Even if was 20%, that's 5 billion.....that's almost real money, isn't it.?
You have to measure the increase, not the total amount, the current amount is already paid.
Increasing the capital gains rate to 20% as planned is a 5 percentage point increase. Moving them to 35% is another 15 percentage point increase off of that, but only if you can actually get them to pay that which you probably can't. These are the people structuring the deals. If you tax the particular structure more, they will structure it a different way. If you tax payments of a percentage of the profits at ordinary income rates they will shift to taking an ownership stake which they will later sell for actual capital gains, or maybe they will have some better idea, I'm not a hedge fund manager or tax lawyer, they might be more clever than I am at this. But the point is that they are unlikely to be less clever, they will avoid your tax increase without too much difficulty and they will do so legally.
I don't recall the RW on this thread making noise about Bush's spending.
If you mean complaining about it on this thread, well the increase in spending under Bush wasn't to any large extent from any new government medical care program (Medicare Part D, is only a small part of the increase), but still there where complaints. There where a lot more on other threads by "the RW" posters from this thread at the time.
Like many I gave him a pass at first with 9/11 and a the recession and other issues, but he just kept spending and spending, and my patience wore thin. Of course most of that increase was do to programs from well before his term, but he was unsuccessful and reforming medicare, and didn't even really try to get control over Medicare (instead adding to it) or Medicaid. So complaints of his big spending where reasonable (and did happen, including from me and from some of the other conservative, or otherwise anti-Obamacare posters here).
But Bush's spending increases where small compared to the problem of entitlement spending. Cut all his military increases back to the old level (even in nominal dollars which would mean slashing out military capability), get rid of Medicare part D, bring education and other "discretionary" social spending back to the old levels, and you still haven't done much to resolve the real problem, since the real problem is the coming explosion in entitlement spending. |
