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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (526052)	11/4/2009 5:16:38 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1576691

Well those tax cuts were sold as temporary stimulus. I don't care too much what selling technique was used, but they where not sold only as a temporary stimulus. As for spending on the police and military - Even money spent on the military in direct terms makes you less free (although if it prevents an invasion and conquest it may make you slightly or even very slightly less free now in exchange for not being hugely less free later). Money spent on the police makes you less free because their taking money from you, and because police exercise a degree of control over people (and that control is not limited to preventing or punishing people harming each other or defrauding each other), but spending here is justified both for practical reasons of keeping crime down which has lots of direct and indirect effects, and for the same reason as the military, preventing someone else from ruling over you (say some organized crime group) and thus reducing your freedom. So both of these forms of spending protect the freedom you have, but since the government funds them through involuntarily taxation, this is at the expense of at least a very slight reduction in freedom. I'm not saying the spending isn't justified, I'm just saying my point isn't wrong about these examples. Also the vast majority of the additional spending under Obama, or even under Bush, has been in other areas. "2 - Reducing tax rates reduces the discouragement and distortion of investment and other economic activity." Which can be a bad thing. Especially with entrenched old tech industries with high barriers of entry. Reducing distortion of or discouragement/reduction of investment is rarely a good thing, and industries with entrenched companies are not an exception. You need a lot of investment to compete against entrenched companies so reducing investment helps make them more entrenched, while distorting investment gets you investment that's less productive and useful, or perhaps pushes it somewhere else without the high taxes. What Bush should have done after the economy recovered was reign in spending, but he never did that. What Bush should have done was balance the budget... probably by raising taxes and at least keeping spending growth flat. Raising taxes would have been the wrong way to go, and would have been totally unnecessary had spending been kept flat. We would have had large surpluses if spending had been kept flat.