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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (140847)	7/14/2010 8:25:10 PM
From: Paul Smith	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 542836

keep the taxes as unequal as they now are What proportion of all taxes are paid by the undefined rich? What percentage of the population currently pay zero Federal income tax? Yeah, taxes sure are unequal. campaign against middle class workers. Many of the people that are furious about this situation are the middle class. The non-government middle class. We have to stop protecting government workers at any cost. Too much job security combined with gold plated benefits. It will cost all of us middle class people. All taxes are going up. As for "surgical approaches to dealing with public sector issues," the time to do very small things around the edges is long past. The problem is way too big. The long ongoing public policy malpractice is now on full display. The unions have gotten too much and probably prevented those that wanted to do "surgical approaches" (whatever that actually is) in the past.

To: JohnM who wrote (140847)	7/14/2010 10:35:30 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542836

<<<Your approach is simply to further the right wing framing--let's keep the taxes as unequal as they now are. And, of course, let's keep them off the table as a way to help solve the present problems.>>> Tax rates at the time Clinton was in office was sufficient to offset expenses. We even had a surplus but now it is all gone. Maybe Paul O'Neill knows what happened. After all he was there. January 18, 2004 ECONOMIC VIEW ECONOMIC VIEW; O'Neill Says Bush Was Set On Cutting Taxes, Too By EDMUND L. ANDREWS WASHINGTON— IF there is a phrase that summarizes Paul H. O'Neill's view of the White House during his two years as President Bush's first Treasury secretary, it is his apparent remark that cabinet debates were exercises in ''incestuous amplification.'' The comment is made in ''The Price of Loyalty,'' a new book by Ron Suskind about Mr. O'Neill's tumultuous tenure before being fired in December 2002. Rather than encouraging policy debates, Mr. O'Neill contended that big decisions were made with almost no discussion and even less debate. Mr. O'Neill has provoked a political firestorm with his contention that President Bush tilted toward war with Iraq almost as soon as he took office; the administration has vigorously denied that. But the former Treasury secretary described a similar pattern in Mr. Bush's push to cut taxes by at least $1.7 trillion over 10 years. Mr. O'Neill was openly skeptical about the need for big tax cuts and expressed concern about frittering away what were then huge budget surpluses. In hindsight, he may have been too sanguine about the economy's prospects in early 2001 and too dismissive of the value in cutting taxes as a way to soften the downturn. But Mr. O'Neill may also prove to have been prescient about other issues that are likely to have long-lasting significance. One was the idea of building ''triggers'' into Mr. Bush's tax cuts, provisions that would prevent some of the cuts from becoming effective if budget surpluses evaporated. Behind the scenes, Mr. O'Neill described how he quietly collaborated with Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, to press for such triggers. As recounted by Mr. O'Neill, the president and his top advisers wanted no part in such precautions. Though the Treasury secretary had one-on-one meetings with Mr. Bush almost once a week, Mr. O'Neill said the president listened to him in stony silence. And when Mr. Greenspan testified in favor of making future tax cuts conditional on the government's fiscal health, the White House balked. There were questions about whether the triggers would have done any good. Congress, in theory, operated under ''pay-as-you-go'' rules in the last years of the Clinton administration, under which any spending growth above the rate of inflation was supposed to be offset by budget cuts or tax increases. But tax revenue soared so quickly as a result of the stock market bubble and the booming economy that spending increased much faster than inflation. Tax-cut advocates like R.Glenn Hubbard, then chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, argued that the tax cuts had to be predictable and permanent to achieve their intended impact. If people thought the cuts would expire, he and others argued, they would have less confidence about spending their extra cash. Shortly after the tax cuts, the government's seemingly inexhaustible surpluses evaporated. Revenues plunged as the economy slid into a recession and the stock market endured a three-year plunge that wiped out investment profits. Then came the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, followed by huge increases in spending on domestic security and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Projections by Congress and the Bush administration of surpluses of $5.6 trillion over 10 years, the outlook in 2001, have turned into estimated deficits of at least $1.4 trillion and possibly as much as $5 trillion. Mr. O'Neill strongly suggests that Mr. Bush worried little about budget deficits and did not want advice about them. EVEN when the government was flush with money, Mr. O'Neill recounted in the book, White House officials surprised him by unilaterally reducing the goal of paying down the national debt. Instead of proposing to cut it from $3.2 trillion to $500 billion, as Mr. O'Neill favored, the Office of Management and Budget said it would be impractical to reduce it below $1.2 trillion. Mr. O'Neill also pushed the president to set aside $1 trillion of the projected surpluses to fund one of Mr. Bush's big ideas during the campaign: the privatization of Social Security. Allowing people to invest Social Security contributions into private retirement accounts would reduce the government's future retirement liabilities, but the government would need to cover obligations to existing retirees without the money coming in from existing workers. Mr. O'Neill said that both he and Mr. Greenspan had estimated that $1 trillion over the next decade or so would be enough to finance the transition for everybody then under the age of 37. But Mr. Bush ''seemed to shrug it off,'' according to the book. Today, three years later, the idea is no longer an option.