One person does not a mass exodus of business make. Taxes have been higher in the past than they are now (contrary to popular belief)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/10/1108409/-CBO-Under-Obama-Americans-Paid-Lowest-Taxes-in-30-Years
and look America is still standing. Business simply shelter their money in offshore accounts. Which is why loophole repairs I think should be a priority before hiking taxes. I dont really care about raising taxes on those making a great sum of money. Good for them, make more. But the sheltering and shuffling to avoid taxes needs to stop.
Welfare. Ahhhh welfare. First of all, you need to more carefully define "welfare" since you, like many other conservatives who want to use it as an argument, use it in a broad sweeping brush and dont really specify what qualifies.
That being said, actual "welfare" (money spent on nonworking folks) is somewhere around 5-6% of the budget.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/how-much-do-we-spend-nonworking-poor
This is a drop in the bucket compared to the massive behemoths that are -
Defense spending (the spending that always gets forgotten when it comes to spending cuts)
Social Security (which I will fully agree needs reform, but disagree with conservatives on how)
Medicare (again, needs reform, the argument is over how)
Romney and most conservative candidates and congresspeople like to talk about the easy half of cutting spending and taxes. The tax cuts. Its not hard to sell people on tax cuts, of course they are going to eat it up. But if you are going to cut revenue you need to also cut spending, and thats the side that gets ignored, though it should be addressed FIRST.
Finally unions, since you for some reason jumped to them (not sure why you are arguing so much in one post).
I am about 3 months away from being a certified teacher. Pension needs serious reform, its a broken system. Tenure too, has serious problems and needs to be fixed. That being said the Chicago Public School system is a perfect example of why unions are also necessary, they can prevent absurd teacher evaluation systems like what CPS is proposing from going into place.
And then you drop a nice vague "Reagan economics" at the end. Please be more specific, many of Reagans policies would be considered borderline socialism in todays far right takeover of the Republican party, and conservative mindsets across the country.
