The economy is really getting bad

[WanderingMonk]

the only way for this economic crisis to end is for the economy to grow.

for it to grow, either the consumers or businesses got to start spending.

it is our patriotic duty to spend money and buy until we drop

[Reverend Tap]

the only way for this economic crisis to end is for the economy to grow.

for it to grow, either the consumers or businesses got to start spending.

it is our patriotic duty to spend money and buy until we drop

Funny how that works out.

When the economy is good, it's "Buy more! Things are great so get out there and spend spend spend!"

When the economy is bad, it's "Buy more! Things are bad so get out there and spend spend spend!"

[1bad65]

Nah, every business just has a really high turnover rate.

If you believe Pelosi's numbers, we all get laid off 3 or 4 times a month.

[1bad65]

the only way for this economic crisis to end is for the economy to grow.

for it to grow, either the consumers or businesses got to start spending.

it is our patriotic duty to spend money and buy until we drop

Actually, this is true. That's why tax cuts have always worked in ending recessions very quickly. It worked when JFK tried it, and when Ronald Reagan tried it. It gives people and businesses more money, money they will spend.

Like Rush Limbaugh always says, 'Just because the press says there is a recession, does not mean you have to participate in it.'

[uki]

what economy?? hahahahaha!!!

planned financial ruin my friends... all planned so that the country will collapse in order to justify the establishment of a new world order, complete with foreign troops on american soil.

[WanderingMonk]

Actually, this is true. That's why tax cuts have always worked in ending recessions very quickly. It worked when JFK tried it, and when Ronald Reagan tried it. It gives people and businesses more money, money they will spend.

always

is a big word.

Bush gave another tax cut last year to stimulate the economy, but did it get the economy out of its spiral?

Reagan said, when your friends and neighbors lose their jobs, it is a recession. When you lose your job, it is a depression.

There is enough fear that people are really cutting back. My supervisor cut back to just the essential and he makes a lot more than I do.

It is easy for rush to say what he says, but how much money is he putting into the economy right now? Why don't he build another studio? How much squeeze is he feeling?
He is right about it is psychology, but what has he done to right the ship beside his radio show? What concrete thing has he done to put Americans back to work?

Honestly, when Warren Buffet is uncertain about the next investment opportunity, we all should get a bit nervous.

I did my part this month, spent a lot of money booking trips and buying stuffs online. But, I am pretty sure that I'll still have a job next month. a lot of people can't say that today and that why they all saving their dollars and putting it into their saving account.

In another time, that wouldn't be so bad, because the banks would have all this money to lend, but because they made so many bad bets over these past couple years, they are using this increase in saving to shore up their balance sheet, so all the money is like being poured into a black hole and companies after companies announcing lay-off one after another.

bank ain't lending and consumers aren't spending. the business aren't going to spend either because there is low visibility. so, the economic growth come to a grinding halt.

I did my part, but can I do it next month, no. One person can't change the tide. We have to get to the tipping point. You have to some type of massive sea change in psychology.

That requires massive public work projects investing in the national infrastructures, or a huge killer apps that compel the consumers to go out and spend. failing that, we are going to wait several years until we find the bottom.

so, I say exercise your patriotic duty and go out and spend just a couple dollars more than you had originally planned.

[1bad65]

always

is a big word.

Bush gave another tax cut last year to stimulate the economy, but did it get the economy out of its spiral?

Bush's tax cuts were not made permanent. That's a huge difference between his and the one's JFK and Reagan passed.

Look at it this way, if your boss gives you a 10% raise, but prefaces it by saying in two years he will re-evaluate things and might cut the 10% raise, would you be less likely to spend the extra money than if you just got it with no strings attached?

It is easy for rush to say what he says, but how much money is he putting into the economy right now? Why don't he build another studio? How much squeeze is he feeling?
He is right about it is psychology, but what has he done to right the ship beside his radio show? What concrete thing has he done to put Americans back to work?

Rush has two studios already, he built the second one in Florida awhile back as he lives there. So he has no need for a 3rd, unless he moves. Rush is well known to travel alot, eat at nice restaurants, and give to charity. He puts his fair share into the economy. It's not Rush's job to fix the economy. Sadly, it's people like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama's job to do that. The scary thing is they have no idea how the free market works, so in all likelyhood they will fail to fix it, and may even make it worse.

Rush also pays his taxes, something many of Obama's Cabinet members do not do.

bank ain't lending and consumers aren't spending. the business aren't going to spend either because there is low visibility. so, the economic growth come to a grinding halt.

If they all got huge tax cuts, the banks would have more to loan, and the people would have more to spend. It's not rocket science.

so, I say exercise your patriotic duty and go out and spend just a couple dollars more than you had originally planned.

Agreed.

[Water Dragon]

Actually, this is true. That's why tax cuts have always worked in ending recessions very quickly. It worked when JFK tried it, and when Ronald Reagan tried it. It gives people and businesses more money, money they will spend.

Like Rush Limbaugh always says, 'Just because the press says there is a recession, does not mean you have to participate in it.'

Well, that's half the story. Maybe I should post the other half since you either don't know it, or are intentionally hiding it.

It's conservative lore that Reagan the icon cut taxes, while George H.W. Bush the renegade raised them. As Stockman recalls, "No one was authorized to talk about tax increases on Ronald Reagan's watch, no matter what kind of tax, no matter how justified it was." Yet raising taxes is exactly what Reagan did. He did not always instigate those hikes or agree to them willingly--but he signed off on them. One year after his massive tax cut, Reagan agreed to a tax increase to reduce the deficit that restored fully one-third of the previous year's reduction. (In a bizarre bit of self-deception, Reagan, who never came to terms with this episode of ideological apostasy, persuaded himself that the three-year, $100 billion tax hike--the largest since World War II--was actually "tax reform" that closed loopholes in his earlier cut and therefore didn't count as raising taxes.)

Faced with looming deficits, Reagan raised taxes again in 1983 with a gasoline tax and once more in 1984, this time by $50 billion over three years, mainly through closing tax loopholes for business. Despite the fact that such increases were anathema to conservatives--and probably cost Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, reelection--Reagan raised taxes a grand total of four times just between 1982-84.

here's the whole thing:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/fea...301.green.html

[1bad65]

I'm referring to income taxes. That is, by far, the biggest tax average Americans pay (well, the ones who are paying it).

Income taxes are the first tax people notice. They see it on their paychecks. Sin taxes, gas taxes, tolls, etc get raised all the time and no one seems to notice. But a huge income tax hike is felt immediately. As is a huge income tax cut.

Even Obama said during the campaign that you have to cut taxes in a recession. Oddly, his 'stimulus' package is missing the income tax cut he promised us that 95% of us were getting.

[WinterPalm]

Maybe the people that voted for Bush 2X should be held accountable!

Heck, we don't even have a military if we wanted a defense budget of world conquest proportions!

[Water Dragon]

I'm referring to income taxes. That is, by far, the biggest tax average Americans pay (well, the ones who are paying it).

Income taxes are the first tax people notice. They see it on their paychecks. Sin taxes, gas taxes, tolls, etc get raised all the time and no one seems to notice. But a huge income tax hike is felt immediately. As is a huge income tax cut.

Even Obama said during the campaign that you have to cut taxes in a recession. Oddly, his 'stimulus' package is missing the income tax cut he promised us that 95% of us were getting.

I see. I think you're playing semantics in the same way that closing tax loopholes is 'technically' not raising taxes even though it means more of our money comes out of our pockets and go into Uncle Sams.

So bad, would you be OK with raising gas taxes, social security taxes, excise taxes by 10-15 % as long as it wasn't the 'Income' tax that was raised?

[Water Dragon]

Even Obama said during the campaign that you have to cut taxes in a recession. Oddly, his 'stimulus' package is missing the income tax cut he promised us that 95% of us were getting.

Yes, and basic fiscal theory states that during recession, taxes should be lowered to stimulate the economy and during times of growth, taxes should be raised to create a surplus. The idea is that you build a surplus so that in times of recession or war, you can afford to run a deficit over the short term.

Everyone loves to talk about cutting taxes, yet nobody wants to talk about raising them. The unfortunate fact is that Congress has screwed up fiscal policy so badly, we can't really afford to cut taxes and/or raise spending without sending the defecit through the roof. The Republicans and the Democrats share the blame on this one because they are both guilty. Both parties f@cked up the system so they could get more votes.

[Water Dragon]

Bro, I hate to keep harping on you, but you keep saying things that blatantly untrue. I don't care where your affiliations lie, but please don't misrepresent the truth to do so. Here's an article from Time breaking out what part Obama plays in the stimulus plan, and what part Congress plays. If you just don't know this stuff, educate yourself before you post. If you already know this then shame on you for using lies to support your argument.

The biggest challenge President Barack Obama faces in trying to sell America on his nearly $900 billion stimulus package is that, as it stands, it's not his. Rather, it is the product of the all-powerful House and Senate committee leaders on Capitol Hill to whom Obama and his team turned over authorship even before the new Administration entered the White House.



Over the course of the transition, when the bill was being drafted, top Obama aides held multiple meetings with committee staffers and their bosses, but in the end, the bill was written on the Hill. "They did a good job of really deferring to Congress," says one pleased senior Democratic aide involved in the bill's creation. (Read "How to Spend a Trillion Dollars.")

Some, however, aren't so pleased with the deference the Obama team showed. Apparently responding to public disaffection, a small but growing number of moderate Republican and Democratic Senators are opposing the bill, which they claim has become loaded down with pet projects and spending that have little to do with spurring immediate job creation and economic growth. "Unfortunately, the House-passed bill is much more like an omnibus bill than a stimulus bill," Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins told reporters on Wednesday after meeting with the President. She asked him to force Democrats to remove things from the stimulus like $780 million for pandemic flu preparation and $14 million for cybersecurity. "The White House would have been better off presenting a bill rather than just outlining priorities."

But that may not have been an option. For one thing, congressional staffers may be the only people in America with the dubious skill of being able to move nearly a trillion dollars into the national economy in a hurry. And Hill staffers claim that Obama needed the leaders of the various committees to tell him what the bill required to garner enough votes to pass. Either way, the fact that the bill is the product of free-spending congressional committees is likely to hurt Obama. It is defining his first major effort to fix the economy not as a new way of doing business in Washington but as a massive exercise in more of the same.

Martin Feldstein, the conservative economist who has been advising the White House as well as Hill Democrats and Republicans, was an early advocate for the stimulus but turned on the bill the House produced. He says the Senate bill, unveiled on Tuesday, is equally wasteful. "[Obama's team] turned it over to the congressional staffs," Feldstein says, and the result is that the bill spends like Congress always spends: with an eye to benefiting regional constituents. The problem, he contends, is that the bill's goal is to boost overall national spending, which is a very different thing.

Feldstein doesn't blame Obama or Larry Summers, the President's economy czar, whom Feldstein taught at Harvard and whom he has been advising in private in recent months. "The White House has been on the job for a few weeks," Feldstein says. "So if you said to them, 'Please design a program for improving the water supply of the United States,' Larry Summers is a brilliant guy, but he probably doesn't know a lot about water supply. And there's a committee in Congress that's been working on this for years."

Congressional staffers who wrote the legislation reject the criticism, arguing that such projects, and the tax cuts and direct state aid that form the bulk of the bill, are necessary to win votes. "If you're the White House, you have two concerns, just like we do," says the Democratic staffer involved in writing the bill. "I want something that's going to fix the economy and I want something that my chairmen say can pass."

By this staffer's account, during the transition, Summers, his deputy Jason Furman and the White House's top congressional liaison, Phil Schiliro, laid out the broad principles they wanted the bill to adhere to, but when it came to actual content, they deferred to the committee leaders. "Because otherwise what's the point in doing something, pie in the sky, if it doesn't have the votes?" the staffer says.

Of course the bill isn't set in stone, and Feldstein, who spoke with congressional Republicans on Tuesday, says it may change before it is passed, either before it clears the Senate or when it is in conference with the House thereafter. Indeed, the Senate voted on Wednesday evening to add a home-buying tax credit to the package, and Obama spent part of the day meeting with Senators like Collins and Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson, who want to cut tens of billions of dollars in spending from it.

This is where Obama's next big test lies: the President may not be able to claim authorship of the bill, but an aggressive editor can change a lot. The question is whether the White House will accept the Hill's arguments for what is needed to pass the bill, effectively letting the Democratic committee leaders price the value of Obama's political capital, or whether the Administration will see for itself what the market will bear.

[1bad65]

So bad, would you be OK with raising gas taxes, social security taxes, excise taxes by 10-15 % as long as it wasn't the 'Income' tax that was raised?

Of course not. The average American family already pays close to 50% of it's income in taxes already.

I'm just saying that twice in recent history we have been pulled out of recessions very quickly with large income tax cuts, so it only makes sense to try it again. I can't recall us being pulled out of a recession very quickly by massive Federal spending, however. Yet the current President and Congress seem hell-bent on trying it.

[1bad65]

Bro, I hate to keep harping on you, but you keep saying things that blatantly untrue. I don't care where your affiliations lie, but please don't misrepresent the truth to do so. Here's an article from Time breaking out what part Obama plays in the stimulus plan, and what part Congress plays. If you just don't know this stuff, educate yourself before you post. If you already know this then shame on you for using lies to support your argument.

If you're talking to me, then you need to educate yourself. Here is Obama calling it "his economic plan":

"President Barack Obama said Thursday that "the scale and the scope" of his economic plan is right, turning up the heat on critics he said were hawking "phony arguments" and "false theories of the past" to chip away at the bill's programs."

And here he is rejecting cutting the spending/pork on it and rejecting putting more tax cuts in it (notice the income tax cut he promised 95% of us is still missing):

"Obama rejected calls for more tax cuts and significant slashing of the bill's more than $800 billion price tag, and said complaints the package was a spending bill rather than a stimulus bill were off base."

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/...lus/index.html

This is where Obama's next big test lies: the President may not be able to claim authorship of the bill, but an aggressive editor can change a lot. The question is whether the White House will accept the Hill's arguments for what is needed to pass the bill, effectively letting the Democratic committee leaders price the value of Obama's political capital, or whether the Administration will see for itself what the market will bear.

I think my link just answered those questions of yours.