US General Election: McCain vs. Obama

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No, NOG, it isn't. The issue is no more a disqualifying issue than McCain's being born in Panama. To be eligible for the office of Chief Executive, one must be (1) a natural born citizen, (2) be at least 35, and (3) have been a resident within the United States for at least fourteen years. Obama clearly meets these criterion, so there are no eligibility concerns.

Obama's mother is an American, and he was born in the US. To crib a bit from Bill Maher, if you accept these two facts and still question whether he's a natural born citizen, no offense, but you're an idiot. If you are trying to argue that Obama hasn't lived in the US long enough, no offense, but your an even bigger idiot. Obama has been a legislator for a little over 12 years and his father abandoned his mother when he was 2. Since 12 + 2 = 14, Obama meets the residency requirement.

 

@ Joacqin: Well, that's one option. Another is the one that the Republicans are so eagerly aiming at Obama for: raising taxes. Bush's tenure showed that lowering taxes and hoping to get more money that way doesn't work (heck, I don't know any cases where it DID work, and it wasn't for lack of advertising), so whoever his successor is, he will have to raise taxes somehow. Well, either that or pass the buck to his successor, the way Bush did.


Let's be honest here, shall we? Whatever the state does, it pays for. It may pay for it preemptively (by having a budget surplus), immediately (by raising taxes) or belatedly (by running a deficit). In any of these scenarios, the money will (have) come from taxes. And with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan costing trillion(s), the business bailout aiming for that number and with unavoidable spending projects such as education, infrastructure and the like - does anyone here think that these could be covered in any other way? Everyone always talks about how so-and-so will have to be covered by the American taxpayer - but when the expenses have been growing, the only way to meet them is to increase the amount collected. This is not an option - it will happen, now, in 5 years or in 20.

What appals me the most is that the same people who got the US in this mess (Bush's administration and those around it) have the gall to blame Obama for the idea that taxes will have to increase - at least for some percentage of the population. They are the ones that embarked on the projects that now have to be paid for, they are the ones that slashed taxes and thus set their successors for an even higher increase - and now they sit on the sidelines and chant "tax and spend" at the people who dare suggest that, yes, the US will have to pay for what THEY have been doing. This is beyond irresponsible, beyond callous - this is ugly. If Obama is elected, he and "tax and spend liberals" will be the ones who pay the political price of unpopular measures (as raising taxes will be) not so much to put their own projects in place, but to pay for the mistakes and the irresponsible policies of the current administration. They will tax and spend - spend on all those little "gifts" Bush left them with. Oh, and if McCain (should he be elected) does not do the exact same thing, it will be because he leaves the same cheques to his successor.

Well, I guess fiscal discipline is called "tax and spend" now. Am I missing on some other vital terms of the nowaday political doublespeak?

 

Lowering income taxes never produces enough revenue to pay for itself, but lowering corporate income taxes sometimes can. From Factcheck.org.

 

Whoa ... Drew ... are you closet Republican?

I was listening to a pollster yesterday. He claimed the average margin of error in polls was 7%. That's average, including the polls from the day of the elections.

Doesn't give anyone much confidence in the polls.

 

True, but that is an average. Some pollsters like Survey USA and Quinnipiac have much larger sample sizes (and therefore smaller margins of error) while others like Zogby, who use much smaller sample sizes and use outdated models, tend to be higher and less accurate. So while it's not wise to listen to ALL the polls, some have very respectable track records and can get their MoE down to 2-4%.

 

Polls are not definitive, I agree. But they are good indicators. I remember when McCain went up his 1 or 2 percent over Obama, after the Republican Convention, conservatives could not stop ranting about how great and significant the polls were. Now with Obama up by 7-14 percent, they suddenly don't mean all that much....

 

DR, that used to be true. Even the big pollsters were off by a much larger margin through out the primaries. The method of taking polls is outdated and fewer people respond (let alone fewer people have land line telephones). The different pollster report cards are very interesting -- ranging from 2% to 19% off. Survey USA claims to be between 2% and 4%, but others have them at over 8% off. It's just all over the map.

Chandos: I was listening to a liberal talk show. The pollster interviewed was a staunch democrat.

 

T2, if the pollster report cards range from 2%–19%, and my argument was that some are more accurate than others, then isn't it still true?

 

See, claiming that reduction of some taxes may, in rare cases, lead to an increase in revenues from said taxes - that I could live with, and I admit not being very familiar with the Irish case (I'm not sure what other cases this survey referenced). Yet I have heard it quoted like the Gospel that lower tax rates equal more money.

@NOG: well, the thing is, almost every country has been attacked, and I'd say the US has not had it the worst in the last two centuries. It has no aggressive neighbors (unless you count the Russians on the other side of the Bering strait from Alaska), yet it spends almost as much as all other countries combined, and about twice as high a ratio on defense as many other western countries do. Now, sure, nobody expects it to disarm, but I think it could be fairly secure with less expenses in this sector. Not that I think it likely that either president will touch the DoD budget, mind you...

Anyway, one week to go. Stock up on popcorn, folks

 

Or Muslim traps, depending on your point of view.

 

I would agree with you DR, but the individual report cards have the different pollsters all over the map. Some are consistently bad on all report cards, none are consistently good though.

 

I see. That makes sense.

 

No. Just a member of the reality-based community.

That said, decreasing corporate taxes can have a positive effect on revenue due to multi-national corporations re-locating to your country but, as Kevin A. Hassett told FactCheck.org, this phenomenon has only been seen thus far in small countries like Ireland. The jury is out on whether it would have the same effect in a large country like the US, since we would have to attract a lot more multi-nationals than Ireland* did in order to offset the lost revenue from the businesses that already here.

* Who, at the time they cut their corporate tax rate and began courting multi-nationals, didn't really have the thriving business community that we do. They didn't really have a lot of lost revenue to offset when they lowered their corporate tax rate.

 

Drew, I don't know how much was from that effect, but didn't Regan do that? I mean, lower the corporate tax rate and end up getting more money? It may not have been from primarily multi-national corporations (don't imagine there were as many at the time), though.

 

No. No, he didn't. Revenue went down under Reagan. Way down. It went so far down that even he conceded that he went too far and began reversing his tax cuts, a distinction that Bush Jr is sadly lacking.

 

I've heard that too... Also, I came across a claim that taxes under Reagan were higher than those under Clinton. Would that be true?

 

As a whole? No, it wouldn't. Reagan began the job of returning tax levels to something approaching sanity, the process was continued under H.W. Bush at great political cost (the fact that Bush Sr knowingly placed the good of our nation over his own political future is the very reason I hold him in such high esteem), and was more or less finished under Clinton. Perhaps a demographic or two was taxed higher under Reagan than under Clinton, but I doubt it.

 

From here

This is an analysis of the Reagan tax cuts. I've spoilered it as it is off-topic

Spoiler

During the summer of 1981 the central focus of policy debate was on the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA) of 1981, the Reagan tax cuts. The core of this proposal was a version of the Kemp-Roth bill providing a 25 percent across-the-board cut in personal marginal tax rates. By reducing marginal tax rates and improving economic incentives, ERTA would increase the flow of resources into production, boosting economic growth. Opponents used static revenue projections to argue that ERTA would be a giveaway to the rich because their tax payments would fall.

The criticism that the tax payments of the rich would fall under ERTA was based on a static conception of human behavior. As a 1982 JEC study pointed out,[1] similar across-the-board tax cuts had been implemented in the 1920s as the Mellon tax cuts, and in the 1960s as the Kennedy tax cuts. In both cases the reduction of high marginal tax rates actually increased tax payments by "the rich," also increasing their share of total individual income taxes paid. Unfortunately, estimates of ERTA by the Democrat-controlled CBO continued to show falling tax payment by upper income taxpayers, even after actual IRS data had become available showing a surge of income tax payments by affluent taxpayers.

Given the current interest in tax reform and tax relief, a review of the effects of the Reagan tax cuts on taxpayer behavior and tax burden provides useful information. During the 1980s ERTA had reduced personal tax rates by about 25 percent, while the Tax Reform Act of 1986 chopped them yet again.


Tax Rates and Tax Revenues
High marginal tax rates discourage work effort, saving, and investment, and promote tax avoidance and tax evasion. A reduction in high marginal tax rates would boost long term economic growth, and reduce the attractiveness of tax shelters and other forms of tax avoidance. The economic benefits of ERTA were summarized by President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers in 1994: "It is undeniable that the sharp reduction in taxes in the early 1980s was a strong impetus to economic growth." Unfortunately, the Council could not bring itself to acknowledge the counterproductive effects high marginal tax rates can have upon taxpayer behavior and tax avoidance activities.

Since 1984 the JEC has provided factual information about the impact of the tax cuts of the 1980s. For example, for many years the JEC has published IRS data on federal tax payments of the top 1 percent, top 5 percent, top 10 percent, and other taxpayers. These data show that after the high marginal tax rates of 1981 were cut, tax payments and the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent climbed sharply. For example, in 1981 the top 1 percent paid 17.6 percent of all personal income taxes, but by 1988 their share had jumped to 27.5 percent, a 10 percentage point increase. The graph below illustrates changes in the tax burden during this period.

The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988.

A middle class of taxpayers can be defined as those between the 50th percentile and the 95th percentile (those earning between $18,367 and $72,735 in 1988). Between 1981 and 1988, the income tax burden of the middle class declined from 57.5 percent in 1981 to 48.7 percent in 1988. This 8.8 percentage point decline in middle class tax burden is entirely accounted for by the increase borne by the top one percent.

Several conclusions follow from these data. First of all, reduction in high marginal tax rates can induce taxpayers to lessen their reliance on tax shelters and tax avoidance, and expose more of their income to taxation. The result in this case was a 51 percent increase in real tax payments by the top one percent. Meanwhile, the tax rate reduction reduced the tax payments of middle class and poor taxpayers. The net effect was a marked shift in the tax burden toward the top 1 percent amounting to about 10 percentage points. Lower top marginal tax rates had encouraged these taxpayers to generate more taxable income.

The 1993 Clinton tax increase appears to having the opposite effect on the willingness of wealthy taxpayers to expose income to taxation. According to IRS data, the income generated by the top one percent of income earners actually declined in 1993. This decline is especially significant since the retroactivity of the Clinton tax increase in that year limited the ability of taxpayers to deploy tax avoidance strategies, temporarily resulting in an increase in their tax burden. Moreover, according to the FY 1997 Clinton budget submission, individual income tax revenues as a share of GDP will be lower during the first four years of the Clinton tax increase, which include the effects of the 1990 tax increase, than under the last four years of the Reagan tax changes (FY 1986-89). Furthermore, according to a study published by the National Bureau for Economic Research,[2] the Clinton tax hike is failing to collect over 40 percent of the projected revenue increases.

Incidentally, the claim that unrealistic supply side Reagan Administration revenue projections caused large budget deficits during the 1980s is false. Nonetheless, this false allegation is often used against current tax reform proposals. The official Reagan revenue projections immediately following enactment of ERTA did not assume huge revenue increases, and were actually quite close to the CBO revenue projections. Even the Democrat-controlled CBO projected that deficits would fall after the enactment of the Reagan tax cuts. The real problem was a recession that neither CBO nor OMB could foresee. Even so, individual income tax revenues rose from $244 billion in 1980 to $446 billion in 1989.


Conclusion
The Reagan tax cuts, like similar measures enacted in the 1920s and 1960s, showed that reducing excessive tax rates stimulates growth, reduces tax avoidance, and can increase the amount and share of tax payments generated by the rich. High top tax rates can induce counterproductive behavior and suppress revenues, factors that are usually missed or understated in government static revenue analysis. Furthermore, the key assumption of static revenue analysis that economic growth is not affected by tax changes is di sproved by the experience of previous tax reduction programs. There is little reason to expect static revenue analysis to evaluate the economic or distributional effects of current tax reform proposals much better than it evaluated the Reagan tax program 15 years ago.


Christopher Frenze
Chief Economist to the Vice-Chairman

 

The non-partisan FactCheck article to which I linked makes it quite clear that we have never increased revenue by lowering income taxes. I'll post the full article (which I skipped, because it was off topic) in a spoiler tag for those who can't be bothered to follow the link to read the whole thing.

Spoiler

Jan 16, 2008
Q.) Have tax cuts always resulted in higher tax revenues and more economic growth as many tax cut proponents claim?

A.) No. In fact, economists say tax cuts do not spark enough growth to pay for themselves.

This economic theory is what George H.W. Bush called “voodoo economics.” We called it “supply-side spin” when we wrote about Republican presidential contender John McCain’s claim that President George W. Bush’s tax cuts had increased federal revenues. We found that a slew of government economists – from the Congressional Budget Office, the Treasury Department, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers – all disagreed with that theory, saying that tax cuts may spur economic growth but they lead to revenues that are lower than they would have been if the cuts hadn’t been enacted.

The supply-side theory that tax-cut proponents often espouse was demonstrated by the Laffer curve, named for economist Arthur B. Laffer. The curve suggests that a higher tax rate can generate just as much revenue as a lower rate. But most economists are not Laffer-curve purists. Instead, while they may believe in the power of tax cuts to create an economic boost, they don't say that growth is enough to completely make up for lost revenue. For example, N. Gregory Mankiw, former chair of the current President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, calculated that the growth spurred by capital gains tax cuts pays for about half of lost revenue over a number of years and that payroll tax cuts generate enough growth to pay for about 17 percent of what is lost.

Corporate income taxes, however, may be an exception. There is some evidence that cutting the corporate tax rate can produce more revenue than was projected under the higher rate in the special case of multinational corporations, which can move their money and operations around to take advantage of lower taxes in certain countries. Economists with the pro-business American Enterprise Institute came to that conclusion in a study released in July 2007. They found that lower corporate rates attract enough growth in corporate income to produce higher government revenues. However, one of the authors, Kevin A. Hassett, told FactCheck.org that small countries, such as Ireland, had the most success and that "it may or may not be correct" to apply the study's results to the United States.