On 60 minutes just now, David Stockman ("architect" of the Reagan tax cuts) just proposed a 1 time (dealer?) 15% tax on the rich that would cut the deficit in half. Looking for reasonable solutions is at least a step in the right direction, no?

15% of their income or their wealth?

How 'bout some reasonable use of the SPOILER tags?!?!?!

"60 Minutes is coming up next, EXCEPT ON THE WEST COAST WHERE IT WILL BE SEEN AT ITS REGULARLY SCHEDULED TIME"

Why not three times then we can buy awesome ****!

Or at least two times to bring the deficit to nothing. I didn't realise it was that easy.

An indiscriminate taxation on rich people is not a solution (how did they get rich, what are they doing with their capital????, what destructive things is the government planning with those new stacks???).

The solution is cut spending, and make it so that people cannot get rich in the future because of special legal privileges.

My bad, for real

It's got to be income because a wealth tax would be unconstitutional. I don't understand why you would want a 15% tax increase for one year rather than a 1% increase for 15 years. It's a bonanza for tax lawyers, but it seems like terrible, terrible policy.

Why don't we just seize Exxon and wal-mart as well?

How about we index the wages of all government employees to the size of government spending (so their pay is inversely proportional to spending)? Make it extra bad for Congress. Honestly if done appropriately this could drastically change the incentive system and how wastefully government monies are spent, but of course will never pass as Congress writes its own rules in our hopelessly broken political system.

This sort of reminds me of those anti-drug commercials, where they show a kid saying "I'm just going to do meth once", and then flash forward a few years and he's an addict.

oh noes! the freedom of the rich are at stake!!

Yeah, who cares about the efficiency or equity of a policy when the targeted group is unpopular?

Policy differing from your preferences = "hopelessly broken political system".

This.

someone just calculated how much money "rich" people have, did a little division, and voila. infallible policy ftw.

Does anyone know what he actually said? Just checking.

The individuals who make up our government have basically no incentive not to drive us into massive, paralyzing debt and plenty of incentive to spend away money that is not coming out of their own pockets. Seemingly very few of them even understand the real economic impacts of their policies. It really is frightening, the size of the budget of the US government and the lack of cost engineering involved in the expenditure of all of those funds. And there is no reason to believe that this will change any time soon.

I'd call that hopelessly broken. But yeah, depends on your preferences.

Since many of these super rich are executives and Wall Street types couldn't they just draw up a new contract to defer their entire year's salary and receive it as a lump sum on Jan. 1 of the following year?

You guys make it sound like there are only two options:

i) no tax increase
ii) bolchevique revolution were you everybody that is rich.

Its not as easy as raising taxes and voila but that is a strawmen, 15% harldy sounds revolutionary to me, I havent read the thing nor I really care since Im not american but everybody has like some emotional problem with raising taxes.
Basically every libertarain post itt has been a strawmen and ridiculizing the position instead of reading it and weighing pro and cons.

To be sure, there are principle-agent problems. Your proposed solution, however, creates perverse incentives in the opposite direction to eliminate even beneficial spending. It is thus only a good idea if you believe that no government spending is beneficial. You probably believe this, but only other ACists would agree. Therefore, your proposal basically implies "I don't want any government spending" - we already know that, you haven't come up with anything that those who do want some positive amount of government spending would support.

My criticism of it is not so much the fact that it is a tax increase, but that making it temporary is both inefficient and inequitable.

It is inefficient because the deadweight loss of taxation increases nonlinearly with the level of the tax, thus a small tax increase over time would be less distortionary than a large, temporary tax increase.

It is inequitable because it affects today's rich without affecting tomorrow's (or yesterday's, for that matter) rich. (This is the principle of horizontal equity). There is certainly a strong correlation between being rich today and rich tomorrow, sure, but a temporary or long-term tax would have a similar impact on them anyway. But I cannot think what ethical principle would justify a larger tax on someone who averages 100k a year than 500k a year simply because the surtax fell in a time period that the former person was doing unusually well in and the former unusually badly in.

Ok I see your point but sometimes temporary taxes are necessarry to play within the system, an example is Chile where we had an earthquake and we needed money fast, so we raised taxes temporarily, only temporarily because if we raised them forever the oligarchy was going to whine and be bitch about it so w/e temporary.

( im not defending the policy, im saying that temporary taxes are not ideal but sometimes necessary within the system ).

Funny how the principle-agent problem tends to be much worse when the agent isn't voluntarily hired, isn't it? Regardless of whether we're ACist or statist, our government is clearly not operating on a sustainable budget, and the situation can be improved with generous budget cuts.

2010 FY Budget ($3.55 trillion)
Social Security - 19.63% phase out to 0%
Dept of Defense - 18.74% reduce to 7%
Unemployment/Welfare/Other mandatory - 16.13% reduce to 8%
Medicare - 12.79% reduce to 6%
Medicaid/SCHIP - 8.19% reduce to 4%
Interest on National Debt - 4.63% phase out to 0%
Health and Human Services - 2.22% reduce to 1%
Remaining - 17.67% reduce to 8%
Dept of Enslaved Former Government Employees -

$1.21 trillion. No, it's not very meaningful to arbitrarily take chunks out of the huge budgets of the depts of the US government, but that's what needs to happen.

That being said I'm a staunch supporter of the We're All ****ed Party.

hmmm Even though it probably makes sense I'm skeptical of this

I have no idea what he is proposing.

here is the link to the whole story...ill watch it...

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?...in;contentBody

Higher marginal rates on top earners seems like PART of a common sense approach to me. Would I radically raise it 15% for one yr, no. Would I let the Bush tax cuts expire, certainly. Do we need an honest conversation as a nation on what huge earners should be tazed based on new dynamics in the world's economy leading to HUGE up till now unseen disparities in wealth and income, yes.

OTOH, we need to also concentrate on things like exploding pension/retirement expenses in the public sector both federal,state and municipal ;defense costs that are well out of whack; fighting wars of choice that we simply cannot afford anymore....


Thats called reasonable thinking; why it is so rarely found these days inside and outside the beltway is really beyond me.

Fair Tax + Smaller Government FTW