Almost 3/4 of those surveyed said to raise taxes people making over 250,000 a year.


Easy to vote yes when you make less than $250,000 a year. I for one do not make 250,000 a year and I would vote no. TO me, that's not fair. These people made money and the haters shouldn't hate.

They made that money because of the consumers ability to purchase goods and services. The consumer needs to be empowered to purchase and cover their credit debts. We cannot continue to grow income gaps or we you have goods on the shelf and nobody to pay for them and then guess what happens. More government subsidizing.

Forget percentages. Lets talk dollars. A person making a million bucks pays $300,000+ in taxes versus a person making $100,000 paying less than $30,000 and getting all sorts of breaks and credits.

Nowhere do you mention consumers taking responsibility for there finances.

Like what a debtors prison? This country lives off consumption and debt and the consumers ability to purchase and pay debt must be protected.

Im talking more about your super elite. But OK the current tax rate probably would be fine if the government was somewhat efficient.

and your cutting things that would stimulate the economy.

To say Republicans have zero interest is completely ignoring the fact that the Bush administration was completely reckless in its policies and entitlement spending on the poor and lower income portions of the working class.

Wasn't it like $700 billion?


800 billion, but who's counting? lol. Gip, those elite players are the ones buying big ticket items. WHere is your source that says the 2-3% control 70% of the wealth?

Of course, with huge budget problems across the country, which segment of the population is The GOP asking to tighten their belts and accept cuts in pay, or loss of benefits, or loss of jobs and which segment is being asked to do nothing or is even getting further tax breaks?

Of course, with huge budget problems across the country, which segment of the population is The GOP asking to tighten their belts and accept cuts in pay, or loss of benefits, or loss of jobs and which segment is being asked to do nothing or is even getting further tax breaks?

Like people who make $30,000 a year but decide to lease a BMW and buy a 3 bed room, 2 bathroom house.

One of the biggest reasons we are in the economic situation we are in is because people chose to live beyond their means.

There should be no problem owning a 3 bedroom house on 30k.

So where is the responsibility for the lender who makes these horrible loans where they make money hand over fist off gullible, stupid, or naive people?

We don't live in a perfect world.

LOL! So Gip is pulling stuff from thin air, kind of like our falling dollar to support all this BS, gotcha.

Im talking about people who have record incomes and declining tax rates. The top 400 earners in this country made as much as 100 million workers but have a lower tax rate.

http://politifact.com/rhode-island/stat ... ed-lower-/

http://www.tax.com/taxcom/features.nsf/ ... enDocument

The point is people choose to live beyond their means. But I figure you already knew that, you just can't refute it.

So the government should be there to protect stupid people who don't bother reading the documents they are signing?

And a government that wastes exorbitant amounts of money is not the solution.

Your premise is misleading. Read the second link you provided carefully.

Yes, these people pay a lower income tax because most of their income doesn't come in the form of a paycheck.

They pay capital gains taxes, which is not included into the equation of the politifact write up.

Capital gains are results of investments from income they already got taxed for.

They used money they already had an made more money.

If people at lower income levels lived within their means, they could do the same thing. Not at the same level, but they could eventually earn supplemental wages from small investments that they could incrementally increase year to year.

The problem is people are too lazy or uneducated to do this.

We also have some of the worst infrastructure in the world and don't spend as much in relative terms as other countries. Can you look that up yourself or do I have to find that too?

we are cutting taxes on the rich whos rates are lower than people in the middle class.

Of course people choose to live beyond their means and lenders choose to enable it, this is America the economy would not stand on its two feet without people who live beynod their means. You can't wrecklessly spend unless you wrecklessly lend.

Incomes among the wealthy have skyrocketed

and the country could afford with no negatvie impact on the wealthy to give us our MFing rail

It's amazing how you exonerated the banks from this mess.

It’s Time to Face the Fiscal Illusion

FISCAL policy debates often focus on technocratic questions about how much money the government should spend and when, yet the actual course of events depends not on the experts but on politics. The more that our government runs up unfunded obligations and debt, the more we are setting a trap for ourselves.

James M. Buchanan, a Nobel laureate in economics — and my former colleague and now professor emeritus at George Mason University — argued that deficit spending would evolve into a permanent disconnect between spending and revenue, precisely because it brings short-term gains. We end up institutionalizing irresponsibility in the federal government, the largest and most central institution in our society. As we fail to make progress on entitlement reform with each passing year, Professor Buchanan’s essentially moral critique of deficit spending looks more prophetic.

We are fooling ourselves most of all. United States government debt in public hands is now more than $9 trillion, but most people still don’t realize what it will take to pay that off.

Keynesian economics talks of the “fiscal illusion” created by government debt: the issuance of such debt can stimulate the economy in the short run by encouraging a false perception of wealth and thus bolstering consumer spending. But, eventually, the books must balance. There is then a fiscal crunch, a sudden retrenchment of plans and great rancor over budgets, as we have been seeing lately at both the federal and the state level.

The famous Keynesian rejoinder, “In the long run we are all dead,” is less comforting when that long run comes into sight. Short-run planning is a hard carousel to stop, especially when there are frequent election cycles, but the federal government must act soon. Limiting Medicare and Social Security spending involves re-indexing benefits, adjusting eligibility ages, shifting the growth rates of costs and making other changes that have their full fiscal impact only over the longer run.

Yet we are postponing even these actions. Experts’ recommendations might lead us toward a fiscal smooth landing, but at this point the fiscal illusion — and not the advice of experts — is in control. So Professor Buchanan’s argument is ringing true.

Now that fiscal constraints are starting to bite, many politicians are afraid to reform or even to discuss changes in the largest problem areas: Medicare and Medicaid. Yes, some laudable cost controls on Medicare are embedded in the new health care law, but they’re not enough. Most likely, we will end up making other spending cuts that won’t solve our fiscal problems — and in areas that could instead benefit from Keynesian employment stimulus. These kinds of knee-jerk, poorly reasoned decisions are what happens when fiscal illusion reigns.

Fiscal austerity may sometimes sound like a dogmatic religion, but fixed principles often help us do the right thing, especially when temptation beckons. Professor Buchanan argued that the real choice was between a religion of budget balance and a rule of illusion. Seeking an optimal technocratic path is not on the menu.

But the entire cause of this mess was people living beyond their means.

But the entire cause of this mess was people living beyond their means.

you say people are stupid

No, you said that. I think people are lazy, not stupid.

The entitlement mentality has made them lazy. You apparently want more of that mentality.

WHy is the tri rail a total failure? Why would this train be different?

You can't stop people from deciding to live beyond their means

You say this, and yet you balk at me saying you exonerated the banks. You can't have it both ways.

Then let them live with the consequences of their decisions instead of cleaning up after them.