Godless Liberal,

I am always amazed at the level of "religious conviction" of socialists. No amount of failure, lack of success, or just plain bad outcomes, deters them from their convictions. After over two hundred years of comparison between countries with market driven economies and those with socialist economies, socialist economies lose and it is not even a close contest. Not to be deterred, socialists will repeat the same experiment over and over with a conviction that, if we just fine tune a socialist economy enough, it will be a success. It must be worse for socialists than even for Chicago Cub fans. But being true believers of their religion, they soldier onward praying to their patron saint Karl Marx. While they are supportive of “freedom” in general, they are not supportive of economic freedom. Yet next to life itself, economic freedom is the more treasured possession that human beings have. That is why the institution of slavery is so abhorrent. Curiously, socialist seldom back up their religious beliefs with their own resources. They are quite careful to insure that other folks pay for their beliefs. They wish to solve what they view as problems with other folks’ time and money. I would be a bit more sympathetic if liberal socialists led by example. Donate more of your money to the government since you believe that they use it wisely. Give back the raise that you received from the University so that the University can help a needy student.

The bottom line is that socialists behave just like non-socialists in their personal behavior. They likely do not care for the way that the state run university (USM) allocates resources because they disagree with the priorities of those making the decisions. If you work at USM, you are experiencing a socialist experiment, so sit back and enjoy it.

Angeline wrote:

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However, my concern is that once one starts down the path of state control of the means of production and distribution, the path becomes all too slippery and easy for the Hitler's of the world to win control of something that was well intended. Read the histories of 1930's Germany and you will find the histories of well intended Germans who slipped down this path.   This ain't so - large corporations remained in place in Nazi Germany, supported the Nazi state (Hitler could not have consolidated power without the support of the corporations and banks), and profited from his policies.  Companies like Daimler Benz, Siemens, Deutsche Bank, Krupps, and Volkswagen grew under Nazi "control."  This is one of the reasons that Henry Ford, yes that Henry Ford, was so enamored of the Nazis, did business with them, and was awarded the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle in 1938 by them.  Stalin's communist state, on the other hand, though just as intolerant as the Nazis of democracy did not tolerate private enterprise of any sort - no corporations in the USSR.

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"In April, 1920, Hitler advocated that the party should change its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Hitler had always been hostile to socialist ideas, especially those that involved racial or sexual equality. However, socialism was a popular political philosophy in Germany after the First World War. This was reflected in the growth in the German Social Democrat Party (SDP), the largest political party in Germany.
The NSDAP

"At this early stage, Hitler brought up the idea of renaming the party, and he proposed the name "Social Revolutionary Party" (4). However, Rudolf Jung insisted that the party should follow the pattern of Austria's Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei. As a consequence, the DAP was shortly renamed the NSDAP.
Wikkipedia article on the NSDAP

"The commandant of the Reichswehr, Franz von Epp, his chief of staff, Erst Röhm, and the Munich chief of police, Erst Pöhner, were eager to overthrow the Republic and openly encouraged and protected all effective ultra-nationalist movements in their jurisdictional areas. Hitler's new style of propaganda soon attracted their attention to the party, which sometime in 1920 began to call itself the NSDAP, probably to give greater credibility to the "socialist" content of its propaganda line."
Adolf Hitler Online

Hitler's brand of socialism is nothing like anything any socialist would advocate. He was also a racist. I will gladly concede that Hitler used and corrupted the idea of socialism to serve his own demented ends. None the less, Hitler came to power under a quasi socialist banner and used the bases of socialism to justify the taking of some individual property (not all property) under the control of the state.

 

Socialism includes many variations on the level of state control/ownership. Under communist style socialism the state pretty much owns everything. At the other end are "socialist" states where only certain key industries/systems are either owned or under state control. My only point is that once you concede to socialism's idea of state control/ownership, however limited, you open the door for someone to come in and push for more control until you end with a dictatorship. This was what Karl Marx himself concluded would be the natural course of events thus he advocated full control, that is to say communist style socialism which gave us Stalin and Mao as well as a host of other socialist dictators to add to the ranks of socialism's accomplishments. This is the last I have to say on this subject.

 

C.L.--Liberal programs didn't build nation

http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060714/OPINION02/607140308/1009/OPINION

Pot Stirrer wrote:

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C.L.--Liberal programs didn't build nation http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060714/OPINION02/607140308/1009/OPINION

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I love the part in this guy's letter where he says that America was built by a "dedicated work force" in the 1800's and early 1900's. That's gotta be the most novel definition of slavery I ever heard!

He must also be talking about the immigrant and migrant workers conscripted into some of the most hellish industrial work environments ever designed by humankind. In them, the 14-16 hour day was standard for over half a century, wages averaged just above starvation, industrial safety engineering was considered utopian nonsense, and children commonly started working alongside their parents well before entering their teens.

Now that was some "dedicated workforce" boy! Dedicated to fighting off malnutrition, injury and exhaustion that is.

How do these delusions take such solid root?  

The UK-based New Economics Foundation publishes the study linked below. It compares resources consumption with quality of life indicators in all the countries on the planet and then creates the Happy Planet Index, again, linked below. The USA comes in at an unhappy 150 out of 178, with Vanatu--a Pacific island nation--being the happiest, at number one, and Zimbabwe being the unhappiest at 178.

Nasty old communist Cuba ranks #6 by the way. I always wondered why I felt so sort of at ease and stimulated down there . . .

Any social scientists attending to this? What do you think of the NEF's methodology?

http://www.happyplanetindex.org/introduction.htm

I took the personal test and it was highly inaccurate, and then it scolded me.

Cuba is happy? That's all those people from Miami risk their lives to sneak over there?

Those wonderful liberal programs:

 

US 'could be going bankrupt'
By Edmund Conway, Economics Editor 

(Filed: 14/07/2006)

The United States is heading for bankruptcy, according to an extraordinary paper published by one of the key members of the country's central bank.

A ballooning budget deficit and a pensions and welfare timebomb could send the economic superpower into insolvency, according to research by Professor Laurence Kotlikoff for the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, a leading constituent of the US Federal Reserve.

Prof Kotlikoff said that, by some measures, the US is already bankrupt. "To paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary, is the United States at the end of its resources, exhausted, stripped bare, destitute, bereft, wanting in property, or wrecked in consequence of failure to pay its creditors," he asked.

According to his central analysis, "the US government is, indeed, bankrupt, insofar as it will be unable to pay its creditors, who, in this context, are current and future generations to whom it has explicitly or implicitly promised future net payments of various kinds''.

The budget deficit in the US is not massive. The Bush administration this week cut its forecasts for the fiscal shortfall this year by almost a third, saying it will come in at 2.3pc of gross domestic product. This is smaller than most European countries - including the UK - which have deficits north of 3pc of GDP.

Prof Kotlikoff, who teaches at Boston University, says: "The proper way to consider a country's solvency is to examine the lifetime fiscal burdens facing current and future generations. If these burdens exceed the resources of those generations, get close to doing so, or simply get so high as to preclude their full collection, the country's policy will be unsustainable and can constitute or lead to national bankruptcy.

"Does the United States fit this bill? No one knows for sure, but there are strong reasons to believe the United States may be going broke."

Experts have calculated that the country's long-term "fiscal gap" between all future government spending and all future receipts will widen immensely as the Baby Boomer generation retires, and as the amount the state will have to spend on healthcare and pensions soars. The total fiscal gap could be an almost incomprehensible $65.9 trillion, according to a study by Professors Gokhale and Smetters.

The figure is massive because President George W Bush has made major tax cuts in recent years, and because the bill for Medicare, which provides health insurance for the elderly, and Medicaid, which does likewise for the poor, will increase greatly due to demographics.

Prof Kotlikoff said: "This figure is more than five times US GDP and almost twice the size of national wealth. One way to wrap one's head around $65.9trillion is to ask what fiscal adjustments are needed to eliminate this red hole. The answers are terrifying. One solution is an immediate and permanent doubling of personal and corporate income taxes. Another is an immediate and permanent two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits. A third alternative, were it feasible, would be to immediately and permanently cut all federal discretionary spending by 143pc."

The scenario has serious implications for the dollar. If investors lose confidence in the US's future, and suspect the country may at some point allow inflation to erode away its debts, they may reduce their holdings of US Treasury bonds.

Prof Kotlikoff said: "The United States has experienced high rates of inflation in the past and appears to be running the same type of fiscal policies that engendered hyperinflations in 20 countries over the past century."

Paul Ashworth, of Capital Economics, was more sanguine about the coming retirement of the Baby Boomer generation. "For a start, the expected deterioration in the Federal budget owes more to rising per capita spending on health care than to changing demographics," he said.

"This can be contained if the political will is there. Similarly, the expected increase in social security spending can be controlled by reducing the growth rate of benefits. Expecting a fix now is probably asking too much of short-sighted politicians who have no incentives to do so. But a fix, or at least a succession of patches, will come when the problem becomes more pressing."

The Myth of Spending Cuts for the Poor, Tax Cuts for the Richby Brian M. Riedl
Backgrounder #1912

February 14, 2006 | Executive Summary |  |

During the 2005 budget reconciliation debate, crit­ics trotted out the tired old myth that Republicans were cutting spending for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Many commentators accepted this as truth and repeated it, including Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, who accused the Republicans of passing a “cut-from-the-poor, give-to-the-rich budget.”[1]

However, the facts simply do not support these overheated claims. Rather than reduce entitlement spending, the budget reconciliation bill merely reduced its projected five-year growth rate from 39 percent to 38 percent. Furthermore, the “additional” tax cuts were nearly all extensions of existing tax pro­visions that would soon have expired.

More broadly, the accusation that poor families are shouldering more of the tax burden while receiving less of the spending is empirically false. From 1979 through 2003, the total federal tax burden on the highest-earning quintile (one-fifth or 20 percent) of Americans—who earn 52 percent of all income—rose from 56 percent to 66 percent of all taxes. Their share of individual income taxes jumped from 65 percent to 85 percent.[2] On the spending side, antipoverty spending has leaped from 9.1 percent of all federal spending in 1990 to a record 16.3 percent in 2004.[3]

Misreading the Data

The data clearly show that the tax burden is shifting annually up the income scale while spend­ing continues to move down the scale. In other words, the people with the highest incomes are paying more of the tax burden while the poor are receiving more of the spending. Yet the mispercep­tion that the federal government is doing the oppo­site persists. This misperception is based on five factors:

The stereotype that Republican government automatically means less redistribution.

Baseline budgeting, which guarantees that large, persistent, annual increases in entitle­ment spending will go unnoticed because they occur automatically. Conversely, any attempt to scale back these automatic increases receives extensive media scrutiny because it requires a separate vote.

Tax cut sunset laws that require Congress to pass a new tax bill merely to keep the current tax rates at the same level, which allows these bills to be misreported as “new” tax cuts.

The misleading focus on how tax relief saves wealthy taxpayers the most money while ignor­ing the mathematical reality that the bottom half of taxpayers cannot receive much tax relief because they already pay almost no income tax.

An erroneous belief that tax cuts for upper-income Americans substantially reduce the amount of tax that they actually pay. Indeed, there is little correlation between tax rates and taxes paid.

Furthermore, the persistent increase in federal antipoverty spending fosters an unhealthy depen­dence on government. For example, from 1990 to 2005, the Medicaid caseload doubled to 55 million participants, meaning that the government is increasingly taking over the health care system from private companies, community, and charitable orga­nizations, thus eroding self-reliance, independence, and local community responsibilities. The measure of the effectiveness of government antipoverty pro­grams is not how many people are trapped into financial dependence on the government, but how many people successfully make the transition away from dependence on the government.

The Increasing Tax Burden on the Rich

The often repeated myth that lawmakers are dumping more of the tax burden on low-income families is simply false. From 1979 through 2003, the highest-earning 20 percent of Americans—who earn 52 percent of all income—saw their share of the federal tax burden rise from 56 percent to 66 percent of all taxes. By contrast, the lowest-earning quintile of Americans—who earn 4 percent of all income—saw their share of the federal tax burden drop from 2 percent to 1 percent. (See Chart 1 and Chart 2.) Clearly, the rich are shouldering an increasing share of the tax burden.

The effective tax rate, which measures the actual share of income paid in taxes, is another way of examining the data. In 2003, the highest-earning quintile paid 25 percent of their income in federal taxes. The lowest-earning quintile paid just 4 per­cent of their income in federal taxes.

Bottom Two Quintiles: No Income Tax. Critics often suggest that poor Americans do not receive enough of the benefits from income tax cuts. Table 1, which also breaks down the tax burden by the type of tax, shows that in 2003, the bottom quintile paid an effective income tax of –5.9 percent of their income and that the second-lowest quintile paid an effective income tax of –1.1 percent. Their income tax burden was negative, meaning that they actu­ally received a subsidy from Washington on April 15. This is due to the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit, both of which subtract income taxes dollar for dollar and can reduce income tax liability to below zero.

Simply put, the bottom 40 percent of earners col­lectively pay no income taxes, and many actually receive checks from Wash­ington. The little tax bur­den that they pay is in social insurance taxes, as well as excise taxes (such as gas and cigarette taxes).

Top Quintile: Lower Tax Rates, Higher Tax Burden. Between 1979 and 2003, the share of income taxes paid by the highest-earning quintile jumped from 65 percent to 85 percent. Their share of all taxes paid (includ­ing social insurance, cor­porate, and excise taxes) increased from 56 percent to 66 percent. Upper-income taxpayers are pay­ing more, not less, of the tax burden.

Paradoxically, this shift occurred after federal income tax rates for top earners were reduced dra­matically. Between 1979 and 2003, the highest individual income tax rate was cut in half, from 70 percent to 35 percent. Yet the top earners’ effec­tive income tax rate dropped only from 15.7 percent to 13.9 percent. (See Chart 3.) The effec­tive tax rate for the high­est-earning 1 percent dropped only from 21.8 percent to 20.6 percent.

Halving the highest income tax rate only slightly reduced effective taxes paid, for two reasons.

First, lower tax rates provide greater incentives to work, save, and invest. High-earners respond by creating more wealth, and this additional income is taxed in the highest tax bracket. In this case, instead of taxing a small amount of income at 70 percent, the IRS taxed greatly expanded incomes at 35 percent. The reverse is also true: Higher tax rates reduce incentives and therefore depress incomes, dropping taxpayers out of the new higher tax brackets.[4]

Second, lower tax rates reduce incentives for tax avoidance and tax evasion. Taxpayers subject to a 70 percent tax rate are much more likely to hide their money in legal tax shelters or even to try ille­gally to evade taxes altogether. By lowering the top rate to 35 percent, lawmakers substantially reduced the incentive for taxpayers to shield or hide their income from the IRS.

Overall, the share of all taxes paid by the top quintile increased because their effective tax rates have remained steady, in spite of cuts in federal tax rates, while the effective tax rates paid by low-income earners have plummeted to below zero.

Unintended Consequences. However, this nar­rowing of the tax burden to a small minority of tax­payers undermines democracy, as those voting for government benefits are increasingly separated from those funding the benefits. In addition, because incomes at the top fluctuate much more from year to year, federal tax revenues have become more unsta­ble as this group has assumed more of the tax bur­den. While most agree that upper-income families should pay more in absolute tax dollars than lower-income Americans, the increasingly overwhelming concentration of federal taxes within one group of Americans is a cause for concern.

[There's a lot more data at http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/bg1912.cfm ]

Cossack wrote:

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Well done Thomas Paine, Sadly, no amount of factual information will make a dent in the liberal mindset. Beliefs and feelings are more important than facts. To feel good, liberals must spend other people's money on whatever they believe is a good cause.

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Fair enough.

What are your thoughts on farm price supports for ADM? Taxpayer bailouts of struggling multi-nationals? The taxpayer costs associated with the savings and loan debacle? Protectionist tariffs? 

To feel good, conservatives must spend other people's money on whatever they believe is a good cause.

GL wrote:

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 Fair enough. What are your thoughts on farm price supports for ADM? Taxpayer bailouts of struggling multi-nationals? The taxpayer costs associated with the savings and loan debacle? Protectionist tariffs? 

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In a word, I oppose them.

What are your thoughts on farm price supports for ADM? Taxpayer bailouts of struggling multi-nationals? The taxpayer costs associated with the savings and loan debacle? Protectionist tariffs?

I opposed the S&L bailout at the time. I would oppose it now. Farm price supports are a joint project supported by both parties. It is bad program that is unnecessary. The sugar supports are the worse. I am against the silly ethanol supports where it takes almost as much energy to create it as it provides. Tariffs have never been a good idea; they encourage inefficient businesses at the expense of consumers.

As an aside, all of these programs you mention were created and supported under Democratic controlled Senate and House.