Why are these charts wrong?

I've been staring at the charts below trying to figure out how EVERY SINGLE REPUBLICAN points to the massive job losses, how the economic stimulus didn't work  and poor economy that President Obama seems to be at the helm of right now.  Sure, the deficit is way to high and one can argue these numbers aren't where they need to be, but isn't that both parties fault? But then there are these charts below that, to me, seem to indicate the contrary.  Now, I am by no means an Obama guy, actually I'm supporting Gov. Gary Johnson, but these charts are hard to argue against, unless they are just flat out wrong.  

So my question is, how are they wrong?

Comments

[Ryan Farmer]

The biggest problem with the stimulus is that there wasn't enough.

The deficit is a concern but it shouldn't be the only concern or even the biggest concern.

Before all else, we desperately need to reduce unemployment and prevent people from starving, going homeless, etc.

When you slash social programs like the Republicans want to do to "decrease the deficit", you'll end up with more people becoming desperate for medical attention, a place to sleep, and some food to eat. If there's no jobs, they might become desperate and start breaking the law simply to go to prison (which costs a lot more than welfare).

Of course, considering that the private for-profit prison system typically gives the Republicans a lot of bribes and kickbacks, this may be their real objective.

[Anon]

Your a progressive socialist PIG! It's wrong because the Republican's say it wrong!

[Karlton]

The issue is sustainability. Any time you simply toss money at a problem you'll see some improvement; the question is whether or not you can sustain it.

The $787B in recovery funds, by the White House's estimates, has created or saved over 6.8M jobs; which is a cost of over $115K per job and is starting to trend downward. Further, since the $787B was borrowed, it's getting paid back at an additional $20-30B per year in interest.

The biggest continued issue with jobs is the fact that the government is continuing to raise the costs of doing business through taxation, executive regulation, and legislation, which is something that is going to continue long after the stimulus boost wears off and we end up worse than where we started.

GDP numbers are mostly irrelevant unless you exclude government spending figures because they're artificially inflated by the stimulus.

[Ryan Farmer]

We could fix a lot of this mess by replacing the Internal Revenue Code with something like...

Six income brackets - no deductions.

The federal government screws around with the tax code and at this point it's over 10,000 pages long.

The IRS can't even tell you what all is in it.

There are many hundreds of loopholes that the top10% of income earners use to reduce their tax bill to next to nothing.

People who can't afford a house, car, or kids, get to pay to fund tax credits for other people's houses, cars, and kids. (Even if the person buying the houses, cars, and having kids is able to pay for all of it themselves)

The IRS paid out over a BILLION and a half dollars worth of fraudulent tax returns, JUST last year. They had to hire 40 more anti-fraud agents (bringing the total up to 440!) just to deny the other FIFTEEN BILLION dollars in fraud.

In the past, the IRS was even more insane than it is now. Up until 1986, they didn't even make people provide proof that the kids they were deducting as dependents actually existed. In 1986, when they started demanding Social Security numbers for all the kids you were claiming.....more than SEVEN MILLION kids disappeared on the 1986 returns vs. 1985 (because they didn't exist.

The IRS misses a lot of income because of arbitrary loopholes in reporting laws. For example, if you're an independent contractor and are paid less than $600 a year, the organization that paid you doesn't have to fill out a 1099 and send it to the IRS.

Perhaps the most insidious example of our tax code is that even though the loopholes for the rich increase every year, the personal income exemption (which is supposed to prevent the very poor from having a huge tax obligation) has barely budged.

We could fix the tax code, downsize the IRS, and ask the obscenely rich to pay their fair share.

What is obscenely rich? The six heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune (The children of Sam Walton) have more combined wealth then the bottom 30% of the population of the United States, put together. (About 95 million people.)

They have money, they don't have a large tax obligation, and that needs to change. We could probably stop borrowing Chinese money to pay for economic stimulation if we would insist that these people pay their fair share for what this country has given them.

[Karlton]

"We could probably stop borrowing Chinese money to pay for economic stimulation if we would insist that these people pay their fair share for what this country has given them."

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Completely false. Even taxing them at 100% yields a far cry from even paying off the annual deficit, let alone any debt.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704621304576267113524583554.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

"Consider the Internal Revenue Service's income tax statistics for 2008, the latest year for which data are available. The top 1% of taxpayers—those with salaries, dividends and capital gains roughly above about $380,000—paid 38% of taxes. But assume that tax policy confiscated all the taxable income of all the "millionaires and billionaires" Mr. Obama singled out. That yields merely about $938 billion, which is sand on the beach amid the $4 trillion White House budget, a $1.65 trillion deficit, and spending at 25% as a share of the economy, a post-World War II record."

[Bill]

Ryan; I agree with you but the Republicans say we can't do that. More especially the tea party branch.

[Ryan Farmer]

If the people who have 90% of the money are only paying 38% of the tax burden (if they're even paying that much, which I sort of doubt), it is proof that they are not paying enough.

To put it the other way around. The people with 10% of the money are paying the other 62% of the tax bill.

This is inherently unfair. We should insist that they pay taxes that line up with their wealth.

Raising the top bracket by 2%, which is what Obama proposed, wouldn't raise revenues much because many of the richest people connive their way into a 15% tax bracket or less.

Mitt Romney did something like that. (He declared $3 million one year and paid taxes at the same bracket that a person who only made $50,000 should be in).

Raising the top bracket doesn't help us much if very few rich people fall into that bracket because they cheat their way into lower ones.