How Progressives Drive Income Inequality

to a piz of the leftist propagands (and to sort of answer wildchild)...

the subject article is authored by a former FED Governor and put out by Brookings.
These are your people Piezoe --- telling you that raising the rates from 35% to 50% would have bad results. (less revenue to redistribute.)

Please read this again... raising rates from where we are lowers govt revenues...

This an exact contradiction of what you are arguing Piezoe. Progressing the rates up... i.e. raising taxes... from where we are up... causes a loss in tax revenue.

And this former fed governor is not the only economist to find this...
Obama's own economist Christine Romer... authored a similar a paper showing substantially the same thing across a wide range of values when the govt raises raises taxes under most circumstances. .

And I have shown you that in the real world... after Mellon, Kennedy, Reagan and Bush tax cuts... tax revenues have gone up in the real world with real dollars.






jem said:
Brookings (a left leaning group) found...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-progressives-drive-income-inequality-1457132837

"There was a catch. When the authors assumed that there might be a behavioral response by higher income taxpayers, inequality fell—but for the wrong reasons. Less work, saving, investing and more tax sheltering reduced the taxable income of higher earners and therefore meant less revenue to redistribute. So the rich got poorer, by their own choice, but the poor got less in benefits. A true lose-lose situation."
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fhl said:
Here are six Conundrums of Socialism in the United States of America:

1. America is capitalist and greedy - yet half of the population is subsidized.
2. Half of the population is subsidized - yet they think they are victims.
3. They think they are victims - yet their representatives run the government.
4. Their representatives run the government - yet the poor keep getting poorer.
5. The poor keep getting poorer - yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
6. The”poor" have things that people in other countries only dream about - yet they want America to be more like those of other countries.
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"Poor blacks have been voting Democrat for the last 60 years, and they are still poor". -- Charles Barkely

America was on the success track until about 1900... when the Leftists and Progressives first started getting their hooks into us with their promise of freebies. America has been degrading since.
 
Scataphagos said:
"Poor blacks have been voting Democrat for the last 60 years, and they are still poor". -- Charles Barkely

America was on the success track until about 1900... when the Leftists and Progressives first started getting their hooks into us with their promise of freebies. America has been degrading since.
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Barklely, who was a basketball player born probably in the 1960s was obviously not a 'political scientist.' Blacks in Dixie, once they were allowed to vote, voted almost exclusively Republican during the 20th Century, while White southerners voted almost exclusively Democrat. Southern Democrats formed an unofficial coalition with Northern Republicans. Those who read history without understanding this, misread. Some Southern Blacks did break ranks in the Kennedy - Nixon contest to vote for Kennedy after Senator Kennedy used his influence to help get M.L.K. released from prison. But this was the exception rather than the rule. Even today, some older blacks continue to vote Republican, but the tide definitely changed with Obama.
 
jem said:
And I have shown you that in the real world... after Mellon, Kennedy, Reagan and Bush tax cuts... tax revenues have gone up in the real world with real dollars.
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But you have never shown me the causes.:rolleyes: Tax revenues rise and fall for a variety of reasons. Many factors operate simultaneously. If you don't understand that you are lost. The only case since 1960 that mainstream economists, who have studied this issue, believe tax cuts may have caused revenue increases was the Kennedy cuts. This is extremely difficult to sort out because of all the different factors, besides tax rates, that affect revenues. The most comprehensive recent such study is C. D. Romer and D H. Romer, "The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks," Amer. Econ. Rev. 100 (June 2010): 763-801. You will have to buy this paper, if you don't have a good academic library nearby. I recommend it if you want to understand the complexity of sorting out the affect of tax policy on revenue from all the other factors that also affect revenue. You're wasting both our times by this continued blind harping on a complex topic you obviously know virtually nothing about.

I should point out to you that the Kennedy cuts were diametrically the opposite of the Reagan cuts, and that seems to be one of several possible reasons why they produced opposite results; one, Kennedy cuts, was Demand Side, the other, Reagan, was Supply Side.
 
don't forget. Reagan really cleaned up those loopholes that were getting way out of hand. Just about everybody owned some bull sperm or some other ridiculous investment sold for the express purpose of avoiding taxes.
 
1. That is the lecture I give you and your big govt loving buddies...
your teams models can't not really discern the cause. Nobody can. Real world systems are dynamic... we can't hold the variables steady in real life. I am sure you understand its the same reason the AGW models have so many problems. There are myraid negative and positive feedbacks in the economy and in the ecosystem.

I note when I studied Economists always employed caveats such as "holding everything the steady vis a vis ____________. " I suggest any economists using a model to make a declaration about tax cuts... use an appropriate caveat. Such as our models is based on holding pre-recession growth and inflation rates the same as they were prior to the recession. "



more academic need to regularly employ.
The academic give far to much credit to their models and don't present to us the proper disclaimers any more. I find it thoroughly lacking in integrity.


1.a Fortunately, we don't need to know the cause of the tax revenue increases because it has happened 4 times in a row after Federal tax cuts. Therefore, any thinking person would say... lets keep cutting because the results have been good for the taxpayers and they have been good tax collector.
Just keep cutting til it does not work. What is the risk... a bit bigger deficit?
When has that worried a president or Congress in the last 50 years.

2. By the way I just told you to read Romer's work in my most recent post.
"Obama's own economist Christine Romer... authored a similar a paper showing substantially the same thing across a wide range of values when the govt raises raises taxes under most circumstances."

So how do you get off telling me to buy it. I have already read it and understood it. I really like the fact she and her co author spoke of the exceptions. It was a nice piece of work in which models were employed but history was not distorted by the bias of the authors.

3. After kennedy's cuts and reagan's revenue both went up. No matter how left you are... you can't call a cut in taxes followed by and increase in revenue - "opposite" results.


piezoe said:
But you have never shown me the causes.:rolleyes: Tax revenues rise and fall for a variety of reasons. Many factors operate simultaneously. If you don't understand that you are lost. The only case since 1960 that mainstream economists, who have studied this issue, believe tax cuts may have caused revenue increases was the Kennedy cuts. This is extremely difficult to sort out because of all the different factors, besides tax rates, that affect revenues. The most comprehensive recent such study is C. D. Romer and D H. Romer, "The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks," Amer. Econ. Rev. 100 (June 2010): 763-801. You will have to buy this paper, if you don't have a good academic library nearby. I recommend it if you want to understand the complexity of sorting out the affect of tax policy on revenue from all the other factors that also affect revenue. You're wasting both our times by this continued blind harping on a complex topic you obviously know virtually nothing about.

I should point out to you that the Kennedy cuts were diametrically the opposite of the Reagan cuts, and that seems to be one of several possible reasons why they produced opposite results; one, Kennedy cuts, was Demand Side, the other, Reagan, was Supply Side.
More...
 
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ETcallhome said:
don't forget. Reagan really cleaned up those loopholes that were getting way out of hand. Just about everybody owned some bull sperm or some other ridiculous investment sold for the express purpose of avoiding taxes.
More...
Another good thing he did was to put Social Security back on track by Asking Greenspan and others to come up with a solution. The hardest thing in the world is to keep pigs away from a trough, and so for years Wall Street has waged an all out war of disinformation on Social Security. That so many congressmen and senators have financial ties to Wall Street may explain why Congress is backsliding once again. They keep putting off acting on the Trustees' recommendations. When they do that repeatedly, it leads naturally to worse problems down the road. A few years ago the Trustees asked that the contribution rate be increased by 1 cent each, employer/employee. Because of the Congress's failure to act, it is now up to almost 1.5 cents each. There is a simple solution, like there is to so many problems. All we have to do is make social security an independent agency, cut Congress out of the control loop, and leave it 100% up to the Trustees to run.

Despite very worthwhile things done during Reagan's Presidency, his economic advisers were responsible for the Supply-Side-Trickle Down economics that continues to do damage. The damage done is far greater than most realize. Many consider him to have been one of our best Presidents. He certainly was an inspiring leader, and will probably never be excelled in terms of speech delivery. Sadly, his economic advisers, such as Wendy Gramm , of CFTC and ENRON Board infamy, and wife of Phil Gramm, sold him on trickle-down-supply-side economics. It was a 1980s version of "Make America Great Again by Making the Wealthy Greater." It was sold as a win for everyone. Later Wendy's husband, Phil Gramm, worked tirelessly with others to trashcan Glass Steagall, merge the banking and insurance industries, gray the lines between commercial and investment banking, and push through, finally, after several failed attempts, the Financial Services Modernization Act by attaching it to a must pass Omnibus spending bill in the waning days of the Clinton Presidency. Though the FMA has been slightly emasculated by the recent Dodd-Frank Legislation the main tenets of supply-side economics still haunt us. Strange as it may seem, there are still those among establishment Republicans who believe the way to help the middle class is to leave more money with the wealthy. This is Reagan's legacy and why, despite the good things that happened during his presidency, I personally consider him to among the worst presidents of the 20th Century, every bit as bad as Johnson, and Bush 43. I wouldn't hold him responsible for supply-side economics had he not so enthusiastically embraced and championed his advisers rhetoric and economic ideas. As it is, there is no way for him to escape being tarred with the same brush.

As an undergraduate, Reagan was an economics major at Whittier College. But we know from countless examples that even a Ph.D. in economics doesn't guarantee success when it comes to the real world application of academic models. Economics truly is the "Dismal Science." Reagan was a first rate Baseball Radio Announcer. Had he stuck with that career we might all be considerably better off today.
 
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