Tax and Spend or Take the Money and Run (the country)

Tax Mageddon is the terms Tax.com calls spending cuts and tax increases which may put the country in dire straits by year’s end. Of course things could be fixed with rational action but that asking a bit much to today’s political practitioners. They break the disaster dilemma into 9 parts: five are tax breaks scheduled to expire at the end of the year and followed by tax increases scheduled for 2013… here they come.

1.    Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts and the 2009 stimulus tax cuts.

2.   Expiration of the alternative minimum tax patch.

3.   Expiration of the payroll tax holiday.

4.   Expiration of extenders.

5.   Scheduled tax increases under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

6.   Sequestration.

7.   Expiration of expanded unemployment compensation.

8.   Expiration of the “doc fix”

9.   Debt limit.

Now I realize these may be meaningless terms for most of us. For details just go to http://www.tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/UBEN-8UHLM9?OpenDocument

To me this all boils down to 35 years of colossal screw-up’s began under the Reagan administration and the whacky economic concept of supply side economics. It couldn’t work, it didn’t work and despite folk saying it will work if we keep doing it, it won’t work.

People are always arguing the economy with, “are you better off today than you were last year?” Think bigger, think if you are relatively better off 35 years ago than you are today?  Unless you’re very rich the clear answer is no. And it is a big no in fact. That is a plutocracy in action.

If we don’t figure out how to get the voice of the people back into being the major influence in congress we will end up being where the birthplace of democracy, Greece is, and that is not pretty.

When I originally began this article I was going to go to the common accusation against the Democratic party, the “tax and spend” party. This simple answer is do that. Remember the New Deal, it worked. What we are doing now isn’t. What we have now is “take the money and run” and they have, the ultra rich that is.