Again....this stimulus package may or may not be a good thing. If they would come out and say that they are "cutting" spending to help pay for it, it would be a heck of alot better.
I'm all for lower taxes and lower government spending.
The problem is that the government sets up more and more programs each year to fund. Then, each year....these projects get a % increase in budget to keep up with inflation or CPI or whatever. If they get a 2% increase instead of a 5% increase, the reporters are all over the news, internet, etc saying that the government is cutting funding to these programs. Most of the time, they are not cutting funding...they are just not giving them the increase in budget that they want.
I really wish they would cut out alot of the programs and cut funding across the board (foreign aid, domestic projects, everything!) to balance the budget.
Why do you think companies are moving out of the US? The ridiculous corporate tax rate is a big reason. Also...anytime a company makes too much money, the government wants to bring it down by making them pay more taxes.
Hey...you're doing too well and you are too successful. Let's change the rules and make you pay even more taxes. Guess what? I'm moving overseas.
Speed
While I agree with you that corporate taxes are high, I believe that another reason for outsourcing is that company like GM can pay someone in Mexico $1.25 an hour to work on the assembly line vs. that union worker in the U.S $47.50 an hour. I'm not saying that this is right (before all you DISers from Michigan start to flame me
, I'm just saying that's the way it is. As for the stimulus. I think it's more insanity on top of insanity.
Adding it to an already mushrooming deficit just makes no sense. It's just borrowing more money and making the underlying problem even larger. A 9 trillion dollar deficit, 53 Trillion in unfunded future entitlement programs. And people want their taxes to go *down*? Seriously, the citizens of this country are in for the mother-of-all disappointments down the road. Those who are riding on the Great American Consumer Treadmill and not saving as much as they possibly can are going to see a huge drop in lifestyle in their futures. I'm saving as much as I can and I think that *I'll* see a huge drop in my lifestyle because what I'm thinking will be discretionary income in retirement will end up going towards health care and energy costs.
This type of slowdown shows how incredibly vulnerable our economy is. Just a one percent slowdown in consumer spending and we're in trouble.
And this stimulus is just another short-term mini-fix to a much bigger problem. How do we keep growing this economy when the money runs out? We had the dot.com bubble that fueled the economy for awhile and went right into the cheap money/housing bubble. Inflation is out of the bag, real wages are down as a result. Now that people are a whole lot poorer on paper (and in reality), and there's nothing in savings, and credit is drying up.....now what?
I have an idea....we'll send everyone $800 dollars....yeah, that will do it!!
