Europe giving America economic advice?

Paris-based group of economists says U.S. should hike taxes on wealthy to fix economy

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International Group of Economists: USA should hike taxes on wealthy

Jonathan Hoenig: Who do you think pays for these Europeans to lecture us that we need to pay more taxes? Americans through their tax dollars. We send these Europeans $84 million a year, and the fact that we do is a horrendous sanction of the victim. We are funding anti-capitalists that advocate force. Taxes are force. It is government taking your productive effort and redistributing it. It is destructive and it is exactly what has imploded Europe with its big spending, our big entitlement state, and unless we reverse course it will do the same thing.

Tracy Byrnes: Yeah, here in America we say people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. You know Cheryl, the other thing we have seen is that taxes don't fix the problem. Let's all come to terms with this now. Raising taxes is not going to help anything. We need to change spending habits! We need to change this notion that we all want to be on the government dole. To hear from socialist-type countries that they should be collecting more of our own money it shouldn't surprise anyone. America needs to focus on America right now. We need to get ourselves back to being the number one country in the world otherwise we are losing that status by the second.

Christian Dorsey: Look, let's not focus on the messenger, let's focus on the message. That message is shared by most credible economists and even the majority of American people that we need to raise revenues in this country and the place to start is with the ultra high earners. Consider the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, it cut taxes for the top 1 percent three times more than it did for the other 99 percent. If you just restore fairness, then you leave a lot of room to reduce the deficit and also make America stronger. Lets not focus on the fact that this came from a European report, this is what Americans have been saying for years.

Wayne Rogers: It's not a question of if Europeans are lecturing us or we are lecturing them. It is a question of us all looking at a world economy if you will forgive me, and recognizing that we all are not independent but interdependent and we have the same problem that they have. If we spend too much, we are going to go in the toilet just like they did.

Todd Schoenberger: Look, you don't just raise taxes first of all. You are not going to see any type of prosperity in this country, but more importantly you won't see it globally either. Look, France and all the European countries need the United States to survive. The only way we are going to do that and be prosperous is by cutting taxes and moving forward. Look, we heard about this all this week. The Supreme Court decision with health care, you are going to hear this further with the fiscal cliff-you cannot raise taxes in this country and expect good things to happen.

Cost of 4th of July BBQ Jumps 5.7 percent from Last Year

Todd Schoenberger: I will tell you that this is going to take a bite out of the economic recovery. Every time you take dollars out of a person's wallet because they spend more to put food on the family table they can't spend it on other things. The other things are the durable goods items- you think of the appliances, the homes, the cars-things that are actually going to boost this economy. So, we have to wonder what the rip-off effect of this will be from these higher food prices.

Wayne Rogers: There is a very good reason for it. I'm going to show you something (Gestures to head of lettuce) when that gets loaded in Salinas, CA there are 24 of these that go in a box. That box costs between $6-7 when it is loaded. By the time it gets to Jacksonville, FL it has doubled in price. So, its not the product itself, it's not the head of lettuce, it is the cost of transportation that are driving these things up. When you look at the cost of food prices you better look at transportation costs. That is the only thing that is going to bring that down is pure competition.

Jonathan Hoenig: Frankly Cheryl, I can afford it but the inflation that Wayne is alluding to is a tax that hurts Joe Six-Pack-the working man more than anyone. I mean a 7 percent hike in the price of chips for a lot of folks actually makes a big difference. To Wayne's point, a free market actually reduces prices. A government intervention always raises prices. You see that in industries that they dominate like health care and schools and the post office. Also across the whole economy, where the expansion of the money supply raises the cost of everything for everybody.

Christian Dorsey: It is incredibly destructive and this is such a big issue given the fact that people have had stagnant wages and stagnant incomes. They are not able to absorb these food shocks and it's not just transportation costs-it's the weather which is causing devastation to corn crops and wheat crops. We have an ever growing planet and we don't have an ever growing supply of food. These are all questions we are going to have to deal with for a long time. It is going to call for a serious revolution for food production in this country.

Tracy Byrnes: Christian is right, the weather has a lot to do with it. When you have flour up 6 percent, you can't even go home and bake bread if you wanted to. I think the problem for a lot of families is that we feel like the government is ignoring us. When they say there is no inflation, we don't know what you are talking about-you're crazy-it makes you feel worse because I'm not crazy! I know everything goes up when I go to the food store. Yet, unfortunately because we use older calculations it doesn't translate that way.

Tax Cheats get $1.5 billion in Loans from President's Stimulus

Tracy Byrnes: Holy Toledo! These are tax deadbeats and we are giving them more money. The notion that they can claim the $8,000 first time homebuyer credit is Loony Tunes. We don't audit our own people, we just give money out because there is no control down there. These are people that owe back income taxes. Collect that money first before you give them one more benefit.

Wayne Rogers: It's not a question of fair; it's a question of stupidity. The government never runs a program well. You can't expect the federal government to run anything right for god sakes! They made loans to children; they made loans to people who were criminals and who were in jail at the time that they gave them the tax credits. This was one of the dumbest things in the world. It's another bureaucratic mess that the federal government can never do right. All those programs are terrible and they should cut them back or learn how to run them right.

Christian Dorsey: It is disappointing Cheryl, but to lump this in with government's ineffectiveness in ridiculous. The last program we talked about food insecurity. There is a program that is $78 billion strong. 92 percent of all those dollars go directly to help people buy food and it has less than a 2 percent error rate. I defy you to find me a corporate enterprise that has that level of efficiency.

Jonathan Hoenig: There is tremendous fraud in food stamps, tremendous fraud in cash for clunkers, there is tremendous fraud in TARP, 20 percent of Medicare is fraud and yet we went ahead and passed ObamaCare. I mean those are stats that no business could survive on. Who is surprised the fact that, to Wayne's point, that when government starts to intervene in markets, wealth destruction always follows.

Todd Schoenberger: Accountability in the private sector Christian, people will lose their jobs if something like this happens and the government-they get to keep them.

This is a proxy of showing you why the government is out of control because it is so big. Look, this is a government that right now is borrowing 40 cents on the dollar to cover its overhead costs. In 2008, it was 20 cents on the dollar. That right there shows you that it is bureaucracy, too many people-too many hands are in the pot now and that is why you have so much fraud because there is zero accountability.