Reviewing your earlier posts I note that you claim:
Actually tax burdens for the average American are higher than in the 70's
The average tax load increased across the '60s and effectively rose during the '70s primarily due to inflation. The Reagan tax cuts pushed the mean tax rate down to pre-'60s levels. The Bush Sr. Administration opened up tax increases and the 'crats under Clinton brought them back to '70s levels.
- particularly due to the closing of loopholes and the AMT.
Closing of "loopholes" is nonsense. When you close one another pops up, so no tax revenue accrues from disallowing them. The only way to reduce the occurrence of loopholes and thereby increase tax receipts is to cut taxes. The AMT which was enacted to stop high rate tax payers from abusing shelters and other "loopholes", has brought with it an unintended side effect of substantially increasing the tax load of the middle income earner. Even so, the effective rate is only similar, not greater, than it was in the '70s.
Stifling government regulation...yes, and we went polar opposite...
No, that's quite an error on your part. In fact, it's part of many myths dominating what I call "media informed thinking". Deregulation has not been deregulation. It's been hyper-regulation. One only needs to look at the energy situation in California or the Telcom Act of '96 to understand that the de-regulators all came from socialist universities. They have no idea what a free market is, so how could they put in place deregulation which essentially tries to return free market forces to commerce, when their prejudices won't let them get beyond 19th century populism?
"Inflation": Inflation was due to a combination of irresponsible money supply and supply shocks.
During the '70s the real money supply fell at a rate only seen greater during the Depression.
You claim to have a BA in econ yet you don't seem to know the Patinkin thesis. In any event before the "supply shocks" hit, the US was already mired in what is known as structural inflation but was then called wage cost push and demand pull inflation. It first started in '71 and rose perniciously until the '73 Oil Embargo which was the first "supply shock". That was deflationary. Got that? Deflationary. The same deflationary effect occurs now when oil price rises because oil price is low and a necessity so people have adapted to these factors making it demand inelastic So oil price increase drains discretionary spending. The "shocks" muzzled the inflation, but the structural realities of socialist policies brought it back, at least until the '79 "shock".
Humorously, the FED had little control over all these factors even though it was their interest rate interventionism, an overt attempt to engineer prosperity, during the late '60s that embedded the structural inflation that Nixon tried to artificially control.
In August '71 Nixon in a panic slapped on wage and price controls, closed the gold window, and did several other 'crat like moves in order to stop inflation, thereby exacerbating them. That was long before the pseudo educated pundits at the universities revisioned history to fit their preferred media informed thinking, so it is likely you only have the media informed thinking view.
You obviously haven't done a lot of reading if you think neither is on the horizon.
You express a knowledge of the past or of economics which represents media informed thinking. I guess you have been doing a lot of reading. Maybe your information can tell us what you think is on the horizon. |
