There is a gap.
The United States brings in some amount of money. And the united States spends some other amount of money.
There is a difference between those two amounts of money; and right now, the bigger amount is the amount we spend.
We’re in debt and getting debt’ier.
All the talk ’round town is that we have to fix this problem pretty soon and the deadline that’s looming is the debt ceiling. Everyone is looking at August 2nd and working to build a plan by then.
In it’s simplest form, the debate is about narrowing the gap of the spending and the revenue.
How are we gonna do that?
The Republicans wanna cut spending. And the Democrats wanna “cut tax breaks”.
I still love how they phrase that; gotta give ’em credit for originality.
So, one side says we need to reduce the amount of money we spend and the other side says that we need to increase the money we need to bring in. Reasonable people in the middle might agree that we need a combination of both. An increase in revenue and a decrease in spending.
I happen to be one of those guys. However, my version of revenue increase may not look like the far left’s version who continue this class warfare on the rich. I think that you can increase revenue without raising taxes.
The big way is to close loopholes; I suspect that this resonates with the Left. The other way is to just let America do what America does. And that is grow:
If the Left is honest and they acknowledge that growing revenue strictly means that this years income is more than last years income, then just letting the economy grow ad taxing it the same will result in higher revenues.
That’s it.
Just expand the thing you are using to bring in revenue.
You don’t have to raise the price of a cup of lemonade; in fact, that may have negative consequences on selling lemonade. Rather, you can raise revenues by JUST SELLING MORE LEMONADE!
Come on Obama, just do the right thing.
The problem is that since the 80s we’ve been consuming more than we produce, financing that with a growing (at least through 2008) current account deficit. Our tax rates for the wealthy are the lowest on the planet, and the lowest in our history — Obama’s proposals are lower than Reagan’s proposals were! So I think it’s a stretch to call asking for an increase on taxes for the wealthy ‘class warfare’ – couldn’t the fact that almost all the income gains in the last thirty years have gone to the top 10% (most to the top 1%) of income earners be called class war too?
Still, I’ll meet you half way on this. Let’s focus on some kind of fair tax, closing loopholes and keeping rates low and perhaps reasonably flat. If we can do that in a way that can raise revenue, be fair, and be acceptable to all sides, that would be great. But how do we get the economy moving again? That’s tough — growing the economy is the best way to reduce debt (that’s how we paid down our WWII debt). But with China giving us cheap consumables and our manufacturing sector less than 10%, we need something which we can produce that others want. We need to shift from consumption and the service economy to some kind of productive economy. How do we do that? One way is to let the dollar decline dramatically so that foreign goods are more expensive and our goods are cheaper. That won’t be fun, though.