Starting to look like 2009 will be the year of the bailout. Sure, we broke the seal in 2008, but next year is certain to be a gusher.
President Bush will leave $350 billion of the magic $700 billion to President-elect Obama. And the cities and states are arranging Washington D.C. junkets to parade their empty pockets and last year's clothes in front of Congress.
Fully two months before taking office, Obama has already shed any pretense of fiscal conservatism.
Kentucky taxpayers has long-endured the boom-and-bust cycles in government spending. The tail end of this latest one is already awash in red ink.
We know there will be much clamoring for tax increases in Frankfort, but they just don't have the votes.
The watchdogs must be ever vigilant, of course, lest the good old boys and girls work out some kind of deal to produce more photo ops and talk of bipartisan love for themselves, and higher costs for the rest of us.
The key to protecting ourselves is to push hard for every state agency, county, city, library, and school board in Kentucky to document the spending of every single penny on searchable web sites for all to see. The time for fooling around waiting for current technology to be applied to the protection of those of paying the bills is over.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Before the bailouts, transparency
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3 comments:
I am all for transparency I would like to see where all of my tax dollars are spent. The idea should not be to tax more, but to spend less.
What's needed is a tax on the benefactors of the bailout. Currently, the derivatives market today is $531 trillion. Were the derivatives taxed at a 5% rate, that would generate $26.550 trillion in revenue. The derivatives are one of the major contributors to the current financial fiasco that Wall Street got us into.
In fact, all transactions should be taxed preferably proportionally as envisioned by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper 12. He wrote:
"The ability of a country to pay taxes must always be proportioned, in a great degree, to the quantity of money in circulation, and to the celerity with which it circulates. Commerce, contributing to both these objects, must of necessity render the payment of taxes easier, and facilitate the requisite supplies to the treasury."
A proportional tax system could max out at a rate of 5% and would continue on the amount of all transactions with no cutoff ceiling as current exists with social security.
The problem is not the lack of sources for sufficient revenue, the problem is we have a government-subsidized socialist system for the wealthy. They like their socialism and want to keep it that way. They don't want any of their income sources subject to taxes.
The Problem with the bailout is:
Too many to list!
But where I feel the top of the list is that this money is just being printed. Inflation is just around the corner. The DOLLAR isn't based on anything anymore and the FAITH of the dollar is going, going, .....
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