Tax The Wealthy And Corporations A Lot More
Greeks adopt ‘won’t pay’ attitude
What happens when you can’t raise taxes
Andy Kroll fact-checks Gov. Haley Barbour’s claim that “we” — meaning Mississippi under Barbour’s leadership — “dug out of a $720 million budget hole in two years without raising anybody’s taxes.” As it turns out, Barbour raised all sorts of taxes during his time in office: He created an excise tax on cigarettes and then raised it, increased taxes on hospital beds and businesses that lay off workers, and tried and failed to pass a new tax on hospital revenue.
Mandatory Spending to Exceed all Federal Revenues — 50 Years Ahead of ScheduleI don’t really care whether Barbour is a hypocrite. What’s interesting about this is that it’s a window into the sort of policies that Republican executives resort to when they decide that transparent, broad-based revenue measures such as income and sales taxes are off the table. Barbour, to keep people from noticing his tax hikes, ended up passing some fairly regressive, narrowly targeted, economically inefficient taxes. He still had to raise taxes, but he ended up doing a worse job of it. And as Kroll goes on to note, because you can’t raise all that much revenue by taxing hospital beds, Barbour had to make extremely deep cuts in public services such as education. Mississippi ranked 48th in Forbes magazine’s list of “best states for businesses and careers,” and Barbour’s decision to cut education funding by $520 million probably isn’t helping his state develop the sort of skilled workforce it needs to lift its position in those rankings. But it is helping him run for president. That’s not a great incentive structure.
Dumbing Deficits Down
Think of it this way: Congress could, with a stroke of a pen, cut Social Security benefits in half. But it couldn’t do the same with health spending: Medicare can’t suddenly start paying to replace only half a heart valve or mandate that bypass operations stop halfway through.
Limiting health costs, therefore, requires a smarter approach. We need to work harder on prevention, which can be much cheaper than a cure. We need to find innovative ways of managing health care. And, above all, we need to know what works and what doesn’t so that Medicare and Medicaid can say no to expensive procedures with little or no medical benefit. “So-called comparative effectiveness research” is central to any rational attempt to deal with America’s fiscal problems.
But today’s Republicans just aren’t into rationality. They claim to care deeply about deficits — but they’ve spent the past two years putting cynical, demagogic attacks on any attempt to actually deal with long-run deficits at the heart of their campaign strategy.
Here’s a recent example. In his new book, Mike Huckabee — the current leader in polls asking Republicans whom they want to nominate in 2012 — attacks the Obama stimulus because it included funds for, yes, comparative effectiveness research: “The stimulus didn’t just waste your money; it planted the seeds from which the poisonous tree of death panels will grow.” Will others in the G.O.P. stand up and say that Mr. Huckabee is wrong, that Medicare needs to know which medical procedures actually work? Don’t hold your breath.Revolving door: The sad, hypocritical retirement of Evan Bayh
How House GOP spending cuts would add up to more spending later
The tax expenditure state in one graph
The SEC Employees Watching Porn At Work Were Making Over $200,000/Year
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