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Both benefits sound good to me but I'm not sold because the same reasons you described. Do you know where I can find info on its historical effectiveness. I'm not sold but I always like to look at all sides. It will either help me strengthen what I believe or I might learn something. Win Win in my view.
Understood, but that's a tax loophole issue, not a tax rate issue. I see it as two different unrelated issues.
Loopholes - also need to be addressed. Tax law is a powerful thing, not necessarily a bad thing - a company can pay half a million dollars in corporate tax or donate half a million dollars to open a wing in a childrens hospital instead. They still pay out a portion of there profits. That's not a bad thing. However, there is abuse and waste, outdated tax rules, etc. I do agree.
Understood, but that's a tax loophole issue, not a tax rate issue. I see it as two different unrelated issues.
Loopholes - also need to be addressed. Tax law is a powerful thing, not necessarily a bad thing - a company can pay half a million dollars in corporate tax or donate half a million dollars to open a wing in a childrens hospital instead. They still pay out a portion of there profits. That's not a bad thing. However, there is abuse and waste, outdated tax rules, etc. I do agree.
But what good is pointing out only part of the equation?
Ok, sure lower the corporate tax rate so it looks like we're lower if that makes everyone happy.
But then close the loopholes, credits, whatever so more than 1/3 corporations pay taxes.
Guys look at the business forum for some good evaluations of the stimulus bill.
Maybe you could point to one. The place is a dead zone.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
I will voting no for the stimulus bill because I don't see how tax rebates to people that payed no tax, increasing the size of government, or increasing food stamps or unemployment programs will help.
It's pretty elementary. People at the lower end of the scale spend more and more quickly than those toward the top. In the time that a rich guy parks a dollar in a 90-day CD, a dollar in extra food stamp benefits may have been spent and respent four or five times. Which do you thnk creates more demand, creates more jobs, and fuels more recovery? Meanwhile, growth in government comes primarily in the admin and oversight areas. You don't just drop $800+ billion out of a helicopter.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
And lets face it, it has billion of dollars in pork projects in this.
Only under the new Republican theory that everything is pork. There are no earmarks in either version of this bill. Every bit of it was marked up in the appropriate committee. You want to call stuff pork, define pork and then tells us what meets the criteria and why. Otherwise you're just babbling the lame Limbaugh Line.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
I don't object to aid packages, within reason, but don't fool anyone that increasing aid and entitlements will stimulate the economy. The opposite usually occurs.
Really. Can you name a time when a recession or other economic contraction was brought on by rising welfare and entitlement spending? I certainly can't recall one.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
I object to the artificial creation of government jobs - a government cannot create self-sustaining jobs. It's a simple and true statement.
It's an entirely bogus statement that only an ideologue could utter. Public workers busy themselves in the provision of public goods and services in just the same ways as private workers busy themselves in the provision of private goods and services. The fact that many public good and services are indivisible and are therefore paid for in a lump sum rather than at discrete points of sale is simply not relevant.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
My ideas are more in line with the republican plan - tax rate cuts to corporate and individual taxes. This would return money into the hands of the people that actually create wealth. It's also fair.
How do you figure it is fair to give all the money to rich people and mega-corporations? How does that create demand and jobs and salaries and economic activity? Answer: It doesn't. The Republican plan continues to be a recipe for failure. I think we've had enough Republican failure here lately.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
Look guys. Stimulus or not, we have to ride out the economic crises. Nothing will help in the short terms, at least until mid 2010.
Whose theory is that, this Nothing Will Help theory? What magical thing happens in mid-2010 where it suddenly DOES start helping? This is really sounding like a lot of empty-headed right-wing rhetoric.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
Obama's plan will not help at all and will probably extend the crisis...
How will that happen? The liquidity increases provided by broad-based tax cuts and income supports promote immediate demand. Investments in energy and infrastructure and other construction provide jobs and incomes in the medium term while creating assets that will pay dividends for decades. How does this extend the crisis? Again, you are shooting nothing but blanks.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
...republican plans will help but results will probably not be seen for a few years.
They won't be seen at all, because the Republican plan isn't going to be adopted. Tax cuts for the rich and diversions of productivity gains into corporate profits gave us the so-called "jobless recovery" from the First Bush Recession, and directly set the stage for the conditions that plunged us into the Second Bush Recession. Let's face it...these ideas have failed enough already...now is not the time to ask them to fail for us again...
Huh? Sorry I am used to fact based responses from the other forums. The U.S. has never cut corporate income tax, it remains one of the highest in the world.
Fact-based? The top corporate tax rate was cut from 46% to 40% in 1987, and from 40% to 34% in 1988. Those cuts were coupled with elimination of many deductions, such that the effective corporate tax rate rose to about 26%. Today it is in the neighborhood of half that, placing it among the three or four lowest in the world.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
Personal income tax cuts (not the rebates that Bush did last year) have actually been very successful.
Not as recently applied. Only the top 50% of earners pay income taxes, and when you send all the benefits to those at the very top end of that range, you get very meager beneficial feedback into the economy as a whole.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
If you are against the rebates "that didn't work" then you are against Obama's stimulus bill.
The rebates of 2008 actually worked very well. They were intended to provide a bridge and they did just that. Unfortunately, what was on the other side of the bridge was even worse than what had been left behind.
My God, does this guy even understand the basics of economics? Does he think rich people put it under their matress? Spending and investments (via savings) is two sides of the same coin.
You really ought to check some numbers. You don't have to stuff money under a mattress to be a less efficient contributor to the velocity of money. Rich people have no pressing needs. They are slow. Poor people have only pressing needs. They are fast.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
But last I checked, a poor man never hired anyone else to work.
I don't think you've ever checked. Rich people don't create jobs...demand creates jobs. Jobs happen when demand puts strains on existing resources, evidencing an opportunity for additional profit through increasing resources. The bulk of demand comes from the middle class, but those who can and will most quickly expand their demand at the margin are not the rich or the middle class. It's those other people.
Vote No on the Economic Stimulus (http://www.countryfirstpac.com/petition/economic.aspx - broken link)
click on the link if you against the stimulus waste package and sign the petition....don't start complaining later while you still can take some action today...maybe it will help.
Over 100.000 people already have signed it!
So loosen up credit. I'm all for that. One of the problems is the banks are not lending, I don't defend them at all.
So you think the banks are conspiring to prolong the crisis, then? There are risk-reward prospects out there flashing Green/Go all over the place and the banks are just ignoring them? Have they decided that they don't want to make money anymore? Maybe you should ask yourself what it is about their own books, about the books of other banks, and about the books of potential borrowers that might give pause to banks over the prospect of making more loans than they are.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
One thing I can say is Obama coming up on TV everyday and preaching gloom and doom will not encourage banks to make loans and infusion into capital is what will make jobs.
Banks don't make decisions on whether to lend or not today based on what Obama happens to say today. The first TARP tranche was an "infusion into capital". Where are the jobs from that?
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Originally Posted by Dd714
The wealthy don't get handouts, that's just the populist rhetoric that everyone complains about because it makes them feel better.
Obviously, you were not wealthy when the Buhsie tax cuts hit.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
Pass an aid package, that's OK. Temporary. Don't hide it as "stimulus".
For stimulus - cut taxes for EVERYONE. Rich and poor. Small businesses and corporations.
Look it up. Tax cuts are one of the low-impact stimulus measures, and the impact gets lower and lower as you go up the income scale. Your problem it seems to me is that you have no program other than tax cuts to offer and try to fit those in as the "right approach" to every situation imagineable. All your word parsing here is empty smoke and mirrors trying to lead to tax cuts, since all roads must necessarily lead to tax cuts. For my money, it's a hopelessly simplistic approach and ill-advised under the present circumstances as it fails to address the actual causes underlying our current problems...
Tax cuts and stimulus increase the money supply during times of recession. Rebates (wich half of Obama's plan consist of)...
Numbers? Language? For most, the tax cuts in the bill are implemented by adjusting IRS witholding tables. If you get paid twice a month, your net pay will go up by about $40 per paycheck bcause that much less will be withheld. Is that what you are calling a "rebate"? Cost is less than $150 biilion. Not nearly half of $800+ billion.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
...but they infuse money into areas that will not create wealth and simply infuse from the bottom up.
Wealth creation will take care of itself. The point is to create demand, particularly the sort that has a high multiplier and therefore ripples in succesive waves through the economy.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
People don't pocket the money, they spend or save. Saving isn't bad, the money supply is still there, the money supply has still been increased in the economy.
The money supply is hardly the problem, and saving is horrible from a stimulus perspective because it immediately undercuts the velocity of money.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
The key is getting the banks to loan, people to invest, companies to produce. That's what neither the republicans or democrats have figured out how to do yet...
And do you and your Business Forum sharpies have this figured out yet? You can take steps to shore up bank liquidity. That's what TARP is about. But what do you propose to do about the lack of transparency that prevents confidence. Asset risk exists everywhere as an amorphous, non-specifiable cloud. How do you propose to drain that from the system?
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Originally Posted by Dd714
...the October TARP stimulus (which I was against) also did not help.
According to whom? Look at current banking numbers against the numbers projected in the absence of TARP. At worst, the first TARP tranche sharply decreased the rate of deterioration. And you say it didn't help.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
But that's the key. Obama realizes it, he hinted at it today - loosen up credit.
Brilliant. Loosen up credit. You've discovered the very thing that everyone else has been talking about already for at least the past five months.
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Originally Posted by Dd714
But again, what I object to is the public spending and increased entitlements. Bush increased entitlements enough during his term (contrary to popular knowledge) and Obama will increase it even more. THAT'S the policy that did not work.
What? Is there a Disjointed Writing Contest going on? I didn't get that memo...
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