Friday, January 4, 2013

A Note Regarding the Payroll Tax Holiday Expiration

The 2% increase in payroll taxes that primarily affects the working and middle classes has a remarkable budget effect that has so far been essentially ignored by the media -- including the chest-thumping New Media.

It is this: the cumulative tax revenue gain from the expiration of the payroll tax holiday over the next ten years is in the neighborhood of $1.2 trillion dollars. This is far more than the projected revenue gains from the increases in income tax rates on the Rich (between $400 $150 and $600 $270 billion depending on how successfully they evade the increases.)

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Furthermore, there still is no jobs program, and there are no realistic economic stimulus measures even being contemplated by Our Rulers as they lurch from crisis to crisis, cliff to precipice. Instead, there is a continuation of corporate welfare and military overspending that sucks revenue and provides little or no economic benefit.


5 comments:

  1. Well, on the plus side, that 1.2 trillion will all be used for Social Security with none of it being treated as general income, just as corporate pension funds have never been raided for the benefit of private equity vultures.*

    *No insult intended to actual vulture, which provide actual value to the eco-system.

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  2. Exactly. Aren't we the lucky ones, then!

    (BTW, before we left California, a colony of buzzards took up residence in the trees over on the deluxe side of our neighborhood, roosting there by the hundreds, making lots of noise and bird doo-doo, causing the ricos no end of handwringing and worry. The birds would sometimes fly over to our side and swirl in the sky over the freeway -- no doubt spying some sort of roadkill -- before heading back to their roosts in the rich neighbors trees. They're extraordinary birds, quite attractive in their own special way.)

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  3. Here in Florida we have the Turkey Buzzards, who are well supplied with meat by Florida's Highways.

    The truth is I just like birds in general, and I think I still have a plush toy of a vulture around here somewhere that I got at Disneyworld as a child.

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  4. We're getting used to the abundance and variety of bird-life in New Mexico. The sand hill cranes that fly over our place every day are an extraordinary sight, but there are so many more kinds of birds around, from the swallows and sparrows nesting in our eaves to the grackles and woodpeckers and doves and larks and hummingbirds and roadrunners and hawks and eagles and all the rest of them that come by or roost or nest in the trees... For us, it's amazing.

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  5. At the Buddhist temple in Plant City, they have some really beautiful birds now and then. (Totally safe too, no one at the temple would think to harm an animal, especially on temple grounds.) I see Sand Hill Cranes there occasionally, as well as a lot of ducks.

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