His campaiging on 95% of Americans will get “tax cuts” INCLUDES all those refundable cuts where we send those who don’t pay, an actual payment for the difference.

What he doesn’t tell you, is that those deductions get smaller and phase out as one’s income gets higher, beginning at $100,000 per year.

Essentially, the college tuition credit he gives, sends those in the lower income groups a check , even though they paid no income tax.

But for anyone from $100,000 and above, those credits phase out, and they get nothing.

It’s a shell game.

The ole okey-doke, a complete bamboozle.

What’s wrong with actually cutting spending and cutting taxes for real? That’s how we got out of the depression of 1920-21. You know, the one that didn’t last ten years and need a World War to break us out of. The one that was immediately followed by the Roaring Twenties.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/powell-jim4.html

I agree fully that we are engaged in transfers or ‘loans’ from the future, etc. And that was exactly what FDR’s deficit spending was. It doesn’t matter if it is deficit spending to just maintain the current size of gov’t, or to pump of the economy somehow.

I disagree that the two polls are somehow contradictory. The poll on a ’stimulus’ bill just leaves it wide open to interpretation, especially in light of previous ’stimulus’ bills. Since that probably meant to many people, some kind of tax-cut or rebate scheme, then suddenly you can see some overlap between the two polls.

I see the mid-to-upper middle-class and lower upper-class (the doctors and other professionals who make a decent chunk of money, but are way too busy to defend it) getting squeezed to death. The voting poor and even some lower middle-class effectively don’t pay taxes at all, and on the other end, the rich effectively pay an extremely regressive tax rate that can be down in the single digits. This can be done in several ways, but the end result is that a person like Michael Moore or Nancy Pelosi can talk about paying their ‘fair’ share of taxes at the highest rates, but much of the wealth they control isn’t counted as their personal taxable income.

So how can we not end up with a violent middle-class tax revolt in the near future? I think its too late to simply vote our way back to sanity, but if we could, the only answer is a flat consumption tax, like the FAIR tax.

I am in 100% agreement with you. The last 8 years saw a transfer of wealth from the middle class to the investor class. As you note, this is not good for our economy. The backbone of the economy (and democracy for that matter) is the middle class. One or two more straws and that backbone could very well break.

I do understand your point about loaning and it does allow you to make your point cleaner and clearer. And they are good points. I guess I just think both the stimulus and the bank bailout are ultimately being put on the backs of the american people and with more and more folding under their own mortage meltdown, debt and/or job loss, the burden is getting heavier and shifting faster on to fewer remaining workers. The middle class can only hold up so long under the weight of all of this before their knees collapse.

The failure to distinguish a tax cut from a tax loan has produced the mess we are in.

Thank you, Sam. Your clear and simple explanation really clarified the situation in my mind. This could have been entitled “The Current Bamboozle for Dummies.” I, for one, needed to read this.

And some poor people have been especially duped, they actually believe they will somehow escape paying for it all. They apparently can’t see the new 61 cent cig tax, the gas tax, the increase in sales tax, inflation. The poor do not escape tax increases. They’ll get their 9.68 cent increase and lose it all as the value of the dollar drops and the little taxes and fees nickel and dime them to death.

You make a very good point.

In selecting the term “loan” I wanted to emphasize that these are not tax cuts and just add to the deficit. The “tax cuts” in the stimulus package are nothing more than “cash-backs” from the VISA card and carry the same overall economic problems as when we “max-out” on our card.

Your use of the term “transfer” is also valid and emphasizes that they are different than most loans in that the debt can be transferred to someone else — the middle class or future generations.

I think it is important to keep in mind both aspects of these “tax cuts.”

For what it is worth, I think my emphasis on “loan” is most important for understanding the stimulus package. However, your emphasis on transfer will be particularly important tomorrow when Obama releases his plan for the bank bailout. This fiasco is a pure transfer of wealth from the middle class and taxpayers to the investors on Wall Street.

Thanks for the addition to the discussion.