[asinclair]

One of the big problems I see in this discussion is that the people who are against tax increases don't spell out where the spending problems really are. After reading diatribe after diatribe, I think I'm starting to see the shape of the failure cascade:

• The cost of doing business continues to rise by the imposition of regulations by the Federal government; how many of those regulations are really necessary?
• The cost of medicine continues to rise because the lawyers do after-the-fact analysis and assignment of liability; he-said she-said dueling experts don't help, either
• The body of law continues to grow and grow, so "experts", not the writers of law, need to interpret the law itself, not to mention applying the law to specific situations
• The tax code has grown to the point that an "expert" consists of a group of people, all specialists in specific sections of the Code.
• As a consequence, businesses tend to shy away from expanding, which means they need fewer employees.
• Profit-sharing is discouraged by the tax code, so employees tend not to share in the success of their hard work -- if you want more money in the hands of a wider base, provide some tax advantages for giving "bonuses" to everyone, not just management
• Too many tax deductions that fulfill social objectives, and/or require the army of "experts" to understand

The first priority should be to remove the barriers put up by government that discourage employment. Look what is happening with Obamacare: companies are, where possible, converting employees part-time to reduce the costs of regulation. Is that what Pelosi wanted? What Reid wanted?

The fact that the Democrats don't see the failure cascade says to me that this is what they want. If they really cared about the unemployed, about getting people who want to work back to work, they would fix the root cause of the problems, not just throw more money at idle people.

I don't blame the idle people -- you can't grow crops on rocks.

[KeyLargo]

“One of the big problems I see in this discussion is that the people who are against tax increases don’t spell out where the spending problems really are. After reading diatribe after diatribe, I think I’m starting to see the shape of the failure cascade:”

Yes, the author in his article says:

“Rather than expanding programs that didn’t work from the start, and never did, rather than funneling handouts to the poor, rather than financing bloated bureaucracies wedded to their systemic failures, those resources should be channeled to initiatives that create the educational and training opportunities, not to mention the economic conditions and incentives, for people to transcend and overcome poverty.

If you have a persistent ailment, and the high-priced medicine the doctor keeps prescribing doesn’t work, what do you do? Do you just take more as the doctor wants you to, throwing ever more money away, or do you try a different protocol of treatment?

The smart thing to do is try something different. In medicine, treatments that depart from establishment orthodoxy most often cost less and prove successful – for example, the VA hospitals’ rejection of expensive specialty drugs for less costly workhorse drugs that help to render that system so successful.

And so it goes. We could unchain the doors of failed public schools, which lock so many of the poor in cells of failure, and empower families with school choice, at about the half the price of public education. We could lower tax rates and regulatory burdens to create a flow of job-creating capital into poor communities from the private rather than the public sector. We could limit the duration of benefits to disincentivize dependency.”