I hear Obama and McCain each claiming that their tax plan will be better than the other guy's tax plan. Unfortunately the US personal income tax is so complex and loaded with gotcha's and loopholes that nobody knows what will happen, no matter who wins. All we taxpayers can figure is the man who wants to spend more will raise taxes more. So far, Obama is miles ahead on the spending front. He plans to offer free health insurance to everyone. That's gonna cost so much it will bankrupt the country.
All of Obama's tasty goodies will have to be paid for some how. Once a federal goodie is offered , it can never be revoked, so each of Obama's pricey goodies will burden us taxpayers for ever and ever. We will have to pay for them somehow, taxes, borrowing, or just plain printing the money, none of which is good for the economy.
Obama's goodies mean taking money away from industry, investment, research and development and just consuming it.
4 comments:
WIthout lots of tax money, how do you propose supporting the forces in Iraq at $16billion per month? That is about $100/month from each American family! See http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/apr/01/iraq-war-100-month/ for how this was calculated. McCain will need to tax you much more to maintain the war effort.
Iraq supplemental budgets have been $85-90 billion a year since the invasion. That's closer to $7-8 billion a month, not $16 billion. We have been meeting that budget load for five years at the current tax rate. Compared to the $700 billion Wall St bailout, that's chicken feed.
Obama wants to grant every citizen health care as plush as Congressmen enjoy. That will increase spending on health care from the current 16% of GNP to something like 20%. That's big money. Our international competitors only spend 8% of GNP on health care, and boast life expectancy and infant mortality rates as good as the US, for half the money. US exports cost foriegn customers 16% more just to cover the worker's health care. We need those exports to pay for $700 billion a year oil imports, among other things. It's hard to be a successful US exporter when you have to pay 16% for workers healthcare on top of 35% Federal corporate income tax.
"meeting that budget load"??? Isn't there a deficit?
Any sources available for your numbers?
The $85-90 billion is the number that comes up on the ordinary news each year. There is always a Congressional challenge to funding the Iraq war and that's the number that gets tossed about each year. The federal deficit, up until just last month, was running a fraction of the yearly GNP, which isn't too bad by international standards. European countries run higher than that to finance all their social services. The US has run a budget deficit pretty much every year since the end of WWII. The deficit run over the Bush years isn't wildly out of line compared to budget deficits going all the way back to the 1940's.
I'm all in favor of running a surplus, but we have been fighting the Iraq war without a tax hike and without running a deficit bigger than ordinary.
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