Open Thread

Reagan tax cuts and Bush tax cuts both blew enormous holes in the budget. Bush tax cuts destroyed surplus. Post-tax cut Bush era, if you take home-equity-financed private spending, economy would look very sluggish. Did government spending grow that much faster under Reagan and Bush than under Clinton?

Actually, in Reagan’s case, rapidly increasing military spending was a culprit. And perhaps if our defense costs per capita were comparable to our friends up north and in W. Europe, we could get closer to reconciling our demands on taxes with our service expectations.

What happened afterwards in NZ? It’s still deregulated but doesn’t seem to be unusually so as far as I know.
Funny thing is that Roger Douglas was part of a NZ Labour govt (nominally the more left wing of the parties there).
Current NZ prime minister is a former Merrill Lynch currency trader!

Everyone who doesn’t work is certain that the income tax should be higher!!

If the Bush tax cuts do expire, it should become obvious fairly quickly that it was a mistake. We are definitely headed towards another wave of free enterprise fiscal policy. A tax hike would just be an unfortunate bump in the road.

Silver is a lawyer. Need we say more.

after work yesterday get out of the union street stop and there was a huge fight going down between what i think was a livery cab driver and what appeared to be a generic park slope dad. a huge crowd formed and the cab driver was holding down the other guy and people calling the police. the dad kept trying to escape but he was no match i guess even tho he was only being help by his bag. at one point he fell on his ass trying to escape and it seriously looked like he was going to cry. everyone was totally laughing at his big giant gay galoshes as well. it was kinda pathetic, but a bit entertaining. the police eventually showed up and im not sure what happened after that cuz i got bored and left.

i really thought at first someone was filming a comedy cuz it just seemed so strange.

*rob*