Whatever...
Taxes are as low as they've been in four decades but they're still way too high for the tea...oops ME...party.
The top bracket during WWII was prox 90%...but we run our latest wars on our kids' credit cards and handed out tax cuts because Homey don't wanna pay that game.
Our generation is a freakin' disgrace.
Taxes are low but the debt is rising way faster than taxation can fix. You could tax at 100% and still need a very long time to pay off the debts being incurred. It's unsustainable.
It would appear that you're confusing the two different sides of the balance sheet. I doubt you'd get any serious argument from a Tea Party or even just a boring old fiscal conservative, if you said tax rates had to be frozen exactly where they are and government had to immediately, not over years, right now, balance their budget. Income equals spending.
Arguing for higher tax rates while not paying attention to spending is beyond ridiculous.
I don't see it as a disgrace that your generation is trying to reign in the idiots that they elected and gave a blank check to, and allowed them to buy votes with those low value dollars.
My Boomer parents followed a pretty typical trajectory in life. Started as slackers who spent all their time doing dope and not working as flower children well into their 20s, one figured out after the divorce that they needed a real job and worked their butt off at a private firm that was eventually bought by one of the largest firms on the planet and was there over 25 years, promotion from secretarial job all the way to managing a national division. The other half heartedly went to college and realized they'd be drafted soon so signed up to do a specific job and applied themselves after military service to that field and also ended up a national level Sales Director for a private firm that sells 80% of a particular type of electronic component that every electronic device on the planet uses.
If anything, both paid too little attention to what their peers who had less skill and more natural sociopathic behaviors were doing who went into politics and didn't stop them.
The single most effective way to change people's thinking is to do away with withholding, and make people pay their taxes quarterly or annually.
Won't work. Every dollar is taxed multiple times from earning to spending. Your sales tax is printed on every receipt you get. Very few people even notice it, let alone move to somewhere it's lower or gone, or demand it be different. They might try to buy "big ticket" items from a county with a lower sales tax rate if they pay any attention at all. And none say a word about ever increasing "fees" as hidden taxes on various things or worse, think their original old style taxes can't pay for the things the new fees claim to. (The total amount went up, the services actually went down. Nobody notices. Where did the money go?)
There's a road sign on our $2.3M dollar freshly paved dirt road. It says, "Paid for by your county sales and use taxes." It's a flat out lie. Half of the road was paid for by a State grant. Which the county folks think is "free money" and don't like being reminded that we all pay increasing taxes and fees to the State every year, too.
As long as they can think they got a "deal" on the road they can't be bothered with the bigger picture that $2.3M for four miles of pavement that no one needed or wanted, is a frivolous waste of everyone's money.
The lack of hard spending controls on these idiots is the real problem. I have been asking around and I can't find a single person in the only rural neighborhood served by this four miles of road (and two ranch houses) who asked nor wanted the road paved. The closest thing I've come to a "reason to do it" was the volunteer fire department says it'll be a little easier maybe to get north of the station in winter and even then, they admit they've never missed a call that direction or had a truck get stuck on that road, in their entire existence.
$2.3M dollars for essentially nothing. And this is at a local level where there are hard money limits on spending. The waste and large numbers grow many more decimal points at each consecutive layer above the local level. And we have no control over it nor interest in controlling it.
We all know what needs to be done. We do it every day in our own homes. A balanced budget that can't be busted, a simplified tracking system of collecting the dollars doe needs vs wants and maintenance vs building, and slash every bit of overhead and costs that don't make sense once the input number is known. Nobody is going to do it that needs to pander to some contrived made up grouping of people in a popularity contest (voting).
Tim wants higher taxes but can't articulate why he can't demand the wasteful spending on things can't be used to pay for whatever his pet projects are instead. Why? Because he knows he can't control his politicians' spending any more than I can.
The whole thing is an amazing farce. The joke is on those who believe taxes are paying for things. We're lucky we make the interest payments. We aren't paying down the principal.
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