Getting rid of government programs makes politicians unpopular. So anyone who wants to continue to ride the gravy train won't go near it. The president cannot do it alone. I guess the alternative is to tax the corporations back into oblivion. I'm sure that will work out just fine, let's try it. I couldn't care less about them being less profitable if there aren't heavy consequences in lost jobs and what not.
Lowering tax rates didn't prevent the near universal disappearance of American manufacturing during the 1980s. You may not be old enough to recall, but we actually used to make things in America. All those good middle class jobs really sucked. The service economy has been soo000oo much better.
How dumb do you have to be to still believe in trickle down fairy tale? Kansas just went through this hard core and guess what the end result was - raising taxes on the middle class (sales tax, sin tax, etc) to pay for tax cuts for the rich as the fairy tale revenue never appeared.
funny, I didn't see anyone mention anything about trickle down in here. try to keep up you lazy american. What's your solution for cooperate inversion and cash stored abroad? Raise taxes? btw - if you don't think the middle class benefited from the Reagan era please take a look at the # of jobs created. We had huge economic growth as a nation during that time. But feel free to pretend like it didn't work. But if you cut revenue you have to cut spending. And therein lies the fail.
The success of Trump and now Ben Carson still doesn't give the message to the GOP. Even though polls of Repub voters show their contempt for the GOP do-nothing Congress. They are in denial and as usual blame their failures on everyone else in the world esp the Dems, of course and the current POTUS. They claim this resistance is because of his liberal policies not their partisan shenanigans like shutting down the gov and threatening to do it over again. While they are despised by their own constituents the Pres is doing ok in the polls. I think because as a lame duck he isn't shrinking into the woodwork he's trying new things and attempting to get important things done. Even people who disagree with him on almost everything can respect that.
Of course you could tax the very wealthy and cut loopholes like Trump is now saying about hedge fund managers. And boy is he right. It's not just the GOP protecting them either, they have huge support from some of the Dems. As for the hated gov programs the problem is waste and fraud not the programs themselves. Including entitlements. Giving hungry people food stamps including poor people and the underemployed to me is a great thing. And what we as a society should be doing. I have no problem paying taxes for something like this. I don't like paying 2 billion for one submarine. Or going to war. But for entitlements the fraud level is high. The money isn't just going to the people who need it.
In fact the theory behind Reagan's program was that cutting taxes would increase revenue without substantial cuts. And it is entirely appropriate to call that approach trickle down. Since the vast majority of the cuts were given to the wealthy. And of course revenue did not go up. Deficits did. This is again the lesson of what is currently going on in Kansas, btw. There are essentially two problems with looking at economic performance during and after Reagan in light of current GOP proposals and the simultaneous GOP adherence to revering him. One is that a significant factor in the overall economy since Reagan was inaugurated was the growth of substantial income inequality and the rapid decline of the middle class. Looking at overall economic numbers, as his supporters want to do, belies that virtually all the increases in income went to the very wealthy, while your average American's income has been more or less flat. (this was attenuated somewhat during the Clinton years, but that is another subject.) Second is that you can't look at the Reagan economy's overall performance as an argument for the kind of austerity-based approaches the GOP wants now. In fact the federal deficit tripled under Reagan. Federal employment increased by over 230,000 (federal employment has declined under Obama). And the net amount of taxation when taking into account all tax measures during his presidency was essentially the same. There was not even a real decline in governmental regulation overall. What Reagan did accomplish was to shift the tax burden from the wealthy down the economic pay scale. Anti-union efforts also were a factor. And now we have vast income inequality on a scale not seen since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. This did not just happen. It was a direct result of Reagan's economic policies. As to the number of jobs created argument, a $10 an hour job at Walmart is not the same as what in today's dollars would be a $50 an hour job at General Motors. There is no question that income inequality went substantially up since Reagan took office. So, if you are very wealthy and have benefitted, I get that you might revere Reagan. But if you are not, and live in the fact based world? Not so easy to understand. Instead those who revere him now either don't know the facts or think that some quasi-religious kind of faith in free market fundamentalism is the way to go. But even a free market fundamentalist should have issues with supply side economics. They should if they really believe in smaler government and lower deficits. You cant believe in them and revere Reagan. Not if you want to be a serious person.
Reagan busting the unions was his biggest scam of all. This is a guy who would've been today's version of the struggling youth if it wasn't for unions! The Screen Actors Guild looks out for him early in his career, protects him financially, eventually elects him President all helping drastically to give him the notoriety and financial means necessary to become the Ronald Reagan that he would become. how does he repay the system? by working diligently to destroy the unions in this country and sell people on a sham policy that caters to the rich and sets in motion the creation of the massive income gap we have today and the destruction of the middle class. A working class midwesterner, union member & union president, becomes U.S. President and works knowingly to destroy the very same ladder he climbed for future generations and yet the working class today lauds him as some kind of hero? its mind-boggling to me too BB
Yeah, this is one of the fascinating and disturbing questions of our times. I think it's partly an anti-immigrant, anti-"those" people thing. But do you know Joan Dideon? Despite my tending to liberal economic views, I tend to prefer, very much so, male writers. Joan Dideon is a fascinating exception. There's a new biography out on her, which led to a semi-review of that and discussion of her in the New Yorker a couple of issues ago. Anyway the point made is how Dideon grew up in northern California to a Republican and conservative family, with ranchers, military men, in her background, from originally homesteading pioneers who came by wagon train. It was in their worldview. Voted for Goldwater. She famously wrote a put down article for Look magazine about the counter-culture in 1967. But... she was never happy with the article's pov. To make a long story short she eventually morphed into a new pov on American society. She came to say that we are dominated by this notion that the virtues perceived to have been involved in the westward expansion - individualism, merit-based acquistion of property rights, but also loyalty to one's group, were not so much bad ideals as one that really did not describe what occurred in the actual economic development of California. The mythology that they did describe it ignored all the huge federal programs, infrastructure development, weapons industries especially later aerospace, that provided the basic structure of the state's economy. How this led to a serendipity in who was a winner and who a loser, economically. Who got the power. From those ideals also came the view that the rules that apply in the US economy are seen by many as not only necessary but essential on some moral level, such that those who "fail" under such rules are to be morally castigated. To them there is no other moral understanding. Well, I could go on, but the bottom line is this is all pretty silly. It doesnt' have to be like it is now, and we've evolved into a perverse situation where the frontier ideals make for a very poor fit in understanding what is really going on in today's America. Too many working class voters see their situation in simple, really simple minded, terms acccordin to those ideals, when they have long outlived their usefulness.
\\Unions were a policy tool that were born of necessity, but have long outlived their usefulness as courts of civil redress have advanced... In one day, sub human conditions, and miserly pay necessitated the need to organzie. Currently it exists as nothing more than a money grab partcularly on the public sector side, where even as big a commie as FDR decried them. You want a public sector job. You don't get to organize. Go work in the private sector.
Not exactly. The largest falls in revenue, were due to cuts directed at LOWER (hence regressive) tax brackets. Actually the inverse of the perverse trickle down misnomer. Which brings us to the Laffer Curve. It's really quite simple. By removing disincentives, that propel you to prohibitive tax rates, you generate the same revenue, at non prohibitive rates. (it's usaully adorned with an A,b C,D, E legend. Just realize that point e is the rate that is the least prohibitive, most generating rate. Not 50%. at 100% taxation no one works (A), and only the black market operates, at 0% (B) everyone works. But there is no revenue in either case. at 80% (C) some people move to the legit economy, and gov't makes money. at 20% (D) many people work and the government makes the same money. Finding point e, is the work.
You must have been ODing on Dick Cheney and his daughter today. He should be kissing Obama's ass for granting him and Bush immunity so they couldn't be sued for war crimes.
Based on the fact that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld helping to create this graph, you know its total bullshit...
Recent Poll: 29% of GOP voters say Obama was born in the US. 40% of GOP voters say Cruz was born in the US. You can see why these folks buy up the Laffer curve BS.
