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The Republican party is generally claimed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Note the term "claimed" here; I do not think the record of Republican governance proves this claim at all well, but nonetheless the default expectation seems persistent. When I was younger, this was certainly a selling-point of the party to me, and I voted for Bush II in the hope that he'd get government spending under control. Then 9/11 happened, and he wasted trillions wandering our military through the middle east.
Now the debt is very bad, and people are once more raising the banner of Fiscal Responsibility. Is it in Republicans' interest to enforce "fiscal responsibility", and if so, how? If we were to seriously cut spending and raise taxes, as people claim the fiscal situation demands, this would almost certainly cost us the next election. In the best possible case that I can see, we would be expending our political power to create stable economic conditions for our opponents to then rule. The more likely case would be us expending our political power to ameliorate spending that our opponents increase to gain power for themselves, resulting in a much shakier economy and our complete political irrelevance.
Why not offer the Fiscal Responsibility mantel to the Democrats? The economy is very complicated after all, and they are at this point clearly the party of Expert Opinion: who better to determine and implement the hard-nosed measures necessary to right our economic vessel? When I was younger, the obvious rejoinder would have been that they would do a bad job of it and disaster would result, but it seems to me that we have not done all that much better, and disaster seems likely in any case. If disaster cannot be meaningfully avoided, then why expend limited resources demanded by a serious political conflict on an unfixable resource-sink of a problem? What's the actual plan, here?
The US unironically needs to raise taxes on the rich (I mean actual rich, not those earning large salaries). (Non-land) Wealth taxes are usually bad, but with the global reach of the IRS and their policy to tax worldwide income, there's no reason the US can't easily adopt a policy of taxing worldwide assets without too many bad side effects. This would raise significant money, imagine even a 1% worldwide non-US housing asset yearly tax on all US permanent residents and citizens (temporary residents get a pass because you don't want to discourage smart wealthy people from the rest of the world coming to the US), it would easily fill the black hole.
Please, do the math. Get some data on how many wealthy people are there, how much you expect to get from each, multiply one figure by the other, and get surprised about how paltry it is.
As it happens, US already has the most progressive tax system of all developed countries. In US, it is disproportionately the wealthy how pay the bulk of the taxes. In contrast to that, in Europe, the bulk of the taxes is paid by the middle class. For example: in US, you only enter the 32% tax bracket once you’re above $192k/year. In France, and I shit you not, you start paying 30% tax starting from 27.5k EUR. On top of that, when you actually try to spend whatever you’re left with, you pay 20% VAT, whereas in US, the highest sales tax rarely exceeded 10-11%.
The result is that people making 60k EUR/year are the backbone of French budget, whereas in US, if you make $60k, you barely pay any tax at all, considering deductions, EITC, etc.
Seriously, just do the math.
It's ironic that the Buffet quote about how he personally pays less tax than his secretary stimulates outrage about capital vs labor, but if this outrages you then you should be especially outraged by how much of the tax burden is being carried by the middle class in more socialist nations.
If you consider health insurance companies to be outsourced tax collectors and insurance premiums to be a payroll tax in all but name that's mostly imposed on the middle and upper-middle class, I wonder how different the tax burdens really are.
Unclear. Employers in the US vary on how comprehensive a health plan they will buy for their employees. Additionally, some households will have one spouse enroll in their employer's family plan while the other opts out entirely (and maybe even gets a monetary rebate for declining it).
Another complication is even with 65%+ total employee cost going to taxes, professionals in France opt for additional supplemental insurance so they don't have to share services with the poors.
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