Enjoy Your Tax Cut

He's ooky and he's kooky

Tax cut, what tax cut?

Editorial 5/26/03
By David Gergen • Editor at large
Too clever by half
Caught in their worst budget crisis since the Depression, state governments across the land are taking desperate measures. Oregon has cut teachers' pay, and parents are now selling their own blood to raise money to help out. Texas is reducing healthcare benefits for 275,000 children. Kentucky is letting people out of prison early. California, Wisconsin, and New Jersey are borrowing against future tobacco-settlement revenues--money once intended for healthcare. In Missouri, state workers are unscrewing every third light bulb to save cash.


Against this backdrop, how can politicians in Washington possibly be enacting more tax cuts? Especially cuts tilted yet again toward the wealthy? Is our national testosterone so high after the victory in Iraq that we've forgotten our obligations toward the young and the vulnerable?
It would be different if the half-trillion-dollar cuts pushed by the White House were truly aimed at creating jobs for today's unemployed. But they aren't: Only 17 percent will take effect in the next three years, according to Pete Peterson, the investment banker who heads the Concord Coalition. Remember, too, that just two years ago the White House used a similar promise of more jobs to persuade Congress to pass tax cuts of $1.35 trillion--the largest in our history. Those cuts were backloaded, too, and since 2001 we have been losing jobs at the rate of 74,000 a month.

Continued at:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030526/opinion/26edit.htm

You didn't get one?

New Haven
You may have heard the eulogy where the preacher says God giveth and God taketh away. In this instance the federal government giveth and the states taketh away. The states are strangling and bleeding red ink. Let me remind you that we the people live in the states and the present financial state of the states has a greater impact upon our lives [average citizen} than that piddling federal tax cut.

Looks like New York's having big finance troubles.

I believe California will up the taxes by $8 billion.

au - What do federal taxes have to do with state budget shortfalls?

And what do state budget shortfalls (a paltry $9.9 billion here in TX)have to do with our rapidly improving economy? (insert extreme sarcasm emoticon here)

Nothing; those shortfalls are based on the past and projections made based on the bad economy we've had. (Perhaps if you spent less time working on your sarcasm you wouldn't need to ask questions that have such obvious answers.)

Scrat
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The last I heard the federal government is the sum of all it's parts. THE STATES.
The reason for the states dilemma is the state of the national economy. I should also point out that the money that the federal government has comes from the people who live in those very same states. How dare Bush cut national taxes while our pockets are being picked on a state level. We may have two pockets but they are both on the same pair of pants.

Nothing could be further from the truth than to suggest that "the federal government is the sum of all it's parts. THE STATES". They are completely separate and distinct entities.

And if the "reason" (and by that I mean sole and unavoidable causative factor) for the states' dilemmas is the state of the national economy, why are some states doing just fine?

ANSWER: Because some states were running fiscally responsible budgets before the bubble burst, and continue to do so. Others ramped up spending at the rate of growth during the boom years and have been fighting tooth-and-nail against reality, trying to retain those spending levels in an economy that is incapable of supporting them. This is not solely about the economy. To a great extent it has to do with woefully inept fiscal mismanagement by state governments, and the notion that the fed should play ANY role in bailing faltering states out distresses me as much as I suspect the Savings and Loan bailouts distressed you and others.

au, Some of us have more than two pockets on our pants, and they're all being drained by taxes. Federal, state, excise, sales, fees, utility, gas, energy, telephone, and the list goes on..... c.i.

Scrat
Separate entities, my backside, that have their hands in the same pockets. If you have been reading the news you will find that many in fact most states are in fiscal distress. Which means the people in those states are in fiscal distress and being bled dry? Those people the last I heard were citizens of the US.
I remember the headlines in the seventies when NY was last in fiscal difficulty.

FORD TELLS NY TO DROP DEAD.


Should they now read

BUSH TELL THE STATES TO DROP DEAD.

What effect do you think cutting federal taxes will have on those citizens?

Scrat
Use the funds to help the states instead of cutting taxes. You will note that inorder to get his 320 Billion [800 Billion ] tax bill passed the democrats in congress forced him to allocate 20 billion to help the states. Something he was reluctant to do.

I think the feds bailing out poorly managed states is a terrible and dangerous precedent to set.

even if the bailout is needed because of fed mandated spending? strange logic.

Yes, strange logic that suggests that spending mandated by the feds for all states only busted some of their budgets. Strange, indeed. Of course, it's completely in keeping with liberal thinking. You're merely extending the notion that the individual is not accountable for his own failings to the state as a new victim-entity only capable of existing (in your liberal view) on the largess of the all-seeing, all-knowing fed.