2011/07/20/0836/link

link

• link: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/not-taking-other-people-s-money 576486.html
• title: Not Taking Other People's Money
• author: Arthur C. Brooks
• date: 2011-07-18
• source: The Weekly Standard
• summary: “The problem with socialists, according to Margaret Thatcher, is that "they always run out of other people's money." We haven't hit that point just yet, but we have hit our nation's legal credit limit of $14.3 trillion. To avoid defaulting on our loans, policymakers must raise that limit.” ...so that we can continue borrowing other people's money.
• topics: other people's money 2011 US debt ceiling socialism/smear
• example of: bad argument straw man socialism/smear
• arguments:
  • The US government should solve its financial problems the way a family would, by reducing expenditures rather than raising revenue.
  • Countries that attempted to solve budgetary problems by reducing expenditures have had a better success rate than those that did so by raising taxes.
• quotes:
  • But even the president knows he can't solve the fiscal crisis by helping himself to bigger and bigger chunks of the income of America's most successful people.
    • This is followed by a straw man argument: "Even if individuals earning more than $200,000 were taxed at a 100 percent marginal rate – and we confiscated their passports so they could not flee – the take would come to $1.27 trillion, or just 77 percent of this year's deficit." Nobody is suggesting taxing at that rate; the serious suggestion is merely to restore taxation of the very rich to Reagan-era levels, which would solve enough of the problem as to render necessary cuts less extreme.