President Bush explains the economy to everybody during ANOTHER hastily called press conference...."Lets say you have a chair for sale, but the customer doesn't have the credit to buy the chair...."
My question is, why doesn't the customer have the cash to buy the chair? Answer, because taxes, fees, and interest take as much as 60% of a customers income, that's why there is a "need" for credit.
I never realized that the Government and Wall Street was doing everybody a favor by keeping everybody in debt and requiring ever increasing debt loads to pay their monthly bills.
Crikey.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
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My question is, why doesn't the customer have the cash to buy the chair? Answer, because taxes, fees, and interest take as much as 60% of a customers income, that's why there is a "need" for credit.
That's nonsense.
First of all, how can you possibly be paying 60% of your income in taxes and fees?! The highest federal income tax bracket is 35%. You live in California, I see, where the highest state tax rate is about 9.3% (and deductible on federal taxes). Even if you add them together, that's only a little over 44%. Yes, there are social security taxes, and yes, there are sales taxes and other things like that (although sales tax isn't a function of income, but a function of spending), but seriously, the only way I could see you being at 60% is if you're in the top percentile of income in the country, making well over $350,000 per year. If you are, I don't have much sympathy for you. Average people certainly aren't losing anything close to 60% of their incomes. Maybe more like 30%. And even that is not enough to foot the collective bill for the services provided by government (though, granted, there is a lot of waste that needs to be addressed).
Second, why don't we have "cash to buy the chair"? Because our culture has grown accustomed to living well beyond our means, at every level of our society. Individuals do it, municipal and state governments do it, and the federal government does it. (In fact, most of the so-called civilized world is doing it.) If state and federal authorities didn't collect the income taxes they do, then how on earth would you expect them to provide even marginal services (to say nothing of the much more expensive — and growing — entitlement programs)? More deficit spending?
And by the way, during the 1940s and 1950s, the maximum tax brackets were mostly over 90%. So if you think paying 35% now is bad, try 90%. No, really, I think that taxes are the absolute last thing we should be grousing about now.
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