Barack Obama’s plan means higher taxes for everyone!
It’s simple. When Obama implements his tax plan the end result will be higher taxes and fewer jobs for everyone. Raise taxes on people who make $250K or more and those people will figure out how to make less than $250K. Raise taxes on corporations and small businesses that can afford it, and those businesses will pass on the increased expense to their customers. End result? We will all pay higher taxes.
There is NO acceptable reason that people who have become successful enough to earn $250K or more a year should be taxed at a higher rate than someone like me who barely made any money last year. I don’t want Obama’s handout! I don’t need Obama’s handout! I just want Obama to keep his grubby hands out of my pockets! I want Obama to keep his grubby hands out of your pockets too! Of course we must pay taxes. I don’t question that at all. With taxes we purchase infrastructure and defense. Those are things that government should be involved in.
Obama is not interested in your success or prosperity! He is only interested in giving you a handout so that he may control and manipulate your life.
Obama’s plan is a tax CUT overall. So’s McCain’s. Both socialistically put wealthy people in higher tax brackets than poor people. It’s been that way since the income tax was created. It was WORSE under Reagan and even Ike. Obama’s top is lower than that in the 90s. You remember then, when jobs boomed and the stock market went up 350%.
As for tax policy, well, the best thing is to cut taxes everywhere. Unfortunately, in the past 8 years the deficit has doubled. We’ve mortgaged the country to China to pay for big ag giveaways and a socialistic drug plan and a war or two, costing about $10B per MONTH. And, oh, we’ve decided to nationalize the banks. You know, one of those basic commie moves.
But I digress. Given that we need a certain amount of taxes to pay for all the above, how to spread the burden? Cutting taxes of the wealthy, at the expense of the middle class, is supposed to trickle down. But that doesn’t work, because the wealthy spend a good part of that money overseas, investing in Chinese shoe companies and buying Ferragamo loafers. They also tend to park that cash in the form of expensive items, like lots of cars, houses, and jets. The money sits there, tied up. Or they buy $200 bottles of French champagne and drink it all, enriching a French bottler.
Cutting taxes of the middle class, however, creates far more jobs. The money gets spent instantly in the local economy, on local restaurants, and, yes, hiring the local plumber rather than trying to fix it yourself. Middle class people vacation more in the USA, and they are more likely to buy American cars. A tax dollar distributed here circulates 5-10x, whereas one given to the wealthy generally circulates 3x. You won’t hear this from McCain — he never said the phrase “middle class” once in all the debates.
Where’s the best place to put tax dollars? The small businessman. This is the biggest engine of jobs in the country. And nearly all of them make less than $200K.
Don’t buy into the myth that you have to give Wall St. millionaires more money and they’ll make jobs. It hasn’t worked. Job creation has lagged well behind that of the 90s.
This isn’t socialism. Obama hasn’t called for nationalizing any industries (unlike, say, Mr. Bush). He does, however, understand that the middle class is the engine of this country, and the more you do to help them, the better the entire country will be. It’s why he’s always talking about the middle class and Mr. McCain, a child of wealth and power, has had problems even saying the phrase, until very recently.
Earlier in the year when I was hanging out in Malibu there was a group of people who would meet at the local coffee shop to discuss the progress of the primaries. Mostly liberal with a few conservatives. There was always a lively discussion. Interestingly enough we had an inside joke that the solution to everything in America was to . It was usually said tongue in cheek, however everyone in that particular group could see that cutting taxes would benefit more than raising taxes.
Providing tax cuts to the middle class and small businesses is hugely beneficial. This is what happens when people are given a break. Large corporations are a different matter. They treat taxes as expenses which are passed on to their customers. Give them a tax break and they’ll probably just pass the savings on to their stockholders as profits. Corporations have no conscious, immense power, and only one thing regulating them. The market. And we’ve just made the market obsolete with a $700 Billion bailout.
We are all children of wealth and power. However most of us fail to learn how to use it to our advantage early enough, and we end up spending it. One of the reasons the wealthy get that way is because of the way they handle their available cash. They park it in assets, they don’t borrow money, and they spend less than they make. When individuals manage to accumulate huge sums of money in this country they are very generous with their cash. They create jobs, set up research institutions, build hospitals, and this list goes on. Individuals do this. Corporations build factories overseas and hire foreign workers at a fraction of the cost of American workers. Although corporations have the same rights as people in this country, they are not people and do not act the same way.
RE: taxes and the federal budget
There are several sites that let you peruse the federal budget. I like http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/resource/
for an overall view and http://www.kowaldesign.com/budget/money.html as an explorer. Dive right in. The overall view, you’ll see, is that social security more or less pays for itself (it’s a ponzi scheme), and the biggest items are Medicare+Medicaid followed by DOD then by interest payments on all this borrowing we’ve been doing. Now in the past 8 years we’ve cut taxes, but have actually spent more, paying for it by borrowing. And everyone except the superrich have been doing worse since then. So cutting taxes alone doesn’t work.
You’ve got to cut spending.
Go ahead and try to cut Medicare. This is how the rest of the world spends less on medicine. They let their old people die. Over 65? No more heart bypasses for you.
The next on the list is the DOD. Well, actually, it is corporate welfare. We actually don’t spend all that much on operations. Ike was right. The military-industrial complex is bankrupting us. But nobody has managed to cut defense spending, not even Ike. Everyone is hostage to the hard right wing who scream “traitor” if a president, both D and R, try to cut the budget. Actually, the last cuts were done by Bush Sr (via his Sec Def Cheney), and he was hammered for it. But I think it must be done. We spend more on defence than the entire rest of the world put together.
The next on the list is interest. Well, Clinton tried to cut the deficit, but Bush erased those gains.
Beyond that, is a mishmash. Nothing big really sticks out. Yeah, lots of big ag spending, and the energy dept. gets a lot to help the nuclear industry. But it’s a big task.
So I hope the next president cuts defense, even a little. We can afford it, and, as Ike put it, you only need so much and anything beyond that is harmful to the Republic.
Part II Corporations
Corporations pay close attention to taxes. They are an expense, and they can’t just pass them off to customers, as you say. They move to lower tax areas, and do a huge amount of financial shenanigans to pay less taxes. Thus so many US corporations paid zero taxes last year, and other, like Halliburton, just moved their headquarters to a PO box in the Cayman Islands.
Extra money in the hands of corporations goes to a variety of things, but creating jobs is one of them. Lately, most of those jobs are overseas. My company has opened huge factories in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. There are two small, highly automated factories in the USA.
Moreover, few corporations set up research institutions (Bell Labs, IBM research, and Xerox PARC are shadows of their former selves), and most hospitals are paid for by the local communities and states (just like stadiums).
Wealthy People
They leverage themselves way more than average people. They have access to more leverage. Million dollar homes are not bought in cash, nor are private jets. Moreover, they also use this leverage to buy stocks. This provides for jobs both here but increasingly abroad. Few factories are built anymore in the USA. The money for those Chinese factories comes from international investors.
Again, the fastest way to create jobs in THIS country is to create demand for small companies. Put the money in the hands of people who will spend it HERE, not on an African safari vacation.
Spoken like a truue republican, Phil! You know how I feel about Republicans in general (except the ones I like, like you!) but I must ask- do you REALLY think Bush has made your life better in 8 years? And please THINK before you answer that.
barack obama plan…
I cannot agree on everything you say in this article, but perhaps I missed some of the points you were trying to make….