Iām not confusing anything. As usual, itās you whoās confused.
I donāt think anybody apart from perhaps yourself would ever confuse the US with a āsocialist utopiaā - a capitalist dystopia, perhaps, notwithstanding Obamaās efforts. Itās no wonder the infrastructure there is crumbling.
Republican tax cuts have decimated the US economy over the last four decades. The solution for Trump supporters, many of whom have been most affected by that, would appear to be more Republican tax cuts, ie, the main cause of the problem in the first place.
None other than Trump himself admitted Reaganās tax cuts were āa disasterā. And now he wants to bring them back.
Proven economic failure has never been any barrier to the faith of true believers of voodoo economics.
āSocialist utopiaā is an oxymoron, and clearly compared to most of Europe the US is still far from the concept thankfully. Once again, you have no idea what you are talking about.
Trump has no idea what he is talking about either on most subjects, he is just making it up as he goes along. Tax receipts did not decrease at all under Reagan, the 40 year average when Reagan took office was 18.1% of GDP, and under Reagan was 18.2%. The cuts in tax rates were offset by eliminating tax loopholes and shelters, and increased social security taxes. The results of the āReagan tax cutsā are still hotly debated, but the evidence is the US experienced unprecedented economic growth in the late 80s and 90s, and many would attribute that at least in part to the changes in the tax structure. The marginal tax rate when Reagan took office was 70%, add in social security tax, state tax, sales tax, etc. and you are over 90%. What the fuck is the incentive to bother your hole setting up a business, or working your ass off to be a professional in any field if you are going to pay 90% in taxes?
What has decimated the US economy is insane levels of government spending. Reagan was guilty of this himself with his build up of the military, but since Reagan the great majority of the exponential increase is in entitlement spending, including the administration of entitlement programs. A good example is education, the US spends by far the most per capita in the developed world on first and second level education, and yet ranks bottom of the developed world in results. The liberal response to the problem is well we just need to spend more, when spending more is the fucking problem, as it just creates an even more useless bureaucracy. For balance, Republicans in office have been just as guilty as Democrats of ballooning debt based spending on totally inefficient government bureaucracies. The fundamental problem is not lower taxes, it is ballooning inefficient government spending.
When Trump supporters talk about āmaking America great againā, what time period are they referring to? One can only presume that itās the post-war boom decades when the top tax rates were 90%.
Its not the 90% tax rates most of them are nostalgic for, but the primacy of the white person, and particularly the white male, in American society.
This hardly needs to be said, itās so obvious.
What happened under Reagan? The rate of job growth slowed, the de-industrialisation of the US was started by him, inequality spiralled, homelessness exploded and not so much a trickle up as a flood up effect ensued, with money taken out of the economy and left to accumulate unproductively in the hands of the rich. The USās deficit tripled.
Bill Clinton raised taxes, ended up running a budget surplus and job growth accelerated again
George W. Bush lowered taxes, job growth was close to zero, the unemployment rate soared and the deficit spiralled again.
Go figure.
Reagan also deregulated the media, which led to right-wing demagogues filling the airwaves and news becoming little more than entertainment, the direct result of which is utter ignorance amongst a large section of American society, which directly benefits the likes of Trump now.
Whatās the main overarching reason why the US fares so badly in terms of health and education outcomes? Poverty. In education that means inherited negative sociological factors and a self-perpetuating cycle where poor children feel they have less of a stake in society and thus less incentive to do well. In health, inequality also drives bad outcomes, with less access to care in a vastly unequal system, and lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry also push costs up. The food industry lobbys to allow it to put crap into the food that people eat. Theyāre examples of the power of light touch corporate regulations pushed by Republicans which have direct negative consequences for outcomes.
Perhaps if the US followed a more socialistic European model in terms of education and healthcare and how it treats its general society in terms of equality, its outcomes in those fields would be a lot better, thereās no perhaps about it, really.
Europe for all its faults generally puts the US to shame in terms of health and education.
I sincerely hope you are not referring to Ireland when you compare European to US health care. The quality of health care in the US is excellent, as good or better than the best in Europe. The problem is the cost which is driven by the insurance industry. Obamacare is an abomination which has driven up costs again by layering on another beurocracy that the working public have to fund.
I donāt think socialist Europe has much to be proud of. Double digit unemployment in most of the peripheral counties, and 50% among young people is as bad as the poorest areas of the US. At least the US has some level of economic growth and low unemployment, Europe is completely stagnant and the EU a failed venture.
The āmade America great againā mantra has nothing to do with race. It has all to do with the destruction of the middle class, the causes of which we would likely agree on. Trump is correct in identifying the most significant factors such as insane trade agreements that only benefit large corporations and predatory states like China, the question is whether he has any workable policies to address them.
America has been in decline since the launch of the Great Society and the āWar on Povertyā. Socialist experiments were worth a go but have been a total failure - single parents households, a rising debt, ghettosā¦the list goes on. US worker productivity continuing to rise due to the innovations of early 20th century and the Wars papered over the cracks for a while but the decline was inevitable.
Tim likes Trump because he thinks he is a Republican and a conservative. He is neither, he is a NY liberal who is using the Republican Party to fulfill a lifelong egomaniac desire to become president. The Republican establishment are apoplectic at the thought of a narcissistic psychopath representing the party. This will not end well.
The US had revenue growth for 50 years. The revenue growth slowed down during the Reagan years. The revenue growth adjusted for population changes were less than in the 1970s and far far less than the 1990s.
Extending the credit to Reagan for growth in the mid to late 1990s is a stretch too far.
Anyway itās not a particularly interesting topic because itās debated to death but the reality is far less straightforward than you have presented.
leave it out pal, labane is the man on the ground, he knows what he is talking about instead of some lad on the internet who read something in a magazine
Revenue as a % of GDP is the only sensible metric as it is independent of inflation and population changes. There has been no significant change since the 1950s, an average of 18% with a range of 16 - 20% depending on the business cycle. The conclusion is with all the significant changes in the tax code over the various Republican or Democratic administrations, it hasnāt made much difference. Spending as % of GDP is the problem, which has accelerated wildly since the 1980s, and was masked in the 1990s by technology driven productivity gains.
Agreed itās a boring topic, but the simplistic argument is that presented by @Sidney of high taxes good, low taxes bad. There is some evidence that low individual tax rates stimulate economic growth, but no evidence that high tax rates stimulate economic growth or even revenue growth (as the wealthy will always find ways to avoid paying them).
[quote=āanon7035031, post:1005, topic:19437, full:trueā]
I sincerely hope you are not referring to Ireland when you compare European to US health care. The quality of health care in the US is excellent, as good or better than the best in Europe. The problem is the cost which is driven by the insurance industry. Obamacare is an abomination which has driven up costs again by layering on another beurocracy that the working public have to fund. [/quote]
Ireland rejected āsocialised medicineā in the 1950s and is still paying the price for that. Iād rather be sick in the vast majority of Western Europe, the UK or Cuba than in the US.
But over 11 million more Americans now have health cover under Obamacare and that has to be a good thing.
Ironically thatās because Europe has abandoned Keynesianism and adopted pro-cyclical austerity policies whereas the US went for stimulus.
Iāve never said that job losses and economic trouble werenāt factors in the popularity of Trump, as they are with Sanders. Heās clearly used them to play to his gallery.
But the appeal to racial hatred is a significantly bigger factor. For the last 50 years Republicans have appealed to whites using thinly veiled racism, but at least there was some sort of veil on it. That veil has been hanging on by a thread since the advent of the Tea Party and now Trump has blown it off altogether. He is the product of that 50 years of thinly veiled racism from Republicans, and it just so happens that he comes along as a black president, who has been vilified at every turn by Republicans using that thinly veiled and sometimes not so thinly veiled racist rhetoric, prepares to leave office. Going up against the first female presidential candidate adds a misogynistic element and also ties neatly into the narrative of fear and hatred he promotes.
Whilst the Democratic Party appealed to minorities, once disgracefully enslaved and prejudiced against by the DP, with goodies from the Man.
This has lead to a growth in single parent African American households, poor educational attainment and the AA people being caught in a trap. Now instead of admitting the failure of the War on Poverty, they perpetuate it by offering more goodies and riling up racial division with support for crap like Black Lives Matter.
Nah, itās a shit measure because it penalises a growing economy or rewards a depressing one. A neutral tax position with a shrinking GDP will look look like a better revenue take than an increase in tax revenue in a rapidly growing economy.
Anyway, as youāve said the tax cuts were offset by some increases. Those increases caused a decline in revenue as a % of GDP to become an increase. In other words, one could just as easily argue that the tax increases caused an increase in revenue, not the tax decreases.
Cuba
Iām surprised you didnāt include Venezuela, that other socialist utopia. A grand place to live, if you enjoy fighting with 5,000 other people for the last remaining fish in the just gone off section.
