Hey, no problem. If you want more, I can keep patting myself on the back all night. Not going to answer what your degree is in, eh?
4 long, long minutes have slowly passed by and you haven't asked me to keep praising myself. I was really hoping I could keep droning on and on.
While the suspense mounts and we're all pins and needles about which area of study blazerboy30 got his degree in, or not, let's roll back the clock and let Boz Scaggs give us the Lowdown from his breakout album SILK DEGREES: [video=youtube;eQK_QAUa8Dw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQK_QAUa8Dw[/video]
I'm just trying to decide which is more impressive: you (maris61) being a real estate agent in Lapine, Oregon... or you (jlprk) being an accountant. Tough choice.
All occupations are unimpressive and boring in and of themselves. It's the unique talents, sincerity, and ingenuity of the successful individual which sometimes makes them impressive to others.
I disagree. Your former government employment is impressive regardless of how much lack of talent, ingenuity and sincerity it required.
Or you being nothing you want to admit. You may not know the winner in this 3-way, but you know who is the loser.
Savior??? He explicitly blamed the President calling him Bush Jr. for not reversing those ridiculous tax cuts for the ultra rich (and multiple other things) in his first post that you responded to, yet you're still producing this knee jerk insult. I'm sorry but it's like you're not reading what you're responding to. STOMP
The cost breakdown from this article (nothing special, CBS...just the first one I came across) said that of the $850+B over 2 years, that $120B would come from the "top 2%" of taxpayers. That seems to mean that $730B would come from the unemployment benefits and the SS tax rebate and the "not rich" (top 2% is around $200k/yr). (Regardless of the fact that SS/M/M is overrun by about the size of the entire DoD...we're giving rebates now!) For those 52% of households that don't pay a dime in federal income tax (making below about 50k) the 2% rollback of SS tax means they're getting a 27% savings on their tax bill (from 7.45% to 5.45%). I'm not saying whether this is right or wrong, but showing how this isn't just "paying off the rich people at the expense of the poor".
6 months later I have forgotten the numbers, but I remember that the estate tax cuts for the rich were at least as big as their $120B income tax cut, and that the middle class S.S. tax cut just means the middle class will receive that much less when they are retired. Republicans had 2 reasons to include the SS cut: 1) It was a pretty ornament so they could say the middle class was getting a cut too. 2) The revenue cut moved up the year that SS will run out of money, so Republicans had new propaganda ammo to call for SS cuts. You notice they immediately followed this SS revenue cut with increased calls for future SS payout cuts.
So you're complaining about following a revenue cut with a spending cut? Didn't you say you were an accountant?
Obama demanded the SS cuts in exchange for not vetoing the extension of Bush tax cuts. And those Bush tax cuts applied to everyone who pays taxes, not just the "rich."
Another Mellon Scaife owned mouthpiece, CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2010/09/15/news/economy/bush_tax_cuts_faqs/index.htm What happens on Jan. 1 if Congress does nothing? Everyone's federal income and investment tax rates will go back up to where they were before the 2001 tax cuts were passed. In other words, your tax bill next year would increase. If the tax cuts do expire and tax rates go up, you may notice the difference in your wallet as early as January, when your employer starts to withhold more taxes from your paycheck. The Tax Policy Center estimates that a married couple with two kids under 13 and a household income of roughly $75,000 could end up paying about $2,600 more in federal income taxes next year than they would if the tax cuts were extended.
Your link is nearly a year old, before the cuts for the rich were extended. I question it's accuracy and relevance to something that might happen another 6 months from now. The example they cite is laughable and deceptive. Taxes stay the same or disappear entirely for most Americans.
A more accurate and less deceptive way to read that graph is in reverse, since the numbers on the right are what was the norm before Bush changed it. Reading backwards shows clearly who the 1.1 trillion went to.
That was the cover story he arranged with Republican leadership. I gave 2 ways Republicans benefited from their supposed concession. The fake compromise was window dressing. This would return us to the halcyon days of the late 1990s, when the entire national deficit was a decade away from completely vanishing. If we could return to then, the $75,000 guy would find that in the improved economy, unemployment would disappear before the decade was out, he'd develop triple the customers, and he'd be making a lot more than when his taxes had been lower. If conservatives could have just waited out the decade, they'd now have untold riches to squander on wars and tax cuts for the rich. That era would have started a decade after Republicans destroyed the surplus, right now. But they just couldn't wait to cash in. Their priorities are--their immediate bank accounts, ahead of the national good or even their own long-term wallets. If we cut social security now, the deficit won't change, because Republicans will again wipe out any surplus with a tax cut for themselves. Same as last time.
My time frame of my link was right before Obama and republicans agreed to extend the tax cuts. The analysis is correct, as was mine - that everyone's taxes were affected by those cuts.
Silly, uninformed Maris. Most Americans (over 50%) don't pay any Federal Income Tax anyway. You want them to pay less than zero?
