Should Republicans Vote Yes Now on the 98%

Originally posted by no1marauder
$250K a year puts you in the top 2% of taxpayers.

Right wingers keep screaming about the budget deficit, but refuse to accept that revenues have to be raised if it is to be reduced. Presently tax revenue as a share of GNP is the lowest since 1950 yet right wingers keep insisting that lower taxes have nothing to do with the deficit. This is nonsense.

If you want to tax the wealthy, base taxes on wealth, not income.

Originally posted by Eladar
If you want to tax the wealthy, base taxes on wealth, not income.

Aha, a wealth tax, like how they do it in... France.

Originally posted by sasquatch672
What about the debt? The deficit is a red herring, kind of - closing the deficit with tax increases alone would require marginal rates to rise on everybody by about 25%. So take whatever rate everybody is paying, and multiply it by 1.25. Obama's $82 billion is a whiff on any serious talk about responsibility.

But the deficit is still a red herri ...[text shortened]... r way out of a $20 trillion hole. And when you hit dEbt to GDP of 100%, investors get nervous.

Right wingers are screaming about cuts to the military of half that amount. Granted, taxes have to be increased by even more than the pittance proposed by Obama, but if even that is politically impossible than there is no chance of ever balancing the budget.

So long as the debt is paid, it is not a problem. There is no possibility of running surpluses to reduce the overall debt; when we ran a small surplus briefly in the last few Clinton years, right wingers insisted that taxes had to be cut because the government was taxing ("stealing"😉 more than it needed.