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.
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.
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.
When I die, turn me into a brick and use me to cave in the skull of a fascist
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?
When I die, turn me into a brick and use me to cave in the skull of a fascist
Romney delivered a message that said, “I am an old white racist billionaire.”
I thought that the left hated old white racist billionaires.
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.
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.
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 cited the Congressional Budget Office projections for future growth based on increasing debt.
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.
When I die, turn me into a brick and use me to cave in the skull of a fascist
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.
So you would agree then, that is sophist and deliberately leaves some pretty exculpatory information out.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.
If the wealthy are increasing the amount of income they take, would that not have an effect on their overall share of wealth?
When I die, turn me into a brick and use me to cave in the skull of a fascist
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
Last edited by Flash; 02-18-2020 at 03:23 PM.
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?
Well that's because they already have free public colleges and single payer, universal health care.Several countries tried taxing wealth and have repealed it--Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Luxembourg, Sweden........
When I die, turn me into a brick and use me to cave in the skull of a fascist
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