palerobber wrote: i appreciate your perspective, EAllusion, but regarding (2), is it not the case that Ryan's budget doesn't actually name a single specific tax deduction or loophole he would eliminate?
Since his budget isn't a ready to pass bill, it doesn't specify what would be eliminated. But it words itself to blanket eliminate all deductions, credits, adjustments, etc. with a few exceptions. Everyone is curious over what those exceptions would be, and Ryan is famously coy about that. One would imagine it would be things like charitable contribution deductions, but no one can say for sure. If you want to suggest that it would try to just eliminate middle-class and poor tax breaks and leave the complicated system that wealthy take advantage of largely intact, I don't think that is correct. I think the budget is attempting to sweep away the tax break system. Holding out exceptions is meant to give people hope that their ox won't get gored to stave off opposition.
Ryan's tax proposal is essentially a very standard flat tax proposal with the one key difference is that instead of one flat rate, it is a two-tiered rate system. A core component of flat tax proposals is streamlining through removal of tax breaks. I think we have solid reason to think Ryan is ideologically behind that. It would be interesting to see what actually can get passed through congress, but that is the jumping off point.
sock puppet wrote: As always, my input will be voiced by my abstaining from the ballot booth--yes, I'm that much of a libertarian.
Pfft. Vote Gary Johnson. Unless you are morally opposed to voting at all, I don't see why you'd have to abstain when you have a very strong libertarian candidate in Johnson to vote for.
But I just can't bring myself to participate in a process that seems inevitably to take away liberties from individuals, no matter who wins an election.
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
sock puppet wrote: As always, my input will be voiced by my abstaining from the ballot booth--yes, I'm that much of a libertarian.
Pfft. Vote Gary Johnson. Unless you are morally opposed to voting at all, I don't see why you'd have to abstain when you have a very strong libertarian candidate in Johnson to vote for.
It boils down to personal pride and effort. Just look at the contrast in effort in this case. I mean it's got to be so much easier to drive up to a bar and order a drink than it is to drive up to a polling place and pull a lever! Why our country even subjects it's citizens to the effort of voting is beyond me. Wouldn't we all really be better off just to have a few drinks and complain why we aren't getting more entitlements from our federal gov't??!! The poster child for "Apathy to Austerity".
No wonder we all pay for a tripling welfare cost in this country!!!
"It's not so much that FARMS scholarship in the area Book of Mormon historicity is "rejected' by the secular academic community as it is they are "ignored". [Daniel Peterson, May, 2004]
A subset of hardcore libertarians believe that voting itself is immoral because is actively taking part in a process that will inevitably wrongly coerce others. I don't agree with this. Heck, I strongly disagree with this, but I at least understand that it isn't a matter of simple motivation.
The idea of a someone who is such a hardcore libertarian that they don't believe in voting also being someone who will complain about there not being enough government welfare his hilarious, though. So thanks for that.
I'm concerned. Maybe it wouldn't have helped but I felt like Mitt had to pick some kind of minority running mate of some sort. Maybe he wouldn't have won Florida anyway.
There's just too many people who have found ways to profit from government socialism to outvote them anymore. While it's nice not to have to work when you're living off the government, these people don't live very well either. Living off the government is not the life I would choose but as the taxes skyrocket, I don't have much choice anymore but to try to join in this game with everyone else. Most of us are just going to end up being equally poor, unless you have some card to play that allows you access to more government benefits than your peers.
One important lesson from socialism in Russia is that you're better off going into law or politics rather than science, engineering or anything productive. Unless you can gain some kind of influence on how the goods being confisctated are distributed, you're truly wasting your effort by working longer hours in non government professions. Another lesson is that even when you can't pay for children, you're committing genetic suicide by not going ahead and having them anyway. If you don't have a lot of children, you'll inevitably pay for those who will. Each child that is born has become the responsibility of the village, not the reponsibility of the parents who chose to have the child.
We're entering an age where it takes a different set of values and ethics to survive and prosper. I can either change, or be stuck where I am now. Hail Obama, I'm now becoming a daylight democratic party member and a closet capitalist.
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
Federal taxes are as low as they've been in many decades. They aren't "skyrocketing." People who advocate lower taxes, myself among them, have been winning for years.
Moreover, Ryan's budget provides substantial tax relief almost exclusively to the wealthy. That's because he's trying to make the tax code much less progressive than it is. You don't come across as being wealthy Ajax. In fact, because Ryan's budget also attempts to eliminate credits you likely take advantage of, there's a very good chance - depending on how much you make - that you would see your effective tax rate climb under his proposal, not decrease.
Everybodys taxes end up going up when you take on more welfare cases. Or the debt just increases and then everyones taxes go up to pay the interest on the debt. Living under socialism requires a different mindset and a different set of values. One cannot control the winds of political change. You can only adapt and try to best fit yourself to be able to take what is available.
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
Welfare programs aren't being expanded. They're being shrunk. They only pay out more currently simply for the fact that more people are in poverty due to poor economic conditions.
I think by "welfare" you really mean any form of social spending to people that isn't corporate welfare. In that case, with the quite notable exception of Obamacare, which has discrete tax increases associated with it, that's not really happening either. And that's offset by all manner of tax relief that has occurred under Obama. I think people forget that a huge chunk of the "stimulus" was just tax breaks.
Obama, Marxist extraordinaire, conceded massive cuts in entitlements that would take them to pre Lyndon Johnson days just last year. If you're worried that we're living in the halycon days of massive growth of the welfare state, you're badly misinformed.
It is true that you can metaphorically "tax" people not by taxing them, but by devaluing their currency via the Fed. And that has happened and will continue to happen if debt problems aren't brought under control. But the debt problems aren't being driven by expansion of welfare programs. They're being driven by lowering of taxes without parallel lowering of spending, retirement of baby boomers and massive military spending.
ajax18 wrote:We're entering an age where it takes a different set of values and ethics to survive and prosper. I can either change, or be stuck where I am now. Hail Obama, I'm now becoming a daylight democratic party member and a closet capitalist.
"A daylight democratic party member?" What in the hell does that mean? It sounds like you are saying that you can’t compete in the current economic environment, but you don’t want to take responsibility for your own problems. So while you constantly complain about able-bodied welfare recipients, you are actually on the dole.
Did I read between the lines correctly?
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.