Romney delivers powerful message.

[Flash]

If you want to be reductionist, sure.

But doing so means you have to act in bad faith and ignore the fact that their share of the wealth has increased as their share of income gains have increased.

I am not ignoring that fact. It is not relevant. When those who pay most federal individual income taxes also pay a higher percentage in taxes than their share of the income they are paying more than their fair share while all other groups pay less than their fair share.

So it sounds to me like you think all income should be taxed the same.

It doesn't sound like that at all. I agree with President Obama and many other presidents. There is no incentive to take the risk of investing when I can pay the same percentage of taxes on investments with no risk.

We just went through this garbage argument of yours no less than 8 years ago.What I don't understand, Flash, is why you keep arguing something that is so obviously wrong, even the original authors admit that they were fooling you. Is it a matter of pride? Is it a matter of ego? What gives? Why are you so insistent on being wrong? Are you really that petty?

I didn't join Just Plain Politics until 11/22/2017. So, who is being lazy now? I never heard of the article "Growth in the Time of Debt" so you are introducing a big straw man to argue against when I never made any arguments based on it and the authors did not "fool me" because I never read them. It was apparently a non-peer reviewed edition.

I cited the Congressional Budget Office projections for future growth based on increasing debt. However, there are quite a few more recent studies showing weak growth with rising debt.

Public Debt to GDP Can Harm Economic Growth

"A careful empirical examination of this relationship using a panel of 40 advanced and emerging economies and four decades of data indicates that a persistent accumulation of public debt over long periods is associated with a lower level of economic activity. Moreover, the evidence suggests that debt trajectory can have more important consequences for economic growth than the level of debt to gross domestic product (GDP).[Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas].

https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/do...018/el1803.pdf

New Evidence on Debt as an Obstacle to US Economic Growth

"there is evidence that Americans have already borne the costs of high debt levels, and without a reform of policy these costs will continue in the future. Using a new econometric technique for threshold autoregression and a debt measure that includes private debt as well as public debt, we estimate that in the period 1995 to 2014, US economic growth was more than 1 percentage point lower than it would have been at a debt level below the threshold."

[Mercatus Center, George Mason University.]

https://www.mercatus.org/system/file...g-paper-v2.pdf

Other economists find a more complicated relationship. You can find many of these studies with a little research.

[LV426]

but we don't tax wealth so your comparison is meaningless

it is like saying Hillary won the popular vote. It sounds good in your left wing circles, but has no meaning in reality

Or that tax cuts increase revenue or grow the economy.

No...wait...that's just a lie.

[LV426]

I am not ignoring that fact. It is not relevant

It's not?

So Flash, do you think that if the wealthy take a higher share of the income that won't also lead to them increasing their share of wealth?

[LV426]

When those who pay most federal individual income taxes also pay a higher percentage in taxes than their share of the income

But their share of the income has grown 50% since the Great Conservative Centrist Recession.

So you don't believe that taking a higher share of income will result in an increased share of wealth?

[LV426]

It doesn't sound like that at all. I agree with President Obama and many other presidents. There is no incentive to take the risk of investing when I can pay the same percentage of taxes on investments with no risk.

So...we cut taxes in January 2018 under the Centrist promise and belief that it would lead to increased business investment.

Did it?

Nope.

So if cutting taxes didn't increase investment, why would raising them not increase investment since investing is how you avoid paying the taxes, right?

[Earl]

Romney delivered a message that said, “I am an old white racist billionaire.”

I thought that the left hated old white racist billionaires.

[Flash]

But they really don't. Their effective rate is much lower than their share of the wealth. You were using marginal rates to make that judgment...effective rates are much lower, and are really the heart of the matter.

I know the sophist game you try to play, Flash.

37% is the marginal rate, not the effective rate.

Changing the goal line again. We were not talking about their tax rates. We were talking about paying a larger percentage of all federal individual income taxes than their share of the wealth.

I said nothing about effective or marginal tax rate. When I write that the top 1% earned 19.72% of the wealth and paid 37.32% of all federal individual income taxes, that is percent of all taxes paid---NOT the tax rate.

When I prove you wrong you hop to another topic.

[LV426]

I didn't join Just Plain Politics until 11/22/2017. So, who is being lazy now? I never heard of the article "Growth in the Time of Debt" so you are introducing a big straw man to argue against when I never made any arguments based on it and the authors did not "fool me" because I never read them. It was apparently a non-peer reviewed edition.

Your arguments are based on it, though. It's good to research your position so you can realize and learn that your position is garbage.

So, some history for you on "GROWTH IN THE TIME OF DEBT" because I don't believe you've never heard of that paper because I know I've referenced it specifically in debates with you at least a dozen times. So now you're not only being a lying piece of shit, but you're being a pretty bad one too.

That paper was commissioned circa 2010-11 to give austerity fans like you the justification they need to cut spending during a recession. The argument made was that increasing government debt as a percentage of GDP to at least 90% would result in slowed economic growth, or even contraction. Now, setting aside the absurdity that cutting spending doesn't contract an economy (even though it plainly does), the premise that government debt results in economic contraction among consumers is a load of malarkey because no one decides whether or not to buy a home based on what the federal deficit is. The only time high debt could affect the economy is if it affects interest rates, but we've had consistently low interest rates for the last 11 years. Now, the austeri-stans pointed to that paper, GROWTH IN THE TIME OF DEBT, as proof that high government debt translates to poor economic growth. HOWEVER they only reached that conclusion by deliberately leaving data out, and by deliberately fixing an Excel spreadsheet because the initial results didn't support the conclusion. That's why it wasn't peer reviewed, and that's why austerity "papers" rarely are.

I cited the Congressional Budget Office projections for future growth based on increasing debt.

What you cited was a "COULD". You even copied and pasted it yourself. And we can also simply look back at the last 80 years of data, post-WWII, and see time and again, that high levels of debt don't correspond with weaker economic growth. THAT WAS WHAT THE WHOLE KERFUFFLE WITH ROGOFF/REINHART WAS ALL ABOUT.

I'm amazed you didn't know about it. Actually, not amazed...skeptical. Skeptical because I know I've brought it up in debates with you before.

Furthermore, the one key part of all this is something you don't even mention: Moreover, estimates of the corresponding long-run coefficients are all negative, implying that countries that incurred persistent increases in the debt-to-GDP ratio over long periods also experienced lower output growth.

You forget that Democrats are the party of deficit reduction, not the GOP...and you forget that increasing spending doesn't ncessarily mean an increase to debt-to-GDP if revenue is raised from tax increases, just like it was at the end of 2012.

So you are framing your argument along a false set of circumstances; that there are persistent increases to the debt-to-GDP ratio, and not persistent declines like we saw during Obama.

I'm not arguing for persistent, increasing debt-to-GDP ratios at all, so it would appear the straw man is all yours.

Hard to see how raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for spending programs like Medicare For All would result in persistently higher debt-to-GDP ratios.

See, what you did was leave that very important part out of everything you're saying. So it's not a matter of "too much government debt means bad economy", it's a matter of "persistent increases in the debt-to-GDP ratio means bad economy in the long term, maybe."

That's not much of a position to have.

[LV426]

"there is evidence that Americans have already borne the costs of high debt levels, and without a reform of policy these costs will continue in the future. Using a new econometric technique for threshold autoregression and a debt measure that includes private debt as well as public debt, we estimate that in the period 1995 to 2014, US economic growth was more than 1 percentage point lower than it would have been at a debt level below the threshold."

Well, we shouldn't have cut taxes then.

[LV426]

Changing the goal line again. We were not talking about their tax rates. We were talking about paying a larger percentage of all federal individual income taxes than their share of the wealth.

But you can't talk about that share without talking about their rate too. They're linked. The share of income they have taken since the Great Flash Recession has been larger than the share of taxes they pay.

So you keep switching between metrics because no matter what metric you use, the details come back to haunt you.

I said nothing about effective or marginal tax rate. When I write that the top 1% earned 19.72% of the wealth and paid 37.32% of all federal individual income taxes, that is percent of all taxes paid---NOT the tax rate.

So you would agree then, that is sophist and deliberately leaves some pretty exculpatory information out.

If the wealthy are increasing the amount of income they take, would that not have an effect on their overall share of wealth?

[Flash]

But their share of the income has grown 50% since the Great Conservative Centrist Recession.

So you don't believe that taking a higher share of income will result in an increased share of wealth?

We don't tax wealth, just income (at the federal level).

Several countries tried taxing wealth and have repealed it--Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Luxembourg, Sweden........

[Flash]

Well, we shouldn't have cut taxes then.

I agree--we shouldn't have cut taxes without equal cuts in spending.

[Flash]

LOL @ the thought of teachers being millionaires.

Here's the problem for you....the average 401K balance isn't $1M, it's $100K.

You obviously have no knowledge of investing. A teacher with a 403(b) working 40 years can easily have over $1 million if they stay invested in stocks during that period. I know 2-3 people who worked with me who have over a million and I'm sure there are some I don't know about. Many others have much less because they stayed in fixed investments.

I also have a friend who owns an investment firm who has several clients who are plant workers and teachers who retired early because they accumulated over a million.

Data from US Census says, there are 7.2 million teachers and 8.6 million people are millionaires.

https://iterativepath.wordpress.com/...-millionaires/

That's because teachers and other educators account for 14% of the nation's 8.6 million millionaires.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/SB5...90061053133138

[LV426]

We don't tax wealth, just income (at the federal level).

Right, but if you increase the share of the amount of income you take in, aren't you also (albeit more slowly) increasing your share of the wealth?

Several countries tried taxing wealth and have repealed it--Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Luxembourg, Sweden........

Well that's because they already have free public colleges and single payer, universal health care.

[LV426]

I agree--we shouldn't have cut taxes without equal cuts in spending.

Cutting spending is economic contraction.

If you pull back spending, and I pull back spending, then who is spending in the economy to make it grow?