But you think a national sales tax will pass because those selfsame people WANT their Federal tax liability to go from nothing to 25%?

Ceteris Paribus on March 15, 2013 at 2:01 PM

I was arguing on the state level. The person I quoted was attacking Bobby Jindal because Jindal was only shuffling the sources of the funding, not cutting the actual cost of government.

My argument was based there.

I do think changing to a consumption only tax system would fix much of the federal problems we are seeing. I do not think it is possible because we already have about half the population enjoying the benefits of government and only paying 2.9% of the cost of government through income taxes.

Pence won Indiana by 3.2%.
Romney won Indiana by 10.2%.

Mister Mets on March 15, 2013 at 11:00 AM

Mr. Mets, are you in Indianna, I am not. My friends would be conservative catholics there, but I am not close enough to understand Indianna politics.

I really don’t understand if Mourdock was not conservative enough, what would that mean? He was portrayed to the rest of the country as a Right Wing Nut, and I understand the media does that. But if he wasn’t conservative enough for the people who back Mike Pense? Why can’t republicans just shove whoever wins the primary thru? Why do they have to be so picky? In Delaware, O’Donnell won, and the party wouldn’t help her because they had backed the other candidate. That is inexcusable. We can’t all have our favorite choice all the time.

…You cannot remove those items from the federal level… They are locked in by a majority vote…
astonerii on March 15, 2013 at 11:30 AM

But you think a national sales tax will pass because those selfsame people WANT their Federal tax liability to go from nothing to 25%?

LukeinNE on March 15, 2013 at 11:12 AM

You cannot remove those items from the federal level… They are locked in by a majority vote of those who are benefiting from them while not paying for or at least only paying a minor amount towards them. As long as you have the PROGRESSIVE tax system, this will remain the way it is until collapse.

You want something that cannot and will not exist in a society. You want to allow the majority of people to be exempt from paying for government and then expect that majority to do the right thing when it comes to voting for things.

You had the perfect example above in your own post. When confronted with the choice of spending a huge amount of money for new and taking the the tax hit for it and doing a moderate upgrade and taking a much lower tax hit, the people chose wisely I would imagine. What would they have said if the government had instead argued they would just raise the money off the 10% highest earners/property owners and let everyone else off the hook?

astonerii on March 15, 2013 at 10:58 AM

Well I won’t hide the fact that I disagree on the regressive tax thing.

I think where common ground might exist is that I favor devolving as many responsibilities from the federal government as possible and leaving it up to the states and even better, local communities, to decide whether they want those services or not. The principle of the idea is demonstrated regularly whenever a local bond issue comes on to the ballot.

Happened a couple years ago in my hometown. The school board wanted to demolish our aging schools and build new ones for $50 million. When people found out that both property and sales taxes were going to go up for 10 years to pay for the thing, suddenly they decided that maybe an $8 million renovation was more prudent.

Mister Mets on March 15, 2013 at 11:00 AM

Yeah I’m not sure why Romney takes so much flak for the down ballot races. Win or lose, he typically outperformed his fellow Republicans in statewide races. The only dramatic exception coming to mind right now is Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

Mister Mets on March 15, 2013 at 11:00 AM

Romney lost because Romney did not want to win. Tagg said so, his campaign post primary proved it so.

For the republican side of the primary, there was never a more vicious negative campaign in recent memory than that of Romney who ran outright false negative advertisements to the tune of 99.9% only two radio ads were not negative for all of the Florida media.

General election, sit back and ride to the finish line. Like McCain before him, when presented with a path to victory he chose instead to reign it in and sabotage his own campaign. McCain got Palin and once it was shown she was a boon had his campaign hacks chew her up. Romney had the first debate where he actually sounded for the first time as if he understood conservative and got a massive boon out of that, immediately after realizing it was working he reverted back to his progressive nature.

So what? Pence won. Romney lost.

ddrintn on March 14, 2013 at 9:16 PM

If the argument is that a conservative would have done better, it’s worth looking at races in which Romney and someone who was more conservative were both on the ballot.

Pence won Indiana by 3.2%.
Romney won Indiana by 10.2%.

LukeinNE on March 15, 2013 at 10:39 AM

The only true fair tax is the one that is levied exactly the same on all persons of responsibility. In this case it would be adults. This would be determined by spending/adults = tax. That is the only fair tax that there can be. Any increase in spending effects everyone exactly the same.

The next best one I know of is a flat rate consumption tax where each person pays for the government based on how much they benefit from living in the society. Spending money on products and services seems like a good place to determine benefit and ensures that you are getting money from every citizen. You call it regressive, I call it incentive based. Yes, a poor person spends a higher portion of their money on their living expenses and poor people in this nation are far from destitute so I am not sure it is a bad thing to make them pay for the government they vote for. If they want low taxes, maybe it is time to stop giving food stamps to every drug user in the state, or to give in state tuition to the illegal immigrants going to their state schools, or maybe the state should cut back or illuminate spending millions of dollars on trying to attract sports teams or what ever other optional and less than beneficial government activity is.

Hey, do you want a top rated sports team? That is going to be +.5% sales tax for 5 years, now do you still want it? Hey, we were thinking of extending the medicaid program to include such and such a group, only an extra .25% on your taxes. We were thinking of opening up a large piece of state land for mineral extraction, that will be a drop of .37%, what do you say?

Now, that 47% that Romney was talking about might start having some heartburn about voting for the free stuff, it is no longer free to them. Thus, the appetite of the population for spending is likely to be lower if not reverse.

You might dislike 75% of the things Mitt Romney would do as president, but if you’re going to dislike 100% of the things Barack Obama would do as president, you’re still better off voting for Romney.

J.S.K. on March 15, 2013 at 12:26 AM

So, I am completely limited to a choice between 75% bad as opposed to 100% bad. Resistance is futile. You just told me so. Eat this!

Ceteris Paribus on March 15, 2013 at 12:54 AM

I’m describing your choices, not imposing them on you. You can choose to vote for neither the 75% bad candidate nor the 100% bad candidate if you prefer. But if you abstain from voting, don’t be surprised if the 100% bad candidate wins.

Not voting isn’t going to magically make a candidate appear who you would consider 100% good, or even 90% or 80% good.

astonerii on March 15, 2013 at 10:28 AM

Out of curiosity, how would you set this up? I agree with a lot of what’s in your post (especially the bit about voters directly feeling the hurt from spending), but I’m curious about what sort of administration we’re talking about.

More directly, one flat rate on all goods and services would definitely be regressive as poorer people would pay a higher percentage of their income into taxes than would wealthier people. While I generally would like to see our tax system be flatter and simpler, a regressive system is something I view as wrong.

Ceteris Paribus on March 15, 2013 at 12:07 AM

By moving the cost of government to a consumption based tax, such as sales, it makes each person capable of determining how much they want to support the government by their in state spending. It also broadens the tax base which causes everyone to feel the pain of the spending they demand from the government. There is very little wrong with this sort of set up. In fact, it gives the voters opportunity to feel the pain of the spending and might actually cause them to question if all that spending is worth it. Say they might want to lower the tax a bit by getting rid of state sponsored X or Y. Or, when presented with a demand to fund new project Z and increase the sales tax by % they can choose their priorities.

Were Akins and Mourdock not conservative enough?

Fleuries

Are you being obtuse? They were both conservative enough. They both said something very stupid too. Otherwise, both would have won easily. Being a conservative candidate doesn’t give you a free pass to be stupid.

They haven’t done it for two election cycles now. Why not? I’m asking earnestly. I have no answer.

Combination of weak fields, the ongoing divide in the GOP between the social and fiscally conservative factions and the fact that yes, there is a significant bloc of centrist Republicans out there who view McCain/Romney types as being ideal nominees.

What’s your solution? Send out thousands of paddy-wagons to knock down doors and round up people in the middle of the night to deport them? Or would you just rather have them on food stamps and/or committing crimes, thus becoming a net burden on society?

Or, we could not give them instate tuition. Not rewarding them in other ways for being here illegally would be another good start.

The feds have neglected their obligation to protect our borders for a long time, and at this point, solutions aren’t as black/white or cut and dried as a lot of people on our side seem to think.

DRayRaven

Actually, the solutions are pretty black and white. Doing the right thing usually is.

Newt and Bachman are loons. Santorum is a bedroom policeman. And Perry is a bad impersonation of Josh Brolin impersonating Bush.

Rusty Allen on March 14, 2013 at 9:47 PM

You sound like ANY lib, spewing THEIR one-note, biased views of these people. Maybe you should actually listen to them speak(in more than 20 second soundbites) before regurgitating the hate-filled, and wrong, talking points of the left.

My calculations, you could check them, show in the Battleground states where Romney could have used just a few more voters:
Florida, 200,000 for 29 electoral votes
Virginia, 116,000 votes for 13 electoral votes
Colorado, 113,000 for 9 electoral votes
Nevada, 66,000 for 6 electoral votes
New Mexico 75,000 votes for 5 electoral votes
New Hampshire 41,000 votes for the 4 electoral votes

We don’t know if being more conservative would have helped, but
Romney needed only 611,000 voters in battleground states to push the electoral vote over the top.

But that is not the 5 million republicans staying home, or conservatives not coming out. If you were a person who cared about your country and the future you did your duty and voted in the November election.

The MSM wanted to cast the Obama win as a landslide.

This morning on Fox news I saw them advertising condos in Florida, and I thought, if 200,000 conservatives from CA went to Florida instead of moving to Texas, they could band together and start working toward the future. The FL election was lost because in early voting, the democrats have paid employees that pick up voters all day every day and drive their buses to the polls, while you are at work.

The best conservative idea to win next time, would be to battle our primary differences out in private and not in front of the MSM camera. And especially, no more candidates planting Obama propaganda out in the battleground states, the way Gingrich put the anti capitalist message out in Ohio, and PA, and the mid west. If Romney could not surmount a messages that democrats said “came from republicans themselves” that Romney was a Robber baron that did not care about the less fortunate…that came from Newt’s pac. So, I turn off the tv when I see him. He has lost all credibility with me.

So, yes, a bit more conservatism next time, stop using liberal ideas like the “1% is evil” to win in the primaries. Romney won the red states with a big margin. That was all he needed there.
He won in MO with more than half of the vote, and the republican senator, an arch conservative lost. In Indianna, he won with 60+% of the vote, Pense won there too, but Mourdock lost.

Were Akins and Mourdock not conservative enough?

To our shame, we have “won” with nonconservatives. We have not nominated a conservative since 1984.

burt on March 15, 2013 at 8:48 AM

I agree, but the essential issue is that the country is more brown/black everyday. I have come to believe that had we nominated a true conservative the results would have been worse and even carried down the ballot. Demographic tide is stacked against conservatives (mainly we’re white men). We are doomed!

A Moderate Republican Candidate will not win the Presidency in 2016. Dole, McCain, and Romney are living proof of it.