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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (39084)	12/3/2009 4:27:03 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

Re: "Tax policy for a $13tril+ economy shouldn't revolve around a $43bil a year program." I really have no idea what you are saying there. Its not convoluted or an attempt to hint at something beyond the words, its very direct. Additional spending of $43bil a year shouldn't drive tax policy for a $13tril + economy. You change taxes you impact that whole economy. You shouldn't change tax rates for such an expense related to the economy as a whole, if you do so you risk damaging the economy much more than the cost of the program. As for your comments about structural deficits, wars are temporary, not structural in the way that say entitlement programs normally are. We should set rates to cover anticipated spending over the long run, not jump them up and down with every relatively small change and temporary change. And again this additional spending is a tiny fraction of all government spending. If you raise taxes to cover a small war than 1 - Your going to be raising them by a very small amount, it seems to be an excessive level of fine tuning esp. since 2 - Tax revenue from new or raised taxes isn't that predictable and tends to be less than the percentage amount that you increased taxes by. 3 - If we are going to increase taxes to cover a $40 to $70bil a year war, what about increasing taxes to cover the much larger increases in other areas over the last few years? 4 - Raising taxes now would be very bad timing, you generally don't want to raise taxes when the economy is doing poorly.