Rep Grayson Introduces "War is Making You Poor Act"

Sounds good on the surface. Someone pop the hood and tell me why I've just been deceived. I don't know enough to see through the smoke and mirrors.

 

EDIT: My bad, made a mistake. Nothing to see here.

 

Yeah...does he mean he will cut the payroll tax for the first 35k?

 

Doh, you caught me.

This would actually be beneficial to all. I was thinking about poor folks and the way the title was worded.

Poor families earning about 35K already don't pay very much federal tax, if any at all.

This would cut the rate for everyone, so everyone would win. In theory.

 

Glad to see a few Republicans on board.

Hopefully this is just common sense stuff to most people. I wonder what a vote would look like.

 

Surely the fiscal conservatives (TEA Partiers?!) can get behind this, right? Even Ron Paul is signed on and he is the bastion of fiscal conservatism!

Surely this will have Republican support, right? Surely there will be no hypocrisy in an effort to stay partisan... right...?

 

If the tea party was not a right wing racist movement yeah.

Spending too much money on guns: Good
Spending too much money on medecine: Bad

Don't we want to heal Americans more than sending them off to die? Just a thought.

 

haha you would think. but no no. iraq was amassing a huge navy and were on there way to the U.S.A. soon. so it was important that we are still there almost 10 years later or i could say for 1/3 of my life.

 

Why shouldn't poor people pay their fair share of taxes? Or conversely, why do leftists think their "fair share" of taxes should be zero?

“The purpose of this bill,” wrote Grayson last week, “is to connect the dots, and to show people in a real and concrete way the cost of these endless wars.”

More like the purpose of this bill is to keep poor people from connecting the dots and hide from them the real and concrete costs of a hyperexpansive federal government.

 

Because they are poor and any money they make they need to use for basic living expenses. It shouldn't be that hard to figure out.

 

I'm sorry -- this is too full of dumb to leave alone.

(1) Poor people do pay taxes, and barely have enough left over to get by. Check poverty statistics in our country, and check them over time. Not a pretty site for the greatest country on earth.

(2) Hyperexpansive federal government... Do you want to know the largest single expense of your boogeyman? DoD. No other component of the federal government eats more than 60% of our tax dollars than the military. So why do you want them to keep hyperexpanding? The DoD budget has been going off the charts since 2000 (even since 1980), and we can't freaking afford it. This teeny little bill wouldn't even address that. It would address the ludicrous policy of letting the military come get emergency cash on top of their already whopper 40 cents on the federal dollar.

(3) Why wouldn't you want the first $35k you make to be tax free? I would enjoy that.

 

The main way that the federal government taxes the people is through a progressive income tax. "Progressive" in this context means that the people who have more pay more, as it should be since many of the things that government pays for (education, roads, air travel infrastructure, courts) are the very same things that allow people the ability to get rich in the first place.

It is pretty clear that the government's fiscal house started to really become imbalanced as we increased spending on defense while at the same time reducing taxes on the rich. You are welcome to argue that another form of taxation would be better or fairer (personally, I am in favor of scrapping the income tax and replacing it with a consumption tax), but as long as we have a progressive income tax, the rich will pay more tax than the poor by design.

This isn't a left versus right issue, the issue is the method of taxation the federal government uses as a primary source of funding. Stop blaming liberals for the method of taxation.

 

Chance are, its already tax free to the poor. I know my federal tax rate is negative. I don't think it should be though. The deficit is a huge problem. Instead of giving everyone a tax break that we do not need, start decreasing deficit spending, which is of far greater concern in the long run.

 

Because basic living expenses includes driving a new car, having a 52" flat screen TV, high speed internet, full premium TV, smart phones, and all the other gadgetry. I suppose my definition of poor and your definition of poor are different.

I propose a "war is making this country poor" act. Its very simple. Let the Fed Gov. spend all they want....as long as they maintain a balanced budget.

 

why would you be surprised that paul would support something like this? this bill is right up his alley. he has been hammering home for years that if we want to get our nation's fiscal house in order it has to start w/ reigning in the military industrial complex and reducing our global empire. this bill is a good start for that.

as for the tea partiers, i still think most of them are wanna-be neo-cons/disgruntled republicans and will see something like this as 'giving in to terr'ists' or 'anti-troop'.

back to paul though, i posted this in another thread, but its probably relevant here too...

More Blank Checks to the Military Industrial Complex - Essay by Ron Paul
Category: News and Politics

Monday, May 24, 2010

Congress, with its insatiable appetite for spending, is set to pass yet another “supplemental” appropriations bill in the next two weeks. So-called supplemental bills allow Congress to spend beyond even the 13 annual appropriations bills that fund the federal government. These are akin to a family that consistently outspends its budget, and therefore needs to use a credit card to make it through the end of the month.

If the American people want Congress to spend less, putting an end to supplemental appropriations bills would be a start. The 13 “regular” appropriations bills fund every branch, department, agency, and program of the federal government. Congress should place every dollar in plain view among those 13 bills. Instead, supplemental spending bills serve as a sneaky way for Congress to spend extra money that was not projected in budget forecasts. Once rare, they have become commonplace vehicles for deficit spending.

The latest supplemental bill is touted as an “emergency” war spending bill, needed to fund our ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. The emergencies never seem to end, however, and Congress passes one military supplemental bill after another as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on.

Many of my colleagues argue that Congress cannot put a price on our sacred national security, and I agree that the strong, unequivocal defense of our country is a top priority. There comes a time, however, when we must take stock of what our blank checks to the military industrial complex accomplish for us, and where the true threats to American citizens lie.

The smokescreen debate over earmarks demonstrates how we have lost perspective when it comes to military spending. Earmarks constitute about $11 billion of the latest budget. This sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the $708 billion spent by the Pentagon this year to expand our worldwide military presence. The total expenditures to maintain our world empire is approximately $1 trillion annually, which is roughly what the entire federal budget was in 1990!

We spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined, and far more than we spent during the Cold War. These expenditures in many cases foment resentment that does not make us safer, but instead makes us a target. We referee and arm conflicts the world over, and have troops in some 140 countries with over 700 military bases.

With this enormous amount of money and energy spent on efforts that have nothing to do with the security of the United States, when the time comes to defend American soil, we will be too involved in other adventures to do so.

There is nothing conservative about spending money we don’t have simply because that spending is for defense. No enemy can harm us in the way we are harming ourselves, namely bankrupting the nation and destroying our own currency. The former Soviet Union did not implode because it was attacked; it imploded because it was broke. We cannot improve our economy if we refuse to examine all major outlays, including so-called defense spending.

http://www.house.gov/htbin/blog_inc...ingdetail.shtml

 

Yes that's right. The poor all drive new cars with 52" flat screens, have high speed internet and full premium TV, plus all the other stuff you claim. In my years working and teaching in the community that is very poor, every single poor family had all of these things as well as private jets.

 

Come on, FB. We all know the poor are not really poor. They just don't manage their money right.

 

This is what I was trying to get at, actually. Ron Paul has become an icon for TEA Partiers (who are supposedly founded on fiscal conservatism, I believe) across the country and he supports this. I think there will be some cognitive dissonance among the ranks because of this bill: should I support it because I am trying to be a fiscal conservative, or should I be against it because I am pro-military and anti-Democrat? Decisions, decisions.

I can't wait to see some of the reaction from the TEA Party and other ultra-conservative Republicans.