...should munis have a tax-favored treatment? Who knows? That is a policy decision. But one way or another it will have an impact.
Originally Posted by atlcomedy
The tax-favored status of municipal bonds goes all the way back to the earliest days of the income tax and I doubt that it will change any time soon.
It seems to me that if anyone ever started serious discussions of removing it, you would see a lot of frenzied activity on the part of state and local governments. The first thing they would want to know is whether the administration and congress would agree to increase aid to states and cities commensurate with the additional interest they would have to pay to bondholders who would demand coupons equal to those of taxable instruments with similar risk profiles. And I can hardly imagine policymakers proposing legislation that would suddenly and dramatically devalue large bond portfolios.
Even more to the point, no one should ever forget that a wealthy person who buys tax-frees is not avoiding taxation; he's simply shifting the payment to state or local entities instead of the federal government. (Although generally at a somewhat lower rate than the federal top-bracket rate, depending on the "tax-equivalent" yield at the time.)
WTF, are you even remotely capable of debating anyone other than a Straw Man?
Remember this statement from way back earlier in the thread:
Where Reagan failed was in allowing government growth and spending to continue unabated. Like every other modern president (except for Bill Clinton) he failed to halt this inexorable expansion.
Originally Posted by CaptainMidnight
We already covered
spending. Everyone who hasn't been living in a cave for about 30 years knows that we let spending grow at an unacceptable rate during the 1980s. (Although that sure seems like a frugal era compared with the last couple of years!)
I realize that it's your typical style, but there's really no need for you to just plow boneheadedly along, completely oblivious to what I and others have said.
But what you did not say was anything to state that what the author said was false.
Originally Posted by WTF
You're attempting to intimate that I claimed the graph you keep posting is inaccurate. That's
not what I said. Go back and read my post again, particularly this point:
The author is wrong about almost everything. Just take a look at that stuff you cut & pasted in post #80. One sentence starts out with, "The economic stimulus of that debt..." The guy apparently thinks that running up massive debt is wonderful "stimulus" for the economy. Try telling that to the Greeks or the Japanese.
And just for fun, take a look at this:
http://zfacts.com/p/1159.html#8593
The author obviously has no understanding of what prolonged recovery from the Great Depression, when and why it ended, or the relationship between debt and economic prosperity. Given that, why should anyone take any of his "analysis" seriously?
That's why I suggested that a more appropriate name for that website would be "zmyths.com."
Originally Posted by CaptainMidnight
Take a look again at that link. If someone can pack that much economic ignorance into so few words, do you really think I should give a damn what points he's trying to make with a graph?
You're just playing a "what if" game. Of course, soon enough we'll probably all be asking how much better off we'd be if our current collection of political hacks had refrained from spending money at a record rate on phony "stimulus" packages, political payoffs, and unpaid-for entitlement expansions.
These people make every other collection of politicians in American history seem like veritable tightwads by comparison, yet most of you liberals defend them at every turn.
