I’ve been reading up a bit on the Bowles-Simpson stuff and, while I think most of it is a political nonstarter, I actually agree with David Broder that the tax reforms it suggests could be very helpful. Obviously, the devil is in the details, but corporations do a remarkable job of evading taxation and I believe there is some way to make them less able to evade taxation.
On the other hand, I simply cannot see how anyone can take Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” seriously. Let’s stay away from the details so Megan McArdle can’t lecture us about the difference between the CBO and the Tax Policy Institute. The plan cuts taxes on the wealthy, along with expenditures. You know how that goes, Step 1 is cut taxes on the wealthy, Step 2 is don’t cut expenditures. We’ve seen this movie before.
Why on earth is anyone taking this stuff seriously? Even if cutting both taxes and expenditures is a good idea (and it’s not, it’s typical Republican palaver), it’s not feasible politically to do both. Pairing one popular, deficit-raising policy — tax cuts for the wealthy — with another unpopular, deficit-lowering policy — spending cuts — just isn’t a realistic way to lower the deficit. The Ryan “Roadmap” is not ever going to be implemented.
Steve Benen paints Paul Ryan as the new John McCain, a politician whose base is the media. That isn’t quite fair to McCain, who did co-sponsor important legislation back in the day. What has Ryan ever done?
morzer
Paul Ryan has sponsored the creation of intellectual fig-leaves for the GOP’s shrivelled, angry, ignorant white ass.
Nothing more.
thomas Levenson
Actually, John McCain’s record as a legislator is pretty thin. McCain-Feinberg was real, and if one views it as a bit of penance after his involvement with Charles Keating, still we’ll take what we can get.. Sadly, for all that it was a good, important piece of legislation he loses credit in my book given how he abandoned it once the
Chamber of Commerce5/9 Supremes gutted it.He did his best work with John Kerry on the POW/MIA questions with Vietnam. That was real. It wasn’t legislative, directly, but it was important work needed to allow this country to get on with all kinds of stuff. Tip of the hat there.
But for the rest? He’s been in Congress since the Cretaceous, as far as I can tell, and he has just one significant piece of now largely ceremonial law that shows his imprint. He helped his friends in the Indian gaming industry with one bill. He proposed important climate change legislation once…which he has since abandoned.
He’s opposed ending DADT, and almost certainly slowed its eventual repeal. He helped torpedo DREAM, despite having promoted similar legislation in the past.
See the pattern: he’s not a legislator. He’s grandstander.
He may have had a marginally more attentive law-making career than Ryan, but not so’s you’d notice — at least not from where I sit.
A Writer At Balloon-Juice
@thomas Levenson:
McCain-Feingold was real and important (we have to say “was” now that the courts have gutted it). Whatever I think of McCain, he has to get credit for that one. What accomplishment of Ryan’s can compare to it?
morzer
@thomas Levenson:
He’s also covered up quite a number of misdeeds, both his own and those of others. Charlie Keating’s circle and the Abramoff cronies come to mind.
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
Maybe a different adjective? “Tax cuts for the wealthy” is really not very popular — except among Teahadi’s, Randians, the wealthy (of course), and other self-identifying Republicans.
.
PeakVT
Why on earth is anyone taking this stuff seriously?
The media needs to balance the right wing Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction proposal with a far right-wing proposal. Ryan’s roadkillmap is perfect for the situation. Thus, it’s a serious proposal. QED.
BGinCHI
The Village is Entertainment Tonight, substituting politicians for actors. Quality of the work? Substance?
Not shiny enough.
c u n d gulag
What has Ryan ever done?
Well, outside of the stupidest fiscal plan in history, that can’t even balance our budget for 50 years, he won an Eddie Munster look-alike contest.
And, oh yeah, he stayed in a Holiday Inn last night.
thomas Levenson
@A Writer At Balloon-Juice: I agree that McCain Feingold was real. I do think he loses some of the credit he could once claim for that by acquiescing so sheep-like to the Citizens United decision. That’s all though. I don’t think there is a single other piece of legislation that became law that matters to his credit.
So I’ll grant you he’s ahead of Ryan there — but especially in light of his walk back there and on so much else that he once supported but failed to turn into law, I don’t put him that far ahead of the boy wonder. You may have more of the milk of human kindness to spare for the Arizona kid than I do.
Baud
I think the GOP playbook is that they can be crazy to their hearts’ content in the House, because they can count on the Dem-controlled Senate and Obama to be rational. That way the politically unpopular stuff never actually gets passed (and if it does, the public will blame the Dems), but the GOP will be able to show their hard-core base that they tried.
sven
Apropos of nothing,
Over at TIE Aaron Carroll has written a really moving piece about his time as a doctor in a NICU.
Definitely worth a look.
nitpicker
Heh. Ryan Rand.
Violet
McCain was elected to the House in 1982, served two terms and was elected to the Senate in 1986. McCain-Feingold didn’t pass until 2002. That’s 16 years.
Ryan was elected to the Senate in 1998. That’s 13 years. He’s still got three years to go if he wants to tie McCain’s legislative record at the same time in his Senate career.
miningcityguy
I agree with JGabriel @ No.5. Tax cuts for the wealthy are,as I understand it, hugely unpopular.If they are in fact popular, then I will have further reason to continue to lament the lack of critical thinking skills in our populace as a whole.
jayackroyd
Cantor is another whose base is the media. The GOP was priming him to the Village as the next bright young thing. And so they repeated it. Privately first, then gradually more publicly.
But it’s generally hard to point to a republican with a coherent policy position. It’s not easy to craft out a policy position that is consistent with reality when the Big Lie is foundational.
morzer
@jayackroyd:
You can have a coherent policy position, without necessarily matching it up with reality. The question isn’t whether policy positions are coherent, because anyone with some nickel and dime logic and a knack for rhetoric can do that for you. What matters is whether the policy-maker has quantified their future impact honestly, and how they will affect society as a whole.
gbear
@Baud: …but the GOP will be able to show their hard-core base that they
triedpretended.They’re not even trying to get anything done.
me
For his constituents? As far as I can tell, not a goddamn thing.
jon
I was initially angry at the idea, but I’ve come around to thinking that maybe the best thing to do is to not tax corporations at all. Only tax people, and the corporations lose their incentive to lobby Congress for tax loopholes. I know it won’t make lobbyists and corporate campaign donations go away, but it would end the charade that businesses get taxed on some sort of an equal basis to each other, and end the idiotic fiction that corporations get taxed in a way comparable to individuals.
My second idea would be to tax dividend income in exactly the same as wages, but that’s as much a non-starter as the first notion. The lies about the “death tax” income otherwise known as “inheritance” would be nothing compared to the rhetorical excesses of that fight.
Whatever happens, I’m all in favor of saving Social Security and Medicare and everything else in the budget by raising taxes on all of us. That should be the easy part of any plan to balance the budget. From there, when the taxes match the government spending, Congress can decide what to cut and what matching taxes to cut. Every other plan requires wishful thinking and future cuts, offsetting responsibility and making cowardice the rule. If the goal is to balance the books, then do it.
Wilson Heath
Serious tax reform isn’t going to happen. What it would look like would be killing industry and constituentcy preferences, having tax accurately track the economics of the transactions, and having mitigating measures go no further than mitigation. Too many powerful and influential parties do better from the current mess then they would with a more reasonable and fair system with a lower nominal rate structure. A tax department at a Fortune 500 is a profit center or it’s committing malpractice.
Piecemeal reform won’t work well, either. If the top marginal rate of a C Corporation drops below the top marginal individual rate, once again the C corporation becomes a tax shelter, which is a great old mess for tax administration and enforcement.
Recent tax shelter litigation shows there is no tax to low to evade. 15%. 15% has been too high for these douchebags.
Bill Murray
Depending upon what’s cut, spending cuts aren’t deficit reducing either
Baud
@jon: I feel the same way about your first idea. If I were designing my perfect tax code, I wouldn’t tax businesses directly, just people. But it’s a nonstarter. The left would object to not taxing corporations, and the right would object because it would require raising taxes on the wealthy to make up for the lost revenue.
Small correction. I think divided income is generally taxed like wages. It’s capital gains that are taxed differently.
Bobby Thomson
Struggling to reconcile these. Power protects itself.
thomas Levenson
@Baud: Nope. “Qualified” dividends are taxed at a lower rate than long term capital gains. The extension of the Bush era tax break was part of the package that Obama signed during the lame duck session.
Baud
@thomas Levenson: Thanks.
PeakVT
@jon: The problem with not taxing corporations is that the ownership and the operations of a company are not necessarily in the same jurisdiction. Since they aren’t, corporations need to be taxed to the extent that they use US government services. However, the CIT might not be the best way to go about doing it.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Fxd. And you can say that about everything the GOP’s CongressCritters shit out for at least the next two years.
JPL
@Baud: Earned and unearned income would have to be taxed the same. If CEO’s were to be taxed at a fair progressive rate, their income would shift to stock which could be held long term.
jon
@Baud: You’re right. It’s capital gains, that catch-all for income that comes from letting wealth accumulate. Somehow, it’s protected as if it’s actually more risky than actual work. I don’t get it, but I’m sure it comes under that rhetorical umbrella of “Things that remained after being taxed at some time, thus putting them somewhat off-limits now even if they get bigger through wealth-accumulating means.”
Dividends get taxed like income after they reach a level most people never achieve with their bank accounts, but that’s a whole other issue. Those living paycheck to paycheck or anything close don’t ever have to worry about that.
Zifnab
@jon: Business taxes are common and necessary throughout the states. They’re a cornerstone of the revenue. What’s more, they should serve to prevent corporations from being used as their own tax loophole in which companies simply buy and own all the assets that the businessmen would buy and own for themselves. Getting rid of corporate taxes seems like the lazy way out.
I, personally, like the theoretical current tax system quite a bit. Taxing corporate profits rather than corporate gross income gives corporations an excuse to spend more. That grows the economy and spreads the wealth.
I’m not a huge fan of the amount of tax cheating that results from the current system, and I think a flat percentage with no deductions would do a lot to remove fraud. But I feel that increasing enforcement of existing laws would be far easier and more effective than rewriting the corporate tax code.
Zifnab
@JPL: That would forestall income tax collection on the short term, sure. But it would even out in the long term (assuming we got rid of the ridiculous 15% cap gains rate).
A CEOs “income” would more closely align with his expenses, but those guys spend so much of their money anyway, it hardly matters. CEOs – like Steve Jobs – already collect the lion’s share of their income in stock. Hell, I know plenty of plain jane employees at Exxon and Schlumberger that take advantage of stock purchase plans to paid their income statements substantially. That game is already being played.
Baud
@JPL: I agree that tax rates should be the same for all income.
I’m not sure what you mean by shifting income to stocks. At least as I envision it, the CEO would be taxed on his or her income regardless of whether he or she is paid in cash or stock.
kindness
What has Ryan done?
Why, he appears on Fox News regularly. He’s in ‘their’ circle wanking away with them.
jon
@Zifnab, increasing enforcement sounds as much a non-starter as everything else being discussed. I’d put it at less likely than even my pie-in-the-sky proposals. But I do hear your point, especially about state taxes.
Maybe, since corporations and individuals are seen as equals, they should both be taxed by profits or they should both be taxed on gross income. I think that corporations would do less outsourcing of manufacturing and maintenance of their facilities and put more people at work in major corporations, something that in the past led to people working more years at jobs and also led to the stories of people who started in a mail room or as a doorman and then rose to management positions. But that’s almost O. Henry kind of fable-stuff nowadays when a company tries desperately to keep as few people on the payroll as possible and hires a cleaning company, a delivery company, a security company, a different manufacturer, and all the other things that taxing corporations on their gross income would do away with to a large extent as having all that tax on the gross would make it financially-sound to keep things “in house”.
Of course, that could increase wages for many workers, so the GOP and the corporatist Dems would fight it tooth and nail.
FlipYrWhig
Part of the reason why media types like Paul Ryan is that (1) they get nervous about coming across as anti-Republican, so they set out to find Republicans to praise to prove their even-handedness; but (2) they don’t want the Republican they praise to be some Bible-banging cracker. The Republicans they elevate are the ones who downplay religion and other culture-wars topics.
Michael
OT, but MSNBC and CNN have generally done an adequate job of getting guests, and haven’t been going with the usual range of dipshit punditry. Fox, of course, is concentrating on teabagger budgetary bullshit and some reporting on Egypt from the Israeli-centric viewpoint.
I’m eagerly awaiting the entry of Sarah Palin into the foray via Twitter and Facebook. I’m sure her observations will be amazing.
Jim, Once
@sven:
That’s a stunning and moving post. But the New Yorker article even more so. It’s something everyone should read. Thank you for sharing these.
Ruckus
@BGinCHI:
The Village is Entertainment Tonight, substituting politicians for actors. Quality of the work? Substance?
Not shiny enough.
Of course I first read this as Not shitty enough. Which explains the direction it’s going, not it’s goal.
Elvis Elvisberg
Ryan’s plan wasn’t a stupid plan, it wasn’t a plan.
MikeJ
@BGinCHI: The old line is “DC is Hollywood for ugly people.”
A Writer At Balloon-Juice
@Bobby Thomson:
A VAT may be one way.
A Commenter at Balloon Juice (formerlyThe Grand Panjandrum)
@sven: Thank you for the link.
JWL
As bad as the tax codes are, I simply don’t trust either party to deal with them. Why not appoint Alan Simpson the head of a commission to investigate an equitable readjustment of the laws?
Sputnik
Does his boyish good looks count?
Ruckus
@sven:
Thank you.
James E Powell
@JGabriel:
“Tax cuts for the wealthy” is really not very popular — except among Teahadi’s, Randians, the wealthy (of course), and other self-identifying Republicans.
Tax cuts for the wealthy turned out to be pretty popular with Obama and the Democrats also, too.
jwb
@A Writer At Balloon-Juice: I’ve actually come around to thinking we need a serious VAT, even though it is fairly regressive. Krugman had a blog post on it awhile back and noted that strong social safety nets are highly correlated with having a VAT, and IIRC he speculated that this had to do with the fact that its more regressive character made it much more difficult to demonize as a wealth transfer.
sven
@Jim, Once:
@A Commenter at Balloon Juice (formerlyThe Grand Panjandrum):
@Ruckus:
I wish more people on the left were willing to make the moral case for change. A dysfunctional healthcare system isn’t just a technical problem, it is about who we are as moral human beings. The public policy debate is important but it is a story like this that makes me feel like I have to get out and do something about it.
It also makes me want to punch the next talking head who says ‘death panels’.
Superluminar
DougJ:
No-one knows what it’s like, to be the bad man…
PeakVT
@A Writer At Balloon-Juice: A VAT would be harder to evade than the CIT, and it acts like an export subsidy / import tariff for countries that have one, which is nearly everybody except for the US. However, implemented without reforms to make federal and state income taxes more progressive, it would hit the less well-off hard. Exempting food and housing (how would you calculate owner equivalent rents, anyway?) would mitigate the regressiveness somewhat.
I’m not sold on the VAT simply because there’s no guarantee that adding one would be accompanied by other reforms.
Robert Waldmann
Tax cuts for the wealthy are not popular.
aimai
@sven:
I think people–not “the left” but people–did make the moral case for healthcare and they were blown away, in the media wars, by the discovery that the right wing was going to make the immoral case for health care win the day. I mean, before the health care debate would it have been possible for anyone to believe that the right wing was going to whip medicare recipients and social security recipients and employed people into a frenzy of selfish hysteria such that people would, with a straight face, refuse to expand the number of insured people? That Megan McCardle would write essays on how impossible it was to tell if having health insurance and health care (two different things) would lead to better outcomes for people? I won’t link but she absolutely argued that medicine would probably kill more people than it would help.
aimai
Joe Buck
“Tax cuts for the wealthy” isn’t politically popular; all the polls said and continue to say otherwise (when the public is asked which measure they most like to deal with deficits, increasing taxes on the wealthy is the top choice).
Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats have managed to confuse the issue by getting people talking about “tax increases” rather than “tax increases for millionaires”, or by otherwise distorting the impact (a clever move is confusing the gross income of small businesses with their net income, or to confuse marginal tax rates with average tax rates).
Shoemaker-Levy 9
No. No, no, no, no, no.
A flattened tax with no deductions would be the nail in the coffin of the Republic. If this were to happen the following sequence of events would occur with complete certainty. Repeat: it is less certain that you will die than that this will happen.
1. Tax rates are flattened, deductions eliminated or severely limited.
2. Congressperson insists a favored constituency needs a deduction of some kind (over/under is fifteen minutes after step one is accomplished).
3. Bipartisan fetishist (Broder will probably live another forty years so it might as well be him) insists other party reach a compromise.
4. President says it’s a great idea.
5. So let it be written, so let it be done.
6. Return to #2 above. Repeat 2-5 a couple dozen times, then go to #7.
7. Bipartisan fetishist notices there’s a huge revenue shortfall.
Raising marginal rates will be extremely difficult. It was done in 1993 but was like pulling teeth from a baleen whale. Inch up the rates a few crummy percent and make the oligarchs whittle away from there. If you start with the flattened rates the Republic is doomed. You might get a sane tax code enacted again, but the damage in the interim will be too severe.
Perhaps there are other countries in the world where schemes like this might work. Not in America. No chance.
joe from Lowell
Republicans are taking it seriously because they don’t care about the deficit, just cutting taxes and demolishing the modern state.
The Village is taking it seriously because there’s just gotta be a Republican plan that deserves to be taken seriously – because just because, otherwise they’d have to acknowledge that the Democrats are better than the Republicans – and this plan is the only proposal they can pretend is that serious idea.
Stella Barbone
We were parked this morning behind a truck with a tool box, a small union bumper sticker, and a sticker that said, “Dear Obama, Don’t share my wealth, share my work ethic”. There is no way that working man would have been affected by the tax on rich people. He has no hope of every making that kind of money. My husband and I, on the other hand, do make well over $250K between us and the tax extension on rich people is saving us $100 between us at each paycheck. To us that’s an inconsequential amount of money. We just stuff it into savings (from which the wizards of Wall Street can help themselves) and would never really notice whether or not we have it.
Damn, if I can understand it.
Mark S.
Krugman:
Why doesn’t Ryan get crucified for proposing this? Oh, that’s right, the billionaires who actually run this country like the idea.
Emma
The Village lets them get away with it. There are very few, if any, reporters and interviewers willing to call them on their lies. I’ve mentioned it before, but the first time I saw a reporter in the UK calling out a politician well, we know that’s not quite true, is it? I nearly fell off my chair. I don’t think we have anyone in the so-called mainstream press willing to do that.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
@thomas Levenson:
One of my favorite things to do here in Phoenix, when in the company of Republicans, is to ask them to name three things John McCain has done for Arizona during his time in congress.
He is in his third decade of service. I have never met an Arizonan who could even name two noteworthy things he has done for this state. Actual measures, implemented and completed or under way. This is one of the best ways I have ever found to bring a Republican chatterbox to a complete stop.
Sigh. And then there is Jon Kyl. Half a century of service between these two. Nothing to show for it.
thomas Levenson
@LikeableInMyOwnWay: “Service” doesn’t seem the word in this case, does it.
They’ve treated the office like a sinecure. I don’t know what to call their waste of oxygen up there on the rarified heights of Capitol HIll.
El Cid
__
Republican ideas are taken seriously without regard to their contents.
debbie
For all the bad mouthing of Walmart, at least they pay their fair share of taxes — 34% — while G.E. pays about 3.5%.
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/29/133311907/for-many-companies-low-taxes-are-key-to-profits
(Check out the table on the lefthand side.)
Ruckus
Because they are constantly lied to about, they benefit directly by, rethug “ideas” or they are blatantly stupid.
Your pick and notice that more than one answer may be correct.
Uloborus
@James E Powell:
You’re right. They WERE a pretty minor sacrifice to get a year’s worth of unemployment extensions, a tax break for the desperately poor during the recession, and to ensure the DADT repeal and START ratification went through. I imagine Obama’s thinking pretty fondly of that tax cut for the wealthy right now!
Chuck Butcher
@Ruckus:
Oh yes, the electoral magic of mixing emotion driven resentment politic with eonomic policies directly counter to the interests of those pissed off. Those emotions are a concrete issue while the economics tend to be theoretical or at least require some analysis. Emo wins.
The Democrats stepping on their own —-s doesn’t help much, either. How it is that the GOPpers get forgiven for it and the Ds don’t – well out of my pay grade.
A Writer At Balloon-Juice
@Superluminar:
Ha
Triassic Sands
He lied repeatedly during his SOTU speech response. Just another horrible person brought to us by the GOP.