Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/29/we-get-fooled-again-again-agai.html
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The great economic achievement we’ve heard about recently is having the highest median wages in history. We’ve come to a point where 0% growth over 17 years is a reason for a party just because it’s not negative anymore.
Real growth in median wages essentially ended with Reagan. The idea that anything is going well economically in America is a farce, and the first step to ending that farce is 70% or higher income taxes on people earning more than $500k (if not even more tax on people who make even less).
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It’s a good thing that these idiots can’t do a damn thing.
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Other GOP tax myths:
- Tax cuts will lead to “fiscal discipline” and reduced spending
- Tax cuts are revenue neutral
- Reducing the number of brackets, or the top marginal tax rate simplifies filing taxes
- “Simpler” taxes pay for themselves by reducing the size of the IRS.
- Our tax cuts will protect american family farms
- Grover Norquist is a serious person
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Isn’t Apple sitting on $50 billion in cash, which could all have gone to the tax man to finance free healthcare for millions?
Just sayin’.
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I have to believe that this is accepted by right wingers partly as a backdoor way to smaller government. By defunding the government, it will become easier to eliminate government spending.
But the funny thing is, they can eliminate all these government departments they don’t like all they want, and the national debt won’t shrink or slow. Not until you address the two biggest sources of spending: Military and Social Security.
And honestly, neither is that hard on paper. Don’t play world police, and single payer to make healthcare cheaper.
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I’m pretty sure small government via cutting the military and social security will be a disaster. I’m for cutting the military’s budget, but not without shifting that spending to infrastructure. In a real way, the military industrial complex is our biggest jobs program…
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Well, I’m not suggesting we cut back the military head count. Bombs are expensive. Aircraft are expensive to operate and maintain. GI benefits for wounded and KIA are expensive. If we’d not have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan, that’d be several trillion dollars saved right there without cutting back the number of enlisted.
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More like $250B just overseas. That iPhone is mostly pure profit.
Income inequality is monument to responsible government exiting the GOP. Bush Sr, nobody’s fool, called supply side “Voodoo Economics” in 1980, then sold his soul to the new GOP for the VP and then Presidency. Despite being disproven by data continually, it remains what Krugman calls “a Zombie idea” that will not die because it lets them do awful things and justify it as “for the greater good”.
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They got their Supreme Court Justice on the bench, and even if they don’t accomplish any other thing, that guy will be fucking us over for years.
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Decreasing tax revenue means less money for the social safety net.
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Yeah, that’s how I would cut too, but now no one is making or designing the bombs. Which is a good thing, but I’d like a plan that keeps spending mostly level. Because trillions in cuts means trillions in lost monetary velocity.
Homeopathic economics.
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What you liberals don’t understand is if the taxes were lowered and Apple had $51 billion, they would start hiring hundreds of thousands of people.
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Not to mention most of the decrease comes from the top 1%, increasing both income and wealth inequality.
I’m with you in spirit and income, but recognize that $110k is in the 77th percentile of income, arguably nowhere near even the bottom of middle class. This country is a mess when it comes to class awareness. At every level we get caught up in the laundry list of things we “must have” and then believe we’re poor when there’s little left. There’s Manhattanites with vacation homes and kids in private schools who believe they’re not wealthy.
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I think the success of the Reagan / Thatcher program was in realising that they could simply create a parallel fantasy economy, with a narrative written by themselves to serve their own interests. You make up some flimsy story about why deregulation and tax cuts and liquidating the public sector are good for society overall – it doesn’t matter that it’s demonstrably false – as long as you bribe the right voters at the right times, no individual voter will ever be both motivated and competent to call you on your bullshit. Of course, in this calculation, you can ignore any groups of voters who’d never vote for you anyway. They can go die in the gutter for all you care.
If the left tries to engage with your bad-faith fantasy economics, they’ve already lost, because they’re playing a game whose rules you set. If they don’t, you can say they’re incompetent about the economy.
Over time, you will of course build up an increasingly damning paper trail showing that you are toxic to the real economy. But the beauty is, no one ever checks! So you can keep doing it forever and ever. Unless of course it got to a stage where most people have been driven into the shitter, while a handful of people have become the richest humans who ever lived. Then your loyal voters – or their kids – might start to find your spiel resistible.
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Convince people like my parents who are in the theoretical middle class that are convinced taxing higher wage earnersis effectivly punishing people who work hard so that their money can be ‘given to the lazy and useless.’ Y’know the same people that think it’s ok that i don’t have a job because I can’t work.
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My mom is the same way and we’re barely the definition of middle class (more like lower middle class at best). It’s this weird myth that everyone will get rich if they just work hard. Well my parents worked themselves to the point of bone spurs (dad) and herniated discs (mom) yet they’re still barely getting by on 50k while caring for themselves and the grandkids.
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As I have stated repeatedly in a variety of ways; this is a hearts and minds war and the progressive/liberal/left has lost so much ground the GOP mode of thinking is firmly entrenched to the point it is seen as ‘the way things are.’ We either break that or we have lost.
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So here’s the counterintuitive thing that was discovered centuries ago but you never hear about:
Money is like blood. The better your blood circulation in your body, the healthier you are. So too is the economy with money.
Taxes serve as a way of tapping into the vast wealth the rich accumulate and placing it in the hands of those who would put that money to use right away to benefit society (such as assistance for the poor, military spending, infrastructure programs, etc.).
You of course hear the complaint that this is “communism” and those lazy shits don’t deserve the benefits of these taxes. But whether they do or don’t, it serves a critical function:
It puts that money back into the economy immediately and keeps it healthy. If you let the wealthy keep most of their money, you end with a situation where those who do none of the work have all the money and those who do all of the work have none of the money, i.e. poor circulation. It’s a terribly weak economy at that point where people are just working to barely survive and you’re basically living in a third world country.
Tax cuts only go so far. What businesses want are paying customers, and they’re going to dry up the less money is available to their customers.
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