{"id":10635,"date":"2010-07-27T20:38:33","date_gmt":"2010-07-28T03:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=10635"},"modified":"2010-07-27T20:38:33","modified_gmt":"2010-07-28T03:38:33","slug":"demvsgoptaxplans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=10635","title":{"rendered":"The Democratic Tax Plan Versus The Republican Tax Plan (with pictures!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Crossposted on “Alas<\/a>” and on “TADA<\/a>.”)<\/em><\/p>\n

Things are still in flux, but it seems likely that Republicans are going to coalesce around extending the Bush tax plan (the legislation Republicans wrote a decade ago created temporary tax cuts, so they’ll need to be actively extended by Congress in order to continue). Democrats seem likely to propose letting the Bush tax cuts expire for households with over $250,000 in income (about 2% of taxpayers), but cutting taxes for many with household incomes under $250,000.<\/p>\n

The Wall Street Journal<\/a> helpfully charts the competing proposals:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The only persuasive argument for the Republican plan is that it’s foolish to let tax cuts expire during a recession. But tax cuts as stimulus are most effective when the people getting the tax cuts aren’t rich (since poor people are more likely to spend the money immediately, and more consumer spending is the one thing our economy most desperately needs). By moving the tax cuts from the rich savers to middle-class and lower-class spenders, Obama’s tax plan may well be more <\/em>stimulative.<\/p>\n

An argument we’re likely to hear from conservatives is that the top 2% of earners already pay a huge portion of federal income taxes, relative to the rest of the country.. That’s true, but they also own a huge proportion of the country’s wealth — most of it, in fact<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s not unjust that the people who own most of everything should also pay most of the taxes. (And in fact, the rich are not as paying as large a portion of taxes as some conservatives claim, once all the other taxes Americans pay — not just Federal income taxes, but payroll taxes, sales taxes, state and local taxes — are included.)<\/p>\n

Finally, some Conservatives are going to voice a philosophical objection to the idea that some Americans will wind up paying no taxes at all. But again — we’re just talking about Federal income taxes here. There are plenty of other taxes, especially payroll taxes, that are paid for by a broader slice of Americans.<\/p>\n

UPDATE<\/strong>: Actually, the Obama administration has proposed not extending the Bush tax cuts for individual filers making $200,000 or above, and joint filers making $250,000 or above. That’s a bit different from what I claimed above; sorry for my mess-up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Crossposted on “Alas” and on “TADA.”) Things are still in flux, but it seems likely that Republicans are going to coalesce around extending the Bush tax plan (the legislation Republicans wrote a decade ago created temporary tax cuts, so they’ll … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crossposted-on-tada","category-economics-and-the-like"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}