Simon Says: A Fitting Monument
A day few years short,
A dollar few hundred million long,
The economy is in crisis,
But who’d call this wrong?
It’s a tribute to waste,
And avarice too,
But like it or not,
It was paid for by you.
>;-)
Monthly Archives: December 2008
Gohmert’s Bailout Alternative: Convert Paulson’s Last $350 Billion into Tax Holiday
From Congressman Louie Gohmert’s (R-TX) November 28, 2008 press release:
Gohmert is currently preparing a bill to declare the tax holiday for January and February of 2009 and is also gathering support at the same time. He said, “We can save more home mortgages, increase employment, and boost economic growth for a lower price tag with this plan than with any centralized bureaucratic program, all by giving the power back to the taxpayers. I am demanding that not another penny goes to executive bailouts, but these billions of taxpayer dollars should go to the taxpayers who earned them.”
According to American Solutions, a conservative think tank founded by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Americans pay $101.6 billion per month in personal income tax and $65.6 billion per month in FICA tax. Under Gohmert’s proposed plan, all of these taxes would not be paid during January and February of 2009, and the money would stay in the hands of American taxpayers – the ones who best know where economic stimulus should be targeted. Gohmert’s two month tax holiday would stimulate the economy while costing less than the remainder of the Paulson-Pelosi bailout plan.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (TX-01) has also recently proposed returning all 2008 income taxes to American taxpayers as a solution to boost the ailing economy, as he believes taxpayers, rather than the government, should be using their hard-earned money to choose the economy’s winners and losers.
Gohmert’s proposal may not solve all of our economic woes but I’ve got to say, I don’t hate it! Rather than the federal government write stimulus checks wealth redistribution checks, why not give the taxpayer a two month break from paying all federal taxes? It’s not as if the congress and the Bush/Obama Administrations are going to spend this money responsibly!
Radio talk show host Neal Boortz makes the following observation of the Gohmert plan:
Now this is a statistic that should shock you … Americans pay over $101 billion in income taxes and $66 billion in FICA taxes every single month. That means that if Gohmert’s plan went into effect, there would be over $330 billion in American pockets. That is money that you have earned and money that you can decide where it is spent or saved. You pick the economic winners and losers with your money – the government doesn’t get to do the choosing for you. The government can’t use it to pay executive salaries for failing companies or subsidize failing UAW contracts. The government won’t spend $50 million just to send every American a letter saying that their pithy “stimulus” check is on the way. That’s it … you just stop all federal taxes for two months.
Will it cost us anything? Well, no more than has already been pledged in the bailout bill. There’s $350 billion left there … this would eat up most of it.
Of course, the only way the Gohmert plan will ever see the light of day is if we, the people demand it.
Bailout, In Spreadsheet Form!
Lance over at QandO posted this, and it really puts the scope of the thing into perspective when you have it in line-item form:
Just where is all this money going to come from, anyway?
Wal-Mart Shoppers Sue For $2M
I guess this one comes from the “give me a friggin break” file:
Two customers are suing Wal-Mart for negligence after being injured in a mad rush for post-Thanksgiving bargains that left one store employee dead, the men’s attorney said Tuesday.
Temporary Wal-Mart worker Jdimytai Damour, 34, was crushed to death as he and other employees attempted to unlock the doors of a store on Long Island at 5 a.m. Friday.
Attorney Kenneth Mollins said Fritz Mesadieu and Jonathan Mesadieu were “literally carried from their position outside the store” and are now “suffering from pain in their neck and their back from being caught in that surge of people” that rushed into the Wal-Mart.
New York Newsday reported that the Mesadieus are father and son, ages 51 and 19.
The lawsuit alleges that the Mesadieus’ injuries were a result of “carelessness, recklessness, negligence.”
In a claim against the Nassau County police department, the men also contend that they “sustained monetary losses as a result of health care and legal expenses … in the sum of $2 million.”
“This is a tragic situation that could have and should have been avoided with the exercise of reasonable care. There are very simple measures that could have been put in place to avoid this, such as barriers along the line to spread people out, extra security and a better police presence,” Mollins said.
I’d like to see some receipts for that $2M in healthcare and legal expenses. Was that out-of-pocket? Because I can’t imagine two Wal-Mart shoppers being able to come up with that kind of cash. And it’s somewhat convenient that both shoppers (who happen to be father/son) have “pain in their neck and back”, which I doubt is possible to appear on any x-ray.
Now, I can’t definitively state that this is a fraudulent lawsuit. But let’s just say I’m not exactly surprised. A little media blitz and I’m sure they’ll get the quiet payoff they desire.
Father & son? Some family values, huh?
A Letter to Senator Kerry
Dear Senator Kerry,
I was aghast to read your response to my email on the subject of requiring people to get Federal government approval to work. It is the sort of totalitarian policy I would expect from some right wing fascist dictatorship. I am especially stunned see a former nominee of the Democrat party send out a letter under his name defending such illiberal policies.
Let us ignore the obvious peril of permitting someone like a Bush appointee telling employers whom they may or may not hire. Let us pretend that people will never be victimized by enemies within the government. Instead, let us pretend that this law will not be abused.
First, let us examine what you call an ‘illegal worker’. I assume that you are not implying that people are somehow illegal. That notion hopefully died with the victory of the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. I am sure that what you meant was that rather some people are working illegally, i.e. without your permission.
So let us examine what workers do.
Workers produce things. When they work for pay, selling their labor services to some customer who needs help getting something done, both the workers and the customer benefit. The worker, of course, gets the wage that he values more than his time. The customer gets the wealth created by the labor which they value more than the money they expend in paying for it.
In effect, two people (or one person and a company, or two companies) decide to engage in trade. You have declared that some of these relationships are illegal. I assume that you believe that these transactions should be illegal because someone was harmed (the alternative is too depraved to consider). Obviously, the people engaged in the practice you want to make illegal are not harmed; they wouldn’t enter into these arrangements if they didn’t feel that the trade was better than not trading at all. Obviously the person who is harmed is someone else – someone not involved in the trade.
It is clear that you want the customer to be forced to deal only with a subset of labor sellers. Much like the segregationists in Virginia who sought to prevent black people from marrying whomever they wished and limit them to only marrying other black people, you want to force employers only to employ people you approve of. Of course, this is ridiculous. Am I harmed because your wife decided to marry you and not me? Is Sacks 5th Avenue harmed because Target makes me a better offer? The very notion is absurd. Like the segregationists in the old south, you are taking your emotional disapproval of how other people interact with each other and are threatening them with violence. Of course, you don’t want to dirty your hands; the clubs that beat lawbreakers will be wielded by the police, allowing you to sleep comfortably in bed with no inconvenient memories threatening your delusion that you are somehow a moral person.
Much like Mr and Mrs. Loving who decided to ignore the racists in the Virginia legislature who declared their love ‘illegal’, people are deciding to do business despite your attempts to stop them. You call it an ‘underground’ economy in an attempt to discredit it. What I see are people heroically asserting their right to choose whom they do business with. Of course, they hide it from you! If my wife and I had lived in the 60’s in Alabama, we’d hide our marriage from the Ku Klux Klan. The fact that people are hiding from you does not discredit them – rather it discredits you. Think about it! People are hiding from you. They are scared of you. Are you proud of this? Do you consider this an accomplishment? If your son came home from school proudly announcing that he’d bullied someone, would you tell him how proud you were of him?
I am told you are a religious man: when you face your creator on judgment day, I don’t think you will earn many brownie points by telling your maker that your big accomplishment was threatening people who wished to peacefully do business with each other.
In these difficult times, it is shameful that an influential senator like yourself is throwing rocks at your countrymen’s efforts to earn a living and improve their lives. I hope you will come to your senses and stop threatening us and let us go about rebuilding our lives.
The letter that triggered my ire below the fold » Read more
