TQWcS wrote:Jose you confusing yourself. The money Bush is giving back to the rich is their OWN money. I don't see why Democrats are all for taxation, it is not good for the economy.
Well....We had this nifty surplus, which we could have used for many good things. It was the combined taxes from the relatively poor, the middle classes, and the rich. He gave most of it back to the rich. Now, we can argue that much of it came from the rich initially, which may be true. But that applies only to the first tax cut. We have to think about the future, too.
Here we have this massive deficit. It has become so massive that, as noted in our paper yesterday, foreign investors are starting to shy away from buying US bonds. This has been predicted by economists, albeit not those who advise Bush. When our credit becomes poor on the international markets, we will have a bit of trouble, so to speak. Meanwhile, who's buying the rest of the bonds that fund the debt? Only 50% is international, so the rest must be: us. Of course, most of us can't afford to support half of the national debt, so it must be the rich who are buying these bonds.
Where will the interest come from when these bonds reach maturity? Taxes. Whose taxes? Well, if the rich have had their taxes reduced, the rest of us will have to pay a higher percentage of the bill. Ergo, our taxes will go to paying the interest on the debt, which will go to the rich.
Had we paid for the war in Iraq as we went along, we'd have no interest to pay back on the debt. The cost would have been less overall--but the interest available to the rich wouldn't be there, so it was unpalatable politically.
We can also look at the issue from an environmental point of view. The Bush administration has been doing a lot of things that are environmentally disastrous. The result will be, among other things, more illness among the population. As usual, the poor will be more affected than the rich, in part because the rich can afford to live in places that haven't been despoiled, and because the rich lobby more effectively against having their back yards despoiled in the first place. And, as usual, the rich will receive better health care, so the poor will suffer more. The way to avoid this would be to have reasonable regulations that prevent pollution, but since those are "costly" to industry, Bush is removing regulations where he can. The result is that the rich--the industries, and their CEOs--get richer, at the expense of the poor.
In other words, it's not as simple as saying that the rich paid lots of taxes, so giving them the surplus was just giving them back their money. There are ramifications well beyond that.
Unpalatable as it may sound, there are only two ways to reign in the deficit. The first is to increase taxes. The other is to stop spending. There are no signs that Bush will stop spending, except on programs he doesn't like (ie, that support non-rich people, or that fund non-Christian science). Unfortunately, there isn't enough "discretional" spending to do the job, so we will have to increase taxes in the future--or abolish medicaid and social security and half of the military.
TQWcS wrote:Kerry had crazy ideas like increasing minimum wage. The market will increase wages based on the market value of that job.
What I've seen, in practice, is that the big employers (WalMart, Tyson, et al) make their profits by paying the least possible. They do so by hiring illegal immigrants below minimum wage. If they have to hire citizens, they pay minimum wage. Unfortunately--at least here in southern Indiana, where the cost of living is so high--minimum wage isn't enough to support a family. Raising the minimum wage would really help the little guy.
