Will it raise taxes on all of us?

According to Kayleigh McEnany it will, but I really don't find the cute little bimbo all that convincing. I need an rational argument not just the opinion of someone who looks and acts like she just graduated high school.

Biden himself says it won't. He says it will only raise taxes on those making over $400,000. The difference here is that I can actually see his proposal and that is exactly what it says.

Do we need to raise taxes at all?

I would say that depends on few variables... First, does our government have the money to cover its expenses? If not, can we cut those expenses? If not, can we get the money to cover those expenses without raising taxes?

The fact that our national deficit is continuing to rise tells me that the first answer is no, our government does NOT have the money to cover its expenses. The experience with post-recession budgets has shown a partisan impasse on cutting expenses where Democrats want to keep their spending programs and Republicans want to keep theirs, so I'm going to say the second answer is also no. That leaves the third question... can we get the money to cover those expenses without raising taxes? And the answer there is yes, we can.

Having said that, I want to explain something to my Republican friends. The government's ONLY source of revenue is tax. That is, unless we start allowing the government to run profit-driven services, but do we really want the government competing in the market? Isn't that what all the fuss over Obama's public option was about? Isn't that basically a step toward socialism? Let's just not even get into that.

So... if the only source of revenue is tax, then how else can we get money to cover expenses? Well, if we don't HAVE it we have to BORROW it and our colossal national debt indicates that we do in fact borrow a LOT of money.

Now I'm going to explain these two options in the context of our partisan history. Some of my Republican friends might get a little agitated but please hear me out.

A fundamental difference between parties is in the way each side spends money and another is in the way each side funds their spending. There's a common perception that Democrats just spend more money, so they need more money and that's why they are always raising taxes. But this perception will be corrected in the course of my explanation.

Indeed, Republicans actually spend as much as Democrats do, just on different things. The difference is Republicans promise lower taxes to get the votes then borrow whatever they need to make up the difference and that's why we have such a colossal national debt. If we funded all our spending with taxes we wouldn't even HAVE a national debt.

Now, the reason why people *think* Democrats spend more is because the approach Democrats take is transparent by virtue of the fact that they submit spending bills to our elected representatives who vote on the bill and the taxes required to fund it. This puts their spending in full view where we can watch our representatives argue about it.

Republican leaders on the other hand don't even talk to Congress, they prefer to use the office of the president to borrow money through the U.S.Treasury so there is no obligation to seek our approval or to even inform us that it's happening.

And THAT's why it "appears" as if the Democrats spend more. In reality they're just being more transparent.

Of course, both approaches are provisioned in the Constitution but raising taxes, a power given to Congress, is meant to be the standard practice and borrowing through the Treasury is supposed to be for emergencies only, not the standard practice that Republicans have turned it into.

But to give the Republicans credit, their approach has been very successful at keeping them in power, because nothing says "vote for me" like "No new taxes!"

But there's more to consider...

Not only are Republicans covertly spending borrowed money, the debts they incur from all that borrowing HAVE to be paid off eventually and since the government's only source of revenue is taxes that means the debt, sooner or later, has to be paid WITH taxes... So, not only are Republicans simply deferring the taxes for our children to pay, but they are actually increasing the taxes required to fund their spending because of added interest.

Sorry kids!

So, getting back to the main question... I think it's pretty clear... Yes, we can borrow but it's infinitely better to raise taxes to fund out expenses than it is to borrow. The last thing we want to do is force our children into debt servitude to the communists in Beijing, which is exactly what Republicans have been doing since Reagan and Trump... is NOT changing that.

But wait, there is another trick up the Republican sleeve; it's an interesting idea.

Can we raise revenue by lowering taxes?

Now, I *do* understand the theory that we can increase revenue by lowering taxes. The idea being that lower taxes allows business to divert the money they save to payrolls for more jobs, which means more incomes to tax. It's a neat idea that comes with fancy diagrams like the Laffer Curve. The only problem is that it doesn't seem to work anywhere but on paper.

The Laffer Curve depends on very strict parameters that can be illustrated on paper but they can't be guaranteed in the reality of a free economy. When Reagan implemented this theory in his supply-side economics many other factors came into play and economists to this day can't really determine the isolated impact of supply-side economic policies.

But the kitchen table math doesn't really support the theory either... If a company saves $200,000 in taxes and diverts that to payroll to support four $50,000 jobs. Each of those salaries would be taxed at around 20%, which means the revenue decreases from $200,000 to $40,000.

Sorry folks, but when I see Republicans with a handful of beans, I'm not expecting a beanstalk to lift us up to the clouds where geese lay golden eggs.

The last attempt to push supply-side magic into law was the 2017 tax cuts, which promised more jobs but failed to actually do it. I know Republicans will jump up and down about the jobs Trump created, but they will also ignore the greater number of jobs lost. And there isn't much evidence to suggest that the jobs that were created came from the tax cuts. Actually, we can SEE where a lot of the tax savings went. Millions of it went to stock buybacks which is great for stockholders but it doesn't leave much for those promised payrolls.

So, unless someone can show me what I'm missing, I'm just going to write that whole theory off as a fantasy. Which leaves me with the sobering conclusion that we DO need to raise taxes to increase the government revenue to fund our spending without indebting our children to those communists in China.

So...

Is it fair to tax the wealthy?

Let me ask you this... Is it fair that golf tees for women are closer to the hole? Is it fair that parking spots closest to the entrance are reserved for the disabled? Why would the question about taxing wealthy people more than poor people be any different?

In simple terms... wealthy people can afford bigger tax bills, most people in the middle class can't. That doesn't mean we want to take all the advantages of being wealthy away. We aren't trying to punish people for being rich or equalize people to benefit the lazy. There is a LOT of bandwidth between extremes here. A person with $100 in his pocket can give a starving person $5 to by lunch and STILL have $95 in his pocket and that's about all Biden's tax plan calls for. All he is really proposing with respect to individual income tax is that we repeal the 2017 tax cut for the wealthy who were doing just fine BEFORE the tax cut.

Besides wealth distribution is so extreme by this point that it's ridiculous to think the government can continue squeezing money out of the poorest people to pay for it's spending.

I mean, why tax the worker with a high school diploma at 22% leaving him with barely enough to pay rent and basic provisions for a measly $3,000 when we can tax the NFL athlete at 40%, giving us $800,000 and STILL leaving him with millions in spendable cash? It certainly doesn't take away MY incentive to work hard and make millions.

So in conclusion... I don't think there is ANYTHING wrong with Biden's tax plan. In fact, if anything I would say it's not enough. But then again, I'm a geolibertarian who thinks we shouldn't be taxing income at all. I think it's better to tax profits made from the ownership of property. In other words, don't tax the $10 wage earned by the worker laboring in the fields. Tax the $500,000 profit earned by the landlord sipping mojitos on his porch.

But alas, America isn't ready for something that logical. In the meantime, I think Biden's plan to fix the deficit caused by the 2017 cuts is a move in the right direction.

Actually to be fair, McConnell who is refusing to accept either the Pelosi bill OR the Trump bill, did say something about vetting the recipients instead of just issuing checks to everyone. My questions there is how expensive will the vetting process be and how long will it take and will the process be transparent so we know we aren't getting screwed?

(Nothing personal but I really don't trust McConnell any further than I could throw him).


LOL - I want to call that an understatement. It took Obama his entire first term to pull America out of the mess Bush left us with. I think it will be critical that Joe get a solid staff under him... with people that actually know what they are doing. That means he needs to "drain the swamp" of incompetent loyalists that Trump gathered together.

It is a perplexing problem. It would be easier to save them from themselves if they just stopped voting but it's their right to vote so we just have to deal with it. And it's not that I care about them so much that I want to save them from themselves, it's just that what hurts them also hurts me and my family. I'm sure you feel the same way.

Even if they could just remember their own damned priorities from one election to another... During the Obama years they were screaming bloody murder about the deficit as if nothing could be any worse. Now that Trump drove the deficit even higher they're like... "what deficit?"

Would that not indicate a tendency to be swayed more by talking points than by any genuine concern or understanding of long standing problems?

OK smartypants... Here's your sentence...

"If any supported Trump, I would have thought Trump was one of the turncoats too, but he is not."

So you're trying to write a conditional sentence but conditional sentences only use two clauses and you have three. You actually don't need the third clause because the condition is already implied in the first two clauses making the third one redundant. So, let's lop it off...

"If any supported Trump, I would have thought Trump was one of the turncoats too."

That says the same thing and it cuts your list of subjects from three ("any", "I" and "he") down to two.

You added the word "too" at the end but since you didn't indicate a precedent it really doesn't belong. So, we should lop that off too.

"If any supported Trump, I would have thought Trump was one of the turncoats."

OK, next... Why are you using a quantifier for a subject without specifying what is being qualified? "Any" what?

If any gerbils supported Trump, maybe?

Technically, by using a quantifier by itself as a subject you screwed up the "if" clause and therefore the entire sentence, but I try to read around it. It's what we do when engaging in heated conversations online. I'm just going to assume you meant to say "anyone".

The subject in your second clause is *you* by virtue of the word "I". And what is THAT subject doing? Well, being past tense the better question to ask is, what did the subject do? Oh wait, it's the second clause in a past tense conditional sentence so the real question to ask is, what would the subject have done IF anyone supported Trump. The answer is... The subject would have thought Trump was one of the turncoats.

Here's how your sentence would have looked like if it was written by someone who still remembers how to write.

"If anyone had supported Trump, I would have thought he was one of the turncoats."

Sooo much easier to read and it makes the same point.

Maybe now you can see how the best guess at what you are trying to say is that you are conditioning your perception of Trump on whether or not anyone supported him. Which is pretty much what I said.

This is a fundamental problem with Trump's style and in a bigger sense it's a fundamental problem for the entire "get a businessman to handle government" argument...

A businessman's market share on customers doesn't have to be the biggest as long as it exceeds his operating expenses. Plenty of business thrives on the smaller market shares. But it doesn't work that way in a democracy. In democracy, a support base HAS to be the biggest, or it loses and gets nothing.

The only other way Trump could succeed in winning the election without expanding beyond his loyal base is to follow any of the methods exemplified by the Fascists under Mussolini. That history is a "How To" book for shutting down democracy and establishing a tyranny with a minority.

The problem with that is that Trump just isn't that badass. In three years Mussolini got a lot farther down the path than Trump has. Hitler did too. Those guys were hard, driven and psychotic. Trump is soft, narcissistic and immature. Wrong combo Aryans... find someone else.

drlarrygino actually described Obama as a decent family man who's sexual perversions are at the top of his agenda. Kind of leaves me wondering about his ethics.

Yes, I think you're right. That's why nothing has to be proven, nothing has to make sense. It's not about truth it's about tribe.

Do you ever think about what you say? How can you have illegal immigrants AND open borders? You want to explain that one?


So, you're admitting that you made mistakes. How do you know you're not making one now?


Ah, so clearly you cast your judgement on candidates based on whether or not the people you hate support him. That's very scientific. No wonder you keep getting suckered.

uh-huh... First, you say...



Then you say...



Sometimes, I don't even need to say anything. You're like a deer that shoots itself.

This is true. I also think people underestimate the impact the global Internet has had on global politics. Since the 90's when connections to the Internet became a household item, elections have been manipulated all over the place. I remember first reading how the Russians were accused of interference in the last French election. And now it seems no election is safe from the biases of foreign influence via social media.

I remember finding out about the young entrepreneurs in Russia and Eastern Europe that run websites fitted with advertising schemes like Google's AdSense, that return pennies for every click through on the ads. The key is to attract as much traffic as possible to increase the clicks and therefore the profit.

Apparently, these webmasters found right-wing conspiracy theories to be the #1 most popular and addictive categories of Internet content. Some of these operators were interviewed and admitted that they don't even know English well enough to understand the stories, but the stories come as a package listed as right-wing conspiracy theories, so they syndicate them to their websites anyway and apparently it works quite well for them. Keep in mind there are no national borders on the Internet, so they are perfectly able to make their websites available to Americans which they know to be the largest consumer market in the world.

So that's one form of Russian "interference" that we can't even accuse of being nefarious. It's just... 21st century reality. Of course it's also being discovered that politicians are finding ways to take advantage of these technical trends for nefarious reasons.

I guess the point I want to make here is that I think we need to come to the realization that voters connected to the Internet are going to be hit with all kinds of influences from overseas and there isn't much we can do as a democracy to isolate ourselves from that threat. Unless we want to go Beijing, but even THEY are finding it a difficult challenge to keep Chinese people off the grid.

I think the best thing we can do is teach our children how to assess the value of what they are being told. Too many Americans are raised to believe what they are told without question and consequently lack the capacity to challenge what they read which makes them all the more susceptible to nefarious influences, both foreign AND domestic.

radicalized leftists? LOL The number of people I've met that sit further to the left of me tells me that I'm not as extreme as you seem to think. But you're right about us not being under control. Indeed, no one controls my thoughts. Are you really implying that's a bad thing?


Huh, well how does that work when at the same time you repeatedly insist that Hillary, who hasn't been indicted or crucified either, is nevertheless guilty of horrible crimes?

Is this one of those hypocritical statements the right is so famous for?

It certainly seems that way. Generally speaking, their culture is far more influenced by the religious tradition of believing what you are told and I think that explains a lot. On the left, there are more people who are liberated from that "do as we tell you" tradition and are more inclined to find their own conclusions through a process of discovery.

Unfortunately, being so conditioned by authority, evangelical conservatives are far less capable of recognizing the independence of liberal thought, so they have to insist on superimposing dystopian-style, Marxist conformity for them to make any sense of it.

It's kind of funny but sad at the same time.

Trump was actually due to be in court in San Diego on the date of his first day in office but the courts agreed to put everything on hold until after his term. I would hate to be him now. The first president in U.S. history not to be endorsed by ANY former presidents, the incumbent with the lowest approval ratings, quite possibly the most hated in history and a long, long list of pending lawsuits and investigations just waiting for him to lose the election.

In general, we prefer the right people for the right jobs. We like doctors to handle our surgeries for instance not janitors. We like CPAs to handle our taxes not short-order cooks. By the same token we like experienced politicians to handle our policies and we like them to have legal backgrounds because the government is after all a system of laws.

The idea that a businessman is better qualified is utter nonsense. First of all, a "businessman" can mean anything from a CEO of a major corporation to a dog walker, a baby sitter or even a drug dealer. It's all business.

I co-founded three businesses myself. 'Not all that difficult.

This idiot preference for the businessman seems to revolve around the idea of managing budgets. To borrow a term from the less PC days of yore - that's women's work. I always let my stay-at-home wife manage the household budget which seems to be a very common arrangement. And even that was the easy part of her day. In short, budgets are common place and most people know how to do it.

The REAL challenge of running a government is resolving conflicts, which is infinitely more difficult than balancing a budget. Indeed, comparing the capacity of a businessman to the demands of national politics is like suggesting a soldier is good enough for mission impossible because he keeps his boots shiny.

Trump isn't even a good businessman... First of all, his experience is primarily based on the buying and selling of property. He has no experience in innovation or building a business from the ground up like Elon Musk or Bill Gates. His experience is more in line with the Kardashians and the capital ventures they can afford from inheriting multi-million dollar fortunes from daddy.

Secondly, he has lost an extraordinary fortune to his failures and is currently millions of dollars in debt. He doesn't want to expose his tax records because that would tell us the true story. It was leaked that he only spent $750 dollars in taxes in recent years and the only way to explain that is to point out his loses, which he was able to write off.

I'm still amazed at how you folks got so brainwashed into hating Clinton for things she never did that you would vote for a business failure that depends on borrowed money and scams to retain his opulent facade.

Actually, Trump HAS been prosecuted numerous times over the course of his career AND while he was in office. Maybe you mean to say he hasn't been convicted?

But even then he has lost an abundance of lawsuits resulting in millions of dollars lost to heavy fines and out of court settlements. He is also the first president in history to be impeached in his first term. The Republican Senate saved him from being removed from office, but he is still legally impeached.

The only reason why he hasn't been fully convicted while in office is because his AG insists that his executive privilege puts him above the law. Wait and see what happens when he loses that privilege. There are literally hundreds of pending lawsuits against him and several legal teams preparing to prosecute him for his violations of the Constitution and internationally recognized human rights.

As far as his life being under a microscope, that's his own doing. He craves attention and put himself in a celebrity status before he even came to the White House and ever since then he has been spending a ton of time tweeting and rallying and otherwise commanding the limelight, which may very well be the most important priority for him.


Well, that tends to happen when there isn't any criminal activity to investigate.


LOL, seriously? Did you forget the 33 hearings that Hillary went through? Republicans spent millions of your tax money on an incredible number of attempts to convict her of crimes that NONE of the courts or Senate hearings were able to prove.

Her compliance, civility and sense of humor through all of that is one reason why more Americans voted for her in 2016 than Trump.