1. I wonder how many times he had to practice the word “rostrum”?
2. Gas prices are up. Odd to hear an old oil man worry about that?
3. IRS accepts both checks and money orders; good line I must say.
4. Making tax relief for wealthier Americans permanent is not going to help the above said Americans struggling to pay the higher gas prices.
5. Balanced budgets always sound great and are a laudible goal; I suspect, though, that Congress will be far less receptive when the proposal gets down to picking examples of “bloated earmarks” to excise. Congressman Smith will not want to give up his pork.
6. Making privately bought health insurace free of payroll tax? A. how do you do that? B. how is that single-handedly make healthcare costs shrink?
7. When will Republicans stop beating the dead horse of medical tort reform?
8. “No Child Left Behind” was a noble goal, but education truely is best handled locally and at the state level.
9. President wants to open up new markets/free trade agreements (touting Peru). We could open a new market by normalizing relations w/ Cuba before Castro kicks the bucket (just a thought).
10. Someone please wake John Dingell
January 28, 2008 at 11:18 pm |
6. Making privately bought health insurace free of payroll tax? A. how do you do that? B. how is that single-handedly make healthcare costs shrink?
A. By allowing the costs of health insurance to be deducted from the income tax return. Employer-health care already gets the same treatment.
B. Well, people who buy health insurance will get a savings on their taxes. Depending on how rich they are, it will be worth 15-36% of what they spend. It’ll work just like the mortgage interest deduction.
January 29, 2008 at 5:13 pm |
>4. Making tax relief for wealthier Americans permanent is not going to help the above said Americans struggling to pay the higher gas prices.
Classic left-wing rhetoric declaring a tax cut for virtually every tax-paying American citizen to be a benefit for only the big, bad, evil wealthy people. I am blanking in whatever year of the 1st term that the cuts took effect, but I do remember my salaried pay check getting spontaneously bigger. I believe it was June or July, and I was on schedule to make just over $20,000 for the year. Thanks to the tax cut, sometime that summer I randomly started getting a few more dollars in my bi-monthly paycheck. It didn’t drastically change how I spent money on a day-to-day basis, but I had a few more dollars every 15 days, and virtually every other working American experienced the same relative thing whether they were making $20,000 that year, $200,000, or $2,000,000. Americans were getting a tax cut so literally virtually everyone got one. How is it bad that every American benefitted from this? How would it be bad for every American to keep benefitting from this? I was no more entitled to that tax break than those two other random people making exponentially more, and I am no more entitled to keep that tax break just because I continue to make less money. Why should we in essence financially punish people for being successful?
January 29, 2008 at 9:52 pm |
Wow, I’m getting hammered by my conservative friends here! First, to what Brian said wrt health care, I realize that you could deduct the cost of the insurance from payroll taxes. However, that is not nearly as simple as it being withheld by employers to begin with. The only feasible way I can see for that to work would be for you to declare insurance cost in percentile fashion as a deduction on your returns. In other words, you would pay for it all year and then get it refunded early the next year.
As for what Kevin wrote, he raises the valid point that every little bit helps. But its not the great fix that President Bush makes it sound like, either. The relief is too small an amount in the lower brackets to really do much. Indeed, Kevin said it didn’t really change his spending habits when the relief kicked in a few years ago. What could be a bigger help to people is the rebate checks that people will be getting if the stimulus bill passes.
Also, wealthy people for the most part are not big, bad, or evil; just less in need of financial help.