Posted on 02/18/2012 11:26:25 PM PST by JediJones
An antitax advocacy group zinged Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s tax plan, giving him a grade of “D+” grade and the dubious honor of proposing what “may be the worst idea of any of the Republican candidates.”
”The good news is Santorum has gotten more specific about his tax plan since last month when we gave him a D+,” economist William McBride wrote on Thursday. “The bad news is… he’s gotten more specific.”
Mr. McBride said the biggest problem with Mr. Santorum’s proposal is the sharply different corporate tax rates he would establish. Mr. Santorum would halve the corporate tax rate to 17.5% from its current top rate of 35%. Manufacturers, however, would not have to pay any corporate taxes.
Mr. McBride said the idea is “grossly unfair,” and unlikely to gain traction in Washington. If it did, he said, many businesses would “suddenly claim to be a manufacturer.”
The tax group also took aim at Santorum’s suggestion to triple the tax deduction families can take for each child. “This is obviously a big tax cut, and might spur growth, or it might just spur child making,” Mr. McBride wrote. The Tax Foundation echoed concerns expressed earlier this week by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center that tripling the child tax deduction could push more low-income families off the tax rolls.
While the Santorum campaign has filled in some of the details in recent weeks, big ones remain missing, Mr. McBride wrote. The plan would collapse the current six rates to just two — 10% and 28% — but it doesn’t specify who would pay those rates, he said, adding: ”That’s kind of important.”
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
“Children of tax-PAYERS are more likely to be future tax-PAYERS, producers, not a demand for entitlements.”
You seem to have a logical contradiction here. By tripling tax deductions for children or, heaven forbid, tripling the child tax credits, Santorum would turn tax-PAYERS into tax-FREELOADERS.
Tripling the exemption would mean a family with 4 children would pay no income tax on the first $66,000 of income not even counting any of their other deductions. A family like Santorum’s own, with 7 kids, would have to earn over $100,000 before they owed a dime in federal income tax.
Children raised by parents who never owed taxes are unlikely to support smaller government when they expect to duck out of paying for big government by shifting their tax burden just like their parents did.
Wow, you really dislike Santorum more than Romney? No way, I hope.
New Tweets tonight..
@fivethirtyeight: Our forecast model now has Santorum up ~5 in Michigan. That works out to a 72% chance of winning.
@ppppolls: Our AZ numbers (out tomorrow) and WA ones (out Tuesday) are good for Santorum
Romney is doooooooooomed!!
Can anyone play ?
1) We don’t need to penalize success by having a 28% tax rate when a single 15% rate for everyone generates the same tax revenue.
2) We don’t need to eliminate the AMT, we need to make it apply to everyone. While some people must pay 15% because deductions don’t reduce their income significantly, nobody’s deductions should reduce their income such that they pay less than 10% of AGI. Hence we need an AMT that applies to EVERYBODY, not just upper middle income and rich people.
3) Eliminating the death tax means people can leave money growing in investments, deferring taxes the whole time, and then passing it along to their children where it will never be taxed. I don’t see why those investment gains should not be “realized” at time of death, subtracting the costs of the investment to arrive at net gain, and taxing the estate’s income as capital gains before it is passed on to the heirs.
4) If the single rate for individual income taxes is 15%, I don’t see the point of a special 12% rate for capital gains and dividends. Let all income be treated equally.
5) Very bad idea. The exemption is currently $3,650 per dependent. Tripling it to $11,000 per dependent means a family with 4 kids would make the first $66K of income untaxable. The taxes they do not pay must be extracted from other people. Families should not expect to be able to push their tax burden onto the shoulders of their neighbors who chose not to have children.
6) A flat 15% tax already eliminates any marriage penalty.
7) Every favorable tax treatment for people who made these choices requires the government forcibly extract more taxes from people who did not make those choices. People should not be making these choices at the expense of their neighbors who earned the same income but spent it differently.
8) Principal residence, secondary residence, etc. should all be treated as investments and capital loss should be without limit just as any gain would be taxable without limit.
9) It doesn’t matter what you cut the corporate tax rate to, it won’t eliminate the overhead of compliance or the lobbying in DC. The only way to eliminate the corruption and wasted productivity is to eliminate the corporate income tax entirely. Taxing corporate income and then taxing individuals on their dividends and capital gains amounts to double taxation. Eliminate taxation at the corporate level and tax it as income to the individual shareholders.
10) Don’t play favorites. Eliminate the corporate income tax for all industries, not just manufacturing.
11) Tax credits are unnecessary when their is no corporate income tax.
12) No special treatment is necessary when there is no corporate income tax.
I have nothing against home-schooling, but it is an admission that our actual school system is failing. I don’t see people as “economic units” but I see our success as a society defined significantly by how successful our economy is. Seeing as home-schooling is an economically more inefficient way of getting the job done (just as churning your own butter would be vs. buying it in a store) it is far from an ideal solution.
I believe in school choice and dismantling the government monopoly on education. Just like welfare, a government school should be the option of last resort. If we all were free to use our school taxes to pay to go to any school we wanted to, then a greater variety of schools would be created. I would expect that many people home-schooling would be able to find a school that fit their values and standards better. Of course they could always home-school anyway if they chose to. I’m worried about the people who feel they need to do it because there’s no good alternative, not the people who want to do it.
No I have not. You have conflated two separate issues: deductions for children and bracketing of tax rates. They are separate. Just because the deduction takes a payer at current rates down to zero total, does not mean that the deduction is bad policy.
Children raised by parents who never owed taxes are unlikely to support smaller government when they expect to duck out of paying for big government by shifting their tax burden just like their parents did.
I agree that most everyone should pay some tax.
I don't want government to maintain a monopoly on the schools. I want people to have school choice and have the equal opportunity to send their kids to any school they want and one that represents their values.
And you think that Rick Santorum is insulting to women?
Never once did I say Rick Santorum is insulting to women. Don't put words in my mouth. It's silly to take anything I said as an insult, when I'm specifically saying women have far more ways to contribute to society and the economy than only by raising children. By your logic, I could say you're insulting to children, because you think they need parental supervision to properly develop as individuals and can't do it on their own.
I think too much mothering and parenting is one of the bad trends in our society, hence we now have kids who are supposed to be able to stay on their parents' health insurance to age 27 and are still living at home at that age. I think kids should be working as early as possible while they go to school and be kicked out of the nest and pay their own way as early as possible. For the amount of time I think a kid should be spending with his parents, both parents would have more than enough free time to have at least a part-time job. Certainly in my experience, most of what I learned I learned from the world outside the family home, not from my parents. If I listened to them, I'd be a Democrat. When you have Democrat parents but you go to a traditional Catholic school like myself, you can see how I was much better off with the values I was taught at school than the ones I was taught at home.
At any rate, that's my opinion, and there's no reason for you to be insulted by my opinion or for me to be insulted by yours.
Not true, I believe in school choice and getting the government out of schools. Not to mention, I think our day care centers are generally run by private industry as they ought to be, not by state-run brainwashing centers. Every parent should have the options under the free market to find the education and institutions that best suit their values.
I have no problem with parents who have the means to do so performing these tasks themselves, but I do not agree with having my tax dollars subsidize them in doing so. That’s the collectivism, socialism and statism you’re talking about, the idea that my tax money should be taken and used to pay for someone else’s lifestyle choices.
I said NOTHING about bracketing of tax rates in my post to you.
My post was strictly about your suggestion that tax-PAYERS should have more children, but the article is clear about Santorum wanting to drastically increase the tax exemptions for children, thereby turning tax-PAYERS into tax-FREELOADERS.
It doesn’t matter if there are multiple tax brackets as Santorum wants or a flat single rate tax. What matters is the use of deductions to exclude huge portions of what would otherwise be taxable income. Santorum would increase the exemption to $11,000 per dependent which would quickly eliminate all tax liability for a majority of those tax-PAYER parents you talked about.
Perhaps then we should have an amendment to limit government spending to remain at or below a certain percentage of the GDP. Any revenue taken in that goes above that amount due to fluctuations in the economy should either be returned to the taxpayer or put in a rainy day fund for when revenues received do not meet the funding requirements.
You nailed it, dt57. It's worth repeating. I agree completely. Anyone who truly understands what's ailing our country and our government would have to agree with your spot-on analysis of the candidates.
Anyone who uses such a term is a mindless cliche dispenser unworthy of the time or effort a serious conversation requires.
I don't use politically correct language, I use accurate language. I care about the truth, not about whether I offend people or not. It's not right when liberals ignore a person's message and instead attack their choice of language as "offensive" and it's not right when conservatives do it either. The point of language is to convey meaning. The only language that is wrong is language that confuses. Bottom line, it's a simple, commonly known descriptive term to denote stay-at-home moms and not offensive at all unless you choose to read that into it yourself. Someone could make the argument that it's ideal for women to be "barefoot and pregnant" and that's perfectly legitimate of them to have that point-of-view, because the term itself is not insulting, it's colorfully descriptive and an exact synonym for "stay-at-home mom."
Just like when he jeered and sneered at Newt's social security reform (which Cain agrees with too).
I found the page on their site where they explain their grades for all the candidates’ plans:
http://taxfoundation.org/publications/show/27849.html
Some of their complaints about Newt was him keeping the charitable deduction. I happen to disagree with them there strongly. Any method for diverting money to charities instead of the government is a good thing. They also complain that it’s unclear when Newt’s transitions take place such as from social security payroll tax to private accounts. That’s a pretty thin criticism. At least Newt is planning to do it, I’m not too worried at this point the exact date it’s going to happen as long as it does happen.
So then you'd be okay with cutting the income tax to 0 for black people and cutting the income tax in half for all other races? The different tax rates Santorum's proposing for different industries probably shouldn't even be legal under equal protection laws. What's moral, just or right about one business being discriminated against vs. another?
What in the world are you talking about? This is not the Tax Policy Center, it’s the Tax Foundation. That was identified in the very TITLE of the article, and the article itself links to their web site. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you were just confused and not posting intentional lies in an effort to defend your candidate. This is their web site:
http://taxfoundation.org/about/
Funny, that's exactly the logic Santorum used to object to Newt's social security reform. He called Newt creating private social security accounts a "new entitlement" ("in his post-debate interview with Hannity, he called Gingrich's Social Security privatization plan a new entitlement program because it would entitle people to keep money they would otherwise pay to the government"). And that very social security reform would largely reduce the burden on "future generations" to pay for older people's social security. The current model is an unsustainable and inequitable Ponzi scheme. The solution to it is reform based on private accounts, not on trying to find new people to enter into the bottom of the pyramid scheme.
I haven’t seen that data. Please link to it if you have it available. But keep in mind my goal is not to increase or decrease child-bearing. I was simply saying there should probably be reasonable ways to accomodate mothers with children that still allow society to benefit from their participation in the work force. The choice should not be solely between women having no children at all and working vs. quitting work entirely and staying at home to raise children. I’m looking for a middle ground.
Why wouldn’t it encourage low-income families to have more children? Maybe not the lowest income who don’t pay taxes, but there may be people at the low end of the tax-paying scale who can cut much or all of their tax burden with the additional child credit. It would then be debatable whether those families would qualify for other public assistance to support those children.
He was among the most big spenders Republicans in the Congress. As Senator, Santorum was a prolific supporter of earmarks, having requested billions of dollars for pork projects in Pennsylvania. In 2009, he declared, “I have had a lot of earmarks. In fact, I’m very proud of all the earmarks I’ve put in bills. I’ll defend earmarks.”
He voted for the 2005 highway bill that included thousands of wasteful earmarks, including the Bridge to Nowhere. In fact, in a separate vote, Santorum had the audacity to vote to continue funding the Bridge to Nowhere rather than send the money to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Santorum: "People say that I voted for “The Bridge to Nowhere.” I did. I went with the federalist argument, which is, “Who am I in Pennsylvania to tell Alaska what their highway priorities should be?”
The NTU rating of Congress shows that Santorum has a terrible record on taxes and spending in each of his two Senate terms. In the 2003-2004 session of Congress, Santorum sponsored or cosponsored 51 bills to increase spending, and failed to sponsor or co-sponsor even one spending cut proposal.
Santorum is also a big fan of government regulations. He even boasted about sponsoring a bill to regulate “price gouging and unfair pricing by the big oil companies.” He also voted YES on Sarbanes-Oxley, the bill Newt promised to repeal in his first day as president.
Santorum had flip-flopped on government’s role in the housing market. In 2000, Santorum encouraged more home ownership, particularly for low-income families, with the help of government assistance, whether it was through the Federal Housing Administration, or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. However, he changed his tune in in late 2005 (before the senatorial election), when he urged the reform of Fannie and Freddie.
Santorum - no fiscal conservative, pro-spending, pro-big government, pro-regulations, pro-more subsidies, more welfare, pro-gloated nanny-state ... How can ANYONE believe that he has any intention to reverse the flow of money pouring in Washington?
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