Tear down foreclosed homes to prop up the housing market? If Mark is serious, then that is some of the most ridiculous dumbfuckery I have ever heard of. Let me give you a truly radical idea - rent the fucking homes.
" What bothers me are not the taxes I pay to help others and to support the services our country needs. What bothers me is the mis-allocation and inefficient distribution of our tax money."<p>Completely agree. I doubt many people would be happy knowing that a lot of their taxes (or government debt) goes toward funding the defense budget, two wars, and such. But that's the price everyone pays for a democratic country. If there were enough people pissed off about the misallocation of taxes, then vote the bastards out.
Mark, watch out - the tea partiers, libertarians and wealthy will think you're some kind of socialist with that kind of talk.<p><i>It's a good problem to have</i> is a great saying and has helped me time and again to put things into perspective.
"I have NEVER met a motivated person who has said they would not chase their goals because of tax rates"
This is a common mistake that Cuban makes. The problem with taxes is that they affect marginal behavior. The doctor works a little less, and entrepreneur sells out a little earlier, the medium business hires one less worker than they otherwise would have. These decisions are invisible because they are small and we can't compare what is to what would have been. But, the costs of taxes on economic efficiency are real. We need taxes for to pay for government. And, we can debate how big magnitude of the distortionary effect of taxes. But this should be done with data not based on anecdotal feelings.
<i>With complete transparency we could have hundreds of volunteer deficit reduction Super Committees to look for the best places to cut costs and improve efficiency.</i><p>This sounds like a great idea, but I worry...<p>A lack of shared values means each "Super Committee" seems likely to fall into a battle over values. Some will insist on cutting defence spending, other will cut welfare programs. Compromises won't be based on what makes sense, but by trading off between sides.<p>I'm not sure that is any better than the existing system - and in some ways it is worse. It slows down government even more, and it is likely to increase partisanship.
He is so wrong about nearly everything he says.<p>First you can't get money out of politics and you wouldn't want to anyway, because when the next Huey Long comes around, who is going to defend your business?<p>Second the higher the tax rates the less income you loose buy not working that extra hour. Since working has a cost, wear and tear on a car if you do deliveries, payment to have somebody take care of your children, etc this point will be meet before you would think it would be.<p>With regards to a corporation, the more expensive you make its operation, the more you help foreign corporations.<p>Finally the issue isn't lack of taxes, it is wasteful military spending, particulary in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not because the US isn't fighting efficiently but because they hsouldn't have been there in the first place.<p>Personally I would solve the budget crisis by getting most tropes home, reduce the army to one fifth, double the size of the elite forces (and use them to take out Bin Laden rather than occupy Afghanistan).<p>So long as the US has nukes, nobody is going to invade and there will never again be a world war two style clash of titans (because it would go nuclear and be done with before the soldiers could even be called up).