It has been a crazy week. I’m waiting for things to eventually settle down, which should be, er, sometime soon?
In the interim, I’ve been lucky enough to be asked to write for some cool sites. This week, I’ve been posted on WalletPop and on Type-A Mom. (That cheering you hear in the background is from Colombian coffee growers – they did well this week, trust me.)
Today, on WalletPop, I tackled the issue of Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the national Tea Party movement and her half million dollar tax bill.
On Type-A Mom, I offered some tax advice for widowed moms.
Enjoy!
This “tea party” nonsense is, to me, symbolic of the American penchant for getting something for nothing. Cutting taxes significantly will mean cutting whatever it is that the government provides. If you want to cut taxes, you ought to be able to provide a list of the government programs you can cut too. Cut property taxes and you decimate the public schools, police and fire protection, maintenance of streets and roads, etc. — is that what you want? Maybe you don’t like the TARP plan, the bailouts and such, but any responsible economist will tell you that, distasteful as those expenditures may have been, they made the difference between the unpleasant economy we’re now enduring (although it will eventually recover) and a genuine, disastrous depression. The war in Iraq may have been a colossal stupidity, but we can’t just cut it off in a few months — and until we do “get out”, we have to pay for it. Maybe we should cut taxes and eliminate social security?
Even chicken! Everyone tells you to be particularly sensitive to sanitation when you handle raw chicken because 70%+ of the chicken in your supermarket is contaminated with salmonella and listeria. That’s because our brilliant (Republican) leaders thought it would be effective to save some government $$ and let that industry “self-regulate”. Saving a few bucks on some economic regulation helped get us into our present economic mess.
The big point is that the government spends a lot of money on a lot of programs. Nobody agrees with all of them, but if you’re going to cut taxes and reduce government expenditures, you had better be aware of just what the consequences would be.