In the US, taxes do not fund federal spending.

Profound Bastard said:

The act of forcing another person to fund somebody else's ideas is called living in a society.

As a matter of fact "funds" themselves and the means to transact in them is paid for by, you guessed it, tax dollars. So enjoy bartering, I guess. And only traveling on roads you built with your own two hands, and never purchasing anything made anywhere by an evil society that taxes it's citizens. AKA everywhere on earth.

As a matter of fact, get off the goddamned internet right now. It's entire infrastructure was funded with federal tax dollars. Those fucking scientists and their fucking research. Waste of money.

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Except all of these things are possible without threatening to use offensive force against other people.

So, you would base your society in involuntary human interactions rather than voluntary and consensual human interactions ? Sounds a little totalitarian, why do you like systems which rely on threatening people ?

Profound Bastard said:

The problem isn't taxes, although that's apparently your pet issue, it's how they are spent.

The US spends more tax dollars per person on healthcare than any country in the world. That's a fact. Do we have the best universal healthcare in the world? No, we have sick and dying people who can't pay their bills, and a Repubican congress who is arguing about who should pay those bills, instead of WHY THEY ARE SO HIGH.

Hint: it's the 1% getting richer on the backs of poor sick people.

Now look at the UK, with government-supported tv and films, which is their fastest growing job sector, employing millions of people and generating billions of dollars a year. Is that a better use of money than destabilizing regions of the world and then selling them weapons like the US's military-industrial complex? Grinding up the poor for military service to lube the money machine? They also have universal health care, safety nets for the poor, and famously generous welfare

We need taxes, but we sure as shit don't need more of them. The problem is lobbyists and money corrupting the system, not the system itself, funneling money to the 1%, and fuck everybody else.

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I agree with your charitable sentiment but I think the facts in the thread have alluded you and you have been sucked into debating Tampee the tweaker pedo.

Taxes do not fund spending. Welfare programs are not just there for charity, they are mostly to subsidize industry. For example, food stamps are there to subsidize agriculture. The amount that can be spent is calculated by complex economic models. It has nothing to do with how many people need it.

The gov't can create dollars when ever it wants to. It taxes in order to remove dollars from the economy. The amount it taxes is completely unrelated to how much it needs to spend.

Again I do appreciate your compassionate world view but the point of the thread was to explain complex economic facts.

Robroy gets his economic world view from the likes of Ayn Rand. Don't even bother debating with him, he already knows that what he is peddling has no basis in reality. It gets tiresome that he has been pushing that nonsense for literally years on this forum and really nobody even likes him.

Just ignore the ancap trolls. Their understanding of economics is nonexistent and by debating them you might be going down rabbit holes of fallacy. To even debate a premise in their arguments is to entertain fallacy.

This thread is here for facts, not ancap fantasy.

abandonconflict said:

I agree with your charitable sentiment but I think the facts in the thread have alluded you and you have been sucked into debating Tampee the tweaker pedo.

Taxes do not fund spending. Welfare programs are not just there for charity, they are mostly to subsidize industry. For example, food stamps are there to subsidize agriculture. The amount that can be spent is calculated by complex economic models. It has nothing to do with how many people need it.

The gov't can create dollars when ever it wants to. It taxes in order to remove dollars from the economy. The amount it taxes is completely unrelated to how much it needs to spend.

Again I do appreciate your compassionate world view but the point of the thread was to explain complex economic facts.

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If anyone is actually interested in understanding fiscal policy, taxation and federal revenue, my arguments in this thread are very well researched and I don't mind breaking it down bit by bit and rewording some of the more complex stuff.

Rob Roy said:

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Your memes are more sad than you.

Social security withholdings were not supposed to be a tax. In the New Deal, it was a public fund that people paid into, separate from the federal budget. Much of the "welfare queen" rhetoric that became prevalent during the Raegan administration was aimed at creating a surplus of this fund. The gov't did end up sticking its hand into that cookie jar when it should have just cut defense spending drastically and left the social security money alone. This, along with an 8% (relatively small) cut to defense spending managed to create a federal budget surplus during the following administration. This occurred at around the same time the Cold War ended, meaning there was far less need for a bloated war machine.

Really though, the national debt was and still is irrelevant. It can go well into the bajillions as long as demand for the dollar is strong (sound currency) and the economy keeps money moving. What the gov't can spend is not constrained by solvency, but by inflation. So long as bonds are desired, they are valuable.

abandonconflict said:

Social security withholdings were not supposed to be a tax. In the New Deal, it was a public fund that people paid into, separate from the federal budget. Much of the "welfare queen" rhetoric that became prevalent during the Raegan administration was aimed at creating a surplus of this fund. The gov't did end up sticking its hand into that cookie jar when it should have just cut defense spending drastically and left the social security money alone. This, along with an 8% (relatively small) cut to defense spending managed to create a federal budget surplus during the following administration. This occurred at around the same time the Cold War ended, meaning there was far less need for a bloated war machine.

Really though, the national debt was and still is irrelevant. It can go well into the bajillions as long as demand for the dollar is strong (sound currency) and the economy keeps money moving. What the gov't can spend is not constrained by solvency, but by inflation. So long as bonds are desired, they are valuable.

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Your paragraph about the debt is hardly reassuring. What would cause the demand for the dollar to drop? With wealth concentrating more and more in the wealthy classes, aren't we setting ourselves up for another economic shock like the one in 2008? What I read in your paragraph is the debt isn't important until it is.

Fogdog said:

Your paragraph about the debt is hardly reassuring. What would cause the demand for the dollar to drop? With wealth concentrating more and more in the wealthy classes, aren't we setting ourselves up for another economic shock like the one in 2008? What I read in your paragraph is the debt isn't important until it is.

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Some of the poorest nations have no debt. Some of the hungriest nations are net exporters of food. Some of the nations with the most natural wealth per capita have the least productive economies. It is as I closed the OP, the way to keep the empire from falling is New Deal economic policy. Invest in the working class and the nation will work.

abandonconflict said:

Some of the poorest nations have no debt. Some of the hungriest nations are net exporters of food. Some of the nations with the most natural wealth per capita have the least productive economies. It is as I closed the OP, the way to keep the empire from falling is New Deal economic policy. Invest in the working class and the nation will work.

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Wasn't disagreeing, just asking. I've never understood why the national debt is such a political issue but it keeps going up and we don't go into crisis. It's starting to make sense now.

Would it be true to say that if Italy or Greece had their own currencies, their debt wouldn't be the magnitude of crisis it has been?

Fogdog said:

Wasn't disagreeing, just asking. I've never understood why the national debt is such a political issue but it keeps going up and we don't go into crisis. It's starting to make sense now.

Would it be true to say that if Italy or Greece had their own currencies, their debt wouldn't be the magnitude of crisis it has been?

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I haven't really studied their economic systems in depth the way I have US fiscal policies but I have been looking at Venezuela lately. Again, highly politicized. However Venezuela is solvent. Venezuela has very high material wealth and could easily pay its "debts". I put this in quotation marks because it is externally imposed and not debts to its own central bank. Actually those debts are more real than the smoke and mirrors we call debt in the US. Venezuela has oil, more than enough agriculture to feed its people and then some (though consumer goods are scarce) and despite the prattle of some of our local lolbertarians is not a socialist country. Yes, they have a regime in power (by the will of the population) who embraces socialist ideology, but their economic system is still privatized for the most part. Their economy is ground to a halt for the same reason your house heats up if you close the windows, which means mass unemployment and all of the problems which accompany it.

I would imagine the problems in Greece and Italy are much different from those of Venezuela. However, I don't know much about Venezuela's banking system. It doesn't really matter since they have very little actual economic activity due to Western financial assault. Italy and Greece however, have very little natural wealth and do not borrow from themselves as we do.

Remember, the amount our gov't can spend into existence is a dividend calculated based on projected GDP growth in an arbitrary period of time, let's say a year. This number is not related to what is taxed. What is taxed is for the purpose of removing dollars from the economy to stabilize their value and combat inflation. With this in mind, the deficit is actually more relevant than the debt but even so, not particularly relevant as long as it is sustainable. The mounting debt is a useful number to scare people into accepting that more of the spending go to this rather than that. It has literally no other use. Our bank will not stop lending to us.

For a simple example, we "borrow" money by spending more into existence than we tax. The amount we "borrow" for that arbitrary period of time is not something we necessarily promise to repay, but we're making a bet that the economy will grow by a certain amount within that time period.

In the housing bubble recession of 07-08, we borrowed more than we produced. It had nothing to do with the debt or even the deficit, but that our spending did not stimulate economic growth. We then we got ourselves out of it by spending ourselves out of it. Economy moving, GDP growing, dollar stabilized, aggregate demand stabilized, yet "OMG Obama ruined the economy", said no educated economist ever.

It's just political dog whistling. It's not something the DNC could exactly respond to in the media either since they've been known to use debt rhetoric as well. Now debt ceiling issues, yes those can cause problems. It's like saying "you may not spend that dividend", so congress forced the debt ceiling issue just to be dicks. This led to the sequester.

The national debt is more like a mound of discarded oyster shells than a bank balance. It represents the productivity of the working class which was taken to service the national budget. To literally pay it back would entail investing in the safety net, public works, maybe forgiving student debt, what ever would improve the purchasing power of the proletariat keeping wealth in the hands of those who create it with their labor. Even so, the mound would grow. However, it is possible to increase spending on public works and the safety net (investing in the working class) while achieving and maintaining a budget surplus. Still the debt itself is of no relevance.

The best reason to maintain a budget surplus is to improve credit rating, which will allow the gov't to react to crisis better. It ensures economic stability.

*Edited third paragraph for clarity.

I had to come back and edit a lot of that last post lol, was pretty baked when I wrote it, a lot was incoherent.

tampee said:

If you get food stamps you are a bum plain and simple.

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Why is he still here?

abandonconflict said:

Tampee the tweaker pedo

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A+

abandonconflict said:

For a simple example, we "borrow" money by spending more into existence than we tax. The amount we "borrow" for that arbitrary period of time is not something we necessarily promise to repay, but we're making a bet that the economy will grow by a certain amount within that time period.

In the housing bubble recession of 07-08, we borrowed more than we produced. It had nothing to do with the debt or even the deficit, but that our spending did not stimulate economic growth. We then we got ourselves out of it by spending ourselves out of it. Economy moving, GDP growing, dollar stabilized, aggregate demand stabilized, yet "OMG Obama ruined the economy", said no educated economist ever.

It's just political dog whistling. It's not something the DNC could exactly respond to in the media either since they've been known to use debt rhetoric as well. Now debt ceiling issues, yes those can cause problems. It's like saying "you may not spend that dividend", so congress forced the debt ceiling issue just to be dicks. This led to the sequester.

The national debt is more like a mound of discarded oyster shells than a bank balance. It represents the productivity of the working class which was taken to service the national budget. To literally pay it back would entail investing in the safety net, public works, maybe forgiving student debt, what ever would improve the purchasing power of the proletariat keeping wealth in the hands of those who create it with their labor. Even so, the mound would grow. However, it is possible to increase spending on public works and the safety net (investing in the working class) while achieving and maintaining a budget surplus. Still the debt itself is of no relevance.

The best reason to maintain a budget surplus is to improve credit rating, which will allow the gov't to react to crisis better. It ensures economic stability.

*Edited third paragraph for clarity.

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Thanks for the summary.

In the words of the great philosopher of our times,

NLXSK1 said:

I wish I could like this one twice!!!

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abandonconflict said:

I had to come back and edit a lot of that last post lol, was pretty baked when I wrote it, a lot was incoherent.

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Baked or not, you are never incoherent.

abandonconflict said:

The national debt is more like a mound of discarded oyster shells than a bank balance.

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abandonconflict said:

It represents the productivity of the working class which was taken to service the national budget. To literally pay it back would entail investing in the safety net, public works, maybe forgiving student debt, what ever would improve the purchasing power of the proletariat keeping wealth in the hands of those who create it with their labor.

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Fogdog said:

Thanks for the summary.

In the words of the great philosopher of our times,

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Right? AC has educated me on many topics. He's a gentleman and a scholar and he's not afraid to go deep. The "discarded oyster shell" analogy & post was a thing of beauty, as far as I'm concerned.

Fogdog said:

What would cause the demand for the dollar to drop?

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Good question and to answer it requires explanations of multiple complex factors. Many commodities can be pegged to the dollar to affect its demand. Currently, taxes and the market for oil are the two biggest factors in dollar soundness. Foreign currency manipulation is also relevant but to a much lesser extent. This is because foreign currencies compete directly for value in international markets.

By controlling the majority of oil supply through military means, we can force nations to pay for oil in dollars. This has a dramatic effect on the value of the dollar. This is why threats such as "peak oil" or foreign heads of state seeking to compete in the market for oil are direct affronts to national security. We have built an entire infrastructure on this petrodollar empire, which was foolish considering that oil is a finite commodity and that other commodities and technologies can obviate demand for it. It will become necessary to control another commodity in the future.

Also consider CO2 emissions and their effect on the environment.

Taxing in dollars has the most direct effect on the supply of dollars aside from gov't spending. By taxing, the gov't removes dollars from the money supply. Scarcity therefore increases the value of the dollars left in the supply but excessive or inadequate taxing can harm markets so taxing is used primarily as a means to stabilize the currency, not to manipulate markets.

schuylaar said:

Alas, he is our court jester..

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You're a close second in that regard.

*Bump*

Economics lessons for Bernouts and any lingering Paulbots.