Both times through grad school (once for a master’s, and one to become the kinda doctor that’s useless if somebody gets sick), my TA stipend wasn’t exempt from Federal income tax (although my income didn’t exactly rise to taxable levels), but it was exempt from the Social Security/Medicare payroll tax.
And believe me, that made a BIG difference.
We prefer “pay as you go” liberals, if you please. 
So…Perot talked about raising a tax, eh? That must have cost him a good 10% of the vote right there.
Dumbass!
-Joe
Which strikes me as a fiscally conservative way of handling finances. There’s a semantic difference I’m trying to put my finger on… but when I think of conservative, as in my grandparents’ and parents’ attitudes, what comes to mind is the concept of only buying what you can pay for out of pocket (so to speak). Clearly, there are kinds of borrowing that are a good idea, but my gut feeling is that borrowing and credit ought to be approached with much more caution than they are now.
Sorry this is incoherent, but how can traditional conservatives accept all this deficit spending without a serious ideological breakdown? Or am I mistaken in my sense of what it means to be conservative?
Because you complain about excess spending when the other guy does it. It works great when your party is out of power so you can point at it and say, “I’d do something about that if I had the votes. You should give me your vote, than I can stop them.”
Once you’re in power, of course, then you need to keep up spending to bribe people so that theyll love you more than your opponents.
Of course, since the Right pushed the “Lefties spend like sailors on shoreleave in Bangkok” meme for a few decades people still believe it, even when the Righties have been setting records.
-Joe
I don’t know. Like you, I’m appalled at the spending of the Republicans. They aren’t acting like conservatives. However, that doesn’t mean that the Democrats would if they were given the chance. Bush actually proposes budgets that have deep cuts in them, they just get watered down by the spend crazy congress.
Not that I’m letting Bush off the hook. He clearly hasn’t made controlling spending a priority for his administration. He could be doing a lot more. However, if we put a liberal in the oval office we will get proposed budget increases instead of cuts. How would that make things better?
I’m thinking that unless they start acting with fiscal responsibility the best lesson to give the Republicans would be to just stay home next election day.
When they decide to start cutting corporate welfare and giving away sole-source contracts worth millions, I’ll get behind cutting other entitlement programs.
The US Government is a very poor analogy to your household. The US Government has the power to tax and raise revenue via no productive effort of its own: you do not.
As for Bush and proposin deep cuts: Bush can propose giving every man woman and child in the nation a million dollars if he wants to. If he isn’t prepared to veto or work to get those things into law, it’s a completely meaningless gesture.
First, I think anything would be better than Bush. He’s increased spending more than any other president in my lifetime - liberal, moderate or conservative.
Second, defense spending would be reigned in by a ‘liberal,’ and perhaps even many conservatives. Bush defense budgets are increasing at an un-called for rate (I mean, I understand it’s hard to recruit these days, but still ) - cite: MSN | Outlook, Office, Skype, Bing, Breaking News, and Latest Videos
Third, discretionary non-defense spending has been increasing just as much under any Democrat - cite: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/tst021606a.cfm
America is deeply in debt because it deserves to be deeply in debt. As long as the mere mention of raising taxes is the kiss of death for a candidate, then these deficits will continue. As long as your vote can be bought, they will buy it. Want them to stop buying? Then stop selling.
Let’s get real: our children are not going to pay off the debt. Their children are not going to pay it off. It is never going to get paid off. Over time, each generation is going to pay more and more interest on this debt and have less money for more productive uses. Perhaps at some point, it all breaks down and the economy collapses. But as long as it doesn’t happen before the next election, that’s all that politicians of both stripes care about.
I have the ability to rack up thousands and thousands of dollars in debt which I will never be able to pay off. I’m smarter than that. (At least now, I am.)
I want a smart government.
I am somewhat relieved by these tax cuts, because without them we would have been hit by the AMT next year and I don’t need that big of a bite from the gov’t. I do enjoy the laugh from the Dems that are decrying this “tax cut for the rich”, because I am far from rich.
Part of the new tax cut is keeping the capital gains tax maxed at 15% - that got extended through 2010.
Your ‘AMT exemption’ only got extended through this year.
The AMT is the bone they threw the middle class to protect the rich.
And, as you mention, that’s all the voters care about, too. No one seems to care about anything until it hits their pocketbook/affects them personally. I also find that most people want to go “la-la-la” and shove their fingers in their ears when you try to talk about it because they think it’s to “hard”. And in that case I blaim the media (which, understand, I know are for-profit organizations, so really why should they care). You would think that they’d be able to explain it on a 7th grade level so the majority could understand. Instead of all those misleading “Do You Know What’s In Your Water?” reports, maybe they could have an Action News report on what our children and their children won’t have or what the world will look like if we keep going the way we are. That would be the one time I’d support their stupid Disaster Graphics and Fear Monger mood music.
Over 25 years ago :eek: I knew that they had started to tax them, but what the Airman said made me think maybe it got changed.
TA income was always taxed. The loophole used for RA income was that the RAship was a requirement for graduation. In fact, where my wife went you had to TA part of the time to graduate, and that made her TA income tax free also. Oh, the good old days.
This just in: I read an article in this morning’s paper that says the $69 billion tax cut bill will triple tax rates for teenagers with college savings funds. Under the new law, teenagers aged 14-17 with investment income will now be taxed at the same rate as their parents (both long- and short-term capital gains). This, of course, being in violation of Bush’s pledge to veto any bill that raised taxes.
This is from a table presented on the front page of Jackson Mississippi’s own Clarion Ledger.
Source: Tax Policy Center
Estimated Impact of New Tax Bill
Less than $10,000, $0
$10,000 to $20,000, $3
$20,000 to $30,000, $10
$30,000 to $40,000, $17
$40,000 to $50,000, $47
$50,000 to $75,000, $112
$75,000 to $100,000, $406
$100,000 to $200,000, $1395
$200,000 to $500,000, $4527
$500,000 to $1M, $5656
Over $1M, $42,766
I guess you’re one of the lucky few security guards that makes the big money, Dave.
-Joe
No, BobLibDem. History shows, over and over, that it’s inflated away. Debt that looks like a lot now, winds up being worth, well, pennies on the dollar, really, 40 years later. Once every generation there is a crisis: Roosevelt had to cut the par with gold from 20 to 35, Nixon had to end Bretton Woods, and we’re about due for the next crisis. It’s worth about a decade of misery to get over the crisis.
So, get ready. The next 10 years of woe are coming soon, although exactly when is of course unknowable. But there’s no need to know exactly when, as long as you accumulate enough beforehand to weather the storm.