Cut Military or Raise Taxes, take your pick

[furface]

If you want to do it by cuts only and leave off Social Security and Medicare/ Medicaid, you basically have to cut 100% of everything including defense.

I actually wouldn't have a problem with that. There's a reasonable way of looking at the federal government which is that it basically provides inter-State neutral social insurance & raises an army when necessary. The States do everything else.

There's also the issue of different types of taxes other than the income tax as well as a different theoretical look at the income tax. True consumption taxes, where you tax direct resource consumption are IMV morally legitimate. Higher tax rates on the extremely wealthy (not just making 250k in one single year) are legitimate as well in my view. No one with less than $1 million in net worth should even have to look at an income tax form IMV. Resource consumption taxes could be levied without the vast majority of people filling out forms as well.

National Medical Insurance (let's call it what it is at this point) could also be vastly less expensive if Medical industries were deregulated. Most of the big budget problems seem to be coming from Medical insurance. It has its claws reaching in lots of different places. Much like military programs, but Medical reaches into private business and individual budgeting problems.

But nobody's really talking about a balanced budget at this point. We could meet reasonable debt to GDP goals in the next few years very easily by merely reducing military to a reasonable level & not raising taxes.

[idiom]

At this point, it can't be fixed without killing the empire and gutting monopoly protections in Medicine. Medicare is increasing exponentially because medical costs are going up. Break the monopoly protections and medical costs would crash by 80% overnight.

[Zippyjuan]

Let's say we wanted to use a sales tax- and left off food sales so you don't hurt the poor too much. According to the Fed you have $367 billion a month or $4.4 trillion a year if you annualized that. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/RSXFS Let's say you wanted to balance the budget by keeping everything as it is but adding a national sales tax. To raise the $1.2 trilllon you need, it would require a national sales tax of 27%. Naturally such a high tax would greatly reduce retail sales so to raise the same amount the tax rate would actually have to be even higher than that.

What if we stuck with millionaires? http://quinnscommentary.com/2011/04/...-you-wish-for/

According to IRS data, 323,069 income tax returns out of some 144,000,000 filed (2008) showed an adjusted gross income of $1 million dollars or more. That is roughly 0.3% of all households. Only three percent of all returns have an AGI over $200,000 (that’s households, not individuals). The top 1-percent Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) break point (TY 2008) was $380,354. The state with the most such returns was California…imagine that, not New York with all those greedy Wall Street types, more like high-tech entrepreneurs and Hollywood celebrities.

If we expected to pay for all of our current government expenses of $3.3 trillion, we would have to tax each of them an average of about a $10 million each.

How about merely a "reasonable" reduction in defense spending and no taxes raised? How about half its current level? That would save about $350 billion. Deficit is about $1.2 trillion so we would "only" be adding $850 billion (plus interest) to the debt every year. That would put us about $25 trillion in total debt ten years from now.

[presence]

How about merely a "reasonable" reduction in defense spending and no taxes raised? How about half its current level? That would save about $350 billion; we'd still be spending 60% more than Russia and China COMBINED.

Fixed.

[furface]

If we expected to pay for all of our current government expenses of $3.3 trillion, we would have to tax each of them an average of about a $10 million each.

It could possibly be an average of $10 million each. You'd have to know something about the distribution of incomes in that bracket.

The issue in terms of monetary policy is that money tends to stagnate in a small number of places. If you could print money and have it disappear in bank accounts & asset hoards of say over $1 billion, it would be quite an effective monetary policy.

Really, who would care? "Money" is a State granted monopoly over a certain share of resources & goods. Since there isn't zero unemployment, goods are essentially resource bound, so it's really a State granted monopoly over pure resources. Why should the State go out of its way to grant monopolies to massively wealthy individuals & entities that are acting extremely anti-socially? And it's more than just wealthy people hoarding money. It's sovereign asset funds like those of Gulf Arab States & China.

What I'm getting at is that the open secret of the budget debate is that monetization is somewhere on the horizon. There's no way around it and the only goal of the current budget is to get the deficit pointing in the downward direction, so that a combination of monetization & restructuring of government could work to getting it down to zero.

So really, it's not so much a matter of getting a balanced budget next year. It's a matter of policy decisions & trends. That's why I think that reducing military & cutting the federal bureaucracy to the bone is the best strategy, while leaving tax rates alone.

ALL government bureaucracies are predatory. Give them money & they'll be at your door with a shotgun demanding more. That's including military bureaucracies. Starve the bureaucracies & provide social insurance for the masses to keep money moving & enforce a minimal sense of economic justice. It's much safer than funding predatory government bureaucracies.

[Carson]

If California agreed to raise their own damn taxes (without cuts).. I am sure the rest of America will agree to it too

Sad isn't it.

Alameda County had a Measure B1 to raise taxes that almost passed...until the recount.

Apparently a bunch of TEA Party People where there to witness the recount. I guess it was close enough the government wanted to find a few more ballots to push it over the top.

Here is a message from the TEA Partyers;

Patriots,

Measure B1 has failed. The recount has been stopped! No more volunteers needed. Congratulations!

Kudos to the patriots who were there watching to make sure the votes were counted correctly!

TVP


Alameda County transportation sales tax measure loses after recount

By Denis Cuff Contra Costa Times
Posted: 12/05/2012 02:38:07 PM PST
Updated: 12/05/2012 04:09:38 PM PST

A measure to increase Alameda County's transportation sales tax was defeated after a partial recount failed to reverse its razor-thin loss at the November polls.

The Alameda County Transportation Commission announced Wednesday it was conceding defeat of Measure B1, which would have doubled the sales tax to 1 cent.

The tax increase would have raised $7.8 billion over three decades for roads, freeways, transit and trails. It would have restored public service transit cuts, funded a backlog of road repairs and contributed $400 million for a BART rail extension to Livermore, among other projects.

The measure was supported by 65.53 percent of the votes, falling less than 800 votes shy of reaching the 66.67 percent needed to pass.

The final tally: 350,899 yes votes, and 176,504 no votes.

"We wanted to leave no stone unturned. We now see no value in continuing the recount," said Art Dao, executive director of the agency that oversees the transportation sales tax. "We are encouraged that 66.53 percent of the voters supported the measure."

Dao said his agency commissioned the county registrar of voters to recount ballots in many Berkeley precincts, but the results on Tuesday netted an increase of only seven "yes" votes -- not enough to justify a full recount.


Snip...

More here;

http://www.contracostatimes.com/brea...-after-recount