Houston, we have a problem! Chicago, New York and L.A., you have the same problem I'm afraid, as does our entire nation actually.
And that big problem is the right-wing legislators who signed Grover Nordquist's "no new taxes" pledge despite the fact we have historically low tax rates that also rank among the lowest of all industrialized nations!
Standard and Poor's downgrade of America's AAA credit rating was based almost entirely upon the failure of this Congress to pass legislation that asked for shared sacrifice from the wealthiest Americans and our biggest corporations. And as we watch billions of dollars, yen, francs and Euros vanish into thin air as the world's stock markets continue to drop day after day, it is all too obvious that they know what the problem is too.
It's not "too much" debt, but rather the method this Congress chose to deal with the debt, so they could make Obama look bad before next fall's elections.
The financial markets know too well what cutting spending does to quell any economic recovery. It kills it!
All you need to do is look back a few years in history to see how Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower spent America out of debt by putting America back to work. And lets not forget about the 22 million jobs that were added to America's growing economy after Clinton raised the top tax rate back up to 39.6 percent.
Bush proved tax cuts don't create jobs. An increase in demand from millions more working Americans does however!
Rod Livdahl, Mesa
VofReason posted at 12:38 pm on Wed, Aug 17, 2011.
If the New York Times says so, then it must be.
Try telling your wife you just need to spend more to get yourself out of bankrupcy. She will likely divorce you. Or it that logic only applies at the family unit, just not at the Government level.
Rodini posted at 12:36 pm on Mon, Aug 15, 2011.
Dale...I have 11 published letters to the editor..you've read them, they are original...and they talk about things important to the majority, not just the select few at the top!
Now read this:
Billionaire urges lawmakers to raise taxes on rich to help cut budget deficit
Billionaire Warren Buffett urged U.S. lawmakers Monday to raise taxes on the country's super-rich to help cut the budget deficit, saying such a move will not hurt investments.
"My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It's time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice," The 80-year-old "Oracle of Omaha" wrote in an opinion article in The New York Times.
Buffett, one of the world's richest men and chairman of conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway Inc , said his federal tax bill last year was $6,938,744.
"That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income - and that's actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent," he said.
Vote: Is Congress coddling the super-rich, like Buffett says?
94.3%
Yes, and they should be taxed more.
58,411 votes
5.7%
No, everyone pays too much in taxes already.
3,506 votes
Lawmakers engaged in a partisan battle over spending and taxes for more than three months before agreeing on August 2 to raise the $14.3 trillion U.S. debt ceiling, avoiding a U.S. default.
"Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country's fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness," Buffett said.
Buffett said higher taxes for the rich will not discourage investment.
"I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone - not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 - shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain," he said
"People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off."
Amen and thank-you for telling America the TRUTH Warren!! And the polling numbers clearly show the VAST MAJORITY AGREE!!
Dale Whiting posted at 12:56 pm on Sat, Aug 13, 2011.
Rodini,
How about being original? Give it a try! You'll like it.
Rodini posted at 11:23 am on Sat, Aug 13, 2011.
Read this from Eugene Robinson in todays Washington Post:
The survey by the Post shows that while officials in Washington may be clueless in the face of economic turmoil, most of their constituents see things quite clearly. Seven out of 10 respondents said the federal government is "mostly focused on the wrong things" -- and blamed Democrats and Republicans for this misdirected focus in precisely equal measure.
How many times does this message have to be delivered? In poll after poll, Americans have said their top concern is the jobs crisis. Unemployment is at 9.1 percent. The worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression robbed the nation of 9 million jobs and only a fraction have been replaced. The economy is adding jobs at a snail's pace that doesn't even keep up with growth of the potential work force.
Jobs. The issue is jobs.
Yet the president and Congress have spent months focused on the national debt -- a problem that needs to be addressed, to be sure, but not when unemployment is at staggering levels and the "recovery" is beginning to look like a mirage. Recent data suggest the economy is in danger of sinking back into recession; even if it doesn't, the current rate of growth is too anemic to have much impact on the jobs front.
Oh, and what drama will absorb Washington for the next several months? The deliberations of the congressional "super-committee," a 12-member panel that is supposed to chart a way forward on ... debt. Have I mentioned that the most urgent crisis facing the nation right now is jobs?
Only one-third of those polled said they have confidence in President Obama to make "the right decisions about the country's economic future," the Post found. That may sound discouraging, but only 18 percent of respondents said they have confidence in congressional Republicans to make the right decisions.
For good reason, in my view: The Republican solution has been to eliminate jobs rather than create them. Last month, the economy added 117,000 jobs -- a performance so weak that unemployment changed little. The private sector actually added 154,000 jobs, but the public sector lost 37,000 jobs as Republicans continue to impose an austerity program at an inopportune moment.
The GOP seems to believe that a federal, state or local job somehow isn't a "real" job. I'll bet most Americans know otherwise.
Here we are, with interest rates at or near historical lows. The federal government, despite suffering a credit downgrade to AA-plus from Standard & Poor's, is able to borrow as much money as it wants at an absurdly low cost. Meanwhile, we have a large and growing backlog of infrastructure needs. Roads, bridges and dams need to be repaired; new airports need to be built and old ones refurbished; we need to upgrade the electrical grid to take advantage of new energy sources that do not depend on fossil fuels.
Putting two and two together, you might expect the president and Congress to design and implement a nationwide project of infrastructure renewal that would put Americans back to work, spark a burst of growth and leave us with tangible assets that would increase our competitiveness in the global economy.
But you'd be disappointed. And you'd lose faith in the ability of officials to respond to a crisis they don't even seem to notice.
The disconnect between what the nation cares about and what its leaders care about seems to widen day by day. Hello? Is anybody in Washington listening? Does anybody even care?
Rodini posted at 10:45 am on Sat, Aug 13, 2011.
Read this please:
In a measured tone, the NYT article effectively makes clear that when it comes to economic policy, Republicans plainly have no idea what they’re talking about.
The boasts of Congressional Republicans about their cost-cutting victories are ringing hollow to some well-known economists, financial analysts and corporate leaders, including some Republicans, who are expressing increasing alarm over Washington’s new austerity and antitax orthodoxy.
Their critiques have grown sharper since last week, when President Obama signed his deficit reduction deal with Republicans and, a few days later, when Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit rating of the United States.
But even before that, macroeconomists and private sector forecasters were warning that the direction in which the new House Republican majority had pushed the White House and Congress this year — for immediate spending cuts, no further stimulus measures and no tax increases, ever — was wrong for addressing the nation’s two main ills, a weak economy now and projections of unsustainably high federal debt in coming years.
Instead, these critics say, Washington should be focusing on stimulating the economy in the near term to induce people to spend money and create jobs, while settling on a long-term plan for spending cuts and tax increases to take effect only after the economy recovers.
Republicans respond to all of this by … not caring at all. Some may want a weaker economy on purpose, some are too blinded by ideology to consider objective information, some aren’t terribly bright, and some, as David Brooks recently noted, simply “do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities.”
But the bottom line remains the same: nearly everyone who understands economic policy at any level is convinced Republicans — in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail — are spewing gibberish. And in this case, “nearly everyone” includes veterans of the Reagan and Bush administrations, making opposition to right-wing Tea Party nonsense bipartisan.
Also note the scope of the concerns. Current GOP officials aren’t just wrong about stimulus, the timing of budget cuts, taxes, debt reduction, or monetary policy — they’re wrong about all of them at the same time.
In fairness, the article does note one economist — Stanford’s John Taylor — who’s willing to defend the Republican line (as he always does, regardless of merit). But to appreciate the credibility of the GOP’s go-to economist, swing by Krugman’s blog and type Taylor’s name into the search engine.
Regardless, it’s an important article about the nation’s most pressing crisis. Take the time to read it, save it, and send it around.
By Steve Benen
concernedcitizen posted at 7:46 pm on Fri, Aug 12, 2011.
I haven't read all the comments, but I wanted to share my thoughts on this article.
"Cutting spending kills the economy"-not when your spending habits involve increasing the national debt limit by 100's of billions of dollars each year.
If I am acquiring more and more credit cards and lines of credit and using all that money for wasteful, materialistic things, eventually all of my income will be going to paying the interest on those lines of credit. Interest is not on my side, and those who are loaning me the money (in this case, China and Russia are loaning it to the US) have interest on their side, because they are making bank on my money because of my desire for instant gratification.
It's time for America to cut back it's appetites. It's time for Republican lawmakers, whose business buddies seem to hold all the cards now because they have all the money but aren't willing to pay their fair share in taxes, to own up to their part of the bargain to help keep America a land of opportunity, not just an opportunity for themselves to amass all the wealth and to heck with everyone else. It's time for Democrats to stop insisting that all the social programs they want are "necessary" for the common good.
It's time for common sense to rule. If you spend more than you earn, it will turn around to bite you in the end. It hasn't done that yet, but I think politicians and many Americans are now seeing that the end is closer than they thought, and that they can't pull the wool over the eyes of Americans much longer before they catch on.
There needs to be a balance with taxes. I think both the Democratic party and the Republican party believe in, and fight for, many ideals that help to accomplish the American Dream and help to solve our problem as a nation.
You can't keep cutting taxes and expect to keep programs running.
You can't run up a national deficit in Bush's reign and then all of a sudden decide now it is time to be fiscally conservative and actually balance a budget (why can states produce balanced budgets but not our federal government?). Not to mention how much of a faster rate the national deficit has risen under Obama's reign...
You can't keep adding taxes to support programs, especially with how dishonest politicians are-when they know they have extra money coming in, suddenly it goes to pet projects and CEO buddies of theirs that they "hire" to do certain jobs. Just look at Pearson Education and AIMS as an example, millions of state tax dollars that have been put into a test that is not a reliable measurement from year to year of the achievements of students, because they change it significantly almost every year.
My idea would be that everyone pays a flat tax (like maybe 10-12%), get rid of most of the tax code that exists, and keep things that are important to people, like the child tax credit. Families who receive this need that extra boost, particularly with how expensive it is to raise children today. And well-adjusted children who are healthy turn into well-adjusted adults who become productive citizens (generally speaking of course).
A flat tax would take the surprises out for everyone, be easier to budget, and we would find that more than enough of the programs that we need to fund (social security, medicare/medicaid, education, police/fire, etc.) would receive the adequate funding they need.
For those who think that "Bush is the bomb-diggity," realize that he made it easier for everyone to BORROW money. Banks needed to offer more money for home loans because interest rates were cheaper and there was the American Dream Home act (or something like that) that he signed to help make it easier to get into homes. Thus started the housing boom, which made prices rise significantly, which made demand WAY too high, and brought us to where we are today, all because of appetite. We could refinance our home and have $50,000 to spend immediately. Where did that money come from? Russia and China, and other countries that have loaned us money to "cover our costs." But that money we received meant that our national deficit was rising faster than ever (except for now with Obama).
I think Russia and China have been absolutely right to tell us to curb our appetite and to be careful of our spending habits. Does that scare anyone else that these countries are the ones telling us this? They may have a lot of things wrong politically, but they sound right on to me.
Rich posted at 6:52 pm on Fri, Aug 12, 2011.
Actually. the high tech revolution bridged four Presidencies. The only one with any sense was Reagan, who tried to get Congress to go one dollar in tax increase three in cuts. That didn't work out because the pork barrel beat the rain barrel, what the politicos gave away for election didn't match what fell from heaven. Why didn't Clinton Bushes I & II follow up? Don't know, I only know they just grew the bureaucracy that's choking the life out us. I built a solar panel, twice as efficient as the one I bought at Harbor Freight. Can't put either one up. Red tape, government, hassle, bureaucracy. I can, personally, with my own two hands, take my property off grid. They do it in Hawaii, on the Big Island where they get left alone. You don't need a program, That's just some more brain dead bureaucrats to stop you. You need your hands, your mind and the freedom to use them. The last ingredient is missing, and until you add it, the dough isn't going to rise.
Cerulean posted at 5:25 pm on Fri, Aug 12, 2011.
Rich,
I believe that what you say about “Government protecting Utilities” is true. There are, however, many energy reducing innovations that deserve recognition and support, to include; CoolChip Technologies, Paper Battery Co., Tesla, etc. etc. and etc. . Innovation can make energy efficiency so good throughout all industries that, in time, there will be an abundance of cheap clean energy. (This video http://youtu.be/gn3-XD1fTTo gave me inspiration.) Unlike a few years ago, today UCLA, Yale, MIT and ASU, to name a few, offer graduate programs in Environment and Sustainability. This is the future.
There should be a PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) program in Arizona ( My guess is that Pearce cannot find a way to squeeze some personal money from the program.)
Also, Rich, you have suggested in previous posts that revenue increased under the Bush tax cuts. Why, if the economy was sooo good, did HE not strive for the virtues you hold Clinton responsible for - like paying back the Social Security Trusts and such.
Rich posted at 2:45 pm on Fri, Aug 12, 2011.
"...so please explain how Clinton RAISED taxes and created 22 million additional private sector jobs balanced the budget and reduced the deficit AFTER raising taxes..."
Okay, absurdly simple really, the growth of the high tech sector. In actuality the Clinton administration mishandled it rather badly, spending way too much and not planning for a rainy day. The sector should have been integrated into the economy better so it spread through more fields, and the budget should not only have been balanced, but the Social Security Trust paid back as well as overall debt lowered. Expansions like that under Clinton are once in a lifetime deals, and he wasted this one. Now that it's raining that's a little obvious, if you aren't an ideologue, without even 20/30 hindsight.
As to demand creating jobs, it's simple, straight forward and wrong. Demand is a factor, not a be all, end all anymore than lowering or raising taxes is. Demand for an over-producable commodity, for an automated over a handmade product, and several other forms of demand will actually cause unemployment. Everyone has an answer that is simple, neat, logical and wrong. Though I must admit Rodini, you seem to have gotten your full quota.
Rodini posted at 1:39 pm on Fri, Aug 12, 2011.
Nothing but NONSENSE, sure glad you have such a good handle on nutcases...takes one to know one right?
Like your laughter at spending creating job growth....so please explain how Clinton RAISED taxes and created 22 million additional private sector jobs balanced the budget and reduced the deficit AFTER raising taxes and Bush incresed the deficit, never balanced a budget and only 1 million government job with 50,000 factories closed and a net loss of private sector jobs after CUTTING taxes??
Delusional is a good descriptive wod for Republicans. If cutting taxes increases revenues...LOL WHY NOT...just eliminate taxes all together and we should see money growing on trees in Washington, right?
Or is there a magic cut-off point where the reverse suddenly happens and you can't cut taxes beyond that magic number maybe?
Demand creates jobs..old economic law...when demand exceeds supply, new jobs will be created...am I right?
Read this from an article published today unbelievers:The No-Demand Recovery
Lack of demand is what tripped up Nick Beste, 24, founder of Man Cave, a business modeled on Tupperware parties but focused on men. Beste launched the business in November 2008 with an ambitious business plan, energized management and clever marketing that boosted sales of steaks, grilling supplies, beer mugs and other products of typical male interest.
An aggressive growth plan backed by brisk early sales spurred Beste and his management team to adjust sales projections for the year upward and to expand the company to 15 employees, with plans for more. Sales growth, however, didn't keep up with the new projections. Man Cave had been too optimistic, and in the summer of 2010, it all came to a head, Beste said.
"Last June, we were bleeding cash," he said. "So we put together a plan to bring down the business to bare bones and rebuild based on a new infrastructure."
Now, with five employees, the company is close to being back in the black and ready to grow again. Demand for shot glasses and pork chops has continued to grow at a slower pace, so Man Cave has pushed back expansion plans several years.
Dynamic Drape and Décor, a North Bergen, N.J.-based company launched in February 2010 that supplies drapery and builds props for events and parties, averages between 10 and 14 employees these days, depending on the level of business.
Jeff Guberman, the company's president, had thought that by the end of the company's second year, it would be employing 20 people.
"I don't believe we're going to be there," he said, because of a lack of revenue. Organizations are holding fewer events and scaling back the ones they did have, he said.
Memphis, Tenn.-based Clarion Security is another company that has revised hiring plans because of lower-than-expected sales. The security guard contracting company founded in September 2009 passed the 50-employee threshold six months ago and currently has 84, but hiring really hasn't taken off the way Kim Heathcott, 46, the company's CEO, expected.
"I'm 25% behind in budget in terms of headcount," she said. "I am selling people -- security guards -- so my headcount is directly correlated to my sales and revenue."
To be sure, there is a small but highly visible segment of the economy where start-ups are seemingly exploding: technology.
Kevin Malik, chief information officer of Phoenix-based i/o, a data-center solutions firm, has hired 60 people this year. The company, founded in 2007, now has 130 employees and 50 open positions.
"In the next 12 months, I expect to double at a minimum," he said.
Founded in January 2009, Applico, a mobile application development firm, now has about 40 employees. President and CEO Alex Moazed, 23, said the firm will have 50 to 75 employees by the end of 2011.
"We're hiring a few people every week," he said.
For these fast-growing firms in red-hot segments of the economy, sales aren't the issue -- it's finding qualified warm bodies to fill positions.
"We spend a lot of time finding experienced, talented IT people. It's not an easy field to recruit for," said Malik of i/o.
Moazed said that his company would be at 100 employees by the end of the year if only it could find the right people.
"If we were able to go out and find amazing people or even pretty good people, we'd be able to hit 100 or break 100. That's been one of our biggest constraints," he said.
Meanwhile, back at Man Cave, finding the right people is a concern Beste hopes to have in several years, when sales accelerate again.
"Long term, we want to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and we definitely have the capability of getting there, especially now that we're a lean, mean fighting machine," he said.
When asked when that's going to happen and how many employees he'll have, he said coolly, "In five years, and I know it will be hundreds."
Write to Jeremy Greenfield at jeremyg@fins.com
[smile][smile][smile]
VofReason posted at 12:42 pm on Fri, Aug 12, 2011.
How can you argue with that (ahem) "logic". We need the Government to spend (read waste) more money to pull our economy out of the crapper. Following that line, why don't they raise the price of Milk to $1,000.00 a gallon. Heck, everyone knows it should really cost just $2.50. Though all that overspending will trickle down in to jobs for the Dairy farms. Sure, they will hire people to watch every cow 24 hours a day and administer every corner of their life. Pretty soon, this country will be right back on track. I hopw the liberals in the Demoncat party trot this out to. That should be the final nail for Obama 2012.
Rich posted at 11:21 am on Fri, Aug 12, 2011.
"...all clean energy innovation is entrepreneurial. President Obama is trying to enhance the achievements of ‘entrepreneurs’, especially as it relates to energy independence. Can anyone demonstrate the same in current Republican proposals?"
Unfortunately, no, it isn't entrepreneurial. Really wish it was.A great deal of it is corruption, and most of what the government is doing falls into that category. You can build a basic solar panel for about $200. What you can put on your roof, isn't as good, costs twenty times that won't cover your entire electric bill. Why? Government protects utility companies. An entrepreneur would be allowed to build them, install enough of them on your house to take you off-grid, for about a quarter of what you get the approved system for. Obama, et al, are just hooking suckers for their friends. Leave it open to the free market, create jobs, or reserve it for a few, price gouging friends of politicos? Sort of a microcosm of the problem actually. American innovators, entrepreneurs created most of the modern world, when you tie them up in red tape, you aren't going to progress.
NothingButTheTruth posted at 11:21 am on Fri, Aug 12, 2011.
Give your average neo-buffoon a typewriter and within 5 paragraphs he will use the word neo-con up to 5 times to describe anyone it doesn't agree with, yet say nothing of any substance.
NothingButTheTruth posted at 11:14 am on Fri, Aug 12, 2011.
"It's not "too much" debt, but rather the method this Congress chose to deal with the debt, so they could make Obama look bad before next fall's elections."
I didn't have to read any further to see this guy's a nutbag, but I did anyway to see what other nonsense he would spew, and behold: "Bush proved tax cuts don't create jobs. An increase in demand from millions more working Americans does however!."
Everyone knows the bush tax cuts actually created higher tax revenue and created an environment that created more jobs. How does a demand for jobs create jobs.
Rod Livdahl, I am truly surprised that even the trib would give such idiotic statements as yours to light of day.
Cerulean posted at 10:36 am on Fri, Aug 12, 2011.
Rich said, “Taxes, except were they take entrepreneurial money out of the marketplace…”
Just so that your readers are not confused, an entrepreneur is a person who has possession of a *new* enterprise, venture or idea and is accountable for the outcome, success or failure, of marketing that venture.
For example: Exxon Mobil, and other oil companies are not an entrepreneurs. They do not need the middle class to pay for oil exploration and research (which is what Republicans are insisting that we do). Profits for the oil industry rank in $$billions every quarter.
Ending tax subsidies for large well-endowed businesses is NOT taxing an entrepreneur.
On the other hand, all clean energy innovation is entrepreneurial. President Obama is trying to enhance the achievements of ‘entrepreneurs’, especially as it relates to energy independence. Can anyone demonstrate the same in current Republican proposals?
Rod, if people do look back in history to the Presidents you have named they will know that they too supported innovation.
Rich posted at 10:27 am on Fri, Aug 12, 2011.
Government spending cuts harm employment. (Yes and no, depends on what is cut how and where. Some aid private sector employment others harm it. Way too broad a brush in either case.)
What we need to do is all sacrifice. (Virgins? Goats? Wouldn't it be better to work?)
All take a wage or dividend cut, all pay a bit more taxes, some a heck of a lot more taxes. (Or start a business, work you tail off and employ a couple people)
Let's not lay anyone off. Let's find meaningful, productive things for today's unemployed to do. (In other words start a business and employ some? The jobs aren't there. People can create them, the government has pretty much proven it can't.)
Or does this make too much sense for a Neo-con to understand? (Doesn't make much sense. Throwing more money at a failing, broken machine like the government makes no sense at all. And when you label people, you basically negate them, whether or not they fit your label. And is, probably the last thing we need to do right now. The government doesn't work, big business has been bailed out, but they're still the clueless nincompoops who went broke in the first place. The people are about all that's left to fix it.)
Dale Whiting posted at 8:48 am on Fri, Aug 12, 2011.
Rod,
While working out at a gym before the 2008 election, I had a conversation with a fellow treadmill user. He complained that we were being taxed too much. He asserted that our 50% tax rate was the highest in the world and that it was driving business elsewhere. Being interested in learning from him, and not wanting to make an enemy at the gym, I acted surprised and asked him where he had gotten his information. "Rush Limbaugh" was his reply. I knew that Rush was a college dropout.
Don't confuze Neo-cons with the facts. They need simple logic to make sense of an overly complex world. Try using some soverly simplified logic.
Yesterday Mitt Romney asserted that corporations were people, too. He meant and explained that profits earned by corporations accured to people, the shareholder-investors, many of whom are pension funds. But Mitt was misunderstood, pretty much like was his father George when returning from Vietnam in 1964 [or was it '68?]. Referring to the publisized version of what was going on over there, George observed that he had been brain washed. Heck we all were brainwashed. If one reads Stan McChyrstal's pronouncements carefully, ones sees that Stan was feed up with having to brain wash his own troops about the prospects of prevailing in Afghanistan. Neo-cons are easily brain washed.
So explain that when the government spends a buck, it trickles down, too. Neo-cons worship "trickle down" theory. Even if the buck is spent on a "gold plated toilet seat," the corporation supplying it spends part of that buck on labor, part on materials [and the labor used to provide the materials] and part on the shareholders. So when one cuts government spending, one cuts jobs and hurts investors, investors like Richard Cheney and Haliburton.
Maybe, just maybe today's Neo-cons will come to understand your point. Government spending cuts harm employment. What we need to do is all sacrifice. All take a wage or dividend cut, all pay a bit more taxes, some a heck of a lot more taxes. Let's not lay anyone off. Let's find meaningful, productive things for today's unemployed to do. Or does this make too much sense for a Neo-con to understand?
Rich posted at 7:50 am on Fri, Aug 12, 2011.
Nobody needs to make Obama look bad, he's real good at all by himself. All this scrambling to justify a man who proves almost daily the office of President is well over his head isn't helping anything. Argue taxes all you want, but the fact is, under Obama we've gone too far in debt to make any move on taxes effective for much of anything. About 47% of us don't pay income tax. That is what needs to change tax wise. Why? because people need to pay to be and feel that they are a participating part of a society, not slaves and leeches. You've created an underclass of 47%, and that is what needs to change. You need to revive the real middle class, the entrepreneurs, the small and medium size businesses, because that, and not the bloated ineffectual bureaucracy of government is the key to economic recovery. Now, they bear the heaviest burdens, in terms of regulation and percentage of income. That has to shift, both up and down. Drop the myth of the working class as middle class, they aren't. Middle class takes investment, commitment, work.
The government bailed out banks acquiring thousands of acres of residential, commercial and industrial property. Homestead that. Give people stores, factories, homes for their work to improve them. Drop the 'credit' nonsense. With foreclosures you have eliminated too many people from the market for real estate to recover. The land covers the loan, half the problem with real estate was high pressure salesmen with access to personal data.
Taxes, except were they take entrepreneurial money out of the marketplace, aren't really relevant, except where not paying removes a person from feeling a part of the society and leaves him crying because he doesn't have enough. The government holds the assets necessary to change it. It calls them 'toxic' and looks at ripping people off by renting them. The property belongs to all of us, and needs to be utilized to revive a real middle class, who, in turn, revive the rest of the economy and society.