Replies to post #92143 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[wbmw]

So the purpose of taxes is to regulate the economy. If the economy is too hot, taxes can be raised to cool it down. If the economy is too cold, as it obviously is today, taxes should be cut to warm it up back to operating temperature.

The problem with using taxes in this way is that it's always popular to lower taxes, but never popular to raise them. While Mr. Moseley may be correct in theory, in practice broad based tax cuts during tough times are never backed out during good times, and the impact on the national debt is obvious.

George Bush's tax cuts, for example, did little to spur the economy - it was the real estate bubble which did that. Rather, Bush's tax cuts added trillions to the national debt over several years. Maybe the Bush administration and Mr. Moseley had a common ideology, but in hindsight, it was one of the worst decisions of Bush's presidency.

And now that Obama would like to let the tax cuts expire for the wealthiest Americans to grow revenues, his opponents are using that as a political tool to attack him. And at the same time, the same opponents use the national deficit as a political tool, which is ironic, because if you keep the tax cuts, you've just increased the size of the deficit.

Obama's opponents are trying to force him into a decision of cutting major entitlements, like Medicare and Social Security, because having a Democrat make such an unpopular decision would take the heat off of the Republicans. Well, that's one way of running the country - but it would suck to be any of the millions of seniors whose lives depend on these entitlements.

Rather, Obama is trying to increase spending on jobs creation to keep the economy growing, and paying for it by targeting the wealthiest Americans, such as those who grew in wealth over the last couple of decades, at the expense of the middle class. Well, that just seems fair to me, but I guess if you are one of the people likely to get taxed to pay for other people's entitlements, you might not like that.

That pretty much sums up the current situation, as I see it.