Why Tax Breaks Aren’t Enough

Since the Reagan days, conservatives have regularly emphasized how beneficial tax breaks are for the economy. And don’t get me wrong, I’m all for cutting taxes. But what many people don’t get is that the beloved Reaganomics were heavily weighted toward deficit spending. You can’t reduce what you’re taking in and increase what you’re putting out without going into debt.

Democrats are upset that Republicans recently cut tax revenues by about 300 billion dollars. That seems like a lot of money. But it’s not. When you consider that our budget for 2013 was 3.8 trillion dollars, 300 billion dollars doesn’t seem like the biggest part of the problem. Meanwhile, Congress was only able to cut about 20 billion a year from the annual budget. If you can’t see how absurd that is, watch this video.

And we are certainly in debt. So deep, in fact, that we can’t go into much more without a collapse. So as much as we don’t like it, we can’t really afford to cut taxes.

But before you start raging, let me clarify: We can’t afford to cut taxes unless we cut spending by even more. Honestly, I would rather continue paying higher taxes if the civil government would just cut all the extraneous spending and start paying down our national debt. But they won’t.

Anyway, tax breaks will hurt us if we don’t also cut spending. It probably won’t hurt us as much as the Democrats say though. And giving less money to this spendthrift government does warm my heart.

So I think both Republicans and Democrats need to get together on this and recognize the truth that is obvious to pretty much everyone in this country that pays taxes: We’re broke. Our civil government can’t afford its current rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, and it needs to cut spending. Like now. Forget about tax breaks if you aren’t going to cut spending. Because these halfway compromises are the worst. We’ll still have high taxes even after the breaks, the government will spend even more money, and the debt will just keep sky rocketing. Oh, and the economy will suffer too.

12 responses

  1. Tell Republicans to stop talking about increasing the military budget. That’s one reason why they don’t want to talk about the debt.

  2. Base line budgeting. Every year auto increase is counted as 0 or =. Our current Govt. in DC is NOT interested in a balanced budget. Remember Sequester? Well they got rid of that and it only cut the rate of the auto increase. Remember all that fuss over nothing.

    • Whoever has the most money gets the best tax deal. Remember what Leona Helmsley said about her wealth & status? “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”

  3. What this economy needs is to replace the income tax, in all its forms, with a Federal sales tax of 5% and that has a cap of 10% written into the Constitution, so that this moronic Congress can’t raise it higher than that. No exceptions, and it will be on everything that is sold at the end user, consumer, level. That one thing would cure a lot of ills. If the Government can’t get by on what they get from that, then they can shrink the government until they can.

    • Sales tax is one of the most regressive taxes of all taxes and not fair to working people. Tax the rich; tax Wall St; they have the money – working people do not.

  4. The problem is that the prior in Washington don’t cut spending. They raise spending and call it a cut. The “extreme” destroyed raised spending by $15 billion, but both parties campaigned against this “draconian cut”. If the folks in Gomorrah by the Potomac limited their spending of our money to that which is authorized in the US Constitution they wouldn’t come close to running a deficit.

  5. This country is now a plutocracy, of the money, by the money and for the money. The uber-wealthy like the Koch Bros. have Nazi connections and think greed and power is a game. The Wal-Mart brats fail to understand that actually sharing will make them even wealthier because their workers will be more able to buy more of their crap…

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