Warbird Information Exchange

It wasn't "Hammer and Sickle" since that only comes out once a year. Must have been last week's "Pravda".
At any rate someone who makes $150,000.00 a year still counts as wealthy/upper middle class in 99% of the country.
I think that someone making that kind of dough can take the hit alot easier than many of the broke mechanics who post on this Forum.

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All I did was press this red button here...

Wrench, could you please elaborate what you thought was BS?

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All I did was press this red button here...

No problem Broken Wench

It's not "President Obama" or "Chief Executive and Commander in Chief Obama" until he's actually sworn in, is it not? I was under the impression that he is the president- elect until then. Anyway, I won't participate in the name calling. BTW, you are aware that the top 20% of income earners pay about 80% of the income taxes? Sure, there are a few exceptions, but there are a heck of a lot more people who don't pay income taxes at all.

-Pat

[quote="Enemy Ace"]Wrench, could you please elaborate what you thought was BS?[/quote] The part about upper income earners getting out of taxs.... You have no idea.. Even if you have a corporate vechile you have to pay taxes on that..plus as a upper income earner you are required to donate roughly about 10K to the united way as a requirement for employment.. Without getting into alot or personal data you don't have a clue about who pays what.. Anyway When I ws a mechanic I made about 110K with all the side jobs and other income...What if ossama lowers it to 100k or 75K. Dodn't worry your gonna pay.

Of course the top 20% of incomes pay about 80% of the taxes. THAT'S WHERE THE M0NEY IS! Even if someone turned the income tax code upside down so the bottom 20% gave all their income to the govt and the top 20% paid none, how much money would you raise? You'd have a heck of a small budget. It would be like some guy trying to be a big diamond smuggler but only dealing in cubic zirconium!

Long ago a progressive tax rate was established. Most people consider it fair as a general principal, and in some form it is the way to raise the money needed. The devil is in the details. We once had very high tax rates at the upper end, I think up to a maximum of about 70%. That may have hurt the economic growth overall.

But the top individual income tax rate is now 35%? I think. The new proposal that has the privileged many screaming, would go back to the rate we had under Clinton,before the Bush tax cut, is only a 4% increase to 39.6%. Not likely to bankrupt too many billionaires. Another major point, you may like Clinton, or consider him low as a dog, BUT the FACT IS under his admin we had a great economy, good employment, great stock market; and they left a budget surplus for his secessor who went through it like Oprah through fried chicken. Clinton not only was able to finally get a balanced budget, they even made some progress on welfare reform and getting people back to work. MY POINT IS, not that Clinton per se was good or bad, but his economy was tops and SLIGHLTY HIGHER taxes did not hold back growth then. Unemployment was only about 4% then, which is considered full employment.

I think these tax figures are correct, but am not sure.

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Bill Greenwood
Spitfire N308WK

Another BIG POINT to keep in mind. We got into the economic crisis we are in now under the PRESENT System, with the lower tax rate at the upper end from the last tax cut.

So, the lower rate did not prevent our trouble, and for all the talk about what rates we might have in the future, they are not in effect now and not the cause of this.

And let's talk economics, not names or titles.

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Bill Greenwood
Spitfire N308WK

So, Bill, like I said, what about a required period of holding a stick before you can sell it? Or is this just plain silly? I seems as if speculation is much of the problem so we should be working at slwoing up the short term gaming and speculating that is still going on. Amazing to think that even after all this there are still people out there gambling on the markets.

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"I knew the jig was up when I saw the P-51D-20-NA Mustang blue-nosed bastards from Bodney, and by the way the blue was more of a royal blue than an indigo and the inner landing gear interiors were NOT green, over Berlin."

Bill, that's all fine and well, but the lower taxes increased the amount of money flowing to the IRS substantially since they did so. Taxes don't control an economy, but they certainly can help and hinder it.

When ExxonMobil is reporting world record profits but making a loss within the US solely due to the fact they have to pay more taxes in the US than they bring in from sales of all types within the US is telling on how high the taxes are and where the real money is in the economy right now - international. That is what drives the big companies offshore. That is what drives the value of the US dollar down. That is what causes those "richest" to not want to invest in the US economy. If they're not going to make a return on what they invest within the borders of the US because they're taxed on their international income and not just their national income, what motivation do they have to grow their business?

It's all about motivation. If there is no motivation (i.e. no chance for profit), then it doesn't matter how much or little you tax them, they'll not spend money in your country, state, county, or town. Why do you think that Michigan's been in a recession since before Clinton left office? Because the corporations there were being taxed to death. Now the ones that could have left and the state's in serious trouble, even before this current downswing. It all comes back to the simple idea that a company exists to make a profit. If they're not making a profit then one of two things happens - they change their business to do something that makes profit (move, cut jobs, change products, etc) or they go under.

So, what do you do to stimulate this economy? You motivate the companies to invest in the United States. You make its taxes less oppressive. You make the regulation less oppressive (in some industries the regulatory compliance costs more per year than payroll). You make the companies feel like they're not going to be sued every time someone fails to exercise self control and self accountability. Until the motivation is there for them to be here and invest here, you will continue to have off shoring and low investment rates in the US worker and the US economy.

BTW, on the issue of stock market and banking regulation - the regulations that were removed were ones that made sense. It's the ones that don't make sense that they wanted gone and need to be gone. Too much of the current "credit crisis" came about when Clinton decided in 1997 to loosen the credit requirements for Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac-backed loans. Part of that loosening included a not so subtle implication that the largest banks in the US would "do well" to use those loosened requirements to give minority and high risk applicants loans as part of Clinton's first home program (something that Bush then took up and continued into his Presidency). Add to that the fact that the mismanagement of both agencies has been known since 2004 and yet nothing was ever done to fix it, and you get where we are today - two companies run worse than ENRON on the verge of collapse because the government wanted to make an example of ENRON but not admit that its own agents were guilty of the same kind of malfeasance.

No matter what, it's a mistake to raise taxes on anybody, and Bush's tax cuts were a step in the right direction. Now with B.O. were taking a step backwards by raising the taxes more.

Here's what taxes pay for: BIGGER GOVERNMENT.

What's the answer, stop bridges to nowhere, handouts, pork, fire lazy gov. employees. get rid of fannie mae and freddie mac. (They literally stole money from the gov't).

What are some of B.O.'s ideas, more handouts for welfare type programs which is not a valid solution to economic woes. The solution is to lower taxes and lower government spending.

Someone said Clinton was good fiscally, I beg to differ. Clinton raised taxes, and pulled the wag the dog thing to distact from the Lewinsky Affair(another waste in tax money)

Bush was very good in lowering taxes, but bad with excessive spending.

The right thing for B.O. to do is lower taxes to stimulate the economy, and LOWER taxes on the "so called rich" so that the rich will have more budget for hiring more people. When you hear complex answers, you're hearing B.S. The answers are simple.

Muddy, or current tax policy encourages one to hold a stock or other asset for a year to get the lower capital gains tax rate instead of the regular income rate. But is is not the big difference that it was years ago,it is now 17% versus 35%. I think MCCain proposed cutting it to 7.5 %. The problem for so many now is that we don't have any capitol gains, not so much that teh tax is so high.

I don't think you could fairly or practically force people to hold for a year. What if a family gets a big bonus at the end of the year, maybe they invest $200K in the market. Then they have an emergency, say cancer in the family, or they lose their house to a hurricane and have no flood insurance? They may need the invested money now.

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Bill Greenwood
Spitfire N308WK

CAPPFLYER, you've got it 100% right, all the answers are practical and simple. The doubletalk, and smoke and mirrors, reinventing the wheel type ideas are always the wrong ones. All the answers for economic problems are simple and can be recognized with high school economics. makes me wonder if the politicians went to high school.


The other option is that the politicians are so smart that high school economics no longer apply. In their sophisticated world 2+2=5.

A2C, you said Bush cut taxes and that was good. So, if true, and so important , how did our economy get so bad now? After all, just as you and I say, we are under the Bush lower tax plan and have been for 8 years. It doesn't seem to have worked too good.

And I did not say Clinton had lower taxes, I don't know.. But tell me how was our economy then, our unemployment, our stock market? Good or bad, up or down? What are the economic facts?

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Bill Greenwood
Spitfire N308WK

Bill:

My other 2 posts say the answer is simple lower taxes. Bush did that, and did what he could. He doesn't have any magic wands, he just used the tools he had. There are no other tools. I think you're trying to connect the economy to the government, well the limited connection is lowering taxes. A president is not some kind of god that can control the entire universe. I think to many people look to the government or the president as some kind of WIZARD who can control the economy in a positive way.

On the other hand, the president does have a lot of negative power.

He can become an evil WIZARD by raising taxes, and destroying businesses and people's way of life.

The answer to this is very simple. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. These 2 institutions abused their power in how they did home loans. It turns out that poor managment in these two agencies started a traceable chain of events which damaged Americas vital markets-housing.

Guess who started freddie mae and fannie mac? I believe it was Clinton. So yes it happened during Bush's term, but it wasn't Bush. However I do fault Bush with encouraging everybody to buy a house, and someone in the gov't did some arm twisting forcing banks to loan to people with poor credit.

Again this was a problem created by government abuse. So again the answer is SMALLER GOVERNMENT, basic stuff.