CRUSHING TAX BURDEN (tm
by Dale Coberly
CRUSHING TAX BURDEN ™
I have been putting some information together for an article about the cost of paying the money borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund, and I found a chart among my papers breaking down the effective tax rate among the different income levels. Unfortunately I don’t know where it came from, so if it’s interesting enough that you to want to know the source, you are going to have to look for it.
It is similar to information I found in Statistical Abstracts … though the information there was for 2007, with total AGI, for example, at 8.0 Trillion. The following link gives similar information for 2006
My chart shows for the year (2008 or 2009?) there were 141 Million income tax returns filed, reporting a total of 8.8 Trillion dollars in Adjusted Gross Income (AGI), and a total of 1.1 Trillion dollars in income taxes paid. This would put the “average” income tax for all income levels at 12.5%.
The breakdown:
The richest one percent of the population, who make more than 410 thousand dollars per year (AGI) pay an income tax rate of 22%. (Rdan…Does not include less taxed capital gains and estate income)
The next top 4% of the population, earning over 160k but less than 410k, pay an income tax rate of 18%
The 5% of the population earning over 113k but less than 160k, pay an income tax rate of 13%
The 15% of the population earning over 67k but less than 113k, pay an income tax rate of 9%
The 25% of the population earning over 33k but less than 67k, pay an income tax rate of 7%
The 50% of the population earning less than 33k, pay an income tax rate of 3%.
You don’t often see the breakdown in these terms. The people who get paid to confuse you want you to think of the top 10% of earners paying 50% of the taxes. Their numbers are meaningless because without knowing what percent of total income such earners get, you don’t even know if this is a flat tax. And of course it “sounds like” they are paying 50% of their income in taxes.
From my perspective, it does not look like any of these groups is “over taxed.” Of course no one, not even me, likes paying taxes. But only the truly simple minded think we can run the country without taxes, and until we can arrive at a consensus about what spending to cut, we need to pay the bills.
These tax rates are 3% lower at the top than they were in 2001, because it was argued that a tax cut at that time would “pay for itself.” It didn’t work out that way.
I will show in an upcoming paper that restoring the tax rate to what it was before the cut… that is, raising it about 3% on incomes over 100k from what it is today, would be sufficient to pay down the deficit that is the subject of so much political angst. Moreover, in order to pay back the money borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund, these tax increases would only be needed for about the ten years between 2025 and 2035.
This is not onerous. It would result in a tax rate on the richest one percent of about 25%. The next richest 4% would pay a rate of about 21%, and the next richest 5%(those making more than 113k in the present chart) would pay about 16%.
The purpose of this tax raise would be to reduce the National Debt. It has nothing to do with paying for Social Security. It is repaying the money borrowed FROM Social Security that was used to pay FOR National Security. You would expect the high income earners to be glad to pay it in the spirit of patriotism.
Especially since they know that all along they have been effectively borrowing the money themselves in the form of tax cuts, which they have surely invested in growing the economy and increasing their own personal wealth.
(The hard copy Statistical Abstract has the same information, just not as clearly broken out:
129th Statistical Abrstact of the United States, 2010
table 471 on p3i2, and table 476 on p314
http://www.census.gov/statab/www/ )
Time for A Blitzkrig here on this post, at least I think so. To let the MSM & the Party’s continue ignoring this sort of information, is the same thing as bending over so you know what happens. Patriotism, time to shove that item down the throats of alll the so called ones out in the land. The time is now, Let’s not waste the opertunity folks.
Cedric
this is more meaningless statistics for the purposes of getting people into a panic where they will do whatever “the man in charge” tells them needs to be done.
Much as I hate to say this, if people just keep paying their payroll tax, with some tiny raises to account for increased longevity, they will get enough to retire on. If their expectations are not unreasonable.
Of course if you have your heart set on the Love Boat, you are going to have to come up with a better Plan.
And make damn sure it works.
Mike
I am well aware of the payroll tax. I insist it is not a tax but an insurance premium. You get your money back plus interest…almost always more than enough interest to match inflation plus the general rise in living standards. about 3% real return for folks near the middle of the distribution of lifetime earnings. maybe only 2% for those at the top, and up to 10% or more for those at the bottom.
the folks at the bottom get more because it is insurance and they had the fire.
The WSJ is more meaningless noise to help the rich feel sorry for themselves. Paying all that tax, and the poor not paying any. For what it’s worth, my income is substantially below the 33k in the chart, yet my Federal tax rate is about 10% counting my entire income including SS benefits.
Probably I need a better tax accountant.. if i could afford one.
“Probably I need a better tax accountant.. if i could afford one.”
Don’t bother. If you can’t afford one, you don’t need one. What you see in the tax tables is what you get. Use the free tax sites on the web if you don’t like punching numbers in your calculator and filing out forms by hand. That’s how your $200 tax man will do it.
But no disrepect intended, of course.
Another point. I just looked at the tables referenced by Coberly. A more confusing set of numbers would be hard to find. The worst aspect is that there is no consistency in the census tables, as relates to income and tax data, in the manner in which the data are grouped. Top five percent of this, the percentage of households below this or that income level, etc. No two sets of data can be readily compared; five percent groupings, 20 percent groupings. It is as though the grouping of the data were intentionally confounding.
cedric
i think you are about right. but i inherited a little money a couple of years ago, and while the inheritance itself was not taxable, the interest it was earning at the bank was. because i got it late in the year and didn’t know about “estimated tax” anyway, i ended up paying a penalty for failing to pay an estimated tax on money i had no reason to expect i would get. trying to talk to the irs… or the oregon tax people either… was an exercise in frustration. so i paid an accountant to do the taxes. didn’t save me any money but at least i was able to forget about it.
still, i wonder about those 45% of the population who don’t pay any taxes, and the effective tax rate of 3% for those earning less than 33k.
cedric
i can live on my SS and i don’t get anywhere near the top. but i would never rent a rowboat. if that’s what i wanted to do and i lived near the water i’d buy or build one. and that i CAN afford.
kharris
i have a rotten personality. it has been the bane of my life. so i won’t hold your rotten personality against you.
since you don’t care about my personal views, i wonder why you bother to read them. i often agree with yours.
I deleted my previous post as I added one more table.
MG
i wondered what happened. so now my answer appears before your comment. should make interesting reading for those who don’t follow the coberly-MG debate religiously.
upon second reading, i will give you this: if the numbers you have here show what they appear to show, just restoring the previous tax rates won’t quite do the job. so we are going to have to raise the taxes a bit more, or a bit sooner, and cut a little bit from the budget.
but that little bit ought not to be the money we owe to the people who thought they were paying for their Social Security. and cutting social security in future won’t save a dime for the budget.
you could raise the SS tax a little sooner… and i will talk about that in future article… and let congress continue to borrow from the Trust Fund, but if they can’t pay the money they already owe, it doesn’t seem that more borrowing would be wise.
coberly
“which i suspect they know how to protect themselves against.”
Nope. We are doomed. Anyone that thinks not, is deluded, or rich enough that whacking a huge chunk off of net worth doesn’t matter much.
Pick your poison. If the economy ever does get better, interest rates rise and all those safe treasuries will cause bank balance sheets to implode, assuming we are going to make them value their assets somehow. There will be another taxpayer bailout. Then we will need to pay taxes at that point, but you are locked into illiquid treasuries paying an interest rate that will probably get gobbled up by rising inflation. But you will have to sell them at a loss before maturity to pay taxes and living expenses.
The Fed announces it is insolvent, and the Treasury announces it is insolvent.
This will trash the economy, and stocks, and Doppler Dipper will become a household word.
Echo Boomers will blame Baby Boomers and probably try and kill us in our sleep. Peterson will be the first successfull brain transplant and Glenn Beck will volunteer his body.
There is the “We CAN run the world with a printing press crowd” that wants to wipe out our purchasing power on purpose, because this would be good for the economy. (Don’t listen to them, if you ever become so inclined.)
There is no cakewalk out there.
Cedric – “There is no cakewalk out there.”
That is the bottom line.
MG Cedric
i never promised you a rose garden. i don’t follow cedric’s argument, and to the best of my guess right now MG’s is insufficiently analyzed. But the answer of an entirely affordable raise in taxes sounds quite nicely on my ear.
People aren’t suffering. Yet. I don’t know enough to know if the kind of financial meltdown you all see is either likely, or likely to cause real suffering. My guess is that we will find a way to handle it that maximizes suffering for the poorest and the least able to protect themselves. But that is hardly inevitible from the numbers. Except to the extent you scare yourself silly with them.
sorry MG
i tried to be nice… but you are just piling on bullshit. give it a break until you learn how to compare numbers and keep in mind what is going in to making them.
coberly,
You’re clueless on the scale of the budget issues. Particularly so on the projections for Federal Debt.
The U.S. Treasury stated in writing that the Government is on an unstainable path. Now, that’s pretty bad. Of course, you didn’t read that annual financial report.
coberly, you’re the person who isn’t reading the Federal Budget and who can’t get the numbers straight because you’ve not taken the time to review the Budget and know what the shortfall levels are for each projected fiscal year.
Get the facts straight, then talk.
Stop faking it and do some reading.
It’s complicated, but I agree higher taxes may somewhat temper my doomsday scenario. But Peterson will still be able to afford the brain transplant.
coberly, the numbers are directly from the U.S. Treasury and OMB. I know that the facts about the Federal Budget go right over your head. No news there.
Stop pretending that the facts don’t exist.
Nothing that $50 trillion in QE can’t solve 😉
“my local periodically runs election campaigns to get more money for “schools.” then spends the money on parking lots so kids whose daddy’s buy them bmw’s for their sixteenth birthday don’t have to park them down the block.”
Not to pick a fight, but what the heck are you talking about?
“still, i wonder about those 45% of the population who don’t pay any taxes, and the effective tax rate of 3% for those earning less than 33k.”
Ya. That doesn’t seem to compute either, but maybe they have a huge mortgage deduction and are living on spaghetti, yearning for the day that they can afford catfood.
There are a bunch of goofy tax credits too, so maybe that reduces the figure for the younger sub 33K crowd.
Arne
you live in the same community i do, so you know what the heck i am talking about. we get a “save the schools” “think of the children” campaign here about once every two years. i took the trouble one time to see where the money went. and that parking lot really stuck in my craw.
i am a great sucker for “education” myself… even for other people’s kids… but i looked at this hard enough to come away thinking the voters were being had.
that’s okay MG
i’d just as soon people saw how you take over a thread and dump bullshit all over it so no one can read it.
MG
i am not saying the “facts” don’t exist. only that you haven’t got a clue about thinking about them.
I have looked at every school district budget for the last five years and the amount of deferred maintenance is growing. I have specifically dealt with maintaining my church parking lot and I know it is not cheap.
You are not being had, but you suffer from the same disease as everyone else who thinks something they don’t use themselves is clearly too expensive.
coberly, you’re a poor contributor to Angry Bear. You attack other people, starting many fights, and then you can’t back it up due to a general lack of knowledge.
Dan should rein you in as your comments are becoming more phony and useless in the spirit of conducting well reasoned discussions on the threads.
It should be pointed out that FICA includes a survivors benfit and a disablity benefit as well. So in addition to the retirement portion there is insurace both if you die for your survivors (kids to 18 or 22 if in school) and if you become disabled.
One thought I have had is that if you reach the limits to file a return why not a nominal minimum tax due of say $10. That’s small enough to not bother the bottom, but shuts up those who say those who don’t pay taxes should not have a say. After figuring the refund or the amount due if the net tax is zero $10 is deducted from the refund to be the minimum tax.
Arne
I suffer from the disease that everyone who walked to school has with paying taxes for parking spaces for kids with bmw’s.
i looked at the budget, and unless you knew what it was for you couldn’t know what it was for. everyting was broken into abstract categories that could have meant anything. the local schools are far nicer than anything i went to, and i got a better education.
Gordon
that agrees with my general sense. note that your numbers are a little different from mine. its strange that we can’t even get numbers that agree when we are trying to be honest.
How about a $1000 minimum? To live in the USofA? Quite a bargain, I would say.
And to prove that I don’t care what rich people think either, how about a 100% top bracket at, say, 1 million in annual income? Of course we need to put some teeth in the tax bracket so that the tax dodges don’t work anymore.
And I still remember back in high school and college when dad would go into fits whenever he had a good bonus year(infrequent in the ’70s) and ended up in the old 60% top bracket. And he was just a mid level exec and back then mid level execs didn’t make multiples more than the average employee.
So it looks as though, if you consider total taxes at all levels of Govt., the flat-tax brigade has won.
(NB. in my reply to myself above I made another mistake, saying that the CTJ report was on “effective US Federal tax rates on 13 April…”, when I should have said “effective overall US tax rates on 13 April…” Getting old.)
I’ve figured out what the problem is, I think. coberly already has told us that he has a crappy personality, but that is a side issue, and I generally try to be nice and supportive of coberly and have largely escaped being skewered by his comments.
But the main problem I see in the MG vs coberly debate is MG lumps SS into the Federal budget and deficit picture, whereas coberly and myself take the position that FICA are NOT taxes and SS is NOT Federal spending. This gets complicated by the fact that the Feds already spent the surplus and need to pay it back now, but that shouldn’t be shoved down our throats as our problem to deal with.
So my King Solomon solution is to carve SS out of the federal budget picture, because it is a funded (nearly for 75 years) retirement program, or maybe insurance as coberly likes to point out.
Then we look at what is left, which would have to include paying back the trust fund of $2.5T over the period of 2015 thru 2035, which averages out to $115B a year. A pittance. We spend that on AIG, or City or F&F&FHA or car companies or Iraq. Then we see what we are paying TAXES for.
The next big items are medicare and defense and soon interest which could become a moving target.
Then this recurring discussion would not always end in the same deadlock.
Thanks Cedric
for my part i need to keep MG’s tender feelings in mind so i won’t say anything will hurt them and make him respond with his more in sorrow than anger analysis of my personality.
btw
i don’t think MG has ever considered the possibility that he and i might be talking about different things, even though i specifically pointed out that SS and Medicare “debt” needed to be excluded, and those programs made to pay for themselves. you see, i just haven’t read the whole library on the federal deficit the way MG has, so I have had time to consider its various components and how they really need to be treated differently.
MG just likes to look at the whole picture.
I was just looking at income and ss tax collections from the late Clinton years and recently.
SS revenues up since then, income tax revenues down. Double or nothing seems to be the gambit.
That’s my read on the problem.
And if anything we need in budgeting, it would be clearer links between “funding” and “disbursement”.
Just had a funny thought. Why not add a paystub line item deduction for defense spending? And a footnote for deferred future tax obligation? Well, scratch that. Too tough to figure out.
Coberly: the metric is income taxes divided by income; income, the denominator, of course includes FICA contributions by an employee; econoprof is adding it to income taxes, the numerator (which you among others question, for legitimate reasons in this case); I’m suggesting he could instead subtract it from income, the denominator, to compute the “income tax bite” on after-FICA income. It’s no easier/harder than adding it to the numerator, it avoids econoprof’s treatment of FICA as a type of income tax, and it addresses econoprof’s (also legitimate) objection to ignoring FICA when computing the “income tax bite.”
And while you doing than add 8% sales tax to the poor but make it 1% for the rich since they save most of their money. Add 10% real estate taxes to the middle class but only make it 1% for the rich.
The rich pays 26% in taxes while the middle class pays 34%. Don’t feel sorry for the rich since they pay less taxes than the middle class.
darms
not really. you don’t know what the FICA load is on the rich, so all you are doing is cpnfusing yourself with funny numbers. i was talking in this post about the income tax only for a reason. should have known that the reason most people are so rotten at problem solving is because their attention wanders and they can’t keep track of relevant variables long enough to get a clear understanding of what role they play in the big picture.
pjr,
i find it easier to assemble the parts of a motor if i keep them clean in separate trays. i found a chart that tells me what the governmetn thinks the income tax rate is. i have no idea what the FICA “rate” is for people who have income over the cap and not from wages. i make an estimate when i reach that point (not here) of what the income of the rich is above the first 100k of wages on which they pay FICA…but i have no good data, and i do it in the spirit of “fairness,” but we have not got that far yet.
Cedric
by the way… i hate to think of you cowering away from being skewered by my comments. you should risk it. they don’t hurt. not really.
not like oom doom den kroop. look on my mighty books, look at my terrible big numbers, and despair o man. because i can say “you haven’t read this and you haven’t read that so you are not qualified to comment on anything” and we can sit here to the end of time worshipping in stunned silence the mighty Oedifice of the Movie Guide for fear he will tell us we don’t know what we are talking about. And he won’t reveal his secrets.
Rdan
I am aware that i have a Chicago style of expressing disagreement with those I think haven’t done their homework.. and that sometimes I am wrong about that. I suppose I have no reason to expect the other party will be a grownup and we can work toward an understanding, in the cases where I am wrong. But I ought to know that in the cases where I am right, the other party is more likely to respond in kind (that is, in “not kind”) than to go home and reflect on the shortcomings of his scholarship.
Nevertheless it irritates me that i get the reputation for having a rotten personality (i do) when i have been careful to avoid derrogatory language and still get dumped on with … in the first place… ten thousand word comments that can’t be replied to in any reasonable amount of time and… in the second place … gratuitous shots like “you are clueless..” and … well, and stuff like that.
So MG and little jimi go off into the sunset hand in hand having turned what was a modest little essay about the official net tax rates at various income levels into a cess pool of raw numbers that can’t be analyzed as given, and what has been called ad hominem but doesn’t rise to that level, being merely third grade name calling.
I would invite anyone who cares about such things… and you really should have better things to do… to go back and look at the exchange between me and MG and see where the name calling began. And then give me a polite word to use instead of bullshit after being buried under a ton of it.
Jimi
your views are rejected because we don’t agree with them. they are not censored.
my own opinion is that your views do not rise to the level of human thought. but that is my opinion. It doesn’t leave any scars.
Krasting
i assume you are not referring to your thinking. the SS “tax raise” will fix the SS problem. that’s what i said. the other debt problem may very well need a tax raise today. and it will also involve you and MG learning to separate the SS numbers… which will pay for themselves… the Medicare numbers… which should pay for themselves… and the general debt numbers… which can be paid by a suitable tax increase on about the same order as the 3% I suggested.
as for pixie dust… no, people with more imagination and practicality than you will have to come up with solutions. some of them may look a little like the new deal… or maybe not. but pixie dust won’t do it. neither will whatever it is you are smoking.
CoRev
its too bad you have no sense of humor. both of the statements i made regarding my rotten personality and my wanting to hear them bellow were on the order of self deprecatory jokes. i should have known that you and others would pick them up and use them against me in court.
then i suggest, as i was about to suggest to MG, but he will be “travelling”, that you go back and read this thread IN ORDER, if you can figure it out after MG rearranged it to suit his purposes.
You will see that i did not “insult” MG at all until well after he insulted me. and that was AFTER I agreed with him… which he was unable to notice because his agenda was to discredit me and to discredit the idea of a tax raise solving the deficit problem.
Fundamentalism… of the sort that says “i read it in the Book” and assumes, without knowing its an assumption, that the Book means what I, I, say it means… or think it means without thinking… is a manifestation of a brain problem, probably related to the same neurochemistry as obsessive – compulsive disorder.
If it seems more common in older people, that may not be a sign of aging brain so much as a consequence of the fact that older people are no longer so desperate to be accepted by their peers… a consequence of another brain chemical.
and you have no idea how kind i am being to you at the moment.
what the hell was the point of signing your comment “By Dale”?
MG
regret to say i didn’t have time to read the whole thing.
your style is to continue to assert that my information is false. yet you have never demonstrated the slightest ability to understand even your own information.
keep hammering away. i’ve got to go feed the dogs.
MG
go back and read very carefully. note each use of “reduce” and “eliminate.”
The claim that you made in the main post is false. No amount of chatter and misdirection from you will change that fact.
oh, hell, MG
i can play this game for one more round:
no, it isn’t. you just read it wrong.
MG
your inability to understand the word “reduce” makes it impossible for you understand the difference between “not knowing” and “not saying it the way you would have said.”
The difference between “the deficit” and “the Debt” is that reducing the defict reduces the debt from what it would have been.
The Social Security Trust Fund is part of the national debt (is it “accounted” that way by the official accounters? i wouldn’t know. the fact remains. Paying off the debt to the Social Security Trust Fund reduces the national debt. If other things are increasing the national debt at the same time, that is a separate problem. In any case my point was to make a distinction between paying down the national debt and “paying for Social Security twice” which is the way it is often presented by ignoramuses from the right.
Your insistence upon your way of saying it, or misunderstanding the way I said it, is a sign of a mental problem. Normal people would have found the root of the misunderstanding in a few exchanges. Your oom doom den kroop style of repeating your assertions, your personal insults, and your massive data dumps, makes any possibliity of mutual understanding impossible.
coberly
“The Social Security Trust Fund is part of the national debt (is it “accounted” that way by the official accounters? i wouldn’t know.”
YES!!!! It tis what makes it real!!!!!
I believe it is the OMB that says it is included in the National Debt. But I could be wrong on that. If they didn’t say it was a real debt obligation of The United States Government, some moron could come along and just claim it’s a bunch of worthless paper in filing cabinet, and then people would question why all this money is being deducted from employers and employees. This could cause anger, and people vote in a democracy, you know.
So thank the Gods we don’t have to worry about that in this world!
Also, I noticed in the debate, pages and pages ago, that coberly and MG didn’t use the terms debt and deficit the same way, but I figured out what each debater meant anyway.
coberly, your knowledge of Government accounting and budget issues is exceptionally weak.
Reducing the rate of growth in the U.S. National Debt is not the same thing as reducing the National Debt. The terms do not mean the same thing.
End your little con game and brush up on the basics of commonly used Government accounting terms.
Your whining on this thread was uncalled for as my original comment post was correct down the line. Period.
Care to quantify that? What would a return to Reagan era rates do? If you can’t tell us that you have no grounds for “Tax increases alone will not get the job done”. After all people have been telling us for decades that we can’t get out of Social Security ‘crisis’ by tax increases alone. Only to have me, Dale and Arne do a little arithmetic that shows that claim is somewhere between ignorant and mendacious, we can and should install a mechanism that would address that non-crisis in a methodical way, and not the world bond market would not panic. Nor would workers really notice the flea-bite.
In fact I am planning a post showing (with something I call ‘numbers’) that the Northwest Plan gives an end result where Trust Fund principal never needs to be repaid at all, and that the effective interest rate paid on the balances is discounted roughly by the equivalent in real growth over that period (some interest has to be retained each year to maintain TF solvency and so doesn’t require GF transfers).
Both you and I are more than old enough to remember these precise arguments being made in 1992, the consensus was that the Reagan/Bush I deficits were both structural and unsustainable and that there was no growth/tax solution. Oops instead that there was. Why should we accept that you or even the Treasury Department got it perfectly correct THIS go around?
Dan with all respect to your Dad I suspect he was in that vast majority that thinks their entire income becomes subject to the top marginal rate. I have over the years heard tons of friends and co-workers complaining about mandatory over-time because they think that after taxes it will become a net loss. Well it just can’t, those extra earnings from that time and a half even if they are exposed to the next higher bracket just can’t result in a net loss, except I guess since the AMT where I suppose the interaction could happen. I don’t know how old you are but I don’t think the AMT would have been in effect then or if it was was the cause of your dad’s complaint. For the vast majority of wage workers the effect they see is just not there.
MG can you insert a BRIEF explanation of the relation between the Trust Funds, Debt Held by the Public, total Public Debt, and the effect of paying down the Trust Funds on either of the latter (because they are not the same).?
BTW I do not believe that ‘National Debt’ is even a term of art used by either CBO or OMB, for example it does not show up in the CBO Director’s Summary of the Long Term Budget Outlook.
http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=328 . For a guy making explicit claims of authority in this regards i have to say your grasp and deployment of budget terms seems pretty sloppy. What do YOU mean by ‘National Debt’? ‘Debt Held by the Public’? or ‘Public Debt’? That is in the terms ACTUALLY USED in Government accounting.
Simple challenge. What is the relation between Trust Fund debt service and whatever it is that you are calling ‘National Debt’? After all you have never been shy about handing out quizzes and homework the other direction.
Bruce,
I’m aware of all that of course, but in Layman Speak we have always used the term National Debt, and it means “the whole enchilada”, except we can’t just use the term “the whole enchilada” in debates because it sounds too lowbrow.
Now I think the USG has been moving towards NewSpeak, as a clever way to promote RightThink, which is how we get official budget terms like Public Debt replacing National Debt, the overstated importance of the smaller but similar sounding Debt Held by the Public, and the unheard of and wont to disappear Intragovernmental Debt. (this is the worthless paper in the filing cabinet, except maybe for military pensions and healthcare)
‘on-budget/off-budget’ I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole.
The only thing I can suggest is create a short dictionary of GovSpeak and include it with all papers, posts, comments and free speech.
Oddly I include such a glossary or at least a direct link to it in my recent post called something like Reading List for the Serious Social Security Student. There is a section of the Analytical Perspectives on the President’s Budget (part of OMBs release of the total Budget) called Budget Terms and Processes. It may be Section 6 but from memory the glossary of terms starts on pg 131 this year. It is the single best discussion of the overall topic I have run across. If you read it, something I see little evidence MG has, though I am sure he has it indexed in whatever impressive bibliography software he apparently has at his disposal.
Bruce Webb – Today (Sunday), 2:46:31 PM – “Oddly I include such a glossary or at least a direct link to it in my recent post called something like Reading List for the Serious Social Security Student. There is a section of the Analytical Perspectives on the President’s Budget (part of OMBs release of the total Budget) called Budget Terms and Processes. It may be Section 6 but from memory the glossary of terms starts on pg 131 this year. It is the single best discussion of the overall topic I have run across. If you read it, something I see little evidence MG has, though I am sure he has it indexed in whatever impressive bibliography software he apparently has at his disposal.”
Webb,
Your continued arrogance and typical nastiness are uncalled for in this discussion. Such negative commentary about me doesn’t change the facts outlined in my first and second comment posts.
I thought that was a pretty good reference when you put up that main post.
The definitions section doesn’t cover all Government accounting definitions, but did include the definition for “deficit”, as an example. It doesn’t include definitions for “Gross Federal Debt”, “Public Debt”, or “Intragovernmental Holdings”.
As explained in the President’s Budget under Budget Concepts and Budget Process, Analytical Perspectives:
“Deficit means the amount by which outlays exceed receipts
in a fiscal year. It may refer to the on-budget, offbudget,
or unified budget deficit.”