It begins...

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/06/boehner-lays-down-a-marker-on-taxes/?hpt=hp_t2_6

11/7/2012 1:09:00 AM

bipartisanship at it's finest

11/7/2012 1:15:46 AM

It only gets worse for the Republicans. They can either cut a deal before we go off the cliff and give up tax cuts for the wealthy or they can let it expire and have to fight against a tax cut for the middle class. It's going to the glorious final chapter to the Grover Norquist saga.

11/7/2012 1:20:41 AM

I would take another recession to destroy the Republican strategy of obstructionalism.

11/7/2012 2:48:28 PM

They'd just blame it on democrats though. That's how it works.

11/7/2012 2:55:04 PM

Quote :

""With this vote, the American people have also made clear that there is no mandate for raising tax rates," Boehner told supporters at the Ronald Reagan building in Washington."

...citation needed?

11/7/2012 3:01:57 PM

There is no way for Republicans to win this fight.

11/7/2012 3:45:12 PM

Should be another interesting game of brinkmanship.

Hopefully Obama doesn't fold like a little bitch the way he did last time the Bush Tax Cuts came up.


What we really need is comprehensive tax reform, the kind that the Bowles-Simpson commission came up with. Unfortunately, it sounds a little too much like the plan that Romney put forth, so there is no way that Obama will adopt it. Instead he is gonna stick with the absurd, loophole-ridden leaky sieve of a tax code that we have now, trying to make it more progressive while retaining all the special-interest giveaways (and probably tacking some more on for good measure).

To reiterate Bowles-Simpson:

Quote :

"The Zero Plan in the Bowles-Simpson “Chairmen's Mark” would: Eliminate all tax expenditures—for both income and payroll taxes—except for the child credit, the earned income tax credit, foreign tax credits, a few less common preferences (retain reduced preferences for mortgage interest, employer-sponsered health insurance and reitrement savings in the third variant listed above). Eliminate the alternative minimum tax (AMT). Eliminate the phaseout of personal exemptions and the limitation of itemized deductions. Replace the current six-bracket individual tax rate schedule with a three-bracket schedule with rates of 9, 15, and 24 percent (12, 20, and 27 percent in the third variant listed above). Tax capital gains and dividends as ordinary income. Index tax parameters using the chained Consumer Price Index. Increase the Social Security wage base by 2 percent per year more than the growth in the average wage (making the FICA cap $140,100 in 2015). Phase in an increase in the federal excise tax on gasoline of 15 cents per gallon (13.5 cents per gallon on average in 2015). Eliminate corporate tax expenditures and reduce the corporate tax rate to 26 percent (27 percent in the third variant listed above)."

[Edited on November 7, 2012 at 3:49 PM. Reason : 2]

11/7/2012 3:47:36 PM

^ I support tax changes like that.

Quote :

"Republican strategy of obstructionalism."

To be fair, the Dems practiced the same obstructionalism during Bush's time. It's nothing new in Congress. But I agree with the liberals on this board that the Republicans need to give in on the tax hikes on the wealthy in order to push the far more important goal of balancing the budget. As a conservative, I am ready to kick Boehner to the curb and replace him with someone more willing to negotiate.

11/7/2012 5:34:30 PM

Boehner is hostage to the Tea Party, just like the rest of us. Cantor was ready to stage a coup if he gave in at all during the default battle last year. At one point it looked like Boehner was gonna lose his job because he talked about compromising with Obama during that fight.

11/7/2012 5:40:18 PM

I heard people talking about starting a "fiscal cliff" drinking game no less than 5 times at work today. Everyone decided that they would turn into raging alcoholics by next weekend.

11/7/2012 5:43:01 PM

Quote :

"It only gets worse for the Republicans. They can either cut a deal before we go off the cliff and give up tax cuts for the wealthy or they can let it expire and have to fight against a tax cut for the middle class. It's going to the glorious final chapter to the Grover Norquist saga. "

A million times YES!!, This is my opinion going into this too.


Simpson-Bowles isn't perfect to me, but its atleast a foundation with plenty of elements of compromise in it. I would get behind it 1000% if congress could somehow pass it before January. It would save us so much grief and hopefully help to keep our economy on its slow but positive trajectory.

11/9/2012 10:24:10 AM

Quote :

" Unfortunately, it sounds a little too much like the plan that Romney put forth"

Uhh...

Quote :

"Eliminate all tax expenditures—for both income and payroll taxes—except for the child credit, the earned income tax credit, foreign tax credits, a few less common preferences (retain reduced preferences for mortgage interest, employer-sponsered health insurance and reitrement savings in the third variant listed above). Tax capital gains and dividends as ordinary income. Index tax parameters using the chained Consumer Price Index. Increase the Social Security wage base by 2 percent per year more than the growth in the average wage (making the FICA cap $140,100 in 2015). Phase in an increase in the federal excise tax on gasoline of 15 cents per gallon (13.5 cents per gallon on average in 2015)."

Does not compute


[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 10:59 AM. Reason : .]

11/9/2012 10:58:19 AM

Romney never spelled out specifically which tax credits he would reduce or phase out, for fear of pissing off special interest groups.

The concept, that of comprehensive tax reform by way of reducing tax expenditures and slashing statutory rates, is shared by Romney and Bowles-Simpson. The main difference is that Bowles-Simpson advocated taxing capital gains as regular income.

Comprehensive tax reform is the logical way out of this mess. Lets hope that Obama has the balls to go for it, and that the GOP is truly open to new revenue streams by way of closing loopholes, as they claim.

[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 11:20 AM. Reason : 2]

[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 11:21 AM. Reason : 3]

11/9/2012 11:18:07 AM

Quote :

"Romney never spelled out specifically which tax credits he would phase out, for fear of pissing off special interest groups."

He never spelled them out because it would have been mathematically impossible without eliminating exactly the exceptions in Bowles-Simpson.

Quote :

"The concept, that of comprehensive tax reform by way of reducing tax expenditures and slashing statutory rates, is shared by Romney and Bowles-Simpson. The main difference is that Bowles-Simpson advocated taxing capital gains as regular income."

Total crock of shit. Romney promised the moon and had no way to pay for it, Bowles-Simpson is actually mathematically possible. I can't remember Romney mentioning raising the FICA cap either, or raising gasoline taxes, or indexing anything to inflation. What you're engaging in here is historical revisionism.

Quote :

"Comprehensive tax reform is the logical way out of this mes. Lets hope that Obama has the balks to go for it, and that the GOP is truly open to new revenue streams by way of closing loopholes, as they claim."

The meat of the issue is how the tax burden shifts as a result of the loopholes closing, and that being the meat is exactly why the GOP and Romney never spoke about the effects of closing loopholes in any terms more complicated than "It'll make the tax code book less heavy!"

[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 11:25 AM. Reason : Serious amazement at trying to recast vague GOP tax-populism as "Basically Bowels-Simpson"]

11/9/2012 11:23:42 AM

Romney's plan was mathematically impossible, but he insisted that it was a starting point, up for debate. Again, lowering the rates and broadening the base is the obvious way to go. Should we reduce rates by a set percentage across the board? Probably not. Bowles-Simpson is a more nuanced approach. But the only time Obama has even paid lip service to tax reform is when talking about the corporate tax structure. We badly need across-the-board reform, focusing on reducing/eliminating loopholes.

The longer the Dems cling to this awful, outdated tax code, the more out-of-touch they appear. It is horribly inefficient, laden with special-interest giveaways, and causes gross distortions in the markets it meddles in (Healthcare, housing, etc)

[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 11:35 AM. Reason : 2]

11/9/2012 11:32:31 AM

What needs to be changed about the tax code?

Please don't respond with "fair tax".

11/9/2012 11:34:01 AM

Quote :

"Probably not. Bowles-Simpson is a more nuanced approach. But the only time Obama has even paid lip service to tax reform is when talking about the corporate tax structure..."

Uh, right, that and the time he created the Bowles-Simpson commission.

Quote :

"The longer the Dems cling to this awful, outdated tax code, the more out-of-touch they appear."

Give it a rest, man.

[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 11:43 AM. Reason : .]

11/9/2012 11:39:42 AM

If you're asking me, the tax code obviously needs to be simplified to reduce inefficiency and tax avoidance. Tax expenditures simply have to be reduced, because they encourage tax avoindance and distort markets in countless ways. Business tax rates must be brought in line with the rest of the developed world, and since so many businesses utilize pass-through taxation, this means lowering the top personal income tax rate as well. Capital gains taxation needs to be reformed to bring it in line with income tax rates. Obviously when you reduce corporate and top individual tax rates, you are looking at a loss of revenue even with a reduction in tax expenditures. to make up the shortfall, a nationwide VAT of around 10% would make a lot of sense.

The Bowles-Simpson "Zero Plan" is a good starting point.

11/9/2012 11:43:04 AM

Quote :

"Uh, right, that and the time he created the Bowles-Simpson commission."

Obama never embraced the proposals of the Bowles-Simpson commission. He has never once used his bully-pulpit to call for an overhaul of the tax code, as Bowles-Simpson and innumerable economists have advocated. He ignored it (and yes, Ryan also voted against it). The closest he came was finally producing a corporate income tax reform plan early this year, which was promptly ignored by Congress because they wanted to reform the individual side of things as well.

I'm looking for some leadership from Obama on the biggest issue of his next year in office. Right now his only solution is more of the same, calling for an expiration of the Bush tax cuts on those making over $200K. It won't even make a dent in the deficit. He needs to think bigger. Republicans want comprehensive tax reform. Economists want it. His deficit commission called for it. Time for him to embrace the concept.

[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 11:47 AM. Reason : 2]

11/9/2012 11:46:12 AM

Is simplicity how we decide if a tax code is good?

11/9/2012 11:46:20 AM

It's not so much that simplicity is good, it's that market-distorting tax expenditures rewarded to powerful special interests are bad. No other country in the world has such a ridiculous, inefficient tax structure that meddles so thoroughly in the markets.

The US should look to Canada and northern Europe, where the tax codes are very simple and straightforward, making tax avoidance very difficult and preventing unwanted distortions in the healthcare and housing markets.

11/9/2012 11:50:29 AM

What's so great about Canada and Northern Europe that we should look at their tax code? So far you've only said "simpler = better" so far plus the standard populist "Special interests blah blah" line.

I'd also point out that Northern Europe had a housing bubble too, and Canada's looking at a housing bubble much like ours right now, more revisionism?

And really, you're referencing two places where universal healthcare is ubiquitous as ones that "avoid distortions in the healthcare market"? What?


[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 12:05 PM. Reason : .]

11/9/2012 12:02:24 PM

Quote :

"Right now his only solution is more of the same, calling for an expiration of the Bush tax cuts on those making over $200K. It won't even make a dent in the deficit. "

Source please.

Quote :

"Republicans want comprehensive tax reform."

Republicans want lower taxes, plus vague populist whining about the size of the tax code. They are not serious about either their concerns or their prescriptions, and good luck getting them to pass anything that raises the taxes of the rich.

Quote :

"Economists want it."

Not Krugman, and he has some rather substantive criticisms

Quote :

"So, a public service reminder: Simpson-Bowles is terrible. It mucks around with taxes, but is obsessed with lowering marginal rates despite a complete absence of evidence that this is important. It offers nothing on Medicare that isn’t already in the Affordable Care Act. And it raises the Social Security retirement age because life expectancy has risen — completely ignoring the fact that life expectancy has only gone up for the well-off and well-educated, while stagnating or even declining among the people who need the program most. Yes, I know, inside the Beltway Simpson and Bowles have become sacred figures. But the people doing that elevation are the same people who told us that Paul Ryan was the answer to our fiscal prayers."

Quote :

"His deficit commission called for it. Time for him to embrace the concept."

He needs to embrace job creation, not deficit hawkery, his failure to do is exactly why this recovery's been so slow.

[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 12:12 PM. Reason : .]

11/9/2012 12:12:32 PM

It's so funny when otherwise intelligent partisans are forced to defend something that is indefensible (special interest loopholes) because their political leader does so.

I'm working and I can't write a doctoral thesis on the matter. Ask any economist (across the political spectrum) about their preferred tax code structure and one of the first things that they would tell you is to get rid of the big tax expenditures. After that, they would tell you to cut or eliminate corporate tax rates, and raise top marginal individual / capital gains tax rates in response, because it's more efficient to tax people than businesses. They all advocate a national sales or VAT tax because it's more efficient to tax consumption than savings. These are all basic concepts, but somehow even the intelligent liberals on this forum get their panties in a wad when it comes to comprehensive tax reform, because at the moment it is a "GOP issue".

Drop the partisan bullshit, look at the issue objectively, and you'll realize that tax reform including a reduction in tax expenditures and lowering of corporate tax rates should be the first order of business in any tax plan.

Also, obligatory link to a (partisan) news source backing up my assertions:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/10/18/163106924/a-tax-plan-that-economists-love-and-politicians-hate


[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 12:18 PM. Reason : 2]

11/9/2012 12:14:33 PM

Quote :

"Not Krugman, and he has some rather substantive criticisms"

Krugman has some microeconomic expertise (and a NOBEL PRIZE!!!1), but ultimately the guy is a political shill who really shouldn't be referenced in this discussion. His macroeconomic credentials are hardly worth noting.

11/9/2012 12:16:28 PM

Quote :

"It's so funny when political partisans are forced to defend something that is indefensible (special interest loopholes) because their political leader does so."

It's funny when asses like you are surprised when people don't find confirmation-bias-exploiting gripes like "special interests" to be as substantive as they want them to be.

Quote :

" Ask any economist (across the political spectrum) about their preferred tax code structure and one of the first things that they would tell you is to get rid of the big tax expenditures. After that, they would tell you to cut or eliminate corporate tax rates, and raise top marginal individual / capital gains tax rates in response, because it's more efficient to tax people than businesses. They all advocate a national sales or VAT tax because it's more efficient to tax consumption than savings."

Okay, I'll ask Krugman, Nobel prize winner and one of the most on-point economists post-recession. He says S-B is B.S., moving on...

Quote :

" These are all basic concepts, but somehow even the intelligent liberals on this forum get their panties in a wad when it comes to comprehensive tax reform, because at the moment it is a "GOP issue"."

Except it's not a GOP issue, the GOP issue is populist tax whining with no substance. Just because liberals don't support Bowles Simpson doesn't mean they're against tax reform, and just because they don't buy simple-minded mantras like "Simpler is better" doesn't mean they're against tax reform either.

Quote :

"Drop the partisan bullshit, look at the issue objectively, and you'll realize that tax reform including a reduction in tax expenditures and lowering of corporate tax rates is the first order of business in any tax plan."

Eat shit, you can't just call everyone who disagrees with you a partisan.

11/9/2012 12:19:02 PM

Quote :

"Krugman has some microeconomic expertise (and a NOBEL PRIZE!!!1), but ultimately the guy is a political shill who really shouldn't be referenced in this discussion. His macroeconomic credentials are hardly worth noting."

Yeah, it's not like he's been calling the bond market, rate of recovery, inflation, and unemployment, play after play, flawlessly, since 2008, both in the US and in Europe. The only people who try to call him a political shill are Republicans, who called Nate Silver a shill for the same reasons, that is "using numbers and being correct uncomfortably often."

Also telling is that you the best you can do here is try to attack Krugman himself, even when I posted some of his exact complaints. Ad hominem ahoy! You weren't even original, the "Well he's a micro guy but knows nothing about macro and now to mock the imaginary people who think the Nobel Prize makes him a God" line has been parroted from every conservative's mouth tenfold the past four years.

With you trying so hard to paint anyone disagreeing with you as a liberal partisan, I gotta suggest you visit a professional photographer so they can get a good shot of you next to "projection" in the next Merriam-Webster's.

[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 12:23 PM. Reason : .]

11/9/2012 12:19:50 PM

Quote :

"Eat shit, you can't just call everyone who disagrees with you a partisan."

C'mon, dude. This ain't my first time on this board. I know your political stances. I know what you are gonna write before you write it. It's pretty fucking close to party-line. If you ever criticize the Prez, it's because he isn't liberal enough for your tastes. You're a partisan for the left, and you'll never embrace an issue that the GOP champions, even if they are actually on the right side of an issue for once.

The same is true for Krugman. He's a brilliant economist, but he's also a partisan hack. When he cuts out the political rhetoric (like when he's writing about Europe, or a non-controversial US economic issue), he's worth reading. But anytime a politically-tinged issue comes up, you can throw his analysis right out the window because he has a reflexive bias against anything the GOP supports. Doesn't matter what the GOP supports; he's automatically against it. So are you, apparently.

[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 12:29 PM. Reason : 2]

11/9/2012 12:26:35 PM

I posted his exact criticisms, either respond to them directly or take your boilerplate "Herp a derp I'm against special interests and partisanship why aren't you?" posturing elsewhere.

[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 12:28 PM. Reason : .]

11/9/2012 12:27:58 PM

Also, to be clear, Bowles and Simpson authored the plan, but it was rejected by the commission at large, why?

edit: two more criticisms from economists (I shouldn't have to do this, but you decided to go the "but all teh economists like it!" route)

http://www.nextnewdeal.net/why-fiscal-commission-does-not-serve-american-people <- very substantive

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/erskine-bowles-morgan-stanley-and-the-deficit-commission <-mostly complaining about the financial sector being untouched

[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 12:38 PM. Reason : .]

11/9/2012 12:34:11 PM

Bowles-Simpson is a wide-ranging plan for deficit-reduction. Krugman naturally hates it because he hates anything that calls for deficit reduction during high unemployment. You know, Keynesianism and all. I only advocated the "Zero Plan" tax-reform solutions, so obviously Krugman's little hit piece isn't fully applicable. But lets start:

Quote :

"So, a public service reminder: Simpson-Bowles is terrible."

Nice beginning, Krugman.

Quote :

"It mucks around with taxes, "

Much like how some of you are chirping that simpler isn't better, I'll respond to Krugman, "what is wrong with mucking around with taxes"?

Quote :

"but is obsessed with lowering marginal rates despite a complete absence of evidence that this is important."

While there is scant evidence that lower marginal rates are important to economic growth, given that most businesses use pass-through taxation, it's important to keep these rates in line with corporate tax rates to prevent complex tax mitigation strategies. I can only assume that Krugman would know this, but chooses to ignore it hoping that his readers are too dumb to question him.

Quote :

"It offers nothing on Medicare that isn’t already in the Affordable Care Act. And it raises the Social Security retirement age because life expectancy has risen — completely ignoring the fact that life expectancy has only gone up for the well-off and well-educated, while stagnating or even declining among the people who need the program most."

These are spending-reduction policies, none of which are applicable to the topic of tax reform.

Anything else?

11/9/2012 12:38:14 PM

Quote :

"Also, to be clear, Bowles and Simpson authored the plan, but it was rejected by the commission at large, why?"

Because the commission was full of political partisans who refused to sign their names on a compromise bill.

11/9/2012 12:40:54 PM

Quote :

"Much like how some of you are chirping that simpler isn't better, I'll respond to Krugman, "what is wrong with mucking around with taxes"?"

Nothing, that's why he follows that clause with ", but [a bad thing]"

Reading comprehension doesn't really work when you separate clauses out from sentences.

Quote :

"Nice beginning, Krugman. "

It's from a blog post, chill.

Quote :

"While there is scant evidence that lower marginal rates are important to economic growth, given that most businesses use pass-through taxation, it's important to keep these rates in line with corporate tax rates to prevent complex tax mitigation strategies."

So there's no evidence that it'll cause increased growth, but it's important to keep them in line with corporate tax rates...by lowering them to the corporate tax rate to mitigate pass-through? So the deficit plan is to reduce tax rates with no real indication that growth with increase. How is that not just a revenue reduction?

Quote :

"I can only assume that Krugman would know this, but chooses to ignore it hoping that his readers are too dumb to question him."

Can you really criticize Krugman for things like saying "This is terrible" when you say shit like this?

Quote :

"Because the commission was full of political partisans who refused to sign their names on a compromise bill."

Right, anybody who doesn't want to lower revenue, with no promise of growth, and cut social programs for people who need it most are just partisans, because they don't agree to a compromise between two individuals who are apparently perfectly representative of their respective "sides".


[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 12:46 PM. Reason : .]

11/9/2012 12:44:06 PM

Quote :

"So there's no evidence that it'll cause increased growth, but it's important to keep them in line with corporate tax rates...by lowering them to the corporate tax rate to mitigate pass-through? So the deficit plan is to reduce tax rates with no real indication that growth with increase. How is that not just a revenue reduction?"

There is little evidence that lowering top marginal income tax rates will lead to increased growth. However, there is plenty of evidence that lower corporate tax rates will lead to growth. In fact, Obama spoke about it in his last SOTU address. But you can't lower corporate tax rates while keeping top marginal income tax rates the same, or you are putting small businesses at a huge disadvantage compared to C-Corps. So you have to lower both, or neither.

The way to pay for the lowering of these rates is by reducing or eliminating wastful loopholes and tax expenditures. Again, the home mortgage tax deduction distorts the housing market and serves no real purpose other than to reward home-owners who vote a lot. It should be eliminated. The health insurance tax exemption perpetuates our broken employer-based healthcare system, making it prohibitively expensive for individuals to get insurance (Obamacare is attempting to rectify that). There are too many stupid, inefficient corporate tax loopholes to enumerate on here. A lowering of corporate and marginal tax rates, paid for by a combination of a reduction in tax expenditures and a nationwide VAT, just makes sense. Krugman hates the deficit-reduction portion of Bowles-Simpson more than anything else.

I'd be glad to pick apart further arguments by Krugman about the merits of tax reform, but I don't think that the guy really disagrees with it in concept. He just disagrees when republicans jump on board with the idea.

[Edited on November 9, 2012 at 12:55 PM. Reason : 2]

11/9/2012 12:53:57 PM

Quote :

"Tax expenditures simply have to be reduced, because they encourage tax avoindance and distort markets in countless ways."

So here I go do "research".

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/expenditures/largest.cfm



Now, you may very well say that we can live without the health insurance and pension items because we have to make tough cuts. But a politician? That would be immensely toxic. I always hear people talk about tax loopholes and I never believe them, because when you actually open up the tax books and look at what these "loopholes" are, they're basically supporting all of the things we're otherwise trying to get the government to provide to people. It just doesn't pass the smell test to count it as a viable fiscal proposal.

In some cases, it's like they're getting a tax credit for something that shouldn't have been taxed in the first place. This is the problem with capital gains. It's a terrible system because it's counted differently from normal income. When you invest, the real value of the number of dollars you invested diminishes over time. Yes, the rates are low, but the "rate" is a fundamentally different metric than income taxes.

This drives me nuts. No one is EVER called out on the fact that the rates aren't comparable. It makes me so

I'm not defending capital gains tax rates. The rates are very low, but the problem with the distortion isn't just between wages vs. capital gains, but also between capital gains and capital gains. The ignorance of inflation causes the effective real rate to dramatically favor high yield investments over low yield investments, which capital gains can actually drive a real gain into a real loss.

Think about money market accounts. These days, they'll return 0.75%. Even if you believed that was higher than inflation (ha) then you surely don't believe it's higher than inflation after the capital gains rate. What part about that sounds like good policy? But yet people list this kind of stuff (capital gains rate) on the chopping block for raising revenue. How about we get rid of the trickery first?

11/9/2012 1:25:56 PM

Quote :

"I always hear people talk about tax loopholes and I never believe them, because when you actually open up the tax books and look at what these "loopholes" are, they're basically supporting all of the things we're otherwise trying to get the government to provide to people."

Then have the government support these things with direct grants, instead of muddling the tax code. That's how it's done in other countries, and most countries have much more efficient tax-collection structures in place because of this.

11/9/2012 1:30:19 PM

That won't work because a dollar in tax cuts is better than a dollar in spending to Republicans.

Your proposal would take money out of the economy by changing tax cuts into spending.

11/9/2012 2:34:12 PM

Actually, it would change tax expenditures into spending, which is really the same thing.

The GOP has signaled a willingness to increase revenues by way of reducing tax expenditures. Obviously, any reduction of tax expenditures is a de-facto tax increase, but I think most of us can agree that effective tax rates are already awfully low. Deficit reduction and pro-growth policies are typically at odds with each other, but the compromise that Dems and Repubs come up with must address both. IMO, the best way to do that is with an overhaul of the tax code that makes small and medium-sized businesses more globally-competitive, while maintaining or slightly increasing revenues. The question is who ends up paying more? Well, hopefully high-earners and those in the middle to upper-middle class who find ways to avoid income tax year after year by way of itemized tax deductions.

11/9/2012 2:46:23 PM

I can't believe you responded to that seriously.

I mean, anyone arguing that a tax cut has a material difference from a subsidy when they are mathematically identical is obviously trolling.

11/9/2012 3:00:53 PM

Sorry dude. I seem to be having trouble picking up sarcasm / facetious comments as of late. Need more sleep and/or coffee.

11/9/2012 3:03:03 PM

LMFAO.... they aren't looking to fix the debt at all.

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — After nearly 17 years of courtroom arguments, congressional negotiations and Indian Country bickering, hundreds of thousands of Native Americans could see the first payments of a $3.4 billion U.S. government settlement by the end of the year, plaintiffs' attorneys said Monday.

http://news.yahoo.com/3-4b-indian-lawsuit-ends-disbursements-begin-002551060.html

11/27/2012 2:42:29 PM

LMAO: paying for things we need to pay for.

11/27/2012 2:48:49 PM

LMAO PAYING WITH MONEY MINTED OUT OF THIN AIR

11/27/2012 2:54:13 PM

LMAO credit makes my head hurt.

11/27/2012 3:08:02 PM

Why does it make your head hurt?

11/27/2012 3:32:19 PM

why is the United Nations doing this to us?

11/27/2012 3:33:18 PM

You let it. Next question?

11/27/2012 3:33:43 PM

if we are the United Nations why are we doing this to ourselves?!

11/27/2012 3:38:09 PM

Quote :

"if we are the United Nations why are we doing this to ourselves?!"

We aren't the United Nations. I don't know how you come to that conclusion.

11/27/2012 3:44:17 PM