Brookings and Heritage agree on something? Wow!

[filthyrichkleptocrat]

The bad news is they agree the future looks grim, wealth transfers from young taxpayers to senior citizens become increadingly burdensome
and soon eating up every tax dollar.

Brookings, Heritage, National Press Foundation Seminar Describes "The Future America Can't Afford"
"Budget Deficits an Unsustainable Danger, Scholars, Officials Conclude

http://www.brookings.org/comm/news/20051031budget.htm

The curious news is there are so few ideas for solutions. I'd bet everyone on this forum could devise some reasonable solutions to the baby boom tsunami.

How would you make social security and medicare sustainable for the 21st century.?

[Joe Chi Minh]

1. By appropriately taxing the income of filthyrichkleptocrats,

just like we did in the UK, after WWII. And my, but how the country prospered!

[kenny blankenship]

2. You said it. Nothing more really needs to be said

there is no crisis aside from the crisis of filthy rich kleptocrats ripping this country off and leaving it to rot as they plan their getaways to walled compounds in third world countries and sock their dough away in the Caribbean banking centers tax havens.

[filthyrichkleptocrat]

4. filthyrichkleptocrats pay taxes on their government paycheck only.

Unlike top gun Cunningham the brainless, most of us filthyrichkleptocrats take our graft by briefcase load of 100 dollar bills.

[Warpy]

3. Oh, great, let's have generational warfare

so that none of the worker bees notices the CLASS WARFARE these two institutions have been pushing for decades.

They did this same bullshit back in the 80s. I dimly remember it back in the late 50s, too, whipping up rage among young workers who see their OASDI premiums on small paychecks eating up more than income taxes do.

Hell, end the cap on earnings. Make OASDI apply to all earnings, investment and labor. End the social security "crisis" once and for all by keeping Congress the hell out of our retirement insurance premiums. Give the rich that flat tax with no exemptions they say they want.

Show the public what those tax cuts to the exalted rich have really done to this country.

[filthyrichkleptocrat]

5. I see no reason to raise more taxes on Americans.

Let's juat make more Americans. Offer citizenship to any illegal alien who can get a real taxpaying job, and deport these new citizens forever should they go back to cash only, untaxed jobs. Open the borders to new emigrants, citizenship to all who find taxpaying employment. I'm certain we could find 50 or 100 million or more good alien jobseekers who would love to become citizens of the USA. That'a a lot of payroll taxes!

[Warpy]

6. No jobs + artificially low wages= low revenues.

So unless you enjoy seeing immigrants starve in the street or think a higher street crime rate is a great thing, just keep cutting taxes on the rich, keeping labor on low wages, and bring more people in to drive wages even lower.

Hell, those are great ideas for Repuglicans.

[filthyrichkleptocrat]

7. You don't like immigrants? Where did your family come from?

You want to tax the rich(AKA small business), and you don't think it costs you?

Yhe you'll tax away the operating capital, what they they use to pay the wages % of Americans live on. You'll tax away the investment capital that they need for expansion, and for new and better equipment for the workers to do their jobs with.

The Clinton administration economists saw the need of small business for capital, so they worked hard to cut interest rates and freed up capital for investment, and this, in effect, was absolutely identical to tax cuts for the rich(small business's)!

[Warpy]

8. Small business people are not the rich

which is something you need to know if you're going to crank on an economy board. Most small business owners earn less than $50,000/year.

You've bought supply side economics hook, line and sinker. Too bad this particular scam has never worked. You're about to see why it has never worked, and I do hope you'll take the hard lesson to heart.

Please educate yourself.

[progressive_realist]

9. That's absurd.

For any incorporated business, so-called income taxes are assessed on net revenues, i.e. after expenses have been subtracted. They are more properly profit taxes. A business that matches its revenues to its costs exactly pays no income taxes whatsoever. Likewise for a business whose costs exceed its revenues. The only businesses that pay income taxes are those that show a profit. Even with a punitive tax rate of 90%, every business that showed a profit before taxes would still show a profit after taxes, just a (much) smaller one. Income taxes will never cause a profitable business to become unprofitable. Which means they will never cause a diminishment of capital.

True, it is somewhat different for non-incorporated businesses. Here, the entire difference between revenues and costs is treated as personal income for the business owners. Which means they pay taxes on it exactly as if they were employees taking home an equal amount of wages. Except they don't have to pay Social Security or other payroll taxes. So in general they pay less taxes than someone taking home an equivalent amount of wages.

And don't give me any nonsense about how, without Social Security, they have to pay more to plan for their retirement. The whole argument pushed by right-wingers in favor of privatizing Social Security is that private sector alternatives are cheaper. :eyes:

Furthermore, in the modern economy, operating capital rarely comes from the carefully accumulated savings of hard-working entrepreneurs. That's a nice myth, but most institutions function on credit. Banks extend credit based on their assessment of the future earnings of a business, not its past savings behavior. Thanks to the magic of fractional reserve banking, the money loaned out by banks is created at the time the loan is taken out. Cutting interest rates does not "free up capital"; it creates money/capital out of thin air. Which tends to cause inflation. Which is an indirect tax on everyone else. But that's another discussion.

I fail to see how in the real world tax cuts for the rich will ever lead to enhanced prosperity for the rest of us. If anything, accumulations of personal wealth take money out of the active economy, which diminishes overall economic activity.

[hfojvt]

11. pretty good rant

except that the self employed do have to pay social security taxes. As soon as they make more than $1000 or so, they are required to pay double, since they pay for themselves and also they pay the employer amount. Those rates used to be lower (for workers too, but even more so for the self employed) before the Reagan tax increase of the 1980s.

[progressive_realist]

12. Thank you for the correction.

I forgot that the self-employed pay Social Security taxes. It doesn't change the basic structure of the argument I articulated, thankfully.

[fasttense]

10. What world do you live in?

First small business is NOT the ones who are getting the tax cuts. It is the super rich, known as the top 1% wealthiest people in the United States. They are a handful of people who rake in about 45% of this countries assets. The pResident (in his own words) calls them his base, the haves and have mores. Small businessmen can't touch them.

Second operating capital??? Who taxes operating capital? Not this country. Not for large corporations. Investment capital? No American corporations are investing in the United States. They are investing in India, China, any country but the US. Large US corporations are not investing in expansion and equipment in this country. They are moving all those wonderful jobs overseas. Did you know the average wage earner has increased the amount of federal tax they pay by about 10% but large corporations have decreased the amount of federal tax they pay by over 10%. Now who is supporting this country?

Small business and tax cuts to the rich are two different things. Ask a small businessman how much of that huge tax cut did he see.