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applegrove

(118,008 posts)
Wed Nov 26, 2014, 06:35 PM Nov 2014

"Wait! The right wants a new CBO director after all."

Wait! The right wants a new CBO director after all.

By Lori Montgomery at the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/21/wait-the-right-wants-a-new-cbo-director-after-all/

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After a series of highly-regarded conservatives voiced their support for Doug Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office whose term is up in January, Elmendorf haters fired back on Friday, urging Republicans to jettison the Democratic appointee as soon as possible.

Why? Because he is not a "superb economist" or a scrupulously impartial arbiter of national economic policy, as Harvard's Greg Mankiw and Stanford's Keith Hennessey have made him out to be. No, they argue, Elmendorf is a shill for liberal Democrats and CBO has had a lefty tilt ever since he got there six years ago.

This argument is advanced most forcefully in an open letter to GOP congressional leaders by Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, who works primarily as a political strategist. (Though, to be fair, he does have an MBA and a bachelors in economics from Harvard). Norquist, you may recall, is most famous as the author of the anti-tax pledge that binds virtually every Republican in Congress never to vote to raise taxes.

So why is Norquist against Elmendorf? For one thing, because CBO, under Elmendorf, has not demonized higher taxes. Instead, the agency promotes a "Failed Keynesian Economic Analysis," Norquist says, that asserts that "higher taxes are good for the economy, even to the point of implying that growth is maximized when tax rates are 100 percent."




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"Wait! The right wants a new CBO director after all." (Original Post) applegrove Nov 2014 OP
What Mr. Norquist needs to realize discocrisco01 Nov 2014 #1

discocrisco01

(1,664 posts)
1. What Mr. Norquist needs to realize
Wed Nov 26, 2014, 06:46 PM
Nov 2014

He needs to understand that the federal government is not engaging in excessive taxation. Yes, there is point when excessive taxation is bad for society especially when it is forced on the middle class.

We do not properly tax capital gains in the proper method. Lower capital gains tax rates are acceptable when most of the middle class has significant amount savings tied into Wall Street for retirement savings and needs to liquidate those stock assets to help pay for retirement. When it is used for so some rich CEO get taxed at 20% instead of 40%, there is something wrong with that. Why should we let CEOs pay

It is time to put phase-out for capital gains once it hits a certain amounts.

Where I live in California, i am naturally leery of new tax hikes because I feel that the tax rates are about is high they can get without hurting the economy. I also oppose giving huge tax breaks to corporations in California. California is at the optimal tax rate at the state level before it starts to drag down the economy. Any more huge tax hikes with have negative impact of on our state's economy.

On a federal level: We have not even start to begin with the tax increases that need to be done. There is lots and lots of opportunities to raise taxes at the federal level. I would rather tax the billionaries who live in low-tax state like Texas to go after the because if Texas fails its job at taxing the rich, DC will do it for you.

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