Tomorrow belongs, tomorrow belongs, tomorrow belongs to ME!

[fpb]

The morality, responsibility and consistency of those who voted for the winner may be gauged by the statement - which I have already encountered three or four times - that they "hope" that those of us who warned them against him were wrong.

Hope.

They have elected a politician to the most powerful post in the West based on what they hope he will prove.

Such appalling insouciance and irresponsibility is certain to be punished. God may delay His punishment for sin - often to the next world - but He never intermits anything to the punishment for stupidity, which is always paid, and paid strictly and with plenty of interest, here on Earth.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Except he didn't promise to cut income tax for 95% of Americans; he promised to "[c]ut taxes for 95 percent of workers" (emphasis added). All workers pay payroll taxes; giving them a refundable tax credit lowers their net tax burden. (See the explanation from the AEI, hardly a fan of Obama).

Unless we define "workers" in some very strange way (such as the Marxist one), the vast majority of Americans are "workers," so the math still doesn't work.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Re-read what I wrote. He didn't promise to cut income tax; he promised to cut taxes. All workers pay taxes, even if it's only the payroll tax. Check out the AEI's explanation.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

But if he cuts all taxes, then those cuts which are not on income taxes are on indirect taxes. And indirect taxes are both blunt in their application and unpredictable in their effect. To predict a cut for the majority of Americans under those circumstances seems to me pretty irresponsible.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Just so we're on the same page (you probably already know this), in the US, the entitlement programs are funded through a payroll tax called the FICA tax. For Social Security, the tax rate is 12.4%: half of that is paid by the employer, and half is withheld from the employee's wages, up until the limit of $102,000. (The economics of tax incidence tells us that the actual relative tax burden will depend on the relative elasticities of supply and demand, but that's another story.)

Obama's refundable tax credits (his campaign calls them the "Making Work Pay" credit) is basically designed to compensate the employee portion of the Social Security payroll tax: fully for workers who make $8,000 or less in wages each year, and partially for workers who make more than $8,000 but less than $85,000. A tax credit by definition means a net tax cut. See this graph in the AEI article.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

OK, we shall see. I admit that Obama has good advice - he is currently conferring with Warren Buffett, among others - and in general, the Democrats have long been much better on budget issues. Reagan wrecked the federal budget; Clinton slowly brought it back under control; Bush II wrecked it again. That is one thing one should hope will be better managed.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

WRITTEN FOUR YEARS LATER

And boy, was I wrong.