apparently you missed
So this Buffet Rule is a great populist proposal if the president wants to score some political points, but it has little practical value. It might provide the government a little bit of additional revenue, but unless extremely aggressive, it wouldn't make a dent in the nation's deficit problem. To do that, you'll need to cut entitlements and/or raise taxes much more broadly.
No - you missed the point. You can't expect one single thing to fix the problem. Only through tweaking lots of systems will we find a solution. And when one single tweak provides 2.5% to 5% of the deficit that is a lot!
Most of the professional politicians in DC do not want to raise taxes on everyone OR cut back on entitlements ... or revise the tax code to some other sort of 'equal' tax on everyone .. consumption tax, Fair tax, flat rate tax etc ...
Anything less than 10% is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. If they raised taxes ... the rich would go hide their money in Cancun, Bermuda or Switzerland.
Shoot if the taxpayers didn't have to pay for $16 muffins for government snacks ... that too would make a difference ... separate helicopters for Mr and Mrs president when they go on vacation .. that too would make a difference.
And here it is, right on cue, yet ANOTHER "please don't tax the poor, defenseless rich people" story.
You do know that the so called entitlement programs are self funding. They don't add to the deficit.
Medicaid is not self funding federally NOW, and the 40-60% of the cost born by state governments is VERY MUCH not self-funding.
Medicare was self funding until 2024. In the space of less than a year, that number has crept up to 2019/2020. At the start of the millenia, the prediction had ben sometime in the 2030s.
Social security is more nebulous, as it has a larger pool of dedicated funding coming in, and the existing trust fund is earning interest that varies. The interest is from treasuries that have been having decreasing yeilds while employment is shrinking, and the boomers are preparing to hit. It also has had to be bailed out previously, so....
Then there's food stamps.. not self funding and growing at a rapid pace.
To be fair, there are also a buttload of subsidies to business that are not self funding either. We need to stop leaving programs that are failing to do their job in place.
But both of you are arguing over a moot point. NOBODY is trying to fix the deficit. Right now, what is going on is an atttempt to maintain our ability to borrow for the next decade or so. By raising several hundred billion form millionaires, we can leverage that into several trillion dollars of debt, especially if we can demonstrate it is a reliable, recurring source of income.
Why was the deficit not a problem when Bush was the president? When Bush entered the White House there was a surplus that would have wiped out the entire national debt last year but the first thing he did was cut the tax rate for the rich. And that wasn't enough for him and the Republicans so they did it twice.
What I keep hearing is that we should cut the entire $1.4 trillion deficit by cutting spending. Let me pull out my calculator. Using a money multipler of 2, that $1.4T is worth about 3T to the American economy. At about $50K per job, cutting that $1.5T would cause the loss of about 60 million jobs. Thats about 30% of the people working. So unemployment would be worst that during the great depression.
Vernalex
So his point is that because it doesn't fix the budget we shouldn't do it at all? That is a very weak argument.