Blue Mass Group

Discuss

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1. Wow, they put it back to Reagan levels?

   Glad we are not doing that and instead moving around 2 or 3 %, moving it back to when our ecomony was growing. You know, pre-Bush.

   johnk   @   Wed 22 Feb 1:36 PM
   

2. Jeeze, tax revenue

   couldn’t be down because the UK’s recession has been longer than the Great Depression! Here’s Brad Delong (I’ll give you a break from Krugman):
   

   Britain’s Cameron-Osborne Depression will not merely be the worst depression in Britain since the Great Depression, but probably the worst depression in Britain…ever.

   That is quite an accomplishment. As Phillip Inman of The Guardian recently put it: “[T]he UK’s plan for recovery from the financial crisis was based on a full-throttle recovery in 2012….[C]onsumer confidence, business investment, and general spending would converge to send the economy on a trajectory of above-average growth.”

   It did not work: government ministers “have done what the right-wing economists told them to do and moved out of the way – the theory being that public-sector spending and investment was ‘crowding out’ the private sector.” Instead, as Inman says, “Spain is showing the way with its austerity-driven recession. Where the weak tread, we [in Britain] look keen to follow…”

   The failure of expansionary austerity in Britain should give all of its advocates around the world reason to reflect on and rethink their policy calculations. Britain is a highly open economy with a flexible exchange rate and some room for further monetary easing. There is no risk or default premium baked into British interest rates to indicate that fear of political-economic chaos down the road is discouraging investment.

   Seascraper, you only have half of austerity here. The bigger problem is government cuts (can’t find any sources to support my opinion or yours). There’s a whole lot of money not being pumped into the economy. Taxes may be being diverted, but there’s no evidence here except unnamed sources who might–just might–have political reasons for tying decreased revenue to a tax increase.

   mark-bail   @   Wed 22 Feb 3:09 PM
   

   • Well, I resorted to Krugman

     who sends us to Bloomberg, which reports that unemployment rose and the economy isn’t just stagnant, but contracting.

     And here’s a graph showing the 1930s and now.

     mark-bail   @   Wed 22 Feb 3:15 PM
     

     • higher taxes hurt Britain

       I’m perfectly willing to concede that by raising tax rates, the British government so hobbled and hurt its own economy that it contracted and tax revenues fell.

       seascraper   @   Wed 22 Feb 3:56 PM
       

       • That seems to be

         something you take on faith.

         mark-bail   @   Wed 22 Feb 4:45 PM
         

3. Imagine how awful things got in the US when

   the top marginal tax rate was 91% under that commie Eisenhower, and the wealthiest Americans paid a total of 50% of income to federal taxes. (Well, actually the economy was *booming* during that sad time, but like I wrote, you can *imagine* how bad it was.)

   Or take the Germany, with its confiscatory nanny-state predation upon the Job Creators. Capital gains taxed at 30% and a top marginal tax rate of more than 50%! Those poor bastards are the world’s second-biggest net exporters (after China, a country 18 times larger) and a family can live a middle-class existence on a single median income. Suckers!

   Evidence is the last refuge of a Liberal!

   mannygoldstein   @   Thu 23 Feb 9:06 AM
   

   • Half the world was blown up for Eisenhower

     Half the world was blown up and the Eastern bloc had a 100% tax rate. Different world now.

     Germany’s corporate income tax is 15%. Are you advocating a reduction of the tax rate on business income?

     seascraper   @   Thu 23 Feb 10:41 AM
     

     • I'm cool with adopting all of Germany's tax rates

       Because, in concert, they work well. Liberals are in favor of things that have been proven to work, you know.

       As to the world half blown up, and Eastern bloc taxes – so what?

       mannygoldstein   @   Thu 23 Feb 8:59 PM
       

4. You're resorting to

   sound bites and red(state) herrings, Scrapie. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether you guys don’t know what you’re talking about or don’t care. I think you care, but the Right Wing pees in its own intellectual pool so much you have a hard time seeing the bottom.

   The Eastern bloc had a 100% tax rate? Do tell. How did that work? People worked, but received no money at all? Why did they print the ruble? but they had no economy or growth either.

   The correct answer to taxes on corporate tax income is that many big corporations pay an effective tax rate lower than 15%. It depends on the company and the sector, but that’s the case. As tax attorney Linda M. Beale writes:
   

   the statutory rate of 35% is only on paper. Corporations engage in aggressive tax planning that cheats the system, and they take advantage of a bountiful number of lucrative loopholes built into the system under the four decades of Reagan-style corporate favoritism and deregulation, including items such as accelerated depreciation, various expensing provisions that let corporations deduct before they really have an economic cost, and the lucrative research & development credit that lowers taxes dollar-for-dollar for R&D expenditures that corporations have to do anyway (so they do not serve as an incentive to greater development) and that corporations have often already done prior to the enactment of the one-year “extensions” of the credit that have been taking place as transitions to no-credit for years.

   As a result, the US is actually a corporate tax haven, with the lowest effective corporate tax rates of almost all the countries that participate in the OECD.

   And Bruce Bartlett, the reality-based Reagan White House economic adviser, says our statutory tax rate of 35% is GOP BS:
   

   The economic importance of statutory tax rates is blown far out of proportion by Republicans looking for ways to make taxes look high when they are quite low. And they almost never note that the statutory tax rate applies only to the last dollar earned or that the effective tax rate is substantially lower even for the richest taxpayers and largest corporations because of tax exclusions, deductions, credits and the 15 percent top rate on dividends and capital gains.

   mark-bail   @   Thu 23 Feb 12:47 PM