Okay I think I have all of the niceties squared away. Pandora is up and running, though not without me wasting most of my skips before getting anything decent (“Pump It Up” by Elvis Costello) to get the blogging underway. For future reference to the fine people at Pandora, I have absolutely no desire to listen to Matthew Sweet in this or any other lifetime.
Also on the docket is food, which is forthcoming. I decided that day 2 AC (after Curtis) called for a little dining in. It also called for dancing girls and a live band, but time constraints kept those things from happening. Maybe I should get some people on speed dial to celebrate the next firing at work.
Then again, that may not be all that appropriate. After all, the economy is apparently in the shitter. So disposable dollars for such things as dancing girls may be hard to come by. (Future bloggers take note, this is how I get from relatively meaningless shit to what I wanted to blog about. Pretty clever huh?)
Yes, apparently the full faith and credit of the United States has been downgraded, from its previous status of “you may borrow more money to pay off the interest on the money that you already owe” to “we wouldn't trust you getting a washer from Rent A Center” right about now. Check cashing places are looking at our government and saying, “I'm sorry, but you will need additional ID before we will consider cashing “that”.”
The financial markets are in a free fall, while everyone in Washington is all like “But we came up with a plan”. Trust me when I say McGuyver could have come up with a better plan using nothing but a paper clip, rubber band and a straw wrapper. Let's see if this doesn't just about sum up the plan right here, in exchange for extending the government's ability to borrow through 2012, a commission will be created to come up with places where the government can make cuts in spending in the future. I think I saw this plan on a Popeye cartoon once, when Wimpy said he would gladly pay you Tuesday for a burger today.
Of course there is no plan on how Wimpy will actually raise any money, just that Wimpy might not eat as many burgers in the future, as long as he can eat one today.
Maybe that makes me the idiot in the room, but that seems to be the fundamental problem. Whether you want to call it the phasing out of tax cuts or a tax hike really doesn't matter to me, semantics being what semantics are, they carry little value outside of being sound bites. But at the end of the day there is a significant segment of the population who just doesn't pay their fair share. Warren Buffet hit the nail on the head years ago when he suggested a system is flawed when his tax rate is less than that of his secretary. Not that I can blame the well to do for trying their damnedest to pay as little in taxes as is humanly possible, it is something that we all would do if we could, it is just that there are far more tools at the disposal for the head of Exxon to get out of paying taxes than there are for the person working the register at Walmart.
But what gets lost on the well to do, while they are all awash in their new found creativity in avoiding paying taxes is that they do so at their own peril. Because that money will have to come from somewhere. And if it doesn't come from them then it is going to come from people who are not as well off, also known as their customers. And what happens when people have less discretionary spending? The obvious, they buy less stuff. So while there is a short term gain for the top percentile of earners to sit back and say “woohoo, we don't pay taxes again this year”, it is a deal with the devil, because those people you rely to make you money, your customers, are now buying less of your shit. So your short term savings is a longer term cancer, one that eats away at the very viability of your business.
It is at this point where someone will say, “Matt, you are not an economist. What do you know? Why don't you just sit down and shut the fuck up?” To which I would say it doesn't take an economist to see the obvious, only someone who is looking to do more than fill a 5 minute segment on a 24 hr news channel with two people who just want to bitch at each other. Makes for great TV, not so effective at actually informing the populace though.
But the evidence out there is fairly obvious. Rarely has a tax cut or dropping of the tax rate resulted in the growth it was suggested it would bring. If it had, we would all be awash in cash from the Bush tax cuts to begin with and there would be no need for this blog. Instead I could be writing on how ineptitude has rejoined the Pittsburgh Pirates, much the same way the swallows come back to Capistrano every year. But when our economy was doing well and we actually were running a surplus was when the tax rates were higher under Bill Clinton. Sure, some of his success came from cutting of discretionary spending and I have no problem with entitlement reform and budget cuts (sorry NASA, but I am tired of the sob story of how you can't launch a 40 year old vehicle into space again, but the last time the shuttle program was relevant most people actually thought Milli Vanilli sang their songs) but anyone who thinks that all we need to do is cut our way to fiscal responsibility obviously didn't read the previous paragraph. Government, in even its smallest form, costs money and that money has to come from somewhere. So the question is, should that money come from people who do or don't have it? I think all we need to do is look around us at the result of having people who don't have money continue to be the sole payers of the nation's mortgage and realize that it probably isn't a good plan.
I tend to agree with your assessment. I can't believe people still fall for the "we will cut taxes" election bribe, whilst they come up with other ways to bloat Government spending.
ReplyDeleteAt some point, and I don't know if it can be narrowed down to one specific thing, there was a twist of opinion in the general populace towards government, from something that was (lor at least could be) good to something that was bad or maybe even evil. Perhaps it was Vietnam, or Richard Nixon's presidency, or the failed economic policies of Jimmy Carter but Ronald Reagan hit a homerun of a punchline at the time when he quipped ""The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" Government has ecome in the eyse of many, not a tool to serve them but as a blight to best be avoided at all costs. So when someone argues for tax cuts, there is no thought into the damage that may be done by them, just the short sightedness that believes every dollar government spends is a dollar wasted. Forgetting the good things government can and does provide; infrastructure, health care, education, security, etc. the naysayers glom onto the silliest of notions that government can do no good, and worse still is the fact that this very notion is espoused by people either working in government or attempting to do so. If government was such an anathema to them, then it is at least a tad bit hypocritical of them to then be seeking to be a part of it.
ReplyDeleteInstead we get idiocy being passed off as wisdom, with people who are trying their hardest to make ends meet arguing that millionaires and billionaires should pay less in taxes, even if it means the government defaults on its debt with little understanding of just how punishing that would be to them. While they are defending Joe Millionare's right to not pay the previous existing tax rate, it will not be Joe Millionaire who will see the increase on his mortgage rate, or an increased rate on his credit cards or find borrrowing for his kid's college education an almost impossibility.