Americans DON'T want the debt ceiling raised

[TakeAStepBack]

Tax exemptions are now gifts.....

I suppose so if you believe the government owns all the wealth and allows you to have some (of what you earn). Twisted up, that logic.

What I'm referring to are things such as:

Bailing out failed banking institutions with taxpayer money. And a host of other easy to spot examples of corporatism in America.

Yes TASB, they are. Tax exemptions are VERY much government gifts to special favors and should be eliminated altogether.

The government does not ‘own’ all the wealth but as long as your neighbor is subject to taxes that you are allowed to escape from because you did what the government wanted it is a gift. That is simple logic and does NOT require you to believe that the government owns all the wealth. All it requires you to understand is that IF the government demands taxes it should be demanding that tax evenly from all as part of the shared use of resources rather than demanding that I pay for the road in front of YOUR house.

You might be against all taxes but even you have to admit that uneven taxes are about as terrible a tax system as you can get.

There is no objection to your argument except "equal taxation". There is really no such thing.They are always levied disproportionately.

 

[Geaux4it]

Even the government is not to big to fail.

Just like all the losers that took out bad home loans and got it up the shorts, so to should Uncle Sam for biting off more than it could chew

-Geaux

 

[FA_Q2]

Tax exemptions are now gifts.....

I suppose so if you believe the government owns all the wealth and allows you to have some (of what you earn). Twisted up, that logic.

What I'm referring to are things such as:

Bailing out failed banking institutions with taxpayer money. And a host of other easy to spot examples of corporatism in America.

Yes TASB, they are. Tax exemptions are VERY much government gifts to special favors and should be eliminated altogether.

The government does not ‘own’ all the wealth but as long as your neighbor is subject to taxes that you are allowed to escape from because you did what the government wanted it is a gift. That is simple logic and does NOT require you to believe that the government owns all the wealth. All it requires you to understand is that IF the government demands taxes it should be demanding that tax evenly from all as part of the shared use of resources rather than demanding that I pay for the road in front of YOUR house.

You might be against all taxes but even you have to admit that uneven taxes are about as terrible a tax system as you can get.

There is no objection to your argument except "equal taxation". There is really no such thing.They are always levied disproportionately.

Point taken though I will shy from the word ‘fair’ as that is always a misnomer. I think there are proper taxes though such as flat rates on all dollars earned or a flat sales tax. Both might not be totally ‘even’ per say but the key is that they don’t favor one person or source above another. That is the key to me. As soon as government in authorized to serve special interests you get what we have – a corporatocracy.

I have always found it rather ironic when the left claims to be ‘for the little man’ and points the corporate masters blame game at the right but then fail to understand exactly what allowing and encouraging special interests does. If anything, the left is worse than the right in that arena. That is terribly ironic as the right does not even bother to hide the ties to corporatism that they endorse. 2 sides, same coin.

 

[FA_Q2]

Shutting down the government is an even greater insanity. This would just be the lesser of 2 evils and short of allowing the far right to hold the nation hostage it is a viable alternative to caving in to the demands of economic terrorism in my opinion. Personally I don't like either alternative but given that the Treasury dept has that tool at it's disposal it can do whatever it takes to keep the economy going.

As far as getting hurt is concerned those who are holding a gun to the debt ceiling are the ones who will be causing the harm to our creditors and seniors. Obviously they are not considering the damage they will do in order to get their way. Democracy is about compromise. Threatening to bring down the economy is economic terrorism in my opinion.

Which has nothing to do with anything I stated. This is simply a move to change the subject from the fact that the points in question that you brought up are incorrect without actually having to admit that

For the record this is exactly what you stated;

And all those people that are holding our debt just suck up the fact that the nation fucked them over the barrel, right? That is a recipe for insanity.

Why is obliterating our obligations through printing seen differently than defaulting? The results are the same – a complete mistrust of government fiscal policy and the dollar as a world currency. All you have to do is look at other nations that tried this. The outcome was NEVER positive.

As a side not – many of those that hold those debts are the seniors that you are claiming to ‘help’ by raising SS. What you are ensuring is that they all end up poor.

We each get to decide how and what we answer. We might not like the way the other person answered but we cannot dictate how they must answer.

And?
It STILL has nothing to do with what I stated. I don’t dictate what you answer with but I am going to call you out when you answer my statements about debt and monetary supply with comments about the weather. I was talking about the effects of printing your way out of this as well as the impacts of debt and its meaning and you went into a rant about the right and government shutdowns. Neither has squat to do with the subjects I brought up.

Most of the last posts have been deflections to include the one on the right/government shutdowns. I am going to call you out on deflections.

Why don't you ask the parents of kids whose schools were forced to close? Or workers who can no longer make ends meet because they have been forced to take unpaid "furloughs"? How many of them are about to lose their homes? Hurting hardworking Americans and their children doesn't sound a good plan to me but you want to make it even worse?

Funny that you make claims like this and then ignore the fact that the same effects happen on a MUCH more MASSIVE scale in the supposed 50% cuts in the military. Do you not think that those soldiers and airman that are cut by those changes or the contractors that are left without contracts are somehow not ‘hardworking’ Americans? No, the simple truth is that you only care about the suffering that ceasing spending in certain areas causes IF it happens to be an area that you simply do not agree with. When it is another area where you want spending suddenly the suffering of those no longer matters.

Consistency. Try some

I am not ignoring the impact at all. I pointed out the problems the sequester is having on defense contractors being forced to take furloughs in another post. So please refrain from trying to paint me as something that I am not. Defense spending needs to be reduced just like everything else. How and on what timetable is what needs to be negotiated to reach a compromise that will cause the least pain while achieving the desired spending levels. It is downright dishonest to claim that defense spending must remain at unsustainable and unnecessary levels simply because it will hurt working Americans. Other nations don't have anywhere near the same military spending and yet they manage to keep their economies going. All it takes is innovation. Are they better innovators than America?

No, not at all nor do I think that defense spending is a sacred cow. I would reduce it by the levels that you are talking about in a heartbeat – possibly more. The problem I had was that you are pointing out the ills of the sequester as though that is something that we should have avoided and was a terrible occurrence. Much of this adjustment pain is required and is going to get WORSE if we want to really fix things in the long term. That is simple reality as we shift from government spending. We may not want to face the pain (and frankly that drive to avoid it has created much of the problems we face) but that is not possible.