“But sometimes the ideas that we know to be true are dead wrong …only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring…That’s why our current policies are so upside down… If it were true that lower tax rates and more wealth for the wealthy would lead to more job creation, then today we would be drowning in jobs.”

I also would have to take issue with some of his statements… a great example of one of the elements that illustrates bad analysis would be the following:

“The extraordinary differential between a 15% tax rate on capital gains, dividends, and carried interest for capitalists, and the 35% top marginal rate on work for ordinary Americans is a privilege that is hard to justify without just a touch of deification ”

He’s described this tax rate as hard to justify without a touch of deification… I’d call that pretty biased language, and it misses the point.   First off, lets be clear the 15% tax rate is exclusively for long term investments and not for short term… The tax rate goes way back up if it’s an investment for less than a year.  Second off… the bottom approximate 50% of Americans pay no taxes at all per the IRS’s figures.   Implying that the average american is paying a 35% rate is completely and demonstrably untrue.  It’s a totally bogus argument, the average american would only end up paying 35% if they were doing things that were anything but average.  3rd off… why the real reason for the tax policy?   Let’s look for something other than deification…   There’s a number of things the wealthy can do with their money, and it’s not just the ridiculous story posted about how the wealthy don’t buy 5000 cars… the writer is absolutely correct that spending does not scale with income… BUT we’ve just totally ignored the fact that investing DOES tend to scale with income, and precisely because of this tax policy.   The goal of that tax policy was to incentivize the use of the money…   The wealthy have a choice of how to use their money… and  the goal was to avoid people hoarding it out of circulation…  instead the desired effect was to get it back into circulation… to get them investing in other businesses, growing the economy, etc, and we have to acknowledge that’s exactly what that particular tax policy does, and it does it by making it a benefit to the wealthy to put that money into circulation.  Both poor and rich have access to the same tax break there… the reason it’s called unfair is that the rich have more money they can invest back into circulation… ummm…. duh!?  What else did you expect?  His claim that conservatives feel that the low tax will directly create jobs is totally specious… that tax policies relation to jobs has always been indirect, not direct.   Of COURSE it sounds ridiculous!  There’s lot of other incentives out there… lets say the homeowners exemption… would you call that one unfair?  How about the exemptions for kids?    All these tax policies exist for specific reasons… to incentivize one thing or another, or to help people out who are in challenging situations… it’s easy to ignore the ones you’re using, but to criticize the ones your not as somehow inappropriate.   

In all honesty, there’s some tax policies that I do think are unfairly biased towards the wealthy, but this one?   This guy missed his target big time.

That’s why I provided the example that some conservatives use about the “cost of government” along with the the employment… there’s some interesting parallels there too… that have been “logically” analysed into a structure that holds together just as well….   but that viewpoint isn’t a valid causative analysis either.   A logical string behind correlations is the means used by fiction writers and good marketers…. doesn’t matter what side of the political spectrum you fall on… that’s simply truth… I grant, it’s usually easy to overlook it if someone is doing it about a topic you tend to favor.  (also true of both sides)

These techniques are common marketing techniques, but they are not valid logical proofs.  

Frankly, as I noted before… anyone who claims a 1 step easy fix to all our economic and societal problems, pretty much has already demonstrated they aren’t qualified to fix the problems.

In point of fact, that’s one of the common political divisions between conservatives and liberals in the modern era.    Conservatives often want to go back to the gold standard while liberals often prefer the freedom that being off the standard provides.  Each position has pluses and negatives,

I’d recommend the book “Whatever happened to Penny Candy?” since you’re asking for facts about this.  I’d be careful with tossing out erroneous ones yourself though.

This is the problem with such points as you’re trying to emphasize as they try to portray the problem with tunnel vision.  There are many other factors involved and stereotyping the rich doesn’t help, especially when it’ll effect far more than the so called rich but virtually every business owner.

The reality is we’re just spending and borrowing too much.  While the whole tax system needs to be changed.  Loop holes need to be eliminated and the tax code needs to be significantly simplified. 

Small businesses especially are wasting money just trying to comply with our bloated tax bureaucracy instead of using those resources to expand and create more jobs.  While the government just keeps on finding more and more ways to waste our money.

We may depend on government to try to keep businesses honest but like the old saying goes…

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?…  Who watches the watchers?  We’ve forgotten it’s we the people that hold that responsibility and for far too long we have ignored that responsibility and let both businesses and government do whatever they wanted.

Really, when the government is steep in its own corruption then it’s just corruption on top of corruption, and make no mistake that it’s both parties that are guilty for this mess, and we need to stop listening to them as they’re just dividing us and focus on real solutions.

Waiting with baited breath for your response.

The cost of doing business in the US is low compared to most other countries. And the stimulus did work almost exactly as predicted, it should have been larger and/or should have included more spending vs tax-breaks, but where do you think we’d be today if the government simply did nothing?

Almost everything you posted today is simply wrong.

This is so simple. Take a smoking pipe maker. They buy the raw materials to make a pipe. The wood, lacquer, etc. Say they spend $10. They put in time and effort to make the pipe, and let’s say when it’s done they sell it for $50. That person is now up $40, but the other person is not down $50….they now have a pipe worth $50. That’s a creation of wealth. Simple example, but should get the point across.

And yes, the system is more complicated than pointing out just a few facts and assuming that’s all there is to it!

Like what often gets overlooked is that the so called tax the rich is actually including the not so rich small business owners and not just the upper 1%!  While ignoring facts like the net worth of all the 1% combined would not solve our deficit problem even if you took every penny they had!

The problem is most of these arguments are just promoting class warfare instead of actually solving any of our problems.  We’re just wasting too much money!

What has to be eliminate is inefficiencies like tax loop holes, while restructuring the tax system to actually promote job growth instead of blindly throwing money at the problem and hoping something sticks.

It’s not so much how much we are taxing but how the money is being used that’s the problem.  Too much waste is too much waste no matter how you try to balance the books and the government is responsible for a really large chunk of the waste!

And yes, the system is more complicated than pointing out just a few facts and assuming that’s all there is to it!

Like what often gets overlooked is that the so called tax the rich is actually including the not so rich small business owners and not just the upper 1%!  While ignoring facts like the net worth of all the 1% combined would not solve our deficit problem even if you took every penny they had!

The problem is most of these arguments are just promoting class warfare instead of actually solving any of our problems.  We’re just wasting too much money!

What has to be eliminate is inefficiencies like tax loop holes, while restructuring the tax system to actually promote job growth instead of blindly throwing money at the problem and hoping something sticks.

It’s not so much how much we are taxing but how the money is being used that’s the problem.  Too much waste is too much waste no matter how you try to balance the books and the government is responsible for a really large chunk of the waste!

We can’t go on like this.  I can feel a paradigm shift approaching.  But I don’t know how the wave will break.  Will it prove that there is, in fact, enough to go around?  Or will it be Orwell’s Jackboot to a Human Face Forever?  We do so love the trappings wealth, don’t we?  More than we love anything else, it often seems.  How many people would you doom to a life of wretched poverty (by local standards, anyhow) in order to “get yours”?  Is the world (or at least the nation) now a zero sum game?  If I am to be wealthier, does that now mean that others must suffer more poverty?  Can we maintain our current economic course?  If not, how can we correct it?  Can we?  Stay tuned…

We can’t go on like this.  I can feel a paradigm shift approaching.  But I don’t know how the wave will break.  Will it prove that there is, in fact, enough to go around?  Or will it be Orwell’s Jackboot to a Human Face Forever?  We do so love the trappings wealth, don’t we?  More than we love anything else, it often seems.  How many people would you doom to a life of wretched poverty (by local standards, anyhow) in order to “get yours”?  Is the world (or at least the nation) now a zero sum game?  If I am to be wealthier, does that now mean that others must suffer more poverty?  Can we maintain our current economic course?  If not, how can we correct it?  Can we?  Stay tuned…

What a FAIL.

But it’s easier for you to yell conspiracy and dismiss any bias slashgear might be showing.

But it’s easier for you to yell conspiracy and dismiss any bias slashgear might be showing.

I don’t like the view that politics is like sports, that you choose sides and leave your brain at the door.  This is the news they found, why would you question their ethics/bias with no other evidence?  Because you’re a sports fan, not a real thinker.  Go back to Fox News.

Big gov’t spreads resources to the less affluent, which makes the system more stable and stable economies are prosperous economies.  Look at the crazy Congress and Republican candidate race, billionaires are de-stabilizing our nation’s economy and political system.  Compare the 19th century (Republican heaven) to the 20th century (Democratic/Socialist heaven), the first was horribly unstable and had terrible injustices, the second was prosperous and relatively fair.  Why? Because after the crash of 1929 we had banking rules that actually worked and we taxed the rich starting with the great war.  I’d love to tax people less and get richer, but it doesn’t work.  We’ve had 10 years of taxing the rich less, and it’s featured horrible deficits, 2 recessions, declining employment and the disappearance of the middle class.  These things are related.  Republicans and Democrats have been cutting taxes and we go from bad to worse.  We don’t need big gov’t, but we need a balance, and we’re too far on the side of the rich right now.  

Money is best used in the private economy because it belongs to the people spending it. There is NO WAY that the government makes better use of private funds. When the government decides to spend billions of dollars on a high speed rail in California that nobody will ride, that is a WASTE of resources. Those funds would have been much more effectively spent if the money remained in the private economy.

If this guy wants to peg unemployment on anyone, it is not the RICH, it’s the government. Blame minimum wage, government regulations, and everything else that makes doing business here so freaking expensive. I don’t care how rich the RICH are…if the government makes the cost of doing business astronomical, they’re not going to run businesses that can’t turn a profit.

Or am I still supposed to believe that the trillion dollar stimulus worked?

Money is best used in the private economy because it belongs to the people spending it. There is NO WAY that the government makes better use of private funds. When the government decides to spend billions of dollars on a high speed rail in California that nobody will ride, that is a WASTE of resources. Those funds would have been much more effectively spent if the money remained in the private economy.

If this guy wants to peg unemployment on anyone, it is not the RICH, it’s the government. Blame minimum wage, government regulations, and everything else that makes doing business here so freaking expensive. I don’t care how rich the RICH are…if the government makes the cost of doing business astronomical, they’re not going to run businesses that can’t turn a profit.

Or am I still supposed to believe that the trillion dollar stimulus worked?