Ok, you know what? I give up! lol! I’ve tried writing you all a long beautifully articulated article worthy of a high grade thesis, but my computer crashed after hours of work and killed it all. So y’all gonna get the gist now. XD
So the long and short is earlier this month, the powers that be wanted to get rid of future unemployment benefits (extensions), then the man said “noh wai” and tried to talk to them. They said they would give us peasants our benefits only if the top 2% ($250,000 income and higher) had tax cuts that would equal, you guessed it, $700 billion! So basically, our country is run by cartoonish evil villains with black hats and large curly mustaches who tie our economy to the rails of an oncoming train. Lovely huh.
Since I made this comic, things have been back and forth and I think some of the people get the extension, while others who’ve been out of work longer, such as your’s truly, are still left high and dry. But all this has been pretty muddled in political jargon so who the heck knows what’s happening anymore.
Ok, about this point I started getting into why the economy is in bad shape and offered very concise and logical methods for how we as a people can fix it without having to result in a revolution. Buuuuut, I’m exhausted. If you would like to hear more let me know and I’ll try to retype it, but for now, I’ll cut it a bit short. XP
Loading ...
I normally try to keep my politics & comics separate, but here I have to speak up. There are several points that simply don’t seem to be getting through.
1) These “tax cuts” have been in place for 10 years. Changing them now would amount to a tax increase. The politicians are simply calling them “tax cuts” to get the popular polling numbers on their side.
2) Increasing taxes in the middle of a recession (and they can say whatever they want, we’re still in a recession) is suicidal.
3) $250,000 per couple sounds like a lot of money. And, in some states, it probably is. Out here in sunny California, it’s fairly common - it’s more middle class than upper class. When you have houses that cost over a million dollars (at least before the giant housing bust) you usually have wages that reflect that kind of excess. And almost every small business owner in the state makes more than that - the most of which they turn around and put back into their business. Refusing to renew these “tax cuts” would have further decimated the economies of California, New York, and most of the large cities across the US.
4) These “tax cuts” are not going to COST 700 billion dollars. That is 700 billion dollars the government NEVER HAD IN THE FIRST PLACE. They wanted it - but it was never theirs. Not renewing the “tax cuts” would have given an additional 700 billion in revenue, that’s all. And given Congress’s pathetic track record, that 700 billion would NOT have gone towards the deficit…it would have gone towards saving the spotted pig newt in some south Asian country, or something like that.
5) The top 1% of earners pay over 40% of the country’s taxes already. Think about that.
I’ve worked in a tax office for several years. I’m intimately familiar with how much people make, how much they pay in taxes, etc. I’ve seen I don’t know how many families who take away more money from the government than they actually pay in taxes. Look up earned income credits sometime.
The tax system is totally broken. Raising taxes on anyone in the system isn’t going to fix it.
idk… I kinda like the minis for this reason, most are just wow related, but some are able to break the canon and bring in some real life tie ins as well.
1) Which is sad… you’d think the upper class would have MORE taxes…
2) Not like anything else they’ve been doing is very sound either… like that 700 billion that went to banks and disappeared. that little thing where they wanted to tax each stage of a product’s production to pay for the new health care thing…
3) Well, ok, this is all relative I know. You see here, 250k is a LOT of money. Average yearly incomes in my area are about 50k.
4) What? You got some kinda problem with the Spotted Pig Newt?! Yes, I know that it was something they didn’t have yet, but that’s how they were portrayed in their negotiations, that they wanted this cut “amounting” in that much money. My point was, the 13 billionish for unemployment is so vastly lower than the 700 billionish the top peeps were trying to ransom the bill for. It just oozes of sleaze.
5) Hmm… that’s a hard figure to understand. With all the breaks, cuts, and ways to dodge, I was under the impression that the middle class was the one who has, for the most part, fronted the vast majority of the taxes paid.
Like I said, my problem wasn’t necessarily with the taxes itself, just how the government dealt with the whole unemployment thing. It’s very frustrating when you see this sort of thing when you’ve been looking for work for over a year.
Anyways, I’d really like to say a big thank you Jennifer for your indepth comment! Some good stuff to think about!
“The top 1% of earners pay over 40% of the country’s taxes already.”
I am amused by your deceptive argument. The top 1% of earners also have over 40% of the country’s money, so why shouldn’t they pay over 40% of the taxes?
Not that it matters, because while they might pay 40% on paper, in reality they don’t. Loopholes like the Capital Gains tax make sure of that. Your income tax would be 38%, but we’re capping it at 15% since it’s a capital gain. Even though this limit is being raised to 20%, the fact that capital gains remain a lower rate penalizes those who have a smaller percentage of capital gains; the bottom 90 percent.
The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. It’s a long established axiom for the simple fact that rich people have a much easier time gaining political power. More money = more political power = more money.
A prime example is how Congress receives a larger pension than the median US salary. Try explaining that one to someone who goes to war for his country, then works in a government office for 30+ years. He got denied health coverage by the VA, and his pension doesn’t even cover the cost of a low-end nursing home, where his roommate takes dumps on his bed. My grandfather said he regretted helping the USA in WWII because they weren’t the least interested in helping him in his time of need. Yeah, you try explaining congress’ benefits package to him, see how he takes it.
The rich don’t need the amount of money they have. But as long as they can happily ignore the situations their greed causes, they have no problem amassing pointless levels of wealth.
the economy is like an ecosystem… the money most circulate, but when you’ve got the very wealthy hording all the money and dodging ways of paying taxes and sucking all that money out of the lower and middle classes… bad things tend to happen. kinda like if you siphon off water from a lake, kinda not good.