AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

If an idiot posts on the internet does anyone hear them?

IF

THE BUSH TAX RATE SCHEDULE FOR MARRIED FILING JOINTLY WERE REPLACED IN 2011 BY THE CLINTON TAX RATE SCHEDULE FOR MARRIED FILING JOINTLY,

THEN

Those married persons filing jointly whose taxable income is between $16,750 and $68,000 in both 2010 and 2011, would suffer a tax increase in 2011 of 5% of $16,750 = $837.50.

They ain't rich, and that ain't cheap! So let's make the Bush tax rates permanent!

Notations
The Misinformed Tea Party Movement
Bruce Bartlett, 03.19.10, 12:01 AM ET

On March 16 the Tea Party crowd showed up for yet another demonstration on Capitol Hill in Washington. Curious about the factual knowledge these people have regarding the issues they are protesting, my friend David Frum enlisted some interns to interview as many Tea Partyers as possible on a couple of basic questions. They got 57 responses--a pretty good-sized sample from a crowd that numbered between 300 and 500 people. (Survey results are here.)

The first question that was asked concerned the size of government. Tea Partyers were asked how much the federal government gets in taxes as a percentage of the gross domestic product. According to Congressional Budget Office data, acceptable answers would be 6.4%, which is the percentage for federal income taxes; 12.7%, which would be for both income taxes and Social Security payroll taxes; or 14.8%, which would represent all federal taxes as a share of GDP in 2009.

Not everyone follows these numbers closely, and Tea Partyers may have been thinking of figures from a few years ago, before the recession when taxes were higher. According to the CBO, the highest figure for all federal taxes since 1970 came in the year 2000, when they reached 20.6% of GDP. As we know, after that George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress cut federal taxes; they fell to 18.5% of GDP in 2007, before the recession hit, and 17.5% in 2008.

Tuesday's Tea Party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times as high as they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944.

To follow up, Tea Partyers were asked how much they think a typical family making $50,000 per year pays in federal income taxes. The average response was $12,710, the median $10,000. In percentage terms this means a tax burden of between 20% and 25% of income.

Of course, it's hard to know what any particular individual or family pays in taxes, but according to IRS tax tables, a single person with $50,000 in taxable income last year would owe $8,694 in federal income taxes, and a married couple filing jointly would owe $6,669.

But these numbers are high because to have a taxable income of $50,000, one's gross income would be higher by at least the personal exemption, which is $3,650, and the standard deduction, which is $5,700 for single people and $11,400 for married couples. Owning a home or having children would reduce one's tax burden further.

According to calculations by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a congressional committee, tax filers with adjusted gross incomes between $40,000 and $50,000 have an average federal income tax burden of just 1.7%. Those with adjusted gross incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 have an average burden of 4.2%.

Even though the Tea Partyers were specifically asked about federal income taxes, it's possible that they were thinking about other federal taxes as well, such as payroll and excise taxes. According to the JCT, when all federal taxes are included, those earning between $40,000 and $50,000 have an average tax rate of 12.3%, and those earning between $50,000 and $75,000 pay a rate of 14.5%.

In short, no matter how one slices the data, the Tea Party crowd appears to believe that federal taxes are very considerably higher than they actually are, whether referring to total taxes as a share of GDP or in terms of the taxes paid by a typical family.

Tea Partyers also seem to have a very distorted view of the direction of federal taxes. They were asked whether they are higher, lower or the same as when Barack Obama was inaugurated last year. More than two-thirds thought that taxes are higher today, and only 4% thought they were lower; the rest said they are the same.

As noted earlier, federal taxes are very considerably lower by every measure since Obama became president. And given the economic circumstances, it's hard to imagine that a tax increase would have been enacted last year. In fact, 40% of Obama's stimulus package involved tax cuts. These include the Making Work Pay Credit, which reduces federal taxes for all taxpayers with incomes below $75,000 by between $400 and $800.

According to the JCT, last year's $787 billion stimulus bill, enacted with no Republican support, reduced federal taxes by almost $100 billion in 2009 and another $222 billion this year. The Tax Policy Center, a private research group, estimates that close to 90% of all taxpayers got a tax cut last year and almost 100% of those in the $50,000 income range. For those making between $40,000 and $50,000, the average tax cut was $472; for those making between $50,000 and $75,000, the tax cut averaged $522. No taxpayer anywhere in the country had his or her taxes increased as a consequence of Obama's policies.

It's hard to explain this divergence between perception and reality. Perhaps these people haven't calculated their tax returns for 2009 yet and simply don't know what they owe. Or perhaps they just assume that because a Democrat is president that taxes must have gone up, because that's what Republicans say that Democrats always do. In fact, there hasn't been a federal tax increase of any significance in this country since 1993.

One other possibility is that taxpayers are operating on the basis of a sophisticated economic theory called "Ricardian Equivalence." According to this theory, budget deficits have no stimulative effect on the economy because taxpayers implicitly discount the future tax increase that will be necessary to pay off the additional debt. People increase their savings now, the theory posits, in order to prepare for this future tax increase, thus offsetting all of the stimulative effect of the deficits with an equal and contractionary increase in saving.

While Ricardian Equivalence is a legitimate economic theory that economists continue to debate, one often hears a variation of it on talk radio shows and such, where it is said that deficits are a tax on the economy. The problem is that many people conclude from this arguably true statement that raising taxes to reduce the deficit would in effect constitute a double tax. We're being taxed once by the deficit, people think, so why should they have their taxes raised to reduce it?

Of course, this is a non sequitur. People can't be taxed twice by the expectation of a tax and again by the actual tax itself. But more important, the underlying assumption of Ricardian Equivalence--that taxes will eventually rise to pay off the debt--is now seriously in doubt. Perhaps once it was true when people genuinely cared about a balanced budget. But today's Republicans and Tea Party members oppose all tax increases for any reason, no matter how big the deficit is. I really believe that many would rather default on the debt than raise taxes by a single penny. If this is true, then Ricardian Equivalence is a dead letter--to the extent that it ever existed at all.

Probably the simplest motivation the Tea Partyers have is the one that Howard Beale (actor Peter Finch) gave in the 1976 movie Network. "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it any more!" he said to cheering crowds. In other words, tea parties just represent unfocused anger at current economic conditions. Those who feel this way have latched on to the Tea Party movement not because they really believe that their taxes are too high, that taxes are rising or that taxes are at the root of our economic problem. Rather, they have joined because it's the only game in town; the only organized force with at least the potential of bringing about change that might make things better.

In this sense, the tea parties are simply the latest manifestation of populism, which has arisen periodically throughout American history. In the 19th century populist anger was based in rural America and directed at the banks and railroads as well as government. Populists thought that free coinage of silver, an inflationary policy that would have raised prices for farm commodities, was the solution to their problems in the same way that today's Tea Party crowd thinks that the Federal Reserve, bailouts to big businesses and a looming government takeover of the health industry are at the root of our economic malaise. Tax cuts are like free silver--a one-size-fits-all policy response.

Unfortunately for the Tea Party populists, there is no evidence in American history that populism has ever had a meaningful effect on policy. Even when the movement had a charismatic and articulate leader in William Jennings Bryan, the populists only elected a handful of members to Congress and never achieved the presidency. One reason is that the major parties co-opted populist issues and leaders, which bought time until the populist impulse burned itself out like a brush fire.

Whatever the future of the Tea Party movement in American politics, it's a bad idea for so many participants to operate on the basis of false notions about the burden of federal taxation. It only takes a little bit of time to look at one's tax return to see what one is actually paying the Treasury, calculate the percentage of one's income that goes to taxes, and compare it with what was paid last year and the year before. People may then discover that their anger is misplaced and channel it into areas where it is more likely to bring about positive change.

Bruce Bartlett is a former Treasury Department economist and the author of Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action and Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. Bruce Bartlett's new book is: The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.

Why Teabaggers lie about HCR (and everything else)...they have to.
by griffon2k
Sat Mar 20, 2010 at 11:54:04 PM PDT

Leading up to the 2008 Presidential election, I had a lengthy political discussion with my younger sister. We had been discussing the increasingly volatile nature of the political attacks coming from the right. The cries of “terrorist”, the continuing claims of a “kenyan/muslim Manchurian candidate”, and the warnings of coming socialism bothered my sister and I both, to say nothing of the actual death threats clearly audible at rallies for the opposition. As the children of African American parents who grew in the Deep South in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, the dogs whistles, the latent racism was clear to us both. My sister asked me how these people, could say such things about another American citizen, how they hate one of their own neighbors that much.

My answer was simple. I told her that unfortunately, some of our neighbors, some of our American brothers and sisters had long embraced a world view that said that an African-American was not worthy to hold the presidency, to lead “their” great nation. If Barack Obama won the election, that world view would be proven false. It would be, figuratively speaking, the end of the world for the people who held it.

I’ve heard it said that it’s much better to be happy than right. How true.

These thoughts return to me today after my wife and I decided to spend the day in DC. As a working couple in Northern Virginia, both of us working long hours, and I with a ridiculous daily commute, we’re often jumping at the chance to go somewhere, anywhere to relax. Sometimes it’s a short vacation out of the region. Sometimes, like today, we just take a trip to DC to enjoy the city and the sights. Today, I wanted to see the Capitol building. I know what was going on in those halls this weekend, but that really wasn’t my reason for wanting to go. I just wanted to see it. I just wanted look at it. My wife obliged me.

We weren’t a minute out of the Metro station outside the Capitol building before I began to wish she hadn’t.

I saw it, but it didn’t register at first. Awful lot of NRA hats and shirts out here today, said a passing thought. Awful lot of flags too. After noticing an older man quickly tuck a poster under his arm as if embarrassed after meeting eyes with him, it clicked. Teabaggers were here.
They were sparse in number, but there were enough of them, and enough of their signs to be noticed. They sat outside the Congressional office buildings. They held high the usual signs. “Taxed Enough Already”. “I didn’t vote for Socialism”. They wore the usual shirts. “Glenn Beck Rules”. “Don’t Tread on Me”. None of that bothered me.

But the moment my eyes caught sight of a number of these folks flying the old colonial flag, for some reason, that was my tipping point. It pissed me off.

Why?

Because these people are so enraged by the thought of a competent government, much less one led by an African-American president, that they can’t even fly OUR flag anymore. They’re so blinded with hate and fear that the 50 stars and stripes is no longer good enough for them. It’s not “Their” country anymore. It’s not “Their” flag. They want “Their” country back, and according to the flag many of them were waving, it’s the one where only white men choose the leaders, and people who looked like me were still three-fifths human.

I’m done with the excuses. These people aren’t using the historical Tea Party as some meaningful metaphor for a real, populist movement. This isn’t about socialism. This isn’t about a government takeover of healthcare. This isn’t about being “Taxed Enough Already”. This isn’t about these folks being simply misled or just ignorant of the truth, because most of them are old enough to seek out the truth.

This is about a group of selfish people with a misplaced sense of entitlement, willfully embracing lies and the damn liars who tell them, all because they can’t handle the truth. The truth being that we live in a world where an African- American can not only lead the United States of America, but they can actually lead its democratically elected government to work for the better of the people it serves.

They call leaders selected by democratic elections tyrants.

They call a fellow American citizen, with an American birth certificate, a foreigner.

They use a historical movement that opposed oppression from corporate interests, to serve corporate interests.

They call a plan that not only maintains our system of private health insurers free of public competition but mandates that all Americans have a private plan, a government takeover of our healthcare system.

They witness 95% of American working families receive a tax cut, and scream that the liberals are raising their taxes.

They witness unforgiving hikes of health insurance premiums, good people being dropped from policies because they’ve grown sick and need them, and people dying because no one will offer them the opportunity to PAY for care because of a “pre-existing condition”, and they call the government that attempts to right those wrongs, tyrannous.

And today, after coming to the capital to do all that, they were proud enough carry their signs calling for a stop to socialism all the while enjoy the benefits of public transportation to get back home.

Sorry, ignorance and misinformation just don’t cover it. President Carter, wheter people wanted to hear it or not, called it right.

The right wing, whether they choose to call themselves the “Tea Party”, teabaggers, or Republicans, lie. And the reason they lie is because they have to. They lie because to accept the truth is to accept that all they’ve come to believe, the modern conservative worldview, is wrong. It’s led our country to exploding deficits and debt, abuses of runaway corporate power, unfair trade that hurts American industry, civil and social inequality, wars of choice that diminish our international standing, and shameless acts of violence taken in our name that shame us all. The worldview that power is best trusted to the “blessed”, “deserving”, and “chosen” among us (read, wealthy), and that the benefits of their wealth will “trickle down” to us all, has actually failed us, and like children, rather than face this truth, they CHOOSE to blame someone else. And the person(s) they’ve chosen to blame, as they often do, is the different one. They’ve chosen to blame the “outsider”, the “foreigner”, the one who “isn’t one of us.” No one fits that description better than a man or woman who doesn’t look like them.

So they hate President Obama, and anyone who embraces him. They turn to lies when the truth stares them in the face. They do this because they have to. Because to do otherwise is to admit that they were, and are still, wrong.

And they can’t be wrong.

I’m reminded today of that long conversation with my sister just before the 2008 election, because today I witnessed how right I was, and now wish I wasn’t. I wish these people wouldn’t embrace hate that divides us all, and lies that pervert our political discourse because they’re too immature, or too weak to accept the world as it is and try to work within it. I wish that these people wouldn’t abandon our flag, our government, and our democracy because they’re too damn selfish to acknowledge that their neighbors have decided it’s time once again, for this country to change to better meet the needs of its people. I wish they could be honest with themselves, so maybe, just maybe, they could be honest with the rest of us. More than this however, I wish that those Congressmen and Congresswomen these people cursed today, who over the next 24 hours have the opportunity to finally move this country from a nation that tells the sick “you’re on your own” to one that says all of its citizens deserve access to healthcare, will be brave enough to say “AYE” even in the face of this mob of small people.

We can no longer afford to suffer the delusions of those who choose lies over the available truth. We can no longer hold this nation and its government back from meeting the needs of its people for those who state at every opportunity that they do not believe in it. We must take this step forward despite these few voices, because the cries of millions more in need implore us to act.

The right lies because they have to. We don’t (have to).

The ethos of Modern Liberalism centers around portraying themselves as continual victims of Conservatives.

I can affirm for you, that I am I can affirm for you, that I am no victim of Conservatives at all.

The ethos of Modern Liberalism centers around portraying themselves as continual victims of Conservatives.

So why have you implied you are among those who are threatened with being victims of Conservatives?

Try to prove me wrong by providing rational arguments to support your implied claims that the majority of Conservatives are intolerant of non-conservatives who want to lawfully help people who need help..

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, and from dependency back to bondage.

Most of the people who voted for Barack Hussein Obama are the losers in our society. Those on welfare--those who never finished grade school--the moochers--those who complain that the government never gives them enough- those who pay little or no taxes.

The bottom fifty percent pay 2.89% of the federal tax burden and still they want more from the real producers--the real producers that set up the jobs in which they can work if they do not opt for welfare.