Comments on: Another Big Lie

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:07:19 +0000

Badtux, people will never accept a truth that makes their personal situation worse, they are paid not to believe it by all of the looting they can do during a period of deflation. The scavengers are buying property in Florida, which accounts for the home sales figures in some areas.

They benefited from the tax cuts and don’t want to pay it back. It’s really simple – they’re a bunch of greedy low-lifes.

This is why they dumped the FICA taxes in with the income taxes, Suzan, to hide the real deficits they were running under Reagan and the Bushes. They have been sticking it working people ever since.

By: Suzan

Suzan — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:22:03 +0000

Thanks so much for spelling this out.

I’ve been writing about it for years and the “Pete Peterson liars” are back in force screaming (essentially) that after letting the Rethugs go crazy with tax cuts (that benefitted him and his friends generously) and unpaid-for wars that we need to extract (once again) the moolah to pay for it from the bottom-level of taxpayers (those who pay FICA taxes) just like Alan Greenspan did in the 80’s to make up for the Raygun tax cuts and military spending.

I watched my savings disappear with every paycheck then and eventually my good job in the software industry (as H1-B workers were brought in to solve the fraudulent “shortage of high-tech workers” problem), where I struggled daily to stop the waste, fraud and abuse that was the calling card of the company management, which allowed them to pad cost-plus contracts immensely.

If we allow them to sell the Fox Noise viewers on this solution again, we deserve the violent revolution that will undoubtedly ensue as people will not be content again to watch their livelihoods be taken away amid the furor over the next “American Id(iot)ol” winner.

Bill Clinton’s surplus was all FICA taxes, not income taxes. The income taxes were close to paying for the government, but not quite there. The income tax cuts that the Shrubbery enacted were a redistribution of payroll taxes to the wealthy. They stole from the poor and gave to the rich. Now that they are going to have to repay all the money they looted, Pete Peterson and his fellow travelers want to steal from the poor again.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 06:49:28 +0000

As I pointed out on my own blog today, you *want* to run a deficit when you’re in a deflationary cycle, because running a deficit is the easiest way to print money and thus head off deflation — i.e., run a deficit, have the Federal Reserve show up at the Treasury auctions and hand over a buncha freshly-printed dollars in exchange for freshly-printed T-bills, voila. Instant re-inflation of the currency.

And we *ARE* in deflation right now, and by and large have been for the past eight years unless you’re one of the top 5% of wage-earners. Wage deflation is horrific right now, people’s wages are dropping like rocks as they lose their jobs or find low-paying McJobs to replace higher-paying jobs, and even the CPI (excluding food and energy) was at 0% in November (last month we have data for). Printing money is the thing to do if you’re in this situation, and running deficits is the way you print money right now. This is a lesson we learned 80 years ago during the Great Depression, for cryin’ out loud. I realize that the tighty righties live in an alternate universe where the Great Depression was caused by FDR’s New Deal, but this deficit nonsense is being spread around by supposedly sane people, not Republicans… WTF is the matter with them?!

– Badtux the Frustrated Economist Penguin