So much for the benefit from those tax cuts.
You've been getting your economics lessons from Democrats. Investments are about the future, not the past or even the present. MUCH of what has gone wrong so far has been a result of fear and uncertainty about the future. This would indicate a brighter future, thus produce more investments, thus producing capital gains.
$1000 per child tax credit? Why should I be subsidizing someone else’s procreation?
So, a tax cut is a 'subsidy' now? Wow. Barney Frank, is that you?
Marriage tax penalty? Yea, I guess so.
Gee, thanks for being so generous.
Top corporate rates? That might help, but most corporations simply pass along the tax expense.
And if they didn't have to pass them on and prices were lowered as a result, which they would be in a dynamic and competing marketplace, those lower prices would, of course, be a bad thing in NVDave's socialist utopia. Gotcha.
The GOP is missing the boat completely here.
No, you're missing the boat. In fact, you're missing the fact that the boat is now a plane that has flown right over your head.
They’re peddling the same laundry list of stuff they were trying to peddle in the Bush years. They need a new-new thing.
I don't recall this laundry list being peddled, nor do I recall it actually being implemented. In fact, if the GOP hadn't strayed from this and lost their backbone, a lot of this mess could have been avoided.
How about we remove all barriers to repatriation of foreign earnings for US corporations? That could bring as much as $600 to $700 billion back on-shore.
Okay, thank God Barney Frank is gone! Great idea. Adding that to DeMint's plan would be fantastic and would spur a great deal of growth on top of what the rest of the plan would bring. The Dems would demonize it, but Republicans need to stop running from that and confront it head on. May as well use that for practice.
Or how about making targeted tax cuts for small businesses (less than 500 employees), since the majority of all jobs created in the US are from small business?
I guess that sounds good from a populist point of view, but why not make it across the board? I know Barney hates those eeeeeeeevil corporations, but those corporations employ people and make things that even small business people need to run their own business. Help them all out, so they can help each other.
Yea, yea. Nice dogma.
Now here’s some hard facts of the here and now from the Church of What Is:
What is here and now is that dividends are being slashed, stocks are going to zero, we’re now having to contend with talk of bank nationalization, etc. We’re now in an environment where such previously safe companies as Dow Chemical, with a dividend history of steady, growing dividends back to 1912, are faced with having to cut their dividend. Even utility stocks are not completely safe dividend plays any more, as Goldman Sachs is now warning investors to hedge utility stocks out to 2010.
There are plenty of people who are selling out of stocks because they can see the handwriting on the wall. There are no cap gains to be had, and unless you’re a short-term trader like me, there aren’t about to be gains to be had. Neither the GOP nor the DNC is about to give traders tax cuts. They want to keep people as victims of the “buy-and-hold” scheme of picking the investors’ pockets.
Go look at how long it took the stock market to recover from 1933 onward, or in the 1970’s - and now project that onto the current environment. There’s going to be no stimulative benefit from playing with tax rates on cap gains for years and years to come.
Remember, the object here is to create liquidity in the economy and increase GDP as a result of this “stimulus” — not pursue some dogma. The GOP is completely missing this boat. The CBO has come down against Obama/Obey’s plan, but the CBO’s previous scoring on some of these tax-cut ideas backs up what I’m saying: they have little stimulative effect.
The BEA GDP release for Q2 2008 shows what happened to the last “stimulus” from Bush: People put it into savings, by and large. There was little to no “stimulus” from handing people that one-off rebate.
Hence, this is why job creation and wage growth must be targeted. Everything else is just noise. The US consumer is shutting their wallet - quickly. Look at the auto industry, for example: everyone says that “if Detroit would only build cars that the US consumer wants to buy.... blah, blah, blah.”
OK, so how does that explain Toyota’s sales being down about 30% y-o-y, or Honda being down 23%+ Y-o-y? It doesn’t.
The US consumer being tapped out — now that explains both Detroit’s falling sales and Toyota/Honda/Nissan sales plummeting quite nicely.
The US auto industry is doomed - this year - without stimulating job creation and wage growth. Offering people these laundry lists of recycled pap ain’t gonna get the job done. The GOP needs to focus directly on the task at hand, and quit trying to load up their legislation with their past laundry lists, like the marriage penalty or child tax credits, which are basically sops to social conservatives. Those won’t create jobs. The majority of jobs in the US are created by small business - that is undeniable and well documented. Target those businesses.
The first-time unemployment claims out this morning show that it is time for the GOP to get their head out of their plush posteriors and get serious about this. At some point very soon, the US consumer is going to shut down for a long time to come because everyone (including government employees in tapped-out states) is going to start wondering if their job is safe. The GOP has a chance to show some leadership, but only if they come up with proposals that none of the Obama administration’s economists or think-tank can dispute are stimulative. There are tax cuts that are stimulative and significantly so and the GOP needs to offer up a clean package of just those tax cuts, because the DNC isn’t going to accept them.
The GOP, in the end, needs to have offered up a package of cuts and spending that scores well, so that even if it is rejected, and the Obey/Obama plan results in nothing but more misery, the GOP is on solid ground come 2010.
Thanks to the Congress and their stupid “Buy American” component of the “stimulus” bill, we’re now quite possibly looking at a trade war. The business press in the EU is aflame with furious rants about this provision of the legislation, even as countries in the EU are trying to tamp down their own trade unions and calls for protectionism. If this legislation goes through with a “Buy American” clause in it - even if it contains some footnoted caveat that it is “subject to previously negotiated trade agreements” - the footnote won’t appear in the European press. The GOP has actually picked up points abroad for opposing the “Buy American” nonsense — it is the first time in three months of non-stop Obama adulation abroad that the foreign press is copping a clue who the adults are over here.