Quote :

"WASHINGTON - With recession fears rising and the stock market tumbling, President Bush on Friday called for up to $150 billion in tax relief for consumers and business — and said there was no time to waste. Bush's urgent remarks gave fresh impetus to congressional leaders already hard at work on an economic rescue package that would include extra money for food stamps and jobless benefits in addition to tax rebates of hundreds of dollars each for millions of Americans. The hope is that people would immediately spend those rebates and give the economy a badly needed boost. "

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080118/ap_on_go_pr_wh/economy_stimulus

I can't draw. But the cartoon would be Bush and congress leaning over the railing of a cruise ship..tossing dollar bills into the water to a drowning economy.

You know things are bad when democrats agree to give money back to tax-payers.

1/18/2008 10:28:55 PM

I'm sure the bulk of the tax cuts will go to economic special interests and not the people who have lost their homes from predatory lending practices

1/18/2008 10:52:31 PM

That war thing's free, right?

If that's the case, this shouldn't be a problem.

1/18/2008 11:14:00 PM

Fiat money lets you do everything!

1/18/2008 11:22:44 PM

I'm putting my rebate in my savings account.

1/18/2008 11:53:31 PM

So the solution to a problem caused by people being in debt is to just create more debt?

1/19/2008 1:42:54 AM

I hate this country. I hate this god damned country.

1/19/2008 1:47:04 AM

1/19/2008 1:54:12 AM

^get your black ass out of soap box

1/19/2008 1:56:15 AM

Normally I wouldn't post an image on TSB but it was really all that I could say about this article... it wouldn't have been worth my time to just post "Fucking government."

1/19/2008 2:02:45 AM

Quote :

"the people who have lost their homes from predatory lending practices "

oh jesus christ.

1/19/2008 2:42:21 AM

man wtf

"predatory lending practices"

the fucking lenders knew these people were subprime people...its their own fucking fault for giving them the loans

1/19/2008 2:44:01 AM

i don't hold the lenders blameless

but i put by far the lion's share of the blame on the dumbshits who bought houses they couldn't afford by means of...uhh, creative financing options.

If they were trying to live beyond their means, fuck 'em.

If they were trying to speculate on real estate, they probably know enough about finance to know they were taking on substantial risk. Double fuck 'em.

My only real sympathy isn't really even that--it's that maybe a little bit of intervention would minimize how much these retards manage to flush everyone's else's finances.

1/19/2008 2:54:11 AM

"You know things are bad when democrats agree to give money back to tax-payers"

I know the dems were trying to tie infastructure improvements into it, to make it more of a long term solution rather than a one time boosts, I don’t know the specifics of it, or if they were able to make it happen in so short a time with the pressure they were under after the white house announcing all this.

1/19/2008 6:47:36 AM

Quote :

"I'm sure the bulk of the tax cuts will go to economic special interests and not the people who have lost their homes from predatory lending practices"

give me a fucking break.

1/19/2008 7:42:54 AM

I agree with duke.

The shit thing is that this tax "rebate" will go to those who pay no taxes at all. And it seems I wont get any because im ubber rich and make a couple grand more than the cut off. Thanks for fucking me over yet again. But i understand where I deserve to be punished. Going 8 years of school, massive debts to educate myself...sure I would have been better off in the govt eyes to just go into massive debts buying shit I cant afford instead, then I would get some fucking relief. Way to keep rewarding the irresponsible and punishing the responsible. Like the idiots who, during that time, paid more for a 30 year fixed rate because they arent fucking morons. And the real idiots who, gasp, bought a house thier income would allow.

1/19/2008 10:11:13 AM

Quote :

"the dems were trying to tie infastructure improvements into it, "

Attaching pet projects/pork that have nothing to do with the bill ...typical.

Quote :

"people who have lost their homes from predatory lending practices""

There's lots of blame to go around for this. I read that 70% of the subprime debt-erati lied about their income. And the over zealousr loan industry didn't do much checking.

The banks are taking their hits in massive write-offs, the debters are taking their hits in foreclosures. Both sides took a big chance with subprime and lost. Why bail them out? We don't recoup anyone's losses in Vegas.

Anyway, this current plan to bail out the economy is a bit troubling. On one hand I'm always happy to see tax cuts and rebates. On the other, are we doomed to these kinds of quick fix attempts rather than put a sane monetary policy in place?

1/19/2008 10:30:20 AM

Romneys stimulus plan is better IMO. Permanent, make the lowest tax bracket 7.5%, No tax on savings for middle class (HUGE PLUS PLUS in my book, essentially makes a ROTH pointless), and lower corporate taxes to help push corporate growth(which is another important peice of the economic recession).

Just handing out cash to people doesnt really encourage growth out of a recession on a long term basis.

1/19/2008 10:32:56 AM

Its funny how when a recession is coming EVERYONE talks about taxcuts/rebates to stimulate the economy, even democrates. Just the other times they are the devil.

Robster, I agree, however why only no tax on savings for the middle class? Why not everyone?

Thats what I would love about no income and a consumption tax. It puts an end to this BS class warfare. If govt wants to raise taxes to fund some BS project it affects EVERYONE. Right now shit is too easy to pass bc people want every program but let the "rich" pay for it. If that changed people might actually consider what we really need if it would personally affect them. IMO

1/19/2008 10:39:49 AM

they need to be using that cash to correct the financial institution and rescue the insurance companies that may belly up b.c they insure the banks from these huge mortgage defaults

1/19/2008 1:39:13 PM

Well, taxes in general dont hurt the upperclass so much.

By middle, I really meant middle and lower classes .... Middle being less that 200k per year.

So, really, everyone but the rich. They dont need savings breaks. They all have tax shelters already anyhow.

1/19/2008 1:57:04 PM

Don't forget to file your tax rebates as an income this spring.

1/19/2008 2:00:57 PM

I'll use my incredible powers to predict that this won't do jack shit to the economy.

Foreclosures and their secondary and tertiary effects are the problem. This paltry amount won't do anything to change the fundamental situation.


Tax cut? I could have sworn this was just the gov spending money it doesn't have in order to affect the economy in a way that it cannot.


[Edited on January 19, 2008 at 3:05 PM. Reason : .]

1/19/2008 3:03:32 PM

"Way to keep rewarding the irresponsible and punishing the responsible."


This is basically all our government is doing nowadays, not just with this measure.

1/19/2008 3:56:00 PM

Quote :

"Well, taxes in general dont hurt the upperclass so much. By middle, I really meant middle and lower classes .... Middle being less that 200k per year. So, really, everyone but the rich. They dont need savings breaks. They all have tax shelters already anyhow. "

dude...if you make a quarter-mil per year, taxes tear your ass up.


and the tax shelter crowd lives up in the income stratosphere--not in low-ish six figure land.

furthermore, everyone agrees that rich people should pay more in taxes--but why a hugely disproportionate PERCENTAGE of their income?

1/19/2008 7:15:26 PM

I dont agree that the rich should pay more in their taxes. Unless they choose to through spending. Its unfair to punish success.

1/19/2008 10:50:46 PM

Quote :

"I dont agree that the rich should pay more in their taxes. "

theDuke is talking about absolute terms, not relative terms.
i.e. you think that people making $500k should pay, for example, $2000 in taxes (0.4% of their income), just like people who make $15k (13% of their income)?
(made up numbers, i know people making $15k don't pay that amount)

1/19/2008 11:04:46 PM

No, i mean relative terms.

It's pretty widely accepted that the rich should pay more in taxes than the poor--my quarrel is with the PERCENTAGE that the "rich" (which is a misnomer in many, many cases) get bitchslapped with, because the other 95% of the country thinks everything's cool and a good idea, since they can just stick the "rich" with the tab.

1/19/2008 11:42:55 PM

^ It's because the first 25k a family brings in is far more important to basic survival than the next 475k made by a rich person. The unfairness of a completely flat percentage tax should be just as obvious to people as the unfairness of an excessively skewed progressive-rate income tax. That's why some not-so-flat-tax plans basically have a lower cut off where you don't pay much if any in the way of income tax.

I bet if you just further skewed the progressively-rated income tax system we have today (so that the highest 1 or 2 brackets were only 1% or less of the population) you'd lose a lot of the support for the idea of the flat tax. I'm not saying we should or could do that, then we'd just have our truly-rich fleeing for london. I guess that's because I find the idea of people proposing tax-related plans in politics are doing it out of anything more than self-interest to be highly dubious.



[Edited on January 20, 2008 at 12:06 AM. Reason : ]

1/19/2008 11:58:18 PM

oh yeah, i'm fully aware





right now we have the doo-doo brown line

i'm arguing for the blue line, not the red line

vertical axis is in absolute $ paid, not %




actually, i'd rather shitcan the income tax (and capital gains tax). something along the lines of the FairTax might be ok...I'd like to take a look at a VAT (which I admittedly know only enough about to be dangerous).

1/20/2008 12:28:24 AM

Quote :

"Three years ago, Investor's Business Daily ran a similar article about the top 10 percent of taxpayers -- those earning above $74,981 -- who received 41.6 percent of the nation's income and paid 62.4 percent of the taxes, thus paying a tax share 50 percent greater than their income share. Do people know the top 10 percent pay more than 62 percent of the federal income taxes? "

1/20/2008 12:34:53 AM

shit, i can't believe i'll be in the top 10% of earners in a few months



yet i still feel broke

1/20/2008 12:38:40 AM

Quote :

"Do people know the top 10 percent pay more than 62 percent of the federal income taxes"

Considering they make around 47% of the income and have around 57% of the assets, putting it that way doesn't sound as bad.

^Yeah the blue-line does look better, cutting off for the lowest portion of earnings and not looking like an exponential curve at the higher portions. The difficulty is that it obviously would require massive reductions of federal spending, something that requires political will that I can't see being mustered. Implementing pretty much any flat tax without that kind of spending reduction means most people pay more.

Sort of on a tangent, I wonder how much of a problem that people have with income tax is how transparent it actually is. Meaning, if you couldn't see so clearly each week how much of your paycheck actually went towards taxes, would it bother people nearly as much. I imagine that's why some other nations are able to tax their citizens so much more heavily than we do.

I've found the idea of the national sales tax interesting, but I don't like what I've heard of any of the proposed implementations. I often hear the claim of doing away with the IRS and that people could submit for reimbursement in the same argument. Who do you submit reimbursements and piles of recipts to if there's no IRS? Also, I'd only accept it if individual purchases of groceries, non-luxury clothing items, school supplies, gas, and other necessities were exempted UP FRONT. If you can barely afford to feed yourself, you can't afford to feed yourself at 5% higher cost and then wait for a refund at the end of the year.

[Edited on January 20, 2008 at 12:55 AM. Reason : ]

1/20/2008 12:47:33 AM

Quote :

"putting it that way doesn't sound as bad."

Still sounds bad to me since it discourages work, saving and investment.

1/20/2008 1:15:08 AM

I love that argument. The government taking more of the next 100k than the first doesn't discourage me from finishing my graduate degree to get it. It's not like there are many realistic situations where working more and investing doesn't still get you MORE money. I'm not saying it doesn't influence what KINDS of investments/savings people do though. That's not the same as "punishing" or "discouraging" more work/earnings.

1/20/2008 1:34:02 AM

Any system where the most productive people in society are coerced into being servants of the poor is pretty discouraging to me.

1/20/2008 1:43:32 AM

people always want what they can not have. Poor fuckers who did not succeed in life for whatever reason will always want to tax the more well to do so that

a. they have less tax burden.
b. receive more gov't handouts from the taxes collected via income redistribution.

The problem is that some balance is needed to ensure civil stability while numbing the masses so that they perform their role in society in order to maximize efficiency. I really think gov't policies should be considered a type of engineering as the dilemmas faced by politicians and the net result of the society could be engineered and modeled much like any other engineering problem.

1/20/2008 2:10:08 AM

^^ Huh? who is a servant of the poor?

1/20/2008 2:24:12 AM

Quote :

"Poor fuckers who did not succeed in life"

Ahaha, I love how people seem to think that not being in the top tax bracket means you're not succeeding at life. Amazingly, some people actually want to be teachers, firemen, social workers, military officers, etc. I know it's got to be shocking to you that people might actually be doing something that is, all at the same time:

1) Useful to society
2) What they want to do
3) Shitty paying

As long as people making tax-reform arguments continue to assert that people making less money are inherently less productive, failures at life, or lazy then I will continue to distrust their judgment. I know a lot of you guys mean dirt-poor when you say poor, but since the top 10% is paying most of the taxes, that means people like teachers, cops, firemen etc. in the bottom 50% are significantly benefited by that shift.

[Edited on January 20, 2008 at 2:39 AM. Reason : ]

1/20/2008 2:34:56 AM

Quote :

"Who do you submit reimbursements and piles of recipts to if there's no IRS? "

Ahh.. a FairTax question!
Most of the FairTax will be paid at the retail level. Consumers will not be required to save receipts to "prove" they paid the tax.
Businesses will register with the federal gov't, and will not be required to pay the tax on any item used by that business. They will have to keep records just as they do today.

Quote :

"Also, I'd only accept it if individual purchases of groceries, non-luxury clothing items, school supplies, gas, and other necessities were exempted UP FRONT."

They are.
Each month, every taxpayer recieves a prebate which covers the estimated tax you would pay on items up to the poverty level. e.g. a family of 3 would receive a monthly prebate of about $429.

Quote :

"I often hear the claim of doing away with the IRS...."

You would still need a federal tax agency, but it wouldn't be one the size of the current one. Individual states would collect the FairTax from retailers and pass it on to the feds. The new IRS would no longer be watching 130 million income tax-payers, but only about 30 million FairTax collectors.

1/20/2008 2:37:08 AM

Quote :

"prebate "

Sounds like it would be much simpler just not to tax essentials. There are very few places where retailers and small business do not already deal with split taxation on retail goods. Most places are already set up to handle that just fine.

[Edited on January 20, 2008 at 2:41 AM. Reason : ]

1/20/2008 2:40:34 AM

^ The problem with that though is that it makes the fair tax slightly regressive, instead of the prebate, which supposedly remains slightly progressive.

Because a rich person theoretically would buy more food, or more expensive food, they'd be benefitting more than a poor person buying store brands or buying less food.

1/20/2008 2:44:24 AM

in my opinion, the fairest tax is a straight consumption tax with no prebate, just have certain food and clothes untaxed. The next fairest is teh flat tax. We need to do something to end this BS class warfare. Of course every program is a great idea when it benefits me but someone else pays for it. A consumption or flat tax woudl prevent this BS.

1/20/2008 9:42:03 AM

^
The problem with the Flat tax is we've already tried it and it didn't work. Back in the 1980's, Reagan simplified the income tax code. They got rid of a bunch of loopholes and reduced brackets.

Unfortunately, the income tax was still in place and politicians over the years have ballooned it into the massive mess we have today.

1/20/2008 10:17:05 AM

^Does that mean it didn't work not because of some inherent flaw in a flat tax system, but because of deliberate intervention by our politicians?

I'm kind of torn on the issue of our current tax system. On the one hand I don't think it's unreasonable to ask the rich to pay more in income taxes; someone who makes $500k/year can pay as much as 40% of their income and still get by comfortably, whereas the same cannot be said for someone making only $50k/year. But on the other hand, we seem to have this problem where instead of using that tax money to help out the less fortunate and help get them back into the economy, we give them free handouts and encourage them to not do anything.

As for the OP, all I can say is that it's too little too late. We're headed for a recession big time, if we're not already in it, and there's no stopping this train ride now that gravity has taken over.

1/20/2008 11:39:05 AM

Hey, what a great idea!



Let's put the national government $150 billion MORE in the red! I'm sure the American people will love all the new money they get and elect the same politicians back in office!

1/20/2008 12:52:57 PM

I AM A WEALTHY INDIVIDUAL AND I SEE NO REASON WHY OTHER PEOPLE SHOULD BE HELPED. I BELIEVE THAT ALL PEOPLE HAVE PERFECT INTELLIGENCE IN EVERY TRANSACTION THEY ENACT, AND FOR THIS REASON I BELIEVE THAT THE MARKET IS PERFECT. STOP GOVERNMENTING ME!!!!!!!!

1/20/2008 12:55:26 PM

^ random...

1/20/2008 12:57:08 PM

well if you're going to call people stupid for having agreed to certain loan terms ("predatory") then you are also arguing that they completely knew what they were doing and that there was no misinformation along the process. but hey, why should simple market externalities get in the way

1/20/2008 1:19:01 PM

Quote :

"Ahaha, I love how people seem to think that not being in the top tax bracket means you're not succeeding at life. Amazingly, some people actually want to be teachers, firemen, social workers, military officers,"

when i said poor people I was not necessarily talking of many of your above listed career choices which could be defined as lower middle class or skilled blue collar working class jobs.

Either way if you make a career choice to be a teacher don't bitch about the fact that you only make 35K a year. You will have medical insurance provided by the state but why do you think people who excel more in their career should be penalized for being successful by paying proportionately more taxes as a % of paycheck.

On the other side of the argument though it is kind of ridiculous that the US has one of the biggest income inequaltiy gaps for a modern industrialized developed country. However, I blame this on gov't favoritism toward the few people in the socioeconomic stratosphere top 1% who influence favorable policies from politicians. This does not apply to the upper middle class doctors and such making a few 100K a year.





[Edited on January 20, 2008 at 1:38 PM. Reason : l]

1/20/2008 1:32:16 PM