$20,000 refundable tax credit for every taxpayer. Paid for with bonds sold directly to the Fed.
Let’s see here:
-Get rid of a huge chunk of tax breaks
-Cut spending across the board (yes, incl. military spending)
-Flatten tax rates (though not outright flat taxes)
-Get rid of taxes for small businesses and slash corporate tax rates
-Institute amnesty for illegals but also institute a special “Illegal tax” that they will have to pay for the rest of their lives
-Pass a Balanced Budget Amendment
-Raise the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare
-Approve all free trade pacts and encourage new ones
Brilliant idea. Accounting legerdemain got us into this mess, so surely it can get us out.
Lie and tell people that everything has been fixed.
Those sounds like idea’s to deal with the debt. You understand debt and recession are different things right? I know Republicans have trouble with that concept.
With the exception of the BBA and the last point all of them can be used to deal with the recession too.
Giving people free money reduces confidence in the market, and causes “stagflation”.
Cutting spending means laying people off. Shifting spending from the government to the private sector doesn’t change the underlying economics.
Raising taxes means diverting money away from growth industries and reduces confidence in the market.
Not raising taxes means that government debt grows, which reduces confidence in the market.
Increasing the number of US citizens just means that there’s a greater draw on the government. Anyone making less than ~$30k a year costs the government money in the long run, and most immigrants that could be easily added to the pool are low wage workers.
Making the tax system more streamlined (e.g. flat) is effectively just a method of cutting spending or raising taxes.
A balanced budget amendment just means that the government will lie about its spending in more creative ways and handicap the government during times of crisis.
Basically, the things that everyone advocates are bunk. The only potential solution that I’ve come up with is to base contracted values on an exchange rate, so that the forces of market equilibrium proposed by traditional economic can act against sticky numbers. Unfortunately, I’m just a guy on the internet and that hypothesis hasn’t undergone any particular review by professional economists. So the answer for the moment is to go about your life, make your best economic decisions as you do it, and it will fix itself in time.
Our representatives could stop acting like children and address the country’s economic issues like…
Nah, it’ll never happen.
Jump into World War II. Whoops, already been done.
Seriously, though: I’ve heard it said that in a recession, the economy has merely fallen down . . . whereas in a depression, it’s fallen and it can’t get up. The fact that it’s so difficult to figure out how to get out of this mess tells me that we’re already in Big “D” territory.
Sure we need some steel workers walking on rails at 75 years old. Cops at 75 ,another good idea. How would you feel with a fireman in a walker trying to save your house.
We were financially far better off when we actually had higher taxes on the top . They have been flattened over and over with disastrous results.
How low do corporate taxes have to get when the top corps pay no tax and many get a rebate?
I’ve said in other places that I meant workers that do not engage in physical labour.
In professional jobs, experience is a plus.
That is why I said get rid of tax breaks. Make them pay taxes but a fair rate.
He wanted to know how to end the recession, not create one.
What would this ~$2.6 trillion be buying us (assuming you mean ‘taxpayer’ to mean ‘someone who pays federal income tax’. Because if not then you are talking about a lot more)? Besides more debt? I don’t see how this would end the recession, to be honest. Could you go into some details on how this magical plan would do this?
-XT
Stimulting demand.
The recession is caused by too much debt. Dealing with deficits and implementing long-term trustworthy plans to deal with the debt is the first steps towards ending the recession.
In general, you understand that if you increase the money supply without increasing production, all you are doing is causing inflation, right? Basically, you have an increased number of green pieces of paper chasing the same amount of goods.
Now, it’s not a completely closed system due to imports and such, and I guess if you really wanted to crush us under a huge trade deficit, your plan has promise.
And who would buy these $2.7T-with-a-T in bonds? What would happen to the avg consumer with debt, who now sees those rates go up-up-up, which would be required to talk the ChiComs and Arabs into buying our increasingly worthless paper?
Great plan.
Excellent idea. It’ll go directly towards my student loans, just as it would go towards lots of people’s credit card bills, mortgage payments, etc. I doubt you’d get much consumption, but it’d be interesting to see the effects of an instant $2 trillion or so of consumer deleveraging.
Oh,I don’t know. You see, I would immediately start buying everything non-perishable I could, either as a stockpile in case of emergency, or as an investment once people realized how bad inflation was going to be and things spiralled out fo control.
I’m pretty sure this is the only realistic choice.
**How to End the Recession **
Hope that American corporations stop thinking in the short term and rather look at the bigger picture. They’ll take some of the record piles of cash on hand and use it to hire people on to deal with the persistent high unemployment rate
They could see that although this might not make sense in the short term, in the long term it will get the economy going again and benefit everyone.
Bwa ha ha ha ha ha! Not likely! Corporations are by definition selfish greedy bastards who are out for themselves only, and will not do anything for the benefit of the country!