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Obama Job Speech to Congress

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Boom_70, Sep 9, 2011.

  1. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    We don't tax wealth, but at the same time, I don't feel particularly bad about asking the people who have most of it to pay for society, through whatever mechanisms we do tax.
     
  2. Ben_Hecht

    Ben_Hecht Active Member

    Thank God we never had a Hitler, but Joe the Alky was a great role model of how NOT to behave.

    And 'most everybody tiptoed around the lying, stumbling lush for years, afraid to be tarred by his 100-proof brush.

    His demise was one of the great causes for joy for decent people in the mid-twentieth century.

    Never forget THAT bastard.
     
  3. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    I don't disagree there. When I clicked on the first link to what Obama was proposing here, I thought, "Finally." Then I read that it was aimed at people with incomes over $1 million. It's like designing health care policy to make sure 7-footers are taken care of.

    Ending the Bush cuts, the capital gains break, and maybe the mortgage interest deduction would accomplish much more.

    The one thing I will say about Baron's point, and it is not related to tax policy as much as jobs, is that we have a system where that CEO is compensated very well for putting people out of work. Bonuses and option grants are tied to stock performance and short-term profits, and Wall Street tells us every day that the surest way to boost the stock price is to lay off 5,000 people. So for a Carol Bartz who makes $40-50M at Yahoo, for her and her management team to maximize their own incomes might have meant a few thousand people out of work.
     
  4. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    I think it's true that the anger are corporate executives is misplaced. Executive pay is not the reason for jobs disappearing, nor is it the reason for the deficit, or rising health costs, or anything else the middle class is mad about.

    That said, executive pay is still a market failure where the free market system has broken down.
     
  5. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    I'd argue that executive pay is partially the reason why jobs are disappearing. A considerable amount of that pay could go towards saving some jobs, as LTL pointed out.

    Will raising taxes on millionaires close the deficit? Probably not much. But in this time of "shared sacrifice", they should be sacrificing more too. All you heard from the GOP was that little catchphrase this summer with the government unions, until the Dems started using it for this topic. Then it became "class warfare".
     
  6. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    Lots of things *could* go to save jobs. All the change sitting in change jars across the nation could probably save a lot of jobs, but people putting their change in jars isn't causing jobs to go away. All the money being paid to people on Social Security could probably save a lot of jobs, but they aren't causing the jobs to go away either.

    Jobs are going away because companies no longer finding that the employees add more to the bottom line than it costs to keep them. Executive pay isn't causing that.
     
  7. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    Teachers and some government workers had to pay a higher percentage than they were and they went fucking ballistic.

    How many of us have taken pay cuts in the last four years or so? I'm guessing the number is pretty high.

    The bottomline is that the best way to bring more taxes in is to get more people working and they'll be paying in, rather than collecting unemployment.

    I'm not pretending that that's an easy thing to do, but that's what needs to happen.
     
  8. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    Economic growth is not something that can be managed. And what the U.S. and Western European governments have done fiscally, and their central banks monetarily, has taken a recession and exacerbated it.

    But you are correct about the way to increase tax revenues. The only time we have had balanced budgets recently didn't come from tax raises or spending cuts. It happened when we had a robust economy and the two parties splitting Congress and the White House in the 1990s. The robust economy brought in more tax receipts than the gridlocked government (Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich caused a government shutdown) could agree to spend on. And we had budget surpluses. We have never balanced a budget by trying to do it. During those years Clinton was proposing bigger and bigger budgets that he couldn't get Congress to pop on. It only happens when we get a combination of economic growth bringing in lots of tax receipts and gridlocked government. Right now, people think we have gridlocked government. Yet, our Federal budget continues to grow, so obviously the two parties are agreeing on how to blow through trillions of dollars every year.
     
  9. deskslave

    deskslave Active Member

    Things that only Liberal Democrats can get away with in the U.K.: The party's deputy leader today suggested a redistribution ... of working hours, saying that people who work long hours are (a) doing damage to their own lives and (b) taking away hours that could be worked by other people.

    http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/politics/article-23989015-hard-workers-urged-to-share-their-hours-with-the-jobless.do
     
  10. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    From the story:

    "Mr Hughes urged bosses to cut their own pay to recruit more staff: "If FTSE 100 executives stopped paying themselves hundreds of millions of pounds for failure... they could use this cash to take on more young people or give the money to charities which employ people helping the poor and needy." "

    My point exactly.
     
  11. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    It doesn't work that way. Our system is set up so that everyone is supposed to be maximizing their self-interest. If I owned stock in a company that started hiring people unnecessarily, I'd be rather annoyed. That's my retirement money you are playing with.

    That's why we have taxes and government: To force us to do things we won't choose to do ourselves.
     
  12. Bob Cook

    Bob Cook Active Member

    Yeah, that worked so well for LBJ, he was essentially drummed out of office instead of running for a second term.

    If you think that, say, Joe Lieberman (who counted as one of the 60) was going to be frightened by that logic, you're deluding yourself. After all, the Democratic Party tried to put him out to pasture, but someone he got elected anyway.
     
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