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ORIGINAL: Marc2b

How does cutting taxes equate to a banker tossing a poor person to the wolves so he can be rich again?   

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...because, as we've already covered, when taxes are cut government spending has to be cut as well. And when government spending is cut it isn't the spending that benefits bankers that goes down....its spending that takes people off the streets, or funds medicine for the poor, or helps educate the worst off in society.
Tax cuts historically widen the gap between rich and poor.

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ORIGINAL: Marc2b

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...because, as we've already covered, when taxes are cut government spending has to be cut as well. And when government spending is cut it isn't the spending that benefits bankers that goes down....its spending that takes people off the streets, or funds medicine for the poor, or helps educate the worst off in society.
Tax cuts historically widen the gap between rich and poor.

I reject the premise that cutting taxes means having to cut basic social services.  But for the sake of argument, let’s say that it does – what choice do we have?  We can either take our medicine and start to get better or we can keep whining about how bad the medicine will taste and keep getting sicker.

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ORIGINAL: Marc2b
I reject the premise that cutting taxes means having to cut basic social services. 

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But for the sake of argument, let’s say that it does – what choice do we have?  We can either take our medicine and start to get better or we can keep whining about how bad the medicine will taste and keep getting sicker.

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ORIGINAL: MzMia
Unemployment is Up in all 50 States! What is the solution?

As a politician I suggest we should change the definition of employment to incorporate those currently employed in the activity of looking for work.

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ORIGINAL: Marc2b
To which I will add: this is also why we need to cut taxes, putting more wealth back into the private sector to generate more jobs and thus more taxpayers, leading to an eventual increase in government revenue. 

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If you increase government spending to meet the greater demand for services you have to do one of two things, increase deficit spending (and we’ve all seen where that leads) or increase taxes which leads to less jobs and thus less tax payers as well as an increase in those needing such services.  As I said before, there is no quick fix and there is no fix that doesn’t involve sacrifice and hardship.  I wish it could be otherwise but reality doesn’t give a shit about what we want. 

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I've heard this argument before, but it really doesn't wash.  What's wrong in all of the situations you're tossing out there is that these folks make up a very small portion of the workforce

They make up a small portion of the workforce because they have been locked out of the workforce by minimum wage laws.  Who knows how many more would be working if such jobs were available?

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 If the people who can't afford to pay more made a living wage, they could afford to pay more.

Yes, but they are doing so at the expense of others.

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We're going to pay one way or the other - either in higher prices to support higher wages or in higher taxes to support higher subsidies.

No.  I reject that.  I don’t want to keep repeating myself but one of my points is that we can go the lower taxes route and get closer to where we want to be in time.  It won’t be easy but it is the only real option we have. 

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I dislike the notion of pushing arguments to the extreme in order to “disprove” them since any argument can be made to look absurd if you push it far enough; but perhaps this is a case where it can make a useful point.  If, say, a ten dollar an hour minimum wage is good then why not twenty dollars an hour, or fifty?  The answer should be obvious.  Where’s the magic line that creates a perfect balance?  The answer is: there is no such line because people are different.  Different needs, different wants, different goals, different support systems (i.e. family), different abilities, different levels of education, different belief systems, etc.  Treating people as if they were exactly the same is just one of the reasons why centrally planned economic systems fail.  People will react differently to similar circumstances.

It all boils down to this:  every time the minimum wage is increased jobs at the lowest end of the economics scale are lost.  There’s no way to convince me that people with low paying jobs are worse off than people with no jobs.  You’re looking for the perfect but the perfect is the enemy of the good.       

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....how about reducing the gap between rich and poor? A little bit of redistribution of wealth? Instead of making rich people even more rich and hoping the poor will catch up, why not concentrate on the bottom end of the ladder for a while.

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There's an oft-used argument that only by concentrating on the rich will wealth be generated.....we've had decades of that paradigm. It hasn't worked particulary well, or at least whatever gains it makes are transitory.
i'd be happy with the idea of tax cuts, if there was a guarantee that the government spending at the lower end of the wealth spectrum was protected and the spending at the other end bore the brunt of the cuts........but you and i both know thats unlikely in the extreme......

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Cutting taxes does not create jobs, nor does raising wages destroy them.

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Cutting taxes does not create jobs, nor does raising wages destroy them.  It's supply-side dogma, and there's no evidence at all to support it.  There's a really interesting graphical representation of this here - http://www.miseryindex.us/urbymonth.asp  

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The reality is that we have no choice but to increase government spending on these things.  There are lots of people losing their jobs right now, and it's going to be damned difficult for many of them to get a new one any time soon.  There are lots of other folks who were already on the edge whose hours and benefits are being cut.  There are a lot more people applying for unemployment, food stamps, housing and medical assistance.  The foodshelves, free clinics and shelters are being overwhelmed.  A lot of these programs were already struggling.  There are a lot of non-profit agencies that helped low-income working folks that are closing up.

These people you seem to want to cut off are folks who've been working and paying taxes and contributing to the economy.  They did all of the stuff they were supposed to do and now through no fault of their own, they're out of a job.  They need help now.  They can't wait until the economy turns around.  What do you propose we do with them? 

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This is often repeated, but there's no evidence that it's true.  Teens and housewives and seniors are competing for part-time jobs with full-time working people who can't make ends meet.  If the full-time working folk were making enough to work one job, there'd be plenty of jobs for the part-timers, don't you think?

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Their low-low wages are are subsidizing your low-low prices. You are getting your bargains at their expense.  

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It's the only option you want to consider, it's not the only option we have.

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Reread your previous paragraph.  Who is making perfect the enemy of the good?

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You're right, there is no perfect balance.  There is no one living wage line that can be drawn.  However, we know for an absolute fact that it's a lot more than $7.25/hr, which is what minimum wage will be on 7/24/09.  Our commissioner of labor here in MN - a Republican and no fan of social spending or the minimum wage - said on a radio program a few years back that a living wage was $12-$15 an hour.  He was quick to add that we shouldn't do anything about that for the same reasons you've given, but he put it out there.  I'd be happy to start by bumping the minimum wage up to $12 (with increases indexed to inflation) and see how it works. 

If jobs on the low end are lost when the minimum wage is increased those losses are being offset by gains in better paying jobs, because the unemployment rate overall isn't affected.  The theory that cutting taxes will create jobs and allow us to cut government spending relies on the people working those jobs becoming consumers and taxpayers.  More people spending and paying in, fewer people taking out, we all pay less.  If they aren't paid enough to do that, the whole thing falls apart.  Creating wealth doesn't do us any good at all if we're also creating poverty.

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ORIGINAL: Marc2b

Well, I'm off to a Superbowl party.  I wonder how many people are employed producing all that food and beverage we'll be downing?

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ORIGINAL: Real_Trouble

Popeye,

I will begin to attempt to read your posts when you begin to attempt to format them using paragraphs instead of hitting return after every sentence, and not a moment before (I do not look forward to this day, however, as from what I can tell, your commentary is so poorly informed it would probably take several magnitudes more space than you use to say it in order to refute it).