thought you knew better than to ask me for my thoughts. It's kind of long, but read it anyways. Please.
Here's something that I wrote for my blog (yes, I know you're going to make fun of me). I don't know if it's ignorance or selfishness, but Republicans have somehow managed to get those who suffer from their policies the most to support them:
So, it's been, what, a week since the "Joe the Plumber" debacle at the debate, and I think it's fair to say that taxes are the most misunderstood issue in an election. Here we are, a nation fighting two wars (which is another issue entirely, but here we are), facing crippling economic slowdown and at an environmental precipice. How the party of "limited government interaction" got us to this point I'll never know, but these are problems where the government is either the only solution (war) or the likely leader of a solution.
I'm not for irresponsible government spending, but something's gotta give. Either government spending must come down drastically or the government must raise more income. What we have now is fiscal malfeasance at its absolute worst.
Now we have Republicans continuing to label Democrats as tax-and-spend. This will be the only time you ever hear me quote Cheney seriously, but "so?" In my view, a fiscal conservative is not someone who says they support small government but then goes and spends more than any administration in history. A true fiscal conservative spends what money they have, regardless of how much it actually is.
But, more importantly, who exactly are we taxing? It's misleading to say that only a certain type of tax scheme is "wealth redistribution." All tax schemes distribute wealth, plain and simple. The idea that somehow the wealth is going to trickle down has been proven false, not once, but twice now.
So, here are my thoughts. Any business person who believes that tax cuts are the best way to grow a business deserves to go under. These excessive tax cuts and rebates for businesses are nothing but corporate welfare. The best, and really only, way to grow a business is to sell more of your product. And, the only way to sell more is if people can buy more. So, doesn't it make more sense to keep the money in the hands of the people who spend it. Instead, with gas and food prices up 300 to 400%, people are struggling to cover their basic needs. They're not buying anything that's not a necessity.
I read a great piece on dkos (that I can't find anymore) that discussed the strength of the economy is in the rate at which money changes hands. It's like comparing the pulmonary system of a couch potato versus that of a triathlete. Right now, this economy is sluggish, slow and out of shape. We don't even have the energy to get off the couch, much less go for a run. And why is that? Probably because the last eight years have not been geared at truly growing our economy. Sure, there were shots in the arm, but we all know that steroids do more damage in the long run. The Bush tax plan was like steroids at the beginning, but the strength wasn't real and now we're suffering from crippling damage.
So, what do we need to do? Well, a good start would be to stop wasting $10-12 billion per month in Iraq and an increasing amount in Afghanistan. And then what? We need to keep the money in the hands of the people who drive this economy. So, rich people, sorry (not really), but you're heyday is over. You didn't hold up your end of the "trickle down" economy theory, so now we're going to go for the "trickle up" theory. I believe that when the many succeed, we all succeed. It's not socialism or communism, it's common sense.
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Here's a great piece by Paul Krugman on the real effects of Reagan and Bush:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/reagan-and-revenue/And, I'm just going to add here that the problem with Republicans and their taxes is that they're not willing to look at regressive taxes, like Social Security, property taxes, sales taxes, etc. Everyone who makes more than $62,700 is taxed at the same amount, so basically, you and Bill Gates pay into SS the same amount. What is 7% of your income is barely measurable to him. And, SS tax has been raised nine times since 1977...all under the premise that the people who need it, the people who pay into it, are going to get something when they need it. But, the government borrows from that money to pay for things like no-bid contracts to Halliburton. The fact is that the tax burden on the average person has increased exponentially over the past 30 years, while taxes paid by the wealthy and corporations have dropped to their lowest levels, even while government spending increases.
If you need any more proof that Bush's economic plans don't work, look no further than the stimulus check and government bailouts of this year. I can't think of any more "spread the wealth" policies than 1) giving cash to people and 2) government buying bad investments from banks. The fact is that if this economy was sound and booming, we wouldn't need this massive government intervention. But it wasn't so we did. We needed it because an economy doesn't run on corporate tax cuts, it runs on the volume of business. When people buy things, when money changes hands, it runs. Economies were built to run from the bottom up.
But, the thing that bothers me most of all is that Republicans seem to think that the measure of a strong economy is how much more wealth the wealthy can acquire. That's absurd. We have millions of people without jobs (750,000 jobs lost this year alone), millions without health care and skyrocketing costs of living. And the solution is to let these people fail for the sake of the wealthy? No. The fact is, the strength of the economy is in the ability of each generation to have a higher standard of living than the previous. It's in the person keeping a job, buying a house, sending their children to college and saving for retirement. When the small people have small successes, the big guys do well, too.
Ok, I'll stop here. I could keep going, but it basically boils down to Bush ruined this country, Republicans are either evil, stupid or both, and anyone that follows them after the past eight years deserves what they get (and trust me, it won't be pretty).