Durran Korr,
America was the primary backer of the sanctions. Lobbying for their elimination likely would have been successful.
Were you listening to what I wrote? I said that Bush wouldn’t have been able to justify removing the sanctions because it would be a PR nightmare to the people of the UNITED STATES. You think that with all the years of telling us how Saddam is an evil dictator, they can just lift the sanctions without committing political suicide?
Good. The well-being of the American people should be his primary concern, not concessions to the eco-loonies which run directly in opposition to that aim.
Your forgetting that Clinton actually signed the Kyoto Protocol during his tenure. Might I also add that this is hardly the work of “eco-loonies”? Here is the biggest stipulation of the Kyoto Protocol:
“This treaty would commit the United States to a target of reducing greenhouse gases by 7% below 1990 levels during a "commitment period" between 2008-2012.”
Does this sound unreasonable to you? Personally I think that the environment has taken one too many for the team and it is something we need to concentrate on NOW. You notice how over 16,000 people died in France this year because of a simple heat wave? Can you imagine what a global increase of only 5 C might do to our climate and population? The greenhouse effect isn’t some whacked out theory; just take a look at Venus if you want to see a firsthand example of the greenhouse effect in action.
We still don’t know for sure how damaging the greenhouse gasses we are pumping into the atmosphere are. But the problem is that if they are as harmful as a large percentage of the scientists on Earth fear, we can cause major climate changes that would take decades to reverse. Personally, I think we should spend the extra money on clean air upgrades just in case, don’t you?
Don't try this on an accounting major. Estate taxes and gift taxes (the latter of which will not be repealed) accounted for around 26 billion dollars of federal revenue in 2002. Less than a drop in the bucket.
Furthermore, the estate tax is absolutely devastating to small business, family-owned specifically, like I said. For firms that choose to stay in business upon the death of their proprietors, the estate tax is going to slice their working capital by more than half, drastically increasing the likelihood of going out of business. Others just sell their business at a decreased value (no continued family ownership means less goodwill) and put the proceeds from the sale into a trust or something that is safer from taxation.
You’ll need to provide some evidence to back up this claim. As I state below in my response about the Rockefellers, the estate tax has a number of exemptions that protect small business’.
Because they hate rich people. Duh.
If you read what I said, I was referring to the people OPPOSED to the estate tax. I think there are some valid reasons for opposing it, but I also believe that the benefits outweigh the advantages.
Odd that you should mention the Rockefellers, given that they've got billions upon billions of dollars to work with and would still have billions and billions of dollars to work with after estate taxation. The estate tax encourages the existence of permanent wealthy dynasties like the Rockefellers, ironically, because with the estate tax it's harder for upstarts to join them at the top. The estate tax actually destroys social mobility, far from encouraging it.
The Rockefellers, in case you didn’t know, acquired their wealth long before the first meaningful estate tax was implemented. An estate tax of > 10% wasn’t around until 1916. Also you should remember that the Rockefellers are the most extreme example of a wealthy dynasty that has ever existed in America (yes, including Gates). Don’t you know that the whole reason that Teddy Roosevelt initiated his anti-trust campaigns was because of Rockefeller and a couple of others monopolizing whole markets?
There is already a considerable amount of exemptions from the estate tax for the middle class. Under current laws, anything up to $1 million is exempt. Farmers, like I said before, have special provisions so that their exemptions can go as high as $8 million. Beyond that, the estate tax is on a sliding scale from about 3% up to 77%.
So this basically shoots down your idea about the middle class getting shafted by the estate tax. What it DOES do is prevent those who have accumulated a great deal of wealth to pass it on to their children without the children actually doing anything to maintain that wealth. Is it really so bad that we make the children of those who EARNED the money to work at KEEPING it? When you have that much capital and you get half of it taken away, you can easily turn the other half into as much as the original, it just takes work and smart investments.
Social mobility is maintained, it just means that it is possible for one to slide DOWN the scale as well as climb up. The American dream is maintained.
No, Bush has not cut social programs significantly. He has, however, pushed a brand new one, the Prescription Drug Benefit, through Congress.
His new budget puts the future solvency of Medicare and Social Security into question. Clinton spent years trying to get Social Security back on track and Bush derailed all of that in a matter of months, just to support a $2 trillion tax cut.
Aside from the two biggies, I can’t see how you seriously believe that Bush hasn’t been cutting social programs. The changes he has made to Head Start and the cuts from after school programs are hurting the lower class substantially.
The wealthy are the ones with the resources to invest in new projects and create new jobs. Cutting taxes on the wealthy will indeed benefit the people of this country in the long run, regardless of how they spend that money; indeed, for economic purposes we ought to have a regressive income tax (but that's not exactly moral).
And again, you are operating under the assumption that Bush has cut spending on social programs significantly, which he has not.
So the rich get tax breaks thus spending more of their money and increasing their wealth through investment. How does this help the lower-middle class?
Sure if you’ve got stock options it’s wonderful but the cold hard truth is that by cutting taxes to the rich, we are simply moving the distribution of wealth into an even smaller group of people.
The number one priority for the US government has to be establishing stable social programs. We have one of the worst health care systems in the western world, Social Security is at the edge of insolvency and our public education system is laughed at by everyone. We can’t simply be nickel and dimeing these programs every time the economy hits a speedbump. Things like education reform, healthcare and social security were things that Bush promised he would tackle during his campaign and so far they have all been dismal failures. Would you care for a school voucher?
Incorrect. Lowering taxes increases government revenue. Ever hear of the Laffer Curve?
By your logic, we should lower taxes to zero and the government will have all the money it needs.
Regardless, Laffer won’t help you here. All the Laffer curve established is that as taxes decreased from fairly high levels, tax revenue received by the government would increase. However, as tax rates rose from fairly low levels tax revenue would also increase. Laffer is nothing but a bell curve and you know it.
So my point is still valid in that a tax cut can still HURT the economy under Laffer’s model because too low a tax rate hurts just as much as too high a tax rate.
Without the tax cuts, the federal budget would have grown even more rapidly than it already has, and the economy would likely be even worse. The repeal of the dividend tax in particular has done the market well.
First you quote me Reganomics principles, now you are coming down on government spending? Are you aware that under Regan, government spending shot up to insane levels, especially in the area of military contracts. This cause a lot of debt, but as Greenspan noted many times in his life, sometimes controlled debt can be a very good thing. Regan didn’t do the best job of this as inflation was through the roof, but in controlled amounts government spending (especially on programs for employees outside government employment itself) can help create jobs and strengthen the economy.
They are relatively tiny, but all tax cuts will help the economy.
You still haven’t proved that. In fact Laffer would disagree with you.
Bullshit. Unemployment is currently around 6.1 percent, an outstanding figure for a recession. It is most certainly not the highest we've had in decades.
Depends on where you live I guess. Here in Silicon Valley, we currently have over 10% unemployment and it is getting worse. Anyways, nationwide unemployment hasn’t been this high since the Bush Sr. recession in 1989, which was technically decades ago.
Well, of course. Companies can't afford to pay union laborers 25 dollars an hour when they can pay an overseas laborer a tenth of that.
I’m not talking about blue color jobs, I’m talking about all the tech jobs that the big technology firms are transferring overseas. Or didn’t you notice that IBM, HP, Dell and others have made announcements to this effect recently?
A few points?! November of last year the Dow as low a 7,500; now it's up to 9,500.
As for the fuel cells, which I didn't address, like IP says, it's net-loss. It's not really as easily feasible as it is presented.
Tell me, what exactly does the stock market have to do with the economy? The market is public perception of the economy, nothing more. Or didn’t you notice that for a time startups that were leaking money like a sieve had stock prices of $200+?
As for the fuel cell technology, I’m not a physical scientist, so I won’t pretend to totally understand the technology. I believe the most effective method being talked about was electrolysis of water to create hydrogen, but once again I’m not totally sure. However, fuel cells seem to be generating quite a bit of interested in certain areas and I’m sure that as an eventual replacement for internal combustion in cars, it will suffice quite well.
As for power generation for homes, I’m not suggesting that we remove our dependence on petroleum products, but lessen it. We can get enough oil from politically stable allied countries to last us until we develop better technologies if we conserve and implement new technologies such as hybrid cars and later fuel cells in automobiles. This is about maintaining a stable balance instead of going all over the world fighting pocket wars to protect the oil supply.
