-Overhaul individual income taxes and corporate taxes. For individuals and families, eliminate a host of popular tax credits and deductions, including the child tax credit and the mortgage interest deduction. Significantly reduce income tax rates, with the top rate dropping to 23 percent from 35 percent.Read this link to see the entire list.
-Reduce the corporate income tax rate to 26 percent from 35 percent, and stop taxing the overseas profits of U.S.-based multinational corporations.
-Increase the gas tax by 15 cents a gallon to fund transportation programs.
There is a hot-button issue for every American I know. Maybe more than one hot button.
No matter how we look at this problem, the solution is going to be painful:
Voters who last week sent Washington a message to wrestle the spiraling debt under control have gotten a message back from the leaders of a White House budget commission: It'll hurt.Surely, we all realize that something must be done about our deficit! If nothing is done, our entire economy will collapse.
A proposal released Wednesday by the bipartisan leaders of President Barack Obama's deficit commission suggested cuts to Social Security benefits, deep reductions in federal spending and higher taxes for millions of Americans to stem a flood of red ink that they said threatens the nation's very future.
Interest groups on the right and the left squealed, predictably, about the plan, which would cut total deficits by as much as $4 trillion over the next decade - much of it from programs long considered all but sacred.
Besides Social Security, Medicare spending would be curtailed. Tax breaks for many health care plans, too. And the Pentagon's budget as well in a plan that attaches $3 in spending cuts to every $1 in tax increases.
For all the pain, the deficit still would approach $400 billion in 2015 under the proposal...
Here's my primary question....If several of the proposed reductions do not happen, just how are we going to reduce that deficit?
In my view, no one single proposal will accomplish what needs to be done. We're way beyond the point that trimming wasteful spending at the government level will make enough of a dent in that huge deficit.
What the hell is America up against with this economic disaster? What are we, as individuals, up against here?
Is there any real recovery possible?
2 comments:
I'll start things off before I have to dash off for work....
Losing the mortgage interest deduction doesn't matter to me as far as my tax return goes. I've never had that deduction anyway.
BUT
How am I going to sell my property, which is my retirement basis, if that mortgage interest deduction vanishes? I won't get buyers!
Furthermore, what will happen to our local governments if home prices and home sales tank even worse than they've already tanked? And that additional tanking will certainly happen if the deduction vanishes.
Any cut in tax breaks to individuals -- whether it is the mortgage interest tax break or health insurance plan tax breaks etc -- is tantamount to a tax increase of course. And at a time when so many families are teetering on the brink this would push them over and compound exponentially an already bad situation.
Some entitlements should not be touched, such as SS or medicare. Not that maybe they shouldn't be administered differently, but again, if you slash those payments people who again are on the brink will slide over.
And while I mostly agree cutting government spending will not be much of a dent still, as every househould knows, a penny here and a penny there starts to add up to dollars and over time can lead to quite a few of them.
Before you ask Americans to endure a little pain the economy needs to be fixed first. They have endured enough pain, more than enough, while watching their government waste money. How many hundreds of billions for a ten day trip to Asia? Why should we have to pay for that when we can't take our families on a week long vacation at the shore?
How about we start slamming companies like GE? Jeffrey IUmelt is along for the Asia trip (who's paying for that?) and on Tuesday he announced GE will sink two billion into China on R&D amd customer innovation centers. 2 billion. To China. (here)
SO Obama has taken folks with him, running up a two hundred billion dollar tab to give away American jobs. And the suggestion is to increase American taxes?
Instead find a way to reward companies who bring business and manufacturing BACK to America and dissuade (read:punish) those who take it away. Through tax or tarriff.
And how about a national tax on non-ewssentials. That has floated out there for a long time. Double the tax if it wasn't made in the U.S. (or again and better hit the companies imorting this stuff). The Levi's and Wranglers you wear now were made in Sri Lanka or CHina or Guatamala but USED to be made in places like Reading, Pa. We were a huge textlie center decades ago. But those jobs started going overseas when I was a kid. And never came back. Others followed until now Reading, once an induistrial/manufacturing biggie, is the sixth most impoverished city IN THE COUNTRY.
Concurrent with these start the slashes big and small in the government. A penny here, a quarter there. BEFORE asking Americans to foot one more cent.
I don't understand economics for shit and maybe what I've said above bears that out. But I do know that if you ask Americans to give more and more, continue the financial attack on Middle America as their jobs leave and their homes are lost you are inviting disaster and violence.
We sent a new crop of bozos to Washington last week. Maybe they can find another way. There is always another way.
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