Wednesday, January 28, 2009

THE TAX CUTS DID A LOT OF GOOD OVER THE LAST 8 YEARS

The Republicans in the House voted Obama's economic stimulus package down. No surprise. The argument is that there weren't enough tax cuts. We've had eight years of Bush tax cuts and all the while the economic situation has deteriorated into a quivering puddle of debt and dysfunction. How will those tax cuts help now when they didn't help before?

Talk amongst yourselves.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been amazed recently to hear several Republicans talking about the need for"fiscal responsibility" in order to avoid leaving large debts to future generations.

The Bush Presidency was the largest-spending administration since LBJ.

Have these people NO shame?

Jason said...

So Republican=Bush supporter?

If that was true his approval numbers would not have been so low.

Jeremy D. Young said...

There are certainly more options than:

1) Increase Spending AND Increase Taxes
2) Increase Spending BUT Decrease Taxes

I can honestly state that even though I voted for Bush in 2000, I have not changed my principles, which are support for a much smaller federal government with a balanced budget. In fact I was very supportive of the Balanced Budget Amendment in the 90's.

The citizens of this nation cannot perpetually have deficit spending in their personal budgets. If they get a loan, they usually have to offer up collateral. The Federal Government is not only abusing the current citizens of our nation, but the future citizens as well by this massive debt looming above us.

We as a nation must suffer through a recession to recover from the reckless debt levels that have accumulated. Bad Debt causes pain and suffering. The faster that debt is worked out of the system, the faster we can get back to a growing and healthy economy. The longer our Federal Government spends money it doesn't have, and using the Federal Reserve to practically force people to spend money instead of saving it (sub prime interest rates and reckless inflation discourage saving), the harder this recession will become.

The solution is simple, though not easy. Everyone must cut back spending, especially the federal government, and we must all balance our budgets and start paying off debt.

For the federal government, in my opinion, this means dramatic cuts in spending, from wherever we can manage. If we kept a powerful navy, yet sold off all of the military bases we maintain around the world, we could have major benefits in many areas.
1) We could bring thousands and thousands of troops home to protect our own nation, potentially guarding the borders, otherwise becoming Police Officers for our under staffed communities.
2) Reduce hatred in countries that perceive our presense to be occupation, thereby reducing the threat of terrorism.
3) Reducing the budget dramatically.
4) Making all of the reserve troops available on demand for true threats to our nation, not just perceived threats to resources that we don't own, but have spread ourselves around the globe for.
There are possibly others, as well.

Once again, in my own opinion, tax rates are high enough, but taxes are not transparent enough. I support the Fair Tax as a means of reforming the current tax system. It's not an ideal tax, but it is a dramatic improvement over the current federal taxation system.

I could go on and on, but the bottom line is that my method for improvement would be this:

Balance the Budget, AND reduce taxes as much as possible.

Busplunge said...

Just don't jack around with mypension.

Abby said...

I don't see tax cuts ever making a significant difference. Also, is there any real difference between the Bush and Obama administrations in the long-run? Of course our former president, Bush Jr., led a crusade full of insane government spending. But won't the current president's policies on healthcare and etc. do the same eventually?

It seems that there is no real solution to the issue of taxation and government spending. However, matters on the state level could very well be improved. What do all of you think about the HJR 36 bill on fair tax in Missouri? This link has some compelling info on it:

www.mofairtax.com

What are your thoughts?