You cannot separate the single statement regarding increasing taxation to a degree required to balance our current budget without breaking the economy into two statements and still be addressing the same point. So your "a)" is meaningless. I never said that the taxes could not *be* increased, I simply wonder if the degree of damage we would do to our economy would be sustainable if we raised them enough to actually become solvent. Why you would try and split the statement to create an artificial absurdity to debunk via wordplay is beyond me.

For the purpose of this discussion let us call an economy "broken" if it is not capable of at least 3% growth on average over a 15 year period and/or the adjusted average income/cost of living ratio drops by more than 15% over same 15 year period. That is a long enough time frame to make a working assumption for the sake of argument that current acute disorders would have worked themselves out.

If you want to deduce the magnitude of the detrimental effect, go do an exercise - calculate the recent deficits, be sure to include all expenditures not just the standard budget. Then calculate how much revenue in new taxes would be required to truly balance expenditures with income. Take a look at the actual numbers, and see if you think it is even remotely feasible.

Once you look at the actual numbers, your tune may change. Or it may not. But you should get an idea of the type of tax increases you are talking about. Yes I know the approx amount, but this is something you should work out for yourself if you want to be credible on the topic and argue that taxes should be raised without first addressing what is broken.

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"In fact, I will make a case that resisting taxation is supporting “taxation without representation” violation of future generations."

Other than this statement that I quoted I agree with the second part of your post. I would agree with the quoted part if you changed "resisting taxation" to "spending above tax revenue". It seems patently absurd to spend ridiculous amount of money, then claim after the fact that we need to raise taxes to not burden future generations.

Why not simply reduce the spending? You are correct though that people want to spend the money without paying for it. This is why the spending needs to be cut first. Because just raising taxes is not going to address the deficit spending mentality. To make a balanced budget become a long term reality without significant economic growth - you first need to show people exactly what their current tax outlay buys, before they can be reasonably expected to fairly judge if more taxes and expenditure is needed.


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"Actually, what Bernanke is doing is raising taxes on the poor and middle class. Corporations and wealthy typically derive wealth from a flow of money, while poor and middle class from face value of money. Pumping money into the system and diluting purchasing power of $ disproportionally affects “wrong people”."

Yes, this is correct. But its not an "actually" its an "additionally".

"What can Bernanke do when The Hill is so bat shit insane that they are refusing to increase taxes in fears of political fallout? Value has to be extracted out of the system in some way."

What he should be doing is tightening the money supply and raising interest rates. This would help ease speculatory driven inflation on the commodity markets and help prevent bubbles. It would also interest the banks in lending more money again, because not only would they get more in interest from doing so - but they also would not be able to turn an easy buck by getting free cash from the Fed to try and turn around by making bets on pushing bubbles and finding anything safer than corporate bonds that turn a yield above 0%.

All he is doing is creating systemic risk, and as you say - taxing the poor and middle class. The banks also have no incentive to make loans to middle america with this bailout, so that part of the official justification is a total lie. Many people seem to have no idea just how dangerous and insane this latest move is.

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" I agree with irresponsible monetary policy, and raise you irresponsible taxation policy. Both are at fault."

I am not going to say that the current tax policy is perfect, its not. But, its still true that we are being taxed enough to pay for an awfully large federal govt.

If someone proposed a modest tax increase as part of what I will call a "Stockman reform bill", that is - an omnibus spending bill that addressed all the points of pain that Stockman laid out - then I would be inclined to support it.

With such irresponsible spending, I say again - why would any rational person want to throw more money at a broken system? Its like if the FedGov was a teenager going on a spending binge with your credit card... and instead of reducing their credit limit, you raise their cash allowance. Its reinforcing negative behavior, not demanding positive accountability.

For who could be free when every other man's humour might domineer over him? - John Locke (2nd Treatise, sect 57)