10-05-2010, 01:18 PM
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#66
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“Hypocrisy: prejudice with a halo”
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Savannah, Georgia
Posts: 21,393
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This explains it fairly well....
Quote:
The irony in this drama is that the money at stake is, in the larger scheme, trivial. Raising taxes on the top 2% of households, as Mr Obama proposes, would bring in $34 billion next year: enough to cover nine days’ worth of the deficit. Indeed, the problem with the tax debate is not that Democrats and Republicans disagree, but that they mostly agree. Democrats think 98% of Americans should not pay higher taxes; the Republicans say 100% should not.
Taxes this year will come to less than 15% of GDP, the lowest share since 1950. The two reasons for this are the recession, which has left a diminished tax base, and the legacy of broad-based tax cuts in 1997, 2001, 2003 and 2009. Taxes are expected to rise to 19.6% of GDP in 2020 if all the tax cuts are extended; raising rates on the rich would lift the ratio to only 20% (see chart). That is nowhere near enough to pay for federal spending, estimated at 24% of GDP in 2020. “Citizens could be forgiven for forgetting that there is any connection between spending and taxes,” says Len Burman, a tax expert at Syracuse University.
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http://www.economist.com/node/170434...TOKEN=35979115
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Anyone but the this most fuked up President in History in 2012!
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