Just A Reminder

To the Editor:In 2001, unemployment stood at four percent. Less than thirteen percent of Americans lived below the poverty line. Only one-half of one percent of homeowners faced foreclosure. Seventeen million Americans relied on food stamps. The treasury saw its first budgetary surplus in decades.Yet President Bush declared: “A warning light is flashing on the dashboard of our economy, and we just can’t drive on and hope for the best. We need tax relief now.” Congressional Republicans echoed this alarmist rhetoric in passing a $1.3 trillion tax cut bill.That ‘bill’ is now due. Today, we enjoy nearly double the unemployment rate of 2001; seventeen percent of us live under the poverty line; foreclosure rates have almost tripled; and the number of Americans on food stamps has doubled. Our treasury faces a trillion-dollar deficit.Yet Congressional Republicans now balk at a stimulus package costing $400 billion dollars less than the Bush tax cuts, even though almost half of the stimulus package is tax cuts. And in an Orwellian turn, the nattering nabobs of negativism accuse the president of fearmongering – as if the economic forecast was all flowers and candy.Economists say we will experience a deep recession lasting until at least 2011. Hearing Republicans complain that spending won’t be fast enough, but will peak in two years, is like someone saying you only need to prepare for four weeks of winter, and never mind that it’s early November.Republicans have no credibility to talk about the economy, taxation, or fiscal stimulus. None.—The Times Daily didn’t print this. I’m used to it by now.

mmortal – at the moment the size of the national debt & dealing with it is NOT a priority.Keep in mind that gov’t spending, as laid out in the ARRA creates jobs – jobs which will support other jobs in a community, jobs for people who will then pay taxes, jobs that will teach skills & fund research, development & innovation – which will lead to new industries, new technologies, and a sturdier infrastructure. THEN the spotlight can be put back on the national debt.Without the gov’t spending, there will come a point when tax cuts for the middle/working class won’t matter, because the class will have NO income to be taxed.and FYI, the rich are not disproportionately taxed – even on straight salaries. Wages over $106,800 [2009 figure] are not subject to the social security part of FICA. [Perhaps if that cap hadn't been put in place so many years ago, and high paid executives had had to contribute their 6.2% like the rest of us, the social security system wouldn't be having problems.] Therefore, lower paid workers pay a higher percentage of their paychecks to the gov’t. Gasoline and other taxes are commodity-based, and therefore, lower paid workers pay a higher percentage of their paychecks in taxes to the gov’t for those items.Moreover, a lot of the wealth for the wealthy comes from investments – dividends, interest, and capital gains. The tax rate for capital gains is about 15%, IIRC. So the person who earns $100,000 pays a HIGHER tax rate than the person who has $100,000 in capital gains.Now is the time to support the workers, so that goods are produced & services provided, and to stop the hand-wringing over the plight of the “poor, pitiful” rich.

The Repbulicans did not vote for the bill because it was not really a “stimulus bill” as it was sold to the public to be.”President Obama’s economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.”That is the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office speaking there, not me.The Congressionl Budget Office also said-”CBO did project the bill would create jobs, though by 2011 the effects would be minuscule.”Did you read that! Effects would be minuscule!Effect would be to hurt the economy more in the long run than if it did NOTHING?Almost a trillion dollars for minuscule effects? Worse for the economy than if they did nothing? Thats why they Republicans didn’t vote for it, it was all spending on pork which will lead directly to inflation because of all the extra money the Gov’t has to print, and/or increase taxes to pay for all of this.Remember those are the words of the NONPARTISAN CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE.You can google that report for yourselves. So who to you want to believe? What Obama told everybody, or the Congressional Budget Office?

Swamplandinflorida -You owe us an apology.You are repeating outright lies put forward by the usual list of right wing propaganda dispensers. Your quotes come from a GOP press release, not from a CBO report. The quotes you refer to are not present in the real CBO Report. These quotes are a complete fabrication based on carefully cherry picking sentences from a partial preliminary report. Neither the preliminary report or the final report say what you claim. This fabrication may fool people too lazy to download and read the real CBO report, but I am not one of those.Your entire argument is based on lies. Are we in a fascist dictatorship where you just use one lie after another to lead the sheeple right off the cliff? The Neocons seem to think we are.I’m still waiting for the WMDs to be found to prove that we were not lied into an unnecessary invasion and occupation that my great grandchildren will have to pay for. How about you?Here are two CBO Reports on economy stimulation. Read them both before you comment further on this topic.http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/89xx/doc8916/01-15-Econ_Stimulus.pdfThis is the real CBO report on the Recovery Bill that was signed into law.http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9968/hr1.pdfPeddle your lies elsewhere you propagandizing fascist.You better pray that they don’t ship your job to india. You have no future as an online psyoperative.

“mmortal – at the moment the size of the national debt & dealing with it is NOT a priority.”Ah, but it should be an immediate priority. I’ll tell you why below.”Keep in mind that gov’t spending, as laid out in the ARRA creates jobs – jobs which will support other jobs in a community, jobs for people who will then pay taxes, jobs that will teach skills & fund research, development & innovation – which will lead to new industries, new technologies, and a sturdier infrastructure. THEN the spotlight can be put back on the national debt.”Those “jobs” being created are practically worthless if there is no real value to back the salaries (e.g. they are jobs created on a bubble called our expanding national debt, and probably more critically, our external debt). By having the government take on even MORE debt to pay for them, and continuing to pay such arbitrarily inflated wages, how do you think this magical wealth creation occurrence will just so quickly arise from our current facilities such that we could THEN focus on the debt? It’s like a venture capitalist continuing to get loans but never producing the results he envisions.Your assumption is that it is possible to retain the rosy unemployment figures of the past by playing a shell game of moving money around and printing even more of it, digging the debt hole even deeper. At what point do we invent the special widget that will then pay for all the debt we’ve accumulated, that debt being even greater multiplied because we continue to live inflated lifestyles, instead of cutting back from the very beginning so we know where we stand? We need to cut back out the inflated lifestyles NOW, start paying for them NOW, so our psychology is realistic, and then let the market, by way of effective/efficient/competitive business feedback, create real wealth and new innovation. We need to start buying the store brands NOW, not trick people into holding out and continue to buy the name brands.Having the government force jobs onto the economy to do what it thinks should be done, while taking on even more debt, will make it that much harder for the economy to rebound, because those benefiting from the false security of it will, and it’s only human nature, continue living their lifestyles of yesterday.”Without the gov’t spending, there will come a point when tax cuts for the middle/working class won’t matter, because the class will have NO income to be taxed.”Where is the money for that coming from? With government spending, by way of more debt and printing of money, there will likewise come a point where tax cuts for the middle/working class won’t matter either, because the money supply won’t be worth anything. Inflation is a hidden tax on all of us, especially on the poor.”and FYI, the rich are not disproportionately taxed – even on straight salaries. Wages over $106,800 [2009 figure] are not subject to the social security part of FICA. [Perhaps if that cap hadn't been put in place so many years ago, and high paid executives had had to contribute their 6.2% like the rest of us, the social security system wouldn't be having problems.]“Social Security IS the problem! It’s a pyramid scheme, it always was. The government has spent all of it away to balance out the debt, and we let them, and even if they hadn’t, the false expectations of the American people of an always increasing quality of life and extended retirements, never being conservative and saving any of their own money and living below their means, because the government will always save them, would have eventually broken it. People must be responsible to pay for their own retirements, so that the government can’t underestimate it for them. The poor would have been getting 6.2% more every paycheck to save for themselves, and it wouldn’t have been squandered by the government, had SS never existed.”Therefore, lower paid workers pay a higher percentage of their paychecks to the gov’t. Gasoline and other taxes are commodity-based, and therefore, lower paid workers pay a higher percentage of their paychecks in taxes to the gov’t for those items.”I agree with you. No one should be paying it!”Moreover, a lot of the wealth for the wealthy comes from investments – dividends, interest, and capital gains. The tax rate for capital gains is about 15%, IIRC. So the person who earns $100,000 pays a HIGHER tax rate than the person who has $100,000 in capital gains.Now is the time to support the workers, so that goods are produced & services provided, and to stop the hand-wringing over the plight of the “poor, pitiful” rich.”I don’t pity the rich, and I agree with you that the poor aren’t able to take advantage of investment opportunities like the rich do. However, with the government continuing to inflate the currency every year to try to inflate their way out of the debt that already exists, the poor suffer even more, because their wages don’t increase accordingly, nor do they have the ability to invest to try to keep their heads above the rising water of inflation. Taxing the rich more to compensate for such government bloat just continues to perpetuate the unrestricted spending of our bureaucrats. We have to cut spending and stop the practice of going into debt, and live with the realities of what actually exists, or continue to live in a fantasy world and spending ourselves to death.