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

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (44548)	7/31/2010 10:13:51 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Extend them!

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (44548)	7/31/2010 10:14:47 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Keep them!

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (44548)	7/31/2010 11:57:39 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

No myths there. 1. Extending the tax cuts would be a good way to stimulate the economy. Stimulus by any method is questionable, but to the extent that stimulus is a good idea in a situation tax rate cuts are one of the better forms of stimulus. They go in to effect quickly (compared to say government infrastructure spending), and they don't distort the economy as much to favor special interests over efficiency, all else being equal lower tax rates reduce the distortion (unlike "targeted tax breaks", which distort things more) Allowing the high-income tax cuts to expire would hurt small businesses. Yes it would. Less than 2 percent of tax returns reporting small-business income are filed by taxpayers in the top two income brackets -- individuals earning more than about $170,000 a year and families earning more than about $210,000 a year. The percent of tax returns that report small business activity that fall under certain income brackets is a pretty meaningless stat. Many small businesses are very small, but hobby-businesses, where the person has a day job, or single person companies, don't make up the majority of small business activity. The economic activity, wealth creation, and job creation mostly comes from that 2 percent. Making the tax cuts permanent will lead to long-term growth. If it was done instead of all the extra spending, you would have gotten all the significant benefits of avoiding a tax increase, without the extra debt. Its not tax cuts or lack of tax increases driving the deficit, its the massive increase in spending in recent years. Tax rates are already high enough to be sub-optimal for economic growth, increasing them would be a mistake. Continuing the tax cuts won't doom the long-term fiscal picture; entitlements are the real problem. Exactly true. Without cutting the growth in entitlements no remotely reasonable tax rate would avoid severe fiscal problems. But it just isn't true. The deficits we face over the next decade reflect a fundamental imbalance between spending and revenue, one that goes beyond entitlements Sure its really spending, not just entitlements, but entitlements are the biggest part, and if they didn't grow going forward we wouldn't have this massive deficits going forward. The entitlements are projected to cost, all by themselves, as much or more as a percentage of GDP, than the percentage of GDP the government has typically spent on everything added together, in recent decades.