Tax-Cut Time
It's jobs, jobs, jobs now for the Obama team, rather than health care, health care, health care. You have to call it progress, particularly if you're jobless, or fearful of becoming so at a time when 17 million Americans are either non- or underemployed.
We're about done, in other words, with the free-floating pretense that putting the federal government in charge of health care decisions somehow creates a lot of opportunity and employment.
There's a problem, nonetheless: We're not likely to get from the left, which numerically controls Congress and has its hooks in the White House, many inspirational ideas about the creation of private sector opportunity.
The left—or, as it's known in today's media, the "progressive" side of the street—doesn't think in private sector categories. You could as soon call on Umar "Hot Seat" Abdulmutallab for advice on forest fire prevention as ask the ordinary Democratic congressman for ideas on expanding the economy.
The left has hardly a clue as to how jobs are created, apart from jobs that spring up when new government bureaus open or new government regulations require the hiring of people to figure out what Congress meant, and then to make sure it happens.
Currently, the country's only steadily expanding area of endeavor seems to be government work. Just the other day, the Bureau of Labor Statistics—a government agency, of course—announced that members of government unions now outnumber the members of private sector unions: auto workers, truckers, carpenters, electricians and the like.
This isn't to lament the decline of private sector unionism as much as it is to note the shrinkage of the private sector relative to the burgeoning of the public sector over this decade and the last.
The left prefers government activity to other kinds: the better to set terms, costs and objectives. The left, that is, likes control, as contrasted with the right, which prefers to wait and see what people can dream up on their own. The left doesn't particularly encourage or even trust private dreaming, hence the emphasis on use of the tax code—a mechanism handed down from the top—to specify who needs what and why.
Accordingly, the left almost never wants to cut taxes. Usually, it wants to raise them. There's little surprise in the White House rollout Monday of a new strategy for middle class "assistance" featuring new credits for child care, expanded credits for retirement savings, and . . . well, that seems to be it in the tax department. The president tells us it's all about job creation—"the single most important thing we can do to rebuild the middle class." Many will avert their eyes in preference to noticing the gap between goal and method.
The long and the short of it is, the left rejects serious tax cutting—which puts more money in earners' hands—because it doesn't believe earners will spend their windfalls in the right way. Not without the government telling them how. That means, basically, why cut the government's tax take at all?
Just now, with markets fretful over what's coming from the White House—whose attacks on bankers haven't reinforced optimism for the future—the president and his helpers apparently plan nothing meaningful from a free market standpoint. Cut business taxes? Nothing likely would give businessmen greater incentive to hire and invest. It can't be done, though. It would violate liberal orthodoxy to cut taxes and reduce government in some sense to the role of economic bench warmer.
The left might whine about how we can't cut taxes due to the deficit, but the right could riposte: think of the money we'll save by burying once and for all Congress' trillion-dollar plan for government health care.
In other words, it depends on what you really want—government control and sputtering recovery, or marketplace incentives and growth of the sort that occurs only when government steps back a pace. The left, stuck in government-control mode, likely won't be of vast help as the economic recovery debate takes off. Time for serious tax-cutters—again—to show what's really what.
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"The left might whine about how we can’t cut taxes due to the deficit"
The right *should* state the obvious truth: we cannot cut taxes without cutting spending, period. If the left continues demanding we expand Big Government programs like Obamacare, and if the "right" continues demanding we expand Big Government programs like world-policing, then we must raise taxes to pay for these boondoggles.
I cannot disagree with what Mr. Murchison says about the left but hope that he puts not excess faith in the right, at least the customary thinking on the right as we have come to understand it. There is a penchant for control on both sides of the divide and this involves basically disenfranchising individuals. My job in a giant corporation in the "private" sector is one of a technocratic functionary and the culture (if that is what we should call it) within which I exist daily closely resembles the politically driven irrational one of the "public" sector. Fear of losing that position is not a fear of being relegated to bureacratic functions otherwise run by the government (I am basically there already) but of a diminsihing in pay which, even as the leveling goes on, still remains slightly higher in the "private" sector. Though not likely for much longer.
Mr Murchison
You are to be commended for an accurate simplification of what is needed to jump start US economic recovery,but more important than fiscal (ie. tax) policy changes are budget policy changes. Simply put, spending is a bigger problem than taxing. The catch is that spending is locked in, both short term and long term, to laws, statues, regulations, contracts, etc. which in the current political climate of the welfare/warfare state are almost imposible to eliminate. Therefore, it is much easier for legislators to raise more revenue through various new taxes and fees than to cut spending which is the only thing that will create new wealth.
My simple solution is two fold:
First, have President Paul (1912) propose to a new conservative congress a mandatory cut of the federal budget of 5% per year for three years. No off budget increases allowed for any reason.
Second, have that same congress scrap the current tax code and replace it with a new three tiered federal tax code roughly as follows:
Tier One would be required of all, and would allow the government to provide limited national defense capabilities and limited public works/ infrastructure/ projects along with some others which must benefit all citizens. In other words, the "common good."
Tier Two would be optional and would authorize the gov't to provide services to the truly needy, disaster relief, long term health care for elderly & disabled...etc. Things most would agree are beyond the average families ability to adequately provide.
Tier three, also optional, would be for those who believe that the gov't must provide all needs for everyone from cradle to grave. This tier is for the 60-70% of those who receive current gov't subsidies as special interest groups.
Such changes should also be adopted at the state level and the result would be the dissolution of the nanny welfare/warfare state,a sever reduction of the evil "public sector" mandating the transfer of someone elses wealth, and a return to a proper balance where private affairs dominate the daily activities of most citizens.
Forgive me. I meant Pres. Paul 2012.
The American people are conflicted. They want the programs but don't want to pay for them. Republicans and "conservatives" are not much better than the Left when it comes to spending. The mainstream Right demands heavy expenditure on defense, the intelligence(sic) agencies, NASA, the Interstate Highway System, foreign aid to favored regimes, contributions to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other likeminded globalist gangs, agribusiness subsidies and many more dubious government schemes.
At the end of the day, I agree with Mr. Murchison: More money in my pocket is better than that same money going to D.C.
However, I can no longer lend my support to GOP tax cuts.
These tax cuts are manipulative tools in the shrinking tool box of Republicans. What is needed is tax reform and spending cuts.
The federal tax code, including corporate taxation and some form of import and export tax, needs to be rewritten on the front and back of a single sheet of paper. My tax return should never be bigger than a postcard.
As for cutting spending, first make Congress honest by cutting their salaries and benefits and squaring up the government with the rest of us. Then aim for the three biggest budget (military, SS and Medicare) items and find ways to reduce them. Then eliminate all the nickel and dime programs that do nothing but waste our money.
Tax cuts in and of themselves are not 'conservative'. That so many conservatives believe they are is a testament to the ignorance of the American electorate. There is nothing 'conservative' about spending money one does not have and shoveling that debt off onto one's descendants - in fact, that's the opposite of 'conservative'. It's the behavior of an immature, morally bankrupt degenerate.
I'd also mention "conservatives" should be making a point not to support expanding the tax credit for "child care," though I am sure Lamar Alexander is all for it.
Six Republican co-sponsors wouldn't even support the deficit commission they themselves sponsored in the Senate because they were afraid of what might result of it: a tax increase!
Yes, Republicans have shown once again that like the Bourbons of old they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Apparently a tax rate of 39 percent is still too high for their tastes. Maybe it is. The problem is that it's a rate that cannot support the massive government that we have. That's why we borrow from overseas and print money out of thin air. This is what Ron Paul tried to point out in 2007-08 but apparently Republican politicians and so-called "conservative" columnists continue to myopically focused on "tax cuts", probably because it's politically popular. Once again they call for New Deal government at pre-New Deal prices.
Outside of Dr. Paul and a few others, there is not one politician within the whole GOP that willing to call for what needs to be done, a radical cutting back of government and complete junking of the tax code (not the silly Fair Tax). You can cut taxes or shift the tax burden all you want, it doesn't change anything if you continue to believe the gov't should fight wars all over the world, pay for your grandma's healthcare or should take a man to the moon.
I'll be happy to support tax cuts if Mr. Murchinson and Texans like him willingly give up cotton and sugar subsidies, the Johnson Space Center, the oil-depletion allowance, all the money they've spent on freeways in the Metroplex, Ft. Bliss so forth. If they are serious about tax cuts, well then something's got to go in order to pay for them. I'm tired of subsidizing the Lone Star State. I hope he is too.
"The left has hardly a clue as to how jobs are created, apar from jobs that spring up when new government bureaus open..."
It's interesting that Mr. Murchison mentions this. I was just remembering how, during the Cold War, w were told what a difficult time Soviet citizens would have adjusting to a market economy after so many years of Communism. Supposedly, they would have no clue how to set up and operate businesses successfully (i.e. profitably), since they had all been little more than vodka-addled drones their whole lives. Yet, other than problems related to corruption and organized crime, former Soviets seem to have had little problem making the transition; at least, if they had such problems, little was reported about it here in the West. I think that this is probably due to two factors: one, the innate naturalness of free market exchanges (i.e. for our purposes here, capitalism), and two, the Soviet citizens' familiarity with the operation of a free exchange system vis a vis the Black Market.
Contrast that with the all-too-apparent cluelessness of your average American Democrat politician. Is it not wondrous that some old babushka trading potatoes for linen seems to have a better grasp of economic principles than these supposedly educated Westerners who have lived their whole lives under our capitalist system?
Republicans have shown once again that like the Bourbons of old they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Forgive the off-topic interlude, but I wish that as conservatives we would not quote that statement, which is rather a libel against the French royal family. They did not try to resurrect the old physionomy or the old constitution (fundamental laws) of the Kingdom of France; Charles X, the one who was overthrown in 1830 by a bourgeois revolution, in fact tried to pander to the bloodthirsty revolutionary class with a project of conquest in Algeria, but on a practical level their rule was remarkably conservative and prudent.
Back on topic. Let's speak practically. Even if some uprising gives us a President Paul in 2012, the president would, as a somewhat democratically elected head of state, lack entirely the political capital necessary to effect such unpopular cuts in spending, and if he pushed hard enough, he would no longer be president by 2017. This is why I have been saying for years that a coup d'état is the only solution to save something of U.S. economic and physical infrastructure. That is the only government that could conceivably come to power without owing anything to the gangrenous portion of said infrastructure.
10, EEE, I think your points about bartering might be fine, but the few friends I do have from Mother Russia paint a far less rosy picture than you. Many tend to horde money and still have trouble creating their own jobs. It's difficult to believe that the oppression of Communism would not have some lasting effects on people. In a couple generations, we will see.
11, Mr. Moses, I think it's a conservative fantasy to think any one person or any time will bring about a rapid resolution to a lot of our problems. But short of an uprising, I do believe that someone with the character and intellect of Dr. Paul could do a world of good by simply vetoing every piece of legislation that would come his way (as president). A man like him would be so important to our times and culture by simply setting an example that most have never seen. Our presidents have largely been the same within my lifetime, for example, and he would be truly different.
Until the budget is balanced, spending is slashed, and debt repayment at a reasonable rate has begun, it is irresponsible for any Republican hack politician to prattle on about tax cuts. Furthermore, any Republican shill who doesn't seriously consider slashing our trillion dollar "global force for good" and "defender of the homeland" is not to be taken seriously.