Budget talks: This is getting nasty

For one it will slam the breaks on private equity investments in small companies and start ups. There would be a lot less incentive to make high risk investments based on smaller returns.

 

Again, if all this devotion to the well-being of the rich is effective in the way you describe - because things have been as they are for years when talking about income tax rates vs capital gains tax rates - where are the jobs?

The promise of a rising tide lifting all boats seems pretty hollow after all these years.

Why am I paying 35%+ tax on my wages when Warren Buffett pays 15% on his "income?"

 

This ... 100 times over.

I'm so tired of the so-called "job creators" crowing about taxes when they aren't creating jobs right now in the most favorable tax conditions they've ever had.

Hollow doesn't begin to describe their argument.

 

Not saying it's right or wrong. Just saying it's a possible consequence of what will happen.

As hard as it might be to accept, business decisions have to be made based on the reality of the numbers and not the greater good.

 

The devil is in the numbers, though. When a profitable business expects a profit margin from a boom period and apply it to a time that isn't a boom period, they're just hoarding money because they can. Its why CEOs are compensated way beyond the percentage they were just a decade ago.

That's not cold, hard numbers, it avaricious greed that does no one but a few lucky individuals any good.

 

I don't disagree with that, but in an age when everything has to be on the table - including cuts in defense and SSI and basic services and so forth - then everything has to be on the table. Including some of the sacred cows. We have plenty of historical evidence (Prop 13 in California, for example) that simply cutting taxes without regard to consequences is not just ineffective, but disastrous.

We live in a completely new kind of economy, and have to find new ways to make it work for everyone. Cutting our own throats in service of an aristocracy of billionaires isn't the answer.

 

Let's think about your argument. You say that tax conditions are highly favorable and jobs are not being created. Are we to take it that you believe that, if tax conditions are less favorable, job creation will then pick up?

 

I took Bubbler's point, and it's one I agree with, to mean that "job creation" is a red herring that the business set crows about with no intention of creating jobs, at least none here. The numbers of the past 30 years bear that out pretty indisputably. Accepting that as an argument to keep these taxes lower is just leading us further down a flawed economic model.

 

No. I'm saying the entire argument is bullshit, designed to cover individuals and corporations that want to boondoggle gullible people into thinking they're getting screwed somehow and who desire continued cover for being greedy as fuck.

I don't think the "taxes" that are being proposed have anything to do with job creation one way or another. It's a horseshit excuse. Jobs were created in the 2000s, 90s, 80s, etc., with much-less favorable tax conditions than now. They're full of shit.

 

It's all about ROI and risk. If capitol gains tax is raised it might be a better decision to look to tax free safe investments.

 

It's not about getting screwed. It's about moving the money elsewhere to more favorable risk reward scenarios.

 

The money is already in those more favorable risk-reward scenarios and is not serving the purpose that's being cited here. We are not talking about creating a new tax, we are talking about undoing more recent exemptions; the exemptions have been the status quo for a decade or more, and if they were going to work in job creation we'd be seeing some evidence of it by now.