I Think, Therefore I Rant!

Now that it appears that the Democrats and Republicans agree on how to increase our US deficit by $500B-$1T, it is time to talk about throwing out the old tax code. With the passing of the unemployment extension, the Bush tax cuts and other deficit growing measures, we have succeeded in making our tax code even more unwieldy and unfair.

Eliminate the loopholes and eliminate the tiered system. Make it fair and make it easy.  Here is a great video explaining one way that this might be possible.

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President Barack Hussein Obama has been talking about his new plan to invigorate the economy and move us out of a double-dip or very long recession. I have to admit that I am confused by his logic.

First, a bit about myself. I hate taxes. I know that I need to pay them. I know that I make a good living (not from this blog mind you) and I need to pay into the system more than some others that don’t work as hard as I work. I get all of that.  

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Even though the economy is slowly starting to recover from the excesses of spending of the George W. Bush administration (and the equally complicitous Congress), we are still far from out of the woods. The economy is in pain, in addition to the overspending, due to poor financial market regulation which destroyed several top-notch financial firms such as Lehman Brothers (who also appeared to break some standard accounting laws and best practices). The government responded to help these big institutions because they were “too big to fail.”

Let’s face it – there should be no such thing as “too big to fail.” Most of us work for companies that are not in that category. If our employers screw up and the company goes down the tubes then we will individually hurt and perhaps the micro-economy around that company will hurt a bit but for the most part the US GDP won’t even see the speed bump. This is the way that it should be – screw up and fail then just pick yourself up and get on with life.  

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I really love this line:

Consumers Energy, a Michigan gas and electric company with 2.9 million customers, said it will not take a big first-quarter charge because, like most utility companies, it can try to recover the added costs from its customers through rate hikes.

I am sure the state with the highest unemployment in the country will LOVE having their energy rates increased to pay for medical costs!

I get it, health costs will go down because it will get subsidized by the taxes on energy! We can just rob Peter to pay Paul because Peter is too stupid to realize he got robbed.

The really good news in all that is we may get some more new jobs – the bill gives the IRS $1B a year to hire new employees to collect all of these new taxes – that is about 12,000 new jobs for the IRS! Obama has finally come up with a solution to unemployment – hire the entire US population so that no one is unemployed!  

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