Journal pudge's Journal: Revenues vs. Expenditures 18
A lot of people call a decrease in revenues -- such as a tax cut -- an expenditure.
These people are either idiots, or liars.
If a business starts selling less product, it doesn't say that they are spending more money, it says they are bringing in less money. But when the government brings in less money, many liars say they are SPENDING MORE money, not bringing in less.
They are twisting the language to suit their own purposes, completely inventing definitions that did not previously exist. It's like when Bush said Kerry voted 350 times for higher taxes, despite knowing full well that some of those votes were actually for tax cuts. Bush was lying then, and the (mostly liberal) people who talk about tax cuts as expenditures are lying now.
Re:Hold on a second.. (Score:1)
revenue [reference.com]
Funny thing about words... they have meanings.
We can either change the meaning of words or keep the original meanings.
Your call. Monty Python explains it best [ibras.dk] I think.
Re:Hold on a second.. (Score:1)
meaning of the words expenditure and and revenue. Specifically
expenditure, in this context:
If you're looking at it as a cost vs the total pie, your
expenditures did in fact go up by 2%. If you take in less, but spend
the same, you are, in effect, spending more.
Expenditures are in absolute amounts. When you look at a balance sheet
you do not write in the expense column the percentage of your income
that it cost you, you write the absolute a
Re:That's funny (Score:1)
Re:Hold on TWO seconds.. (Score:2)
Fool me once, shame on me; Fool me twice...
Re:Hold on a second.. (Score:2)
I am not talking about percentages. I am talking about whether a specific set of money is an expenditure or not. Let's give that loss of revenue you mentioned a name. You make software that you sell online, so your expenses do not change the more or less you sell. So your loss in revenue is simply selling less so
"cost" (Score:3, Informative)
But, that aside, regarding the word "expenditure," let me ask you this. Suppose the government were a car dealer. Yes, I know it's a real stretch to think of politicians and car dealers as being similar, the one is so clearly morally superior to the other, but let that go.
A dealer is engaged in a complex dance of negotiations between me, the buyer of their product, and the manufacturer, which sells the dealer the product. Just like the government stands between me, the taxpayer and consumer of its various services, and the agencies that provide those services in exchange for what used to be my dollars.
Car dealers are eager to tell me how much cash back I will get if I buy their car. If I buy X model at Y time with Z terms, I will get $1000 cash back.
Under some circumstances the dealer would surely have to list that $1000 check that they hand me as an expenditure. If I'm buying a car on credit, for example, and I've put less than $1000 down on it, then when I drive it off the lot, the dealer's bank balance is lower than when I walked in, so clearly money was spent.
But sometimes it's less clear. When I bought my last car, I paid with a cashier's check. I could have chosen to bring in a check for the price of the car, and leave with the car and a $1000 check from the dealer. Would that $1000 not have been a dealer expenditure as well?
As it happens, I didn't; I brought in a check for $1000 less. But when the dealer does its books, I honestly have no idea whether the $1000 "cash back" that I was invisibly paid is listed as an expenditure or not. As I understand it, they get incentives from the manufacturer, so if the manufacturer actually gave them $1000 for moving the car off the lot by a given time, maybe that money shows up on the other side of the ledger as an expenditure, and maybe not. The point is that I could see it going either way.
Now think for a moment of Bush's first tax cut. You and I, and millions of Americans, got a check for a few hundred dollars delivered to us in the mail. An actual check that we deposited in our bank account, totally separate from the process of taxation, payroll deduction, and all the rest of it. Doesn't that sound like a cash-back bonus incentive you might get at a car dealer? The Treasury Department had billions in the bank, and wrote out billions worth of checks. Just think common-sense for a moment: doesn't that sound like an expenditure? Wouldn't it be unsurprising if that were counted, maybe according to some technicality, as an expense?
Those checks were sent to us courtesy of the Marriage Penalty and Family Tax Relief Act of 2001 [hslda.org]. You may be interested to know that out of that $100 billion of tax relief, "$15 billion was in a retroactive refundable child credit that was booked as an expense" (Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, 2004, p.163).
And according to the administration [whitehouse.gov] -- read carefully, now -- the Act "lowers the tax burden on families... by, among other things... expanding the child credit."
So it seems that in at least some cases, a lower tax burden -- lower taxes -- has technically been an expenditure. That's not the case all the time, to be sure, at least not if one wishes to be formally correct. But is it really so far-fetched to realize that it just comes down to a matter of accounting and how one sees these things? Do you really need to be so harsh on people who, in informal or off-the-cuff speech, talk about how the government is going to "pay for" lowering taxes? Most people recognize that kind of language to be an expression of an opinion, not a mathematical conjecture. Most people really don't get worked
Re:"cost" (Score:2)
I certainly agree it is a big improvement over words like "spend" and "pay." Those words specifically imply expenditures. "Cost" is far more ambiguous.
Doesn't that sound like a cash-back bonus incentive you might get at a car dealer?
No. It sounds like I gave the government too much of my money and it is paying me back (without interest).
You may be interested to know that out of that $100 billion of tax relief, "$15 billion was in a retroactive refundable child credit that
Re:"cost" (Score:2)
That trillion will be, of course, an expenditure for our children when it shows up on their tax forms years from now. With interest.
If you think you are entitled to that money... (Score:2)
Re:If you think you are entitled to that money... (Score:2)
Government is the anti-business (Score:2)
I used to work directly for the local government here. I was a government worker. I had a boss who was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, and he and I had some rather heated discussions some times. But he did open my eyes about some things. For example, initiation day.
You have your brand new electe
Re:Government is the anti-business (Score:2)
That is not what I said.
What I am referring to is not the idea that the government is entitled to the money that comes in. Of course it is. What I am referring to is the idea that all money is government's money. That whatever money you have is because the government let you keep it, rather than the other way around: what
Re:Government is the anti-business (Score:2)
I'm sure you've heard the phrase "never attribute to malice what is likely attributed to stupidity".
So it isn't with malice that they treat your money as belonging to them first and you second. It is that they are the enablers of orderly society, which costs money.
I could be wrong - you could be against them having any claim on any amount
Re:Government is the anti-business (Score:2)
I am not saying they are malicious, I am saying they are wrong.
It is that they are the enablers of orderly society, which costs money.
That's insufficient. I've known people who have spent many years in civic life who didn't think this way.
I could be wrong - you could be against them having any claim on any amount of your money.
I am for the repeal of the 16th amendment, but that's beside the point.
Like I