Senate panel proposes $300 bonus for seniors

[Drakkon]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28816272/

The bonus for seniors is but one chapter in the Senate proposal. There?s also a temporary two-year $500 tax cut for most workers and $1,000 for couples, a $2,500 tax credit to help pay for college, tax cuts for businesses and to promote renewable energy, and $87 billion worth of help to states struggling with their 2009-2010 budgets for the Medicaid health care program for the poor and disabled.

The $300 bonus for seniors and disabled people receiving Supplemental Security Income payments would cost $17 billion, and is perhaps the biggest difference between the House and Senate economic recovery plans. Veterans who get disability and pension payments would also get the $300 under the proposal. The emerging House and Senate plans are generally similar otherwise.

I don't get why we keep feeling the need to float money to specific groups. And now to propose giving it just to the group that will most likely either save it or spend it on medicine. Why not give it to 16-18 yr olds instead - i mean we know they will run out and pump it into the economy at least buying Diesel jeans right?

 

[Dissipate]

When times get bad the politicians throw a few pennies back to the working sheeple. Of course, in doing this they are admitting that taxes hurt the economy. Absolutely nothing new/shocking about this at all.

 

[Craig234]

Originally posted by: Dissipate
When times get bad the politicians throw a few pennies back to the working sheeple. Of course, in doing this they are admitting that taxes hurt the economy. Absolutely nothing new/shocking about this at all.

Saying taxes hurt the economy is ridiculous. It's like saying putting gas in your car hurts your finances. All depends, doesn't it, where you drive, and why?

Some taxes, misspent, hurt the economy. Other taxes, well spent, help the economy. Other taxes hurt the economy but help people who should be helped. Yet other taxes hurt the economy but help it compared to NOT paying for spending we're doing that just runs up debt owed with interest. And so on.

 

[OCGuy]

Jesus Christ.

 

[babylon5]

At least the money is going to people instead of gold toilet

 

[OCGuy]

Originally posted by: babylon5
At least the money is going to people instead of gold toilet

......

 

[StageLeft]

$300 is ok but why not $300M to each of them?

 

[Dissipate]

Originally posted by: Craig234
Saying taxes hurt the economy is ridiculous. It's like saying putting gas in your car hurts your finances. All depends, doesn't it, where you drive, and why?

Some taxes, misspent, hurt the economy. Other taxes, well spent, help the economy. Other taxes hurt the economy but help people who should be helped. Yet other taxes hurt the economy but help it compared to NOT paying for spending we're doing that just runs up debt owed with interest. And so on.

Taxes always have negative externalities because taxes are at best a form of chainsaw surgery (chopping off one part of the economy to feed some government program). Taxation disrupts the natural flow of capital and forcefully redirects it into other enterprises of varying productivity. But the output of the enterprise that they are redirected to doesn't matter with respect to the fact that the damage of redirecting the resources was already done.

When a politician sends you $300 in the mail they are admitting that they hurt you by taxing it away in the first place, and now they are trying to mitigate the damage so you will produce more in the future. It's total hegemony.

 

[woodie1]

When my check arrives I won't refuse it. Let the bankers have all my money will ya.

With Uncle Sugar printing all these dollars an nothing to back them up how much longer will we be able to sell bonds to the fools?

 

[Craig234]

Originally posted by: Dissipate

Originally posted by: Craig234
Saying taxes hurt the economy is ridiculous. It's like saying putting gas in your car hurts your finances. All depends, doesn't it, where you drive, and why?

Some taxes, misspent, hurt the economy. Other taxes, well spent, help the economy. Other taxes hurt the economy but help people who should be helped. Yet other taxes hurt the economy but help it compared to NOT paying for spending we're doing that just runs up debt owed with interest. And so on.

Taxes always have negative externalities because taxes are at best a form of chainsaw surgery (chopping off one part of the economy to feed some government program). Taxation disrupts the natural flow of capital and forcefully redirects it into other enterprises of varying productivity. But the output of the enterprise that they are redirected to doesn't matter with respect to the fact that the damage of redirecting the resources was already done.

When a politician sends you $300 in the mail they are admitting that they hurt you by taxing it away in the first place, and now they are trying to mitigate the damage so you will produce more in the future. It's total hegemony.

You tried to fit what I said into a misguided ideology, without actually changing much in it.

What are you even trying to say with the word hegemony there?

You are just missing how things work. This 'natural flow of capital' you refer to - and I didn't miss your mandatory right-wing whine about 'forcefully' - is an ugly disaster.

Most of human history reflects what your 'natural flow of capital' actually results in: a few with wealth and power and everyone else serving them, a terrible, inhuman system.

I'm appalled that our schools are not teaching the basic concept of our political system, the idea that the people of the nation have the right to have some power more than that traditional structure, and that they are given more power by our republic so that they can have policies which direct how some resources are used for the public good, and not all are simply controlled by the few people who have the wealth and power.

The economy is a machine. When it's democratically driven, it tends to have more of a middle class and be a consumer society; our economy is 2/3 consumer driven.

When it's not so democratically driven and the public interests is not represented by a government power, mass poverty and misery greatly expands.

You will get neat things like the Pyramids and Versailles; but not much of a middle class.

You will get a few public projects, like the Italian Medicis who sponsored art, but you will not see anything like Medicare or the National Endowment for the Arts.

Look at our nation just over a century ago at the turn of the century for what you get, even with democracy but one that is 'pro-business' - you had the median income $10,000 (adjusted for inflation), 90% elder poverty, short life spans, child labor with people working at least six day workweeks often 12 to 14 hours a day, often living in company shanties for which they paid rent keeping them from making anything beyond barely enough to eat, while the few were building things like Hearst Castle and Stanford University.

The other extreme is as bad - if there are no moderately wealthy people, no incentives for a private sector, you have 'everyone equally poor'.

We need a balance - a private sector to produce goods and services efficeintly, and a public sector to accomplish what's good for the public, and that needs taxation.

I can just repeat what I said before - it costs you money to put gas in your car. But when you then drive to get food, there's a payoff for the gas.

So what's the point in just whining about the cost of the gas and trying to spout platitudes about the natural flow of your spending being disrupted by the need to buy gas?

The point is to buy the gas that you can afford and is useful - whether for getting food or just a visit to the beach - and not argue, no whine, that all gas spending is harmful.

This stimulus does not admit what you claim; it's merely a tuning of the machine to keep the consumer activity at more productive levels.

 

[fskimospy]

Craig, Dissipate wants to live in a form of libertopian anarcho-capitalist society. This means that he's not super good at understanding long term consequences. That should tell you everything you need to know.

 

[jpeyton]

They're prepping for the 2012 landslide. Obama wants to up his majorities in Congress and he needs more seniors on board.

 

[mugs]

Diesel is an Italian company, smart guy.

Originally posted by: babylon5
At least the money is going to people instead of gold toilet

It wasn't a toilet, smart guy.

 

[Craig234]

Originally posted by: eskimospy
Craig, Dissipate wants to live in a form of libertopian anarcho-capitalist society. This means that he's not super good at understanding long term consequences. That should tell you everything you need to know.

One of the great right-wing lies in our time is the lie that the elected government is the enemy of the people.

It can be - but I'll make an analogy. If the medical industry were completely deregulated, you might find doctors who were little more than quacks for dug companies, who did fine because the good doctors could not compete with the highly subsidized practices paid for by drug companies. Medicine could turn into a corrupt disaster.

But that wouldn't prove Doctors are the enemy of the public; it would prove that when the medical system is broken, it breaks.

Aboloshing doctors wouldn't solve the problem. And aboloshing (or crippling) Democratically elected goernment to represent the public interest won't solve the problem.

Yes, we can make a mistake and elect a George Bush who is for the interests of the few, not the public, and make government largely the enemy of the public.

But the fix is to correct the corruption that lets him get elected, to get good government in, not to rob the public of its power that our founding fathers gave it with the vote.

There are other ways the public power is threatened, including the free trade agreeements that force governments to pay the costs for any regulations that a secret corporate board decides are not justified in its opinions, forcing governments not to pass regulations it wants to for the public interest. Since they can't beat democracy, they can turn it into a powerless PTA board who pass awareness day resolutions.

No one who is the enemy of the public, the enemy of democracy, is going to admit it. They're all going to lie and say something else. People have to learn to understand the threats better. But the simple fact is that the few most powerful are at odds with democracy because nearly the whole point of democracy is to give the public an 'artificial' power to protect itself from those few powerful interests, by limiting their ability to milk society.

 

[Fear No Evil]

Originally posted by: Ocguy31
Jesus Christ.

Yes my son?

 

[Dissipate]

Originally posted by: Craig234
You tried to fit what I said into a misguided ideology, without actually changing much in it.

What are you even trying to say with the word hegemony there?

It is very simple: you live under a hegemonic relationship with politicians, as well as everyone else in this 'country.'

You are just missing how things work. This 'natural flow of capital' you refer to - and I didn't miss your mandatory right-wing whine about 'forcefully' - is an ugly disaster.

Most of human history reflects what your 'natural flow of capital' actually results in: a few with wealth and power and everyone else serving them, a terrible, inhuman system.

If the natural flow of capital is such a horrible thing then get rid of it entirely. Of course, if you did that then huge swathes of the population would die off completely because with no free market in farming and foodstuffs, everyone would truly end up practically naked in the wild.

There is already a few with wealth and power in all countries, and almost all of them are connected in some way to the political class.

I'm appalled that our schools are not teaching the basic concept of our political system, the idea that the people of the nation have the right to have some power more than that traditional structure, and that they are given more power by our republic so that they can have policies which direct how some resources are used for the public good, and not all are simply controlled by the few people who have the wealth and power.

The 'public good' is a false concept in the same category as god, invisible purple unicorns and fire breathing dragons. I know this 'public good'/'social contract' narrative well and so I am not dumb enough to fall for it, sorry.

But let me ask you this: how is it that after 200 years of living under relatively new political system did so few end up controlling so much wealth? This is over 200 years with a government that has almost limitless 'powers' to tax and regulate.

The economy is a machine. When it's democratically driven, it tends to have more of a middle class and be a consumer society; our economy is 2/3 consumer driven.

Democracies tend to let the sheeple graze more, thus producing more wealth to be taxed away. Direct slavery is extremely expensive in terms of time managing the slaves, providing them with a place to live, food to eat etc. It is much cheaper and efficient to let the slaves graze out in the fields so they can produce more wealth and be happier. Then, you rake in a huge portion of their productive capacity and perhaps throw a few pennies back to keep them believing that you aren't really treating them like a slave.

When it's not so democratically driven and the public interests is not represented by a government power, mass poverty and misery greatly expands.

You will get neat things like the Pyramids and Versailles; but not much of a middle class.

That is only because democracies tend to allow the sheeple to have a partial ownership of private property and businesses. Totalitarian forms of government are dependent entirely on one ruler who may or may not allow such a private sector to flourish by leaving it alone.

You will get a few public projects, like the Italian Medicis who sponsored art, but you will not see anything like Medicare or the National Endowment for the Arts.

Those can only exist due to the wealth generated by the private economy.

Look at our nation just over a century ago at the turn of the century for what you get, even with democracy but one that is 'pro-business' - you had the median income $10,000 (adjusted for inflation), 90% elder poverty, short life spans, child labor with people working at least six day workweeks often 12 to 14 hours a day, often living in company shanties for which they paid rent keeping them from making anything beyond barely enough to eat, while the few were building things like Hearst Castle and Stanford University.

So given the technology and productive capacity of society a century ago, if only people had a better government they would have been much wealthier and would have had to work fewer hours? Profit driven industry would have absolutely no incentive to provide better jobs and better working conditions? I would be working in a coal mine today if it weren't for the government (all employers would conspire to have me work in a coal mine)? Your narrative is logically absurd.

The other extreme is as bad - if there are no moderately wealthy people, no incentives for a private sector, you have 'everyone equally poor'.

We need a balance - a private sector to produce goods and services efficeintly, and a public sector to accomplish what's good for the public, and that needs taxation.

Your version of what is good for the public is totally different from mine, but what you are saying here is not only do you know what is good for the public, but that your vision ought to be imposed on others, even if they want no part of it. You want your cake: the wealth generated by private enterprise and eat it too: resources diverted to fulfill your fetish based desires of how society ought to 'run.'

I can just repeat what I said before - it costs you money to put gas in your car. But when you then drive to get food, there's a payoff for the gas.

So what's the point in just whining about the cost of the gas and trying to spout platitudes about the natural flow of your spending being disrupted by the need to buy gas?

I have used no such platitudes. This natural flow of capital is everywhere. It exists in empirical reality.

The point is to buy the gas that you can afford and is useful - whether for getting food or just a visit to the beach - and not argue, no whine, that all gas spending is harmful.

This stimulus does not admit what you claim; it's merely a tuning of the machine to keep the consumer activity at more productive levels.

As I said before, the motives behind that 'tuning' is to keep the pastures opened up enough to keep from killing off the engine of the state's massive tax rape fest.

 

[sportage]

They're prepping for the 2012 landslide. Obama wants to up his majorities in Congress and he needs more seniors on board.

Or... maybe "President" Obama just got a close up of the way seniors were surviving after 8 years of GW, during his campaign.

I don't blame for the negative view. After all, it takes a while to recover
from the former 8 years. THAT was not normal. What Obama will bring back is normal.

Like a dog that the owner hits on the head with a news paper constantly,
when someone gentle tries to pet the dog, the poor dog will flinch expecting the worse. We all have to recover from flinching. It takes awhile.