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I like the job-creating logic behind hiking taxes on high-earners: if your boss' business grosses over $1M, the gov't should take a big bite out of him--an extra 5%, plus a small Obamacare tax, etc. Call it 6%.

Okay, I get the tax part, the part I'm not clear on is a) if Big Gov takes an extra $60k from your evil boss, how many people will that make him hire?, and b) that makes your job more secure, um, how?

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Does anyone actually claim those tax hikes for the wealthy will create jobs, though? Maybe a few government jobs, but that's about it.

The logic -- as far as I can tell -- is that, broadly speaking, the number of jobs the wealthy create doesn't have a very strong dependence on their tax rate. How much that's true can be debated all day, of course. But when do you stop? If a 1% tax cut is good, is a 10% tax cut better? (One can argue this from the tax hike perspective as well... but does a 1% tax cut generate as many or more jobs than a 1% tax hike eliminates?)

Tax rates are, I'm thinking, something of a 2nd-order effect on job creation; simple supply and demand are the 1st-order effects: Even if you cut my boss's tax rate by 5%, he's not going to go out and hire anyone new unless we somehow end up with more customers. Just taking, e.g., $100k out of his own pocket to hire someone who isn't paid for by increased sales would be charity -- and I'm sure he can find far better charites than some out-of-work engineer. I realize that well, OK, maybe he'll have more money to advertise with, so we'll have more sales and hire more people, but that's again a 2nd-order effect, with a time constant on the order of many months to years, I expect.

This whole game of "extending tax cuts" is pretty stupid anyway: Just make the cuts permanent, if that's what you want; it's just whining to complain that a bill designed to expire after a certain amount of time will, in fact, expire.

---Joel

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The truth is the whole issue is a class-warfare red herring. Even President Obama predicts the tax hikes would only raise $70B a year, and others predict about half that. The deficit, meanwhile, is $1,400 billion.

I'm not taking a position, just pointing out that the revenue from hiking taxes on >$250k AGI earners is insignificant compared to our spending problem.

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Slight correction: nobody's taxes are going down, the debate today is whether to raise them.

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"Permanent" is another red-herring. The truth is Congress can set taxes whenever and wherever they want. There's no such thing as permanent.

The fact is that long-term, tax rates must inevitably be headed way up, to pay for all this 'free' stuff. They have to be, unless we plan to default (or cut viciously). We could outgrow a smaller deficit, but not this one, not $1.67 on the dollar.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

You mean these guys, right?

Cheers! Rich

I'd rather see the ban, at least now but there is a valid argument to keep earmarks; directing the president to spend on certain projects. Without them the executive has the all of the spending authority.

BTW, one of my Senators (Shelby) is a pork king. He is starting to get some real blow-back from the Tea Partiers, here. He should be glad he ran for reelection this year.

Economics is the easiest I have ever taken. ECON 199. I didn't study for a single minute and got a 98. Easy 'A'. The highest level math in the course was arithmetic -- not even algebra.

If people find this challenging, and these people are running my country.... f*ck, I'd better move. Now.

Tim

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Well, bank stocks look good at current low levels if consumers start making reliable payments on loans with free money. I don't see how government money fixes anything, but if it briefly improves credit, maybe Nancy is right.

Moe Ansari thinks B of A might be a good bet, but maybe he's a liberal.

-Bill

I wouldn't touch 'em with a 10 megafarad capacitor.

Actually, if I had a 10 megafarad capacitor, fully charged, maybe I would...

-- Cheers, James Arthur

If you had such an item, you would be rich.

If fully charged is 1 volt, it wouldn't be worth much.

John

The deal just cut reduces the employee's FICA payments, but not the employer's. So people can buy more Chinese junk, but employers have no added incentive to hire and actually make stuff.

Makes no sense to me.

John

I got a couple of those 2,600F caps Bill Beaty mentioned. They're fierce.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Obama's mandatory health insurance was just declared illegal by a federal judge.

--
For the last time:  I am not a mad scientist, I'm just a very ticked off
scientist!!!

It makes perfect sense. It's just a different way of doing "rebates". Instead of a check for $800 from Uncle Sugar, you get 26 $30 checks from your boss. It's from the same yo-yos, did you expect differently?

It'll be appealed.

Though I _was_ overjoyed at the judge's reasoning, as to the definition of a participant in commerce... if you've never bought health insurance, you can't be forced to start... that would be a penalty, not a tax ;-)

We're in a war... the feds versus the states. I fear who will win. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
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I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Sure, but when you convert joules into KWH, and convert the KWHs into dollars, they don't sound so impressive.

John

10 megafarads at 1V ain't much, but since we're dreaming, charging to 1kV roughly equals 1 kiloton of TNT. Admittedly, still not enough to impress B of A.

Gasoline's got a lot more energy density and it's cheaper, but even the little cap's fun--a kiloamp you can carry in your pocket is pretty cool. (i^2 * r), and so forth...

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Japan cuts corporate tax rates to encourage growth. We cut individual rates to encourage spending. I suppose we'll buy more Japanese cars with our extra money.

John

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Oh I only meant to move the tax from your set of books to the employee's. Not a 'real' tax cut, but yeah seems like it would have been better to give the stimulus to employeers to hire people, rather than to people to buy Chinesse junk. (Or to me..where it will just end up in the bank....paying zero interest..)

George H.