Conn,
Where do you think funding for McCain's refundable health care tax credit comes from? This "tax" credit is available to folks who don't pay taxes, in the sense you defined, either. Moreover, there are several refundable credits available for businesses who don't pay any income taxes. Why is it that you only complain about this type of thing when a poor person is receiving the benefit. Having said that, I want to move on to your complaint about Obama wanting to expand the EITC. The EITC is a conservative idea, similiar to Milton Friedman's Negative Income Tax. I doubt you are old enough to have read much real conservative economics in real time, but the concept of the NIT is described in Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose. The idea is to provide low income people with a min. standard of living while preserving an incentive to work. Unfortunately, many new conservatives don't give a damn about low income people. Read a little behind the history of the EITC and you might change your mind. You might disagree with Obama's expansion of the credit, but I don't see how someone can object to it in

You can either believe that there a separate social security trust fund exists or you can believe obama is giving a tax break to 95% of Americans, but you can't believe both. Bill's observation that Obama is not a party line liberal is wrong. He is actually voted party line on almost every major issue (not that there is anything inherently wrong with doing so). http://projects.washingtonpost.com/c...167/key-votes/

Quoting gwlaw99: You can either believe that there a separate social security trust fund exists or you can believe obama is giving a tax break to 95% of Americans, but you can't believe both.

The lack of a separate trust fund for Social Security has been a liberal talking point since Al Gore debated George W. Bush in 2000.

Conn is right that Social Security taxes are entirely dedicated to Social Security. The current excess is invested in Treasury bills and that debt is held in the SS Trust Fund for later redemption. Bill is correct the effect is that dollars surrendered by workers for Social Security wind up shoring up the general budget - for the time being. The date when this stops shifts around, but I seem to remember something like 2018 or so as to when SS tax receipts go into balance and then into the red on an operational basis. After that general revenue funds, on a net basis, must be dedicated to the redemption of debt to fund benefits. That goes on until something like the late 2040s and then the T-bill debt is exhausted and either benefits are scaled back or taxes are raised or both.
It was the changes in the tax rates back in the 1980s forced Social Security to take in much more than it needed for a benefits that were forecast for many, many years. It is highly regressive and was supported by Tip O'Neill

President Obama is not going to have the money to even moderately fund the 175 programs he is proposing to do. I don't think people are using that as a reason to vote for him anyway since it's such a blatant canard. John

Yay! Scher wants to (effectively) eliminate or at least reduce the payroll tax. Sure beats forced investment in Social Security and is even better than Bush's S.S. plan. It'd be better than having the money go into the governments hands. Conservatives couldn't make a better argument than Scher has just made for them.

I don't want to break up what is already a a good discussion of social security, fica taxes, and tax credits here but I did want to mention this growing debate on the econ blogs about whether the credit crisis is real. Bill and I had it slated for discussion but simply run out of time:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ma...is-the-cr.html
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freee...0/analysis.cfm
http://economistsview.typepad.com/ec...f-the-con.html
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ma...yths-of-t.html
http://economistsview.typepad.com/ec...yths.html#more http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/...ing-times.html
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/...ot_in_a_l.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/...knowledge.html

glh17 writes:

The EITC is a conservative idea, similiar to Milton Friedman's Negative Income Tax. I doubt you are old enough to have read much real conservative economics in real time, but the concept of the NIT is described in Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose. The idea is to provide low income people with a min. standard of living while preserving an incentive to work. Unfortunately, many new conservatives don't give a damn about low income people. Read a little behind the history of the EITC and you might change your mind. You might disagree with Obama's expansion of the credit, but I don't see how someone can object to it in principle.

I am well aware of the conservative/libertarian origins of the EITC and its ideological relationship to the negative income tax. I still think its a great idea and we should move towards it. But Obama's tax plans are a complete perversion of Friedman's idea. Friedman never envisioned a NIT/EITC being chopped up into a million smaller targeted initiatives so that all social and economic policy would be administered by the IRS. As I said in the diavolg, conservatives introduced this policy to win

I guess it is nice that conservatives care about government spending again. There are two problems with the "If too few people pay income taxes, then too few people will care about limiting government spending?" line. 1) Just because you don't pay income taxes doesn't mean you don't pay other explicit and implicit taxes. You still have some money in the game. However, the problem is bigger than that. If I want a program that gives free back massages (of a non-sexual variety, though I'll allow that for phase 2 ) to people with a bad back, the benefit will be much greater for me than the cost, nearly regardless of my income level. That costs are dispersed and benefits are concentrated makes the taxation question almost irrelevant. 2) The GOP has made its living divorcing taxation from spending. This allows them to talk about taxes as "punishment" not costs. It has also allowed them to give the American people the government they want (a lot) at the price they want (a lot less). This is the irony of the charge of "tax and spend liberal". In truth, the only alternative they offer is "borrow and spend

Ouf, this was painful.
Conn is utterly miserable and bored with this election by now, and Bill just happily trots along.
These two guys like each other too much for Bill to put the knife in and twist it where it hurts.
Let's put Conn out of his misery, and give him next Friday off. There must be some conservatives left to fill in.

Let's put Conn out of his misery, and give him next Friday off. There must be some conservatives left to fill in.

Don't start feeling too sorry for Conn yet. He will be back out here the day after McCain's loss and the day after Obama's inauguration to work on the conservative opposition agenda. The election is nobody's funeral and everybody's fresh start. Bill makes the right point -- that now is the time to shift gears and start organizing to hold Obama and his Congress accountable for their promises to the progressive base of the Dem. Party. The Pelosi-Reid '06 Congress has been a craven disappointment, using Bush executive branch power and the impending presidential elections as excuses for doing nothing. The excuses are gone. The 08 Congress and Obama deserve only the shortest of honeymoons.

We need more than just a change in the presidency. A massive amount of the Congress was either paid off or asleep at the switch to let this Wall Street party go bust take place. What gets me about it is I'll help pay for it's cleanup and didn't receive an invitation to attend. Oh well that's not the only extravaganza I missed. Like Conn I go to bed too early. John P.S. (No, I'm not Mickey Kaus/Kausfiles) I recently learned that OFHEO is an oversight group created by Congress in 1992 whose sole job is to oversee Fannie and Freddie. Their annual budget is 65 million a year and has 200 employees. Another questionable bureauocracy.

Conn,
The point I was trying to make is that the principle behind EITC is the same as that of the NIT. The refundable tax credit is a preferable approach to poverty than either the traditional welfare system or the minimum wage. The EITC incentivizes work over welfare and doesn’t generate the negative employment effect of the minimum wage. Conservatives/libertarians used to support this idea. What I hear coming out the Republican party today is that the EITC is just another form of welfare.
Now, you may be right about the micro details of Obama’s tax credits and that Friedman would not support them. [I’m not sure about this because in addition to the NIT he supported tax credits (or vouchers, their first cousins) for education and maybe even housing vouchers for low income housing (not sure about the latter). His preference was to use the IRS rather than other bureaucracies for income redistribution.] But, I think the GOP’s change in thinking about certain types of tax credits (apparently McCain's health care, R & D, and others are exceptions.) is simply an attempt to refute Obama’s claim of cutting taxes by redefining a tax cut to not include a refundable portion of the tax credit for those whose taxable income falls below the minimum necessary to pay taxes. Obama’s plan might be a corruption of the Friedman idea, but the GOP’s approach seems to throw the baby out with the bath water. Thanks

Zinn on potential

80% of American workers pay more in their mandatory FICA withdrawals then they do in federal income taxes. Maybe we need some relief in the former as well as the latter. John

Conn: I am quite sympathetic to this:

Friedman never envisioned a NIT/EITC being chopped up into a million smaller targeted initiatives ...

and other things you went on to say about complications and opacity in the tax code. However, I think this [emph. added]

... so that all social and economic policy would be administered by the IRS.

is a phrase you would do well to abandon. I'm sure it plays well with the people for whom "limited government" and "cut taxes for those who create jobs" are cherished mantras, but it sounds dishonest to other ears. The IRS does not administer policy. They are accountants and cops, basically. They carry out orders, nothing more. Now, granted, the approach of fiddling with a million knobs in the tax code is an attempt to implement policy objectives, and we can agree that there is a lot to criticize about that. But it's not the IRS who is fiddling with these knobs; it's Congress and the President. What you're doing here, it seems to me, is trying to latch onto an image (ZOMG!!! Teh Taxman!!!) that already has strong negative connotations, trying to build your case by invoking a bogeyman that really has nothing to do with

Quoting gwlaw99: You can either believe that there a separate social security trust fund exists ...

Yes, to amplify AemJeff: who, exactly, believes that there is a separate social security trust fund? Sounds like a straw man to me.

Just how do big-government conservatives think they are going to have any credibility with libertarians, that some kind of future political alliance between the two will somehow resusitate the GOP? As for a future libertarian/liberal alliance, what esteem do Jeffersonian Democrats enjoy in the urban Democratic Party that such an alliance is anything more than dreaming at the moon? The GOP is headed for a two-generation trip to the woodshed. The resusitation of the GOP will not likely occur until voters not yet born have no memory of the betrayal by the GOP and K Street Republicans of small-government principles. If anyone in today's GOP hopes to rebuild their party based upon a common belief in small government with libertarians, they have zero credibility. Perhaps Governors Palin and Jindhal are the future of the ideology of conservatism. If so, that means evangelicism will continue to dominate our political right. Arguably, the American public is fed up with religious issues playing a dominating role in one of our major political parties. But libertarianism, unlike conservatism or liberalism, is a philosophy, not an ideology, which helps explain why libertarians perform so abysmally during elections. Libertarians

ha! no one in politics could possibly have less credibility than a libertarian.
i think their lack of success may have more to do with this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwpnH_OTZio
(fforward to 1:15)
....the death knell of libertarianism. I grinned a big grin...
I do appreciate his honesty, though, it's not often you can get someone to admit that their personal philosophy is wrong (especially an old person.) I guess it takes a worldwide financial catastrophe to get people to change.
my prediction is that most libertarians won't change one bit and also won't apologize or admit to any inconsistencies in their religion at all.

Go Tartans!

What a relief after last week. That said ... this "payroll vs income tax" argument seems like a shell game. In the field of software, I go back and forth between being an employee and an independent contractor. When I'm an employee, I tell them I have "zero dependents" and my check gets a ton of taxes taken out, and then in April, I don't have to pay anything extra, or I get a small refund. So I "don't pay any income taxes", according to you. When I'm an independent contractor, I get 100% of all my checks and then in April I have to pay a ton of money and then each 3 months I have to pay "quarterlies" in anticipation of future earnings. It's 6 of one and half a dozen of the other. The bottom line is that if you make less than 250K a year, regardless of how you make it, you're WORSE OFF UNDER McCAIN and yet the lying scumbag robocallers are convincing the great unwashed <$250k/yr masses that Obama will increase their taxes.