Tuesday, July 10, 2012

No New Taxes???

It's always fun to listen to the morning news and then react to what you hear. Sometimes what you react to is the stuff inbetween, the political ads and the fluff pieces. I think the morning TV is at once the most entertaining and most disheartening programming on air. Thank God I always make my coffee first -- a dark roast Columbian or Organic that we grind fresh every day.

What caught my attention today was the re=emerging rhetoric about the Bush Tax Cuts. Obama wants to renew them for anyone making $250,000 or less but repeal them for anyone making more; Romney says it's a tax increase that will stall job growth. Like job growth has been bolstered by the tax break in the first place.

Congress is likely divided right on policy lines.

The dilemma seems so obvious to me, but then I've been through bankruptcy and I also know that a housewife is probably ten times better at budgeting than a hundred economists given a government grant to solve the problem. There are basically four thgings we can do to re=balance the budget and perhaps encourage economic normalcy. Increase revenues, reduce outflow, do a combination of both, or barring being able to do any of the first three, restructure.

The Republicans will not raise taxes. They've drawn a line in the sand on that score, a stupid and useless place to make their battle. Democrats refuse to cut entitlements, and nobody wants to cut military spending. Getting both sides of the aisle to combine the two approaches seems impossible. What's left is restructure -- after which taxes will be raised and programs cut anyway.

So what do we do? Solutions are out there. Between reports this morning I saw an advertisement that coined a new word proving my point, about a company dedicated to solutionism. Yeah, like that's going to work.

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