yet I disagree with you on the national healthcare, as I see that as another attempt to overspend.
One thing seems to happen when the government pays for something. Businesses figure out how to charge the government more then they could ever charge the customer, or insurance companies, the government creates a bureaucracy that gets in the way of everything, and ends up siphoning off tons of money, and doubles the cost of the system. Then there is the idea that if they pay for it, they get to choose what happens within the system, who is allowed to receive what services, when, and why.
Just look at how simple your taxes are to pay. Look at how easy it is to deal with the government on any issue. Big Brother already decided on ephedrine, then on MAG-10 (before I was able to really stock up,) and now you want them to decide on what surgery I am allowed to have?
Let me put this in terms you can understand. (From political standpoint, not intelligence.)
What if someone proposed to take the whole healthcare industry and put one big organization in charge of it from top to bottom? And that organization is Wal-Mart? Would you like Wal-Mart to control the whole healthcare industry? Guess what, I am convinced they could do it better then the government could.
