It’s revealing, and a tad sobering, to realize just how extreme the Republican party has become in quite a short period of time. Bruce Bartlett, according to his bio, “held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.” So, we’re not talking some kind of left-winger here. He brings some much-needed sanity to the ongoing discussion about taxes:
The table below shows total taxes, including state and local government taxes, as a share of G.D.P. in 2008, the latest year for which there is complete data. The table makes clear that the United States has very low taxes by international standards.
… [A] substantial portion of the higher tax burden that Europeans pay is really illusory. They are really just paying their health insurance premiums through their taxes rather than through lower wages, as we do…. There may be reasons why it is better not to subsidize every family with children and not provide government health insurance for every citizen. But the idea that Europeans are enslaved by high taxes, as most American conservatives believe, is just nonsense.
Try telling that to the increasingly pathetic Tim Pawlenty, who today called for ever more extreme tax cuts – of course, nowhere explaining why his insane proposal would not blow the deficit, which he claims to care so much about, through the roof.
Mr. Pawlenty urged a reduction in business income tax rates to 15 percent, from 35 percent. Under his plan, individual federal income taxes would be flattened to just two rates: 10 percent for the first $50,000 of income and 25 percent for income above that threshold. He also urged elimination of all taxes on capital gains.
Such broad tax cuts would be costly, and Mr. Pawlenty did not provide specifics about how he would offset the impact of the cuts on the federal government’s debt — an issue that has become central to Republicans. He said economic growth would provide much of the money to pay for the tax cuts.
This is George H.W. Bush’s old “voodoo economics” with a vengeance. It’s also consistent with Pawlenty’s established pattern of talking a good game on “fiscal conservatism” while pursuing quite a different course, with unfortunate results.
The good news is that not very many people seem especially interested in seeing Pawlenty become president. So, at least there’s that.
thinkliberally says
I would be curious to see the numbers once health care is added in:
Taxes+Health Care Costs / GDP
JHM says
Dear Dr. Bones,
I am still trying to figure out what the huddled Blue Masses huddle for, exactly.
Meanwhile, in the course of my investigations I have stumbled across a nice illustration of a common syndrome, so please make a memorandumb of this one, if you would, sir.
E-comrade ‘david’ of BMG has keyboarded of “the increasingly pathetic Tim Pawlenty, who today called for ever more extreme tax cuts – of course, nowhere explaining why his insane proposal would not blow the deficit, which he claims to care so much about, through the roof.”
For some reason obscure to me, the good guys are always willing to admit the total sincerity of the G.O.P. Geniuses an’ their political hired hands when they (seem to) abandon their minds altogether to AEIdeology like that. That a Neocomrade Governor Th. J. Pawlenty might talk sheer drool to get a nomination and then, after gettin’ it, promptly forget that he ever mentioned anythin’ ‘insane’ — few donkeys seem capable of so wild and wooly a thought as this.
To be sure, ’tis The Stupid Party (®) of which we speak, but let us not go overboard and make the selfservative kiddies out too retarded to be able to promise what they have no serious intention of performin’.
I suppose the Freelord of Pawlenty could be described as ‘pathetic’ if one likes to pin that word on the pachyderm, but let us try to think well about precisely how he merits it. His freelordship’s problem is not mental derangement, clinical or figurative, but rather that he does not (as I consider) quite understand whom a Republicanian pol should pander to an’ how he should go about to pander. Really big-time Big Managers are not much interested in visionary schemes of never payin’ a penny of tax tribute ever again — that sort of dingalingery they leave to their hired hands in the Tanks of Thought, to Catoholics and Heritagitarians and Hoovervillains of Palo Alto.
Plus naturally — ¡talk about ‘insane’! –to the editorial columns of The Wall Street Jingo, who vouchsafe us another woozy doozy this morning:
Notice that ‘david’ knows the right pigeon-hole for that barf inducement: “George H.W. Bush’s old “voodoo economics” with a vengeance.”
The good news is that those wunnerful folks who take their economics from cocktail napkins are — not accidentally, I betcha — located nowhere near the core of the Campaign Contributin’ Class. If they were, we would have been spared Master Dubya and had instead eight years of Neocomrade M. S. “Flat-tax” Forbes, Jr..
Happy days (through affordable healthcare)
–JHM
Mark L. Bail says
pathologically creepy comment.
michael says
utterly confusing.
Mark L. Bail says
and confident in its characterizations of other people and entities. The tone implies: I’m smart: I comprehend you: and there’s something you’re missing.
But boil it down and what the hell does it actually say? Nothing.