Higher tax crowd, come on in.

[BanginJimmy]

Been busy as hell so I am slow getting back to this. A lot to go talk about so lets get to it.

wouldnt work

the interest on 21 trillion would be over a trillion dollars a year alone. You would be throwing a pebble against Mount Vesuvius. you couldnt tax enough to pay the debt off. IMO.

The problem still is SPENDING. Ask yourself, WHY ARE we spending 1 trillion dollars more per year in deficits if our Economy according to Obama is on the road to recovery, we are doing better, the strategy is working and he just got his tax increases?

1. The debt will be 21T by the end of FY16 anyways.
2. By giving congress the large cushion to deal with, they will have time to adjust their habits over time so there is no major shock. When they decide not to do that, they will have no one to blame but themselves. This is why the new tax reduces the overall debt AND the debt authorization at the same time.

This was not a mistake by Jimmy but this seems like a good time to point out that many people don't understand the debt ceiling and what it does. The debt ceiling is not equivalent to a credit card limit, it is more like a limit on what can go out of your checking account. Congress can still pass laws and "buy" as much as they want on their "credit card" regardless of what the debt ceiling is. All the debt ceiling does it say whether they can pay the bill when it comes. The only way to stop congress from spending is to stop passing legislation that requires it or revising existing legislation that requires it. Holding the debt ceiling down will not do it.

Wrong.

The Debt Ceiling closes the amount they can spend by forcing them to prioritize what gets paid with what they have. Right now, its a blank check.

Program costs 100BIllion, spend it, 500 billion spend it, etc etc

When you clamp the debt ceiling down, they must meet their obligations not by printing more money or selling more bogus bonds, they have to deal with the revenue they have coming in.

The debt ceiling is how much MORE MONEY we can BORROW(translation ISSUE) and we never worry about paying down what we already have borrowed or spent. By not lifting the debt ceiling, we will force washington to deal with what they have already spent, not give them more ways to spend more.

There are laws on how much money can be in circulation and the Debt ceiling is 1 factor of the equation

Both of you are right and wrong. To put it into very simple terms, the debt limit is the amount the govt can borrow. Because the govt receives money on a daily basis, they will always have operating revenue, they just wont be able to operate at the same level they do now. If I remember correctly (on my laptop so I dont have a lot of my bookmarks ready) the govt brings in about 6B a day in revenue and spends about 10B a day. If the debt limit is reached and no authorization is approved to raise it, the govt would be forced to make VERY drastic cuts that would adversely affect everyone.

As previously stated:

1) I agree with letting the 2.3% payroll tax go back into effect because its robbing peter to pay paul. When it was first enacted IIRC under Obama back in 2011, we cut payroll tax by 2.3%. The problem with that is A) that is used to directly fund SS B) its such a small amount of money that it has little to no effect on the economy. Obama/Congress was correct IMO in letting that tax be re-instated.

The conundrum is that Obama said NO TAXES would be raised on the middle class. He campaigned on this (SO DID ROMNEY) during the '12 election.. This is obviously patently false as people who work WILL SEE an INCREASE in their taxes because that tax rate will go up. Obama will say "i said no INCOME taxes" which is true, no income taxes will be raised currently for people making under $400k or 450K jointly. But all the people making under that are seeing as much as a $700-1000 increase in taxes coming directly from their paycheck. Washington should be held accountable instead of playing the double talk of income vs capital gains vs payroll taxes. Just be honest and tell us what is going to happen.
If you collect a paycheck, you have already noticed your check is smaller than it used to be.

2) I dont have a problem with the top tax rate going up to 39%, but what i do have a problem with is WHY it went up. As previously state we do not have a revenue problem, we have a SPENDING problem. The amount of money the treasury will see theoretically from that increase amounts to like less than 1% of the yearly DEFICIT we run (100 billion out of 1600 billion).

3) When you need people to hire to get the economy going, you need people with money to invest, raising taxes on them has the opposite effect historically.

4) Im 10000% against the fiscal cliff deal because despite the tax raises i can live with, there was ZERO spending cuts. Washington just said "we will take more of your money, and not care what we spend it on"

Paying more into the Ponzi Scheme sucks when I know I will never collect from it, but as you said, we are going to pay it anyways.

I also agree with your other points. The tax increases are just feeding the addiction. There was no attempt to actually reign in spending to a sustainable level. If the increases were part of a large package to deal with the debt it wouldnt be so hard to stomach, but as it is, its no different than giving crack to an addict.

This is the actual cause. The public simply doesn't care much about our debt. If they did care they could turn our spending problem around in a few years by electing people on platforms of not spending and decreasing the debt.

People dont care because they havent been affected yet. They havent been affected yet because politicians have mortgaged everything and then some to give away more and more benefits and hand outs. When they do start to feel it, most are too stupid to actually understand what happened.

People keep re-electing the idiots over and over because they are absolutely clueless.

You are right to an extent but what you neglect to discuss (and my main point) is the fact that we must raise the debt ceiling simply to pay for the laws as they already exist. The promises have been made and the money spent so no matter how much you prioritize, some promises will be broken. Who should get shafted then? SS? Medicare? Military salaries? Other countries? There is fallout when you don't have the cash to pay your bills. We got a small glimpse of that during the last debt ceiling debate that resulted in the drop in our credit rating.

There are no laws that require spending except SS and medicare. Promises have been made, but since when has a politician been trustworthy? Who should be shafted? No one needs to get shafted. Some people just wont get paid to sit at home on unemployment for 4 years. Welfare requirements could go back to where they were 5 years ago. The list goes on and on with pork projects and handout programs that dove the vast majority of the budget short falls.