re: #557 darthstar

Okay…where’s all the outrageous outrage over the debt ceiling compromise? 22 billion in cuts this year(everything else will get shelved, delayed, postponed, reversed, and adjusted out of sight because, quite frankly, we need our social services - ahem - entitlements)…

But at least it sets the stage for some decent tax increases above and beyond letting Bush’s cuts expire.

Letting those expire, un-indexed, constitutes a whopping big tax increase. Half the country would be thrust into the AMT. Revenues would soar in the first year, and then crater, as economic activity dried up.

There’s more to life than earning an extra buck for the govt and chump change for yourself.

Sensible tax increase inch up marginal rates, leaving them well below the 50-50 split line. They’re broad based, so that even the middle class kicks in a little something, and so that revenue does not depend too sensitively on the earnings of a small and volatile fraction of economy.

Putting taxes back to where they were, (indexed for inflation, of course) before the slew of tax cuts meant to get us out of the recession would be a sensible start. And then we could look around for ways to enhance the revenue without kicking the economy too hard.

But every government dollar spent is extracted, one way or another, from the private economy. If it’s spent on something worthwhile, that’s fine. If it’s, say, a wooden a bridge to nowhere, the spending is no better an idea than simply burning down lumber yards.

Burning down a lumberyard, after all, stimulates the logging industry. It stimulates the market for fire trucks too, and provides wages to firefighters, glaziers, and insurance policy writers. The same sort of arguments that are constantly advanced in favor of government spending, just to be spending, make as good a case for burning lumber yards.