It's the economy stupid!

Foxy,

Revenues only means one thing. That is the amount of money taken in by the government. The real data show your rather rosy view of Reagan and the Bushes is pure fantasy.

Reagan had record high deficits. (A deficit means that the government is spending more than it is taking in). As did Bush I and Bush II.

You can argue about productivity and GNP.

The fact is your statements about revenue and lowering deficits are completely false acording to the facts.

Here are the real numbers (courtesy of the CBO). Extra credit. Compare the deficits of the Carter years, Reagan/Bush I years, Clinton years and Bush II years (yeah, yeah I know about 9/11).

http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=1821&sequence=0#table1

George Bush Sr. coined the term "voodoo economics" to refer to Reagan's flawed plan to cut taxes with increased military spending.

I hope the American people have learned something since then.

check the link, ebrown. Didn't work for me.

It didn't work for me either.

foxfrye, do you have graphs or proof of what you claim? If you do I would appreciate it.

Darn! The link works for me.

Please try going to

http://www.cbo.gov

Then click "Historical Budget Data" (fourth link from the bottom left). I was trying to link to "Table 1".

Please tell me this works...

The link worked fine, now do you think you can explain it? I am not sure if the minuses in some of the columns are a good thing or not. I did notice that the personal debt started going up in in 1983 pretty steady until 1999 and then it went down until 2002 starting to go back up again. Most significant is that revenues of 2003 are down to 16.5 the lowest since before 1962 at least. The rest I don't understand finance and math not being something I paid too much attention when I was in school a long time ago.

Sure,

The first column labeled "Revenues" is the money taken in by the government (i.e. taxes). This is the column that Foxy is focussing on.

The second column labeled "Outlays" is simply the money spent by the government for all of its programs.

The next three columns are the difference. Actually the column labeled "total" is just Revenes - Outlays. The column labeled "On budget" takes out the social security money which is supposedly kept separate.

"Debt Held by public" is not the same as "personal debt". When the government borrows money, it does so by selling bonds. This money is owed mostly to American citizens and corporations. This is basically the amount we are in debt.

Minuses in the columns for "surplus or deficit" means it is a deficit. This is a bad thing.

What is interesting to me is that Reagan didn't do as bad in the "Revenue" category as I thought he did. This number generally goes up 6 or 7 % each year (in a normal year). He did have a couple of very bad years. In 1983 revenues fell 3%. But 84 and 87 revenes increasted 11%.

Clinton had very consistant increases in revenue of 7% - 11% and overall did better.

But the real story is deficits. Under Reagan/Bush deficits soared. Under Clinton they declined and disappeared in his last two years.

The Bush II deficits are extraordinary. Whether this is because of 9/11 or a ill-advised, unecessary war is a matter of political debate.

But the tax cuts certainly are not lowering the deficits.

And I doubt they will -- we're being loaned that money at usury interest to be paid back at a later date.

.

That is certainly true.

btw-thanks for the quick economic lesson. I think I kinda understand it now with your clear cut explanations.

Here's the scoop on who pays taxes - I'm looking for the graph showing income by year for the last 40 years or so.

The link I posted to start the thread has been archived. It now costs a fee to get it. It didn't when I posted it. But I'll find something else to back it up.

FROM THE OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

April 1, 2004
js-1287

Fact Sheet:

Who Pays The Most Individual Income Taxes?

The individual income tax is highly progressive - a small group of higher-income taxpayers pay most of the individual income taxes each year.

In 2001, the latest year of available data, the top 5 percent of taxpayers paid more than one-half (53.3 percent) of all individual income taxes, but reported roughly one-third (32.0 percent) of income.

The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 33.9 percent of all individual income taxes in 2001. This group of taxpayers has paid more than 30 percent of individual income taxes since 1995. Moreover, since 1990 this group's tax share has grown faster than their income share.

Taxpayers who rank in the top 50 percent of taxpayers by income pay virtually all individual income taxes. In all years since 1990, taxpayers in this group have paid over 90 percent of all individual income taxes. In 2000 and 2001, this group paid over 96 percent of the total.

The President's tax cuts have shifted a larger share of the individual income taxes paid to higher income taxpayers. In 2004, when most of the tax cut provisions are fully in effect (e.g., lower tax rates, the $1,000 child credit, marriage penalty relief), the projected tax share for lower-income taxpayers will fall, while the tax share for higher-income taxpayers will rise.

The share of taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers will fall from 4.1 percent to 3.6 percent.

The share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent of taxpayers will rise from 30.5 percent to 32.3 percent.

The average tax rate for the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers falls by 16 percent as compared to a 12 percent decline for taxpayers in the top 1 percent.
http://www.ustreas.gov/press/releases/js1287.htm

Okay here's a link with discussions about whether cuts in tax rates increase government revenues. Still looking too.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/wm182.cfm

Here's a good link to the Zuckerman article, but it doesn't reference government revenues. I thought it did. However it does reference just about everything else in a booming economy.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/mort/zuckerman060204.asp

Another source:
http://www.house.gov/jec/fiscal/tx-grwth/reagtxct/reagtxct.htm

The more I look at this, you can find about an equal number of 'intellectual' arguments indicating that cuts in tax rates do or do not increase government revenues. What is becoming more apparent, at least to me, is that it depends on who is crunching the numbers as to how it comes out.

Income tax revenues alone, however, are only a part of the picture as these are by no means the only source of revenue to the government. So....
still researching.