“Thomas Friedman accidentally telling the truth:

Since President Bush came to office, our national savings have gone from 6 percent of gross domestic product to 1 percent, and consumer debt has climbed from $8 trillion to $14 trillion.”

How can anybody who cares about empirical evidence and fact see this debacle as anything other than an utter condemnation of the policies that engendered it?

The polices have failed, the administration pushing these policies like crack for the rich has failed, the economists, academicians, think tankers and legislatures who acted like demented cheer-leaders in favor of these policies have failed.

And it is the American middle class and, ultimately, the American system as a whole, that will pay the full price for these failures.

Try talking about “matters of degree” to families losing their homes, workers losing their jobs, communities devastated by an epidemic of vacant/abandoned homes and the accompanying imploding tax bases and exploding crime rates, retirees losing their savings to inflation, not to mention all the current and future generations who will have to make real, long lasting sacrifices in standard of living to pay for the debt our glorious leaders have piled up.

Maybe they’ll be impressed with your theory. I am not.

You have no idea how the fury and sense of betrayal is building out here.

“same rich still pay most of the taxes collected”. Mr Buffet disagrees with this statement. Its a waste of my time to continue.

In a more rational world, a 24-26% replenishment rate would not be described by a former Fed Governor as “largely.”

If you were to lower taxes on someone working 2 or 3 jobs, you’d likely see their first reaction to more money be to work less. Their incentive to work that much in the first place was necessity. Someone earning much more has more freedom to choose different options. For those with high compensation, that income seems to cause those people to work more hours for all that additional disposable income. I think higher tax would be more likely to lower their hours than to cause them to work more, as the laffer curve suggests.

As for capital gains and dividend being the most influenced by tax rates, I don’t get that reasoning. Sure people can control when they recognize gains. But that seems to be a matter of just waiting for the tax rate to change to realize income. Cash out right before the tax rate raises, or after it drops. But I don’t see a reason why the amount that is subject to tax should change overall. It’s just a matter of when. The income is passive, so there’s no trade-off. Only by not investing do you lose. You’re not making a trade off between labor hours for more income versus more leisure time.