Cut Military or Raise Taxes, take your pick

[John F Kennedy III]

Why is it never an option to cut military spending to defense only and cut taxes?

Their damn printer must've ran out of ink, leaving that part out of the letter.

 

[adams101]

Why is it never an option to cut military spending to defense only and cut taxes?

Their damn printer must've ran out of ink, leaving that part out of the letter.

The problem is we have let too many "voters" being employed by the military contractors and too much money going to those contractors. They have strategically built their manufacturing plants in all the states they need political support from. This makes it appear Any Congressman that votes to cut military spending is un-employing the local voters who put him in office. Any state that starts making waves......gets a plant and is then "on the team". They pretty much have "the team" wired by now. If the state starts to move away from supporting the defense spending the contractors simply increase employment in that state. It is quite a mess.

It is cold calculating politics which are once again a problem of a highly centralized government that is out of touch with its people and a completely UNDEFINED military and foreign policy. All Washington does is say the word "terrorist" and the public showers them with billions yelling "protect us"! This is despite the fact that more people die from peanut allergies in the US than terrorism.

If you want to cut military spending you are a terrorist or someone who wants to put Americans out of work. The defense budget has become yet another corporate "BAILOUT" and corporate welfare. Federal dependancy is a plague.

 

[Carson]

Do you have any idea how they calculated inflation before 1913? Not that I doubt this graph; I was just curious.

No. I wouldn't see why you would have to. Money was real. It was what it was until a war came along and people wouldn't' show up unless they counterfeited some money.

Actually I read some of the Doctors stuff and his explanation years ago about how it was put together. Even then, like now, I mostly like it because it feels right. It mirrors what I've felt happen in my life time and the impression I've had of the history I've heard about.


Robert Sahr main page;

http://oregonstate.edu/cla/polisci/node/87


2012 inflation conversion factor revision;

http://oregonfuture.oregonstate.edu/cla/polisci/sahr/sahr


Individual Year Conversion Factor Tables ( I don't see as far back as 1913 );

http://oregonstate.edu/cla/polisci/individual-year-conversion-factor-tables


Answer; Oh Yah. Here we go.

Note: In tiny type at the bottom of the chart it says,

"Calculations for 1665 to 1912 use data adapted from John J. McCusker, "How Much Is That in Real Money?," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (2001) , Table A-1.
Calculations starting 1913 are based on CPI data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And then there is the way it goes so well with this chart I found showing the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

It trips me out that all of my life I thought the DOW meant something totally different when it went up. These two charts together really opened my eyes to the what the counterfeiting by the central banks has been doing.

Are you seeing it?

When they double the money supply by counterfeiting, sure you get twice as many dollars when you sell your stock, but they are worth half as much! Then on top of it the government that has been behind a lot of it cuts themselves in on your stuff through capital gains taxes! It's insidious. (What ever that word means.)

Anyway if your still not seeing the charts move hand in hand pretend the DOW is made up of one hundred stocks. Now divide the 13000 at the top and the 500 at the bottom by 100 by knocking off two zeros and then compare with the chart showing it now taking about 130 dollars to do what it used to take 5. Pretty darn close anyway.

Once I caught onto this it has helped me put so many pieces of the puzzle, of the way the world works, together for myself.

 

[jay_dub]

The situation is so bad that we likely will have to cut everything and raise taxes. It's either that or default.

We have $16 Trillion in debt. All forecasts are for increasing the debt for years to come. We'll likely hit $20 Trillion by the end of Obama's term.

In 2010, we paid over $413 Billion in interest on a debt of $13.5 Trillion.

Further increasing our debt will lead to more credit downgrades, which will result in increased interest rates. We could easily be spending a Trillion a year in interest alone by 2020. At that point there will be no debate on what we should cut. We will have lost control of our own destiny.

We need to end the Global war On Terror, the War On Drugs and the War On Our Civil Liberties. Only then will be able to fight the real enemy and declare a War On Debt.

 

[presence]

$663.7 billion (+12.7%) - Department of Defense (including Overseas Contingency Operations)

448.8 BILLION CUTS

=================

214.9 = same Defence budget as Russia and China COMBINED http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures

 

[dinosaur]

The Department of Agriculture alone spends spends about 150B and only 80B of that is food stamps and about 6B in forest service.
I'm not sure where they arrive at that discrestionary vs. mandatory number.

Discretionary spending: $1.378 trillion (+13.8%)

$663.7 billion (+12.7%) - Department of Defense (including Overseas Contingency Operations)
$78.7 billion (−1.7%) – Department of Health and Human Services
$72.5 billion (+2.8%) – Department of Transportation
$52.5 billion (+10.3%) – Department of Veterans Affairs
$51.7 billion (+40.9%) – Department of State and Other International Programs
$47.5 billion (+18.5%) – Department of Housing and Urban Development
$46.7 billion (+12.8%) – Department of Education
$42.7 billion (+1.2%) – Department of Homeland Security
$26.3 billion (−0.4%) – Department of Energy
$26.0 billion (+8.8%) – Department of Agriculture
$23.9 billion (−6.3%) – Department of Justice
$18.7 billion (+5.1%) – National Aeronautics and Space Administration
$13.8 billion (+48.4%) – Department of Commerce
$13.3 billion (+4.7%) – Department of Labor
$13.3 billion (+4.7%) – Department of the Treasury
$12.0 billion (+6.2%) – Department of the Interior
$10.5 billion (+34.6%) – Environmental Protection Agency
$9.7 billion (+10.2%) – Social Security Administration
$7.0 billion (+1.4%) – National Science Foundation
$5.1 billion (−3.8%) – Corps of Engineers
$5.0 billion (+100%-NA) – National Infrastructure Bank
$1.1 billion (+22.2%) – Corporation for National and Community Service
$0.7 billion (0.0%) – Small Business Administration
$0.6 billion (−14.3%) – General Services Administration
$0 billion (−100%-NA) – Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)
$0 billion (−100%-NA) – Financial stabilization efforts
$11 billion (+275%-NA) – Potential disaster costs
$19.8 billion (+3.7%) – Other Agencies
$105 billion – Other

 

[dinosaur]

We can let you keep about $78 billion for defense if we cut everything else to zero (keeping Social Security/ Medicare) and not worry about raising taxes.

Less money for defense than for food stamps?

 

[adams101]

Less money for defense than for food stamps?

The problem is both "poor" and "defense" are totally undefined. Most of the money is going to neither. Only after we as a country define these terms can we make a sensible budget. The problem is you can spend 10 times as much leaving the terms undefined. With "defense" undefined you can do anything you please with the US military and call it "defense". You can say some boogie man called a "terrorist" is chasing 300 million people here in the US and spend unlimited resources to catch ghosts. You can supply weapons to two waring factions then jump in and "save them" from each other. You can plunder foreign governments for corporate profiteering. You can antagonize countries with embargo's etc forcing them into military action just to survive. Heck, military contractor employees have to eat too so lets build a bunch more stuff we don't need. If we can't find some place to store it until it is obsolete we will give it away in foreign aid.

The same crap goes on with the term "poor" which has simply encompassed all "charity". Once you start elevating someone's standard of living it is never enough. If you say giving them $1000 a month for food stamps is good then $1200 is even better. Phones are nice things lets give them one of those. Unlimited utility usage would make them feel better. How about discounting their housing with HUD.

Mexican National citizens need food too and they will come here, lower our working wages and raise corporate profits. Heck there are people 7000 miles away nobody knows starving in foreign countries. If we feed their "poor" they will let EXXON plunder their natural resources. It is a win/win as the people get stuck with the bribery tab while the corporations get to plunder foreign oil then sell it to us under the OPEC mafia pricing. Ooops the people of that country feel they are getting screwed on that deal so we better send in the military under the "defense" budget. After all even defending corporate profiteering in foreign countries is "defending someone".

Heck, since all this charity and defense bounces back and forth so much lets just lump them in together so the taxpayers don't have to worry out what is what and we don't have to define anything. No matter what we want to do it will fall under the "no parameters" of one of them.

Where does the logic end without definition? You just can't feed, house, clothe and give cellphones to enough people. You can't raise someone else's standard of living high enough. You can't keep 6 billion people safe enough. It is just numbers on a spreadsheet. Just keep adding zeros.

 

[Zippyjuan]

How would you propose to answer this million (trillion, rather) dollar question Zippy?

It is incredibly difficult. If your want to balance the budget with tax increases only you would have to double the current income tax. If you want to do it by cuts only and leave off Social Security and Medicare/ Medicaid, you basically have to cut 100% of everything including defense. Neither is realistic therefor it must include everything- making changes in the social programs (any savings would come in the future on that) and you must have cuts in other things and you must raise taxes.

 

[Qdog]

It is incredibly difficult. If your want to balance the budget with tax increases only you would have to double the current income tax. If you want to do it by cuts only and leave off Social Security and Medicare/ Medicaid, you basically have to cut 100% of everything including defense. Neither is realistic therefor it must include everything- making changes in the social programs (any savings would come in the future on that) and you must have cuts in other things and you must raise taxes.

Ron Paul's plan seemed pretty reasonable to me. What was so difficult about that? It didn't completely eliminate the military, or put Seniors on SS out in the cold. It cut from everywhere.

 

[furface]

If you want to do it by cuts only and leave off Social Security and Medicare/ Medicaid, you basically have to cut 100% of everything including defense.

I actually wouldn't have a problem with that. There's a reasonable way of looking at the federal government which is that it basically provides inter-State neutral social insurance & raises an army when necessary. The States do everything else.

There's also the issue of different types of taxes other than the income tax as well as a different theoretical look at the income tax. True consumption taxes, where you tax direct resource consumption are IMV morally legitimate. Higher tax rates on the extremely wealthy (not just making 250k in one single year) are legitimate as well in my view. No one with less than $1 million in net worth should even have to look at an income tax form IMV. Resource consumption taxes could be levied without the vast majority of people filling out forms as well.

National Medical Insurance (let's call it what it is at this point) could also be vastly less expensive if Medical industries were deregulated. Most of the big budget problems seem to be coming from Medical insurance. It has its claws reaching in lots of different places. Much like military programs, but Medical reaches into private business and individual budgeting problems.

But nobody's really talking about a balanced budget at this point. We could meet reasonable debt to GDP goals in the next few years very easily by merely reducing military to a reasonable level & not raising taxes.

 

[idiom]

At this point, it can't be fixed without killing the empire and gutting monopoly protections in Medicine. Medicare is increasing exponentially because medical costs are going up. Break the monopoly protections and medical costs would crash by 80% overnight.

 

[Zippyjuan]

Let's say we wanted to use a sales tax- and left off food sales so you don't hurt the poor too much. According to the Fed you have $367 billion a month or $4.4 trillion a year if you annualized that. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/RSXFS Let's say you wanted to balance the budget by keeping everything as it is but adding a national sales tax. To raise the $1.2 trilllon you need, it would require a national sales tax of 27%. Naturally such a high tax would greatly reduce retail sales so to raise the same amount the tax rate would actually have to be even higher than that.

What if we stuck with millionaires? http://quinnscommentary.com/2011/04...an-save-america-be-careful-what-you-wish-for/

According to IRS data, 323,069 income tax returns out of some 144,000,000 filed (2008) showed an adjusted gross income of $1 million dollars or more. That is roughly 0.3% of all households. Only three percent of all returns have an AGI over $200,000 (that’s households, not individuals). The top 1-percent Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) break point (TY 2008) was $380,354. The state with the most such returns was California…imagine that, not New York with all those greedy Wall Street types, more like high-tech entrepreneurs and Hollywood celebrities.

If we expected to pay for all of our current government expenses of $3.3 trillion, we would have to tax each of them an average of about a $10 million each.

How about merely a "reasonable" reduction in defense spending and no taxes raised? How about half its current level? That would save about $350 billion. Deficit is about $1.2 trillion so we would "only" be adding $850 billion (plus interest) to the debt every year. That would put us about $25 trillion in total debt ten years from now.

 

[presence]

How about merely a "reasonable" reduction in defense spending and no taxes raised? How about half its current level? That would save about $350 billion; we'd still be spending 60% more than Russia and China COMBINED.

Fixed.

 

[furface]

If we expected to pay for all of our current government expenses of $3.3 trillion, we would have to tax each of them an average of about a $10 million each.

It could possibly be an average of $10 million each. You'd have to know something about the distribution of incomes in that bracket.

The issue in terms of monetary policy is that money tends to stagnate in a small number of places. If you could print money and have it disappear in bank accounts & asset hoards of say over $1 billion, it would be quite an effective monetary policy.

Really, who would care? "Money" is a State granted monopoly over a certain share of resources & goods. Since there isn't zero unemployment, goods are essentially resource bound, so it's really a State granted monopoly over pure resources. Why should the State go out of its way to grant monopolies to massively wealthy individuals & entities that are acting extremely anti-socially? And it's more than just wealthy people hoarding money. It's sovereign asset funds like those of Gulf Arab States & China.

What I'm getting at is that the open secret of the budget debate is that monetization is somewhere on the horizon. There's no way around it and the only goal of the current budget is to get the deficit pointing in the downward direction, so that a combination of monetization & restructuring of government could work to getting it down to zero.

So really, it's not so much a matter of getting a balanced budget next year. It's a matter of policy decisions & trends. That's why I think that reducing military & cutting the federal bureaucracy to the bone is the best strategy, while leaving tax rates alone.

ALL government bureaucracies are predatory. Give them money & they'll be at your door with a shotgun demanding more. That's including military bureaucracies. Starve the bureaucracies & provide social insurance for the masses to keep money moving & enforce a minimal sense of economic justice. It's much safer than funding predatory government bureaucracies.

 

[Carson]

If California agreed to raise their own damn taxes (without cuts).. I am sure the rest of America will agree to it too

Sad isn't it.

Alameda County had a Measure B1 to raise taxes that almost passed...until the recount.

Apparently a bunch of TEA Party People where there to witness the recount. I guess it was close enough the government wanted to find a few more ballots to push it over the top.

Here is a message from the TEA Partyers;

Patriots,

Measure B1 has failed. The recount has been stopped! No more volunteers needed. Congratulations!

Kudos to the patriots who were there watching to make sure the votes were counted correctly!

TVP


Alameda County transportation sales tax measure loses after recount

By Denis Cuff Contra Costa Times
Posted: 12/05/2012 02:38:07 PM PST
Updated: 12/05/2012 04:09:38 PM PST

A measure to increase Alameda County's transportation sales tax was defeated after a partial recount failed to reverse its razor-thin loss at the November polls.

The Alameda County Transportation Commission announced Wednesday it was conceding defeat of Measure B1, which would have doubled the sales tax to 1 cent.

The tax increase would have raised $7.8 billion over three decades for roads, freeways, transit and trails. It would have restored public service transit cuts, funded a backlog of road repairs and contributed $400 million for a BART rail extension to Livermore, among other projects.

The measure was supported by 65.53 percent of the votes, falling less than 800 votes shy of reaching the 66.67 percent needed to pass.

The final tally: 350,899 yes votes, and 176,504 no votes.

"We wanted to leave no stone unturned. We now see no value in continuing the recount," said Art Dao, executive director of the agency that oversees the transportation sales tax. "We are encouraged that 66.53 percent of the voters supported the measure."

Dao said his agency commissioned the county registrar of voters to recount ballots in many Berkeley precincts, but the results on Tuesday netted an increase of only seven "yes" votes -- not enough to justify a full recount.


Snip...

More here;

http://www.contracostatimes.com/breaking-news/ci_22131698/alameda-county-sales-tax-loses-after-recount