In a word, hilarious. It never ceases to amaze me just how partisan the Rs really are. Obama’s a fascist, he’s responsible for the economic meltdown, for adding $4000 in college costs, he’s a commie, a socialist, a marxist, most liberal liberal ever etc.

I am with Joe Biden, paying your taxes and participating in our system of government is patriotic. Just blindly blaming the other guy for everything isn’t healthy. I am sorry that either candidate would have had to raise taxes, but we just can’t spend that much debt every year.

Markets do better under D presidents (and this does not include the recent bush disaster, er I mean economy). Look it up.

I remember that Canada recently doubled its defense spending but that takes it from something like 1 to 2 percent of GDP as I recall. To be considered a world class navy I would think you would need at least a couple nuclear subs in each ocean at a bil and a half or so each that would be an additional 20 or 30 percent right there, without operating costs (21 mil each) then you should have at least one light carrier and support ships… so I think tripling or quadrupling your recently doubled defense budget should do. By the way, we should have a few Los Angeles class subs laying around, the Salt Lake City, Olympia, and Honolulu were scheduled to be decommissioned last year and the Augusta is scheduled to be decommissioned this year, why don’t you guys put in a bid?

I know, it’s crazy.

What kind of business ensures that its revenues are at least a little higher than its costs? Oh right, a successful one.

Didn’t Bush inherit a huge budget surplus? Did he present even one balanced budget?

Is he still your hero?

So if you want to go around invading countries and occupying them for years, or bail out corporations with trillions of dollars, you’re going to have to pay for it somehow. I know the current thinking is that fighting a war on a credit card is a good idea, but I assure it’s not.

It’s quite simple. You can’t lower your revenue while increasing your spending. What you’ll end up with is… (see Bush’s legacy).

Yes you can have it both ways, you can only pass so much profit to the consumer. At some point there is a more cost effective method, move the jobs offshore. As soon as the shipping cost is less than the expenses of making the product, including taxes, the job goes the Ireland or China, or Mexico.

Let an idiot explain it to you. If every country has a 35% corporate tax that equates to a national sales tax of maybe 5%, Canada’s seems to be double that that puts them at a disadvantage already. If you raise that percentage or another country (Ireland) lowers it they have a competitive advantage just like a store running a sale. The idea is that you make up for the lower profit with an increase in volume. You didn’t pay attention in your economics classes did you?

Read some of Lawrence Summers’ early ideas before the Clinton years, his theory was that you soak the rich, lower government spending and grow the economy. Well Clinton had no problem soaking the rich, the Gingrich congress helped at least curtail government spending and the dot com bubble grew the economy. Only problem is there isn’t a dot com bubble on the horizon. Maybe wind power, but that isn’t practical so it will require massive government spending either directly or through mandates to power companies. In either case Summers’ second point is violated.

Reagan’s (Kemp’s actually) idea was to lower taxes, lower spending, and grow the economy through incentives. This proved effective through the Clinton years.

The only purpose of taxing the rich is vindictive jealousy. But you know what; they will just pick up their ball and go find another game.

SHCB Premise One – Corp tax passed on to consumer, so corporate profits are not meaningfully impacted by the tax:

Cut corporate tax = GOOD (the rich guys get tens times the amount than does the poor guy)

Raise the corporate tax = BAD (the rich guy pays ten times more than the poor guy.)

Conclusion: reward the rich, shcb wants to reward the rich and punish the poor.

SHCB Premise Two (my original argument) – Corp tax does not get entirely passed on to consumers, (it is a tax on profits)

Cut corporate tax (SHCB thinks this is good) = corporate profits increase and government revenues fall, government has less money to fund wars and otherwise serve people, rich guys (i.e. owners of corporations) get more profits.

Raise the corporate tax (SHCB thinks this is bad) = corporate profits decrease, government revenues increase providing more war funding and greater ability to serve the people, rich guys (i.e. owners of corporations) get less profits.

Conclusion: shcb thinks rich guys should get more profits and government should have less money to fight wars and serve the people.

If you can remember, we were talking about a tax that gets passed on to the consumers.

Essentially that is a consumption tax. In Canada it is called the Goods and Services Tax, and it sits at 5% on final sales (rebates are given to producers who pay the tax on inputs). That is in addition to the Canada’s Corporate Tax of 33.5%

Bringing out the bogeyman of communism was a cheap trick, talk of doubling the capital tax was simply for illustrative purposes. Besides, if you want to play that game you have to realize that BY YOUR DEFINITION is alread firmly entrenched as a communist state given the government cash infusions to major corporation that investors will no longer touch except at a fraction of their former share prices.

And as long as you want to share jokes, there’s another old joke that goes: conservatives are idiots, well actually it’s not a joke.

And if you are okay with unequal outcomes, then it makes little sense to give the rich more and it makes far more sense from a fiscal stimulus perspective to give the poor more because the poor will spend almost all of it locally on things they need now.

But of course that is only one side of the coin, the incentive to leave some of those jobs that are being shipped out of here is greater because the businesses are gaining 20% of their profits back, Some fraction of that can offset the advantage of sending the jobs to China. Also businesses in other countries are more apt to send work this way which produces more jobs and more taxpayers. And when you take an unemployed person and make him employed the government makes money on both sides of the ledger.

Loving it? Yes, but trying not to get too giddy, even though I’ve been hoping for a workable opposition coalition forever (i.e. months). But I can’t yet believe the conservatives could have been so stupid, perhaps we have yet to see their real (political) game plan.

shcb – The point is to compare the taxes paid by the guy making $20,000 to the another guy the same in all respects except he makes $200,000. So by your estimates the poor guy pays $525 and, all else equal, the rich guy pays $5,250.

So Corporate taxes were to double, then, by your assumption that it all gets passed on to the consumer anyway, the poor guy would pay $1050 ($525 more) and the rich guy would pay $10,500 (or $5,250 more).

Of course the poor guy probably needs the $525 for food, shelter or clothing or other items close to essential so the $525 hit hurts him more than it does the rich guy who was going to use the $5,250 to replace his 2 year old living room couch.

So yea, Obama, go ahead and double corporate taxes and then give the poor guys $525 back so they can still buy their fresh local groceries.

That of course would depend on what the person spends his money on. But for argument’s sake let’s say of his $20k five goes to rent or a mortgage, I don’t think that is taxed as corporate taxes, I could be wrong. Most investors look for companies that make say 10% profit with high volume places like grocery stores and gas stations making 2% or so, of course both of those have companies behind them paying corporate taxes. The grocer may only make 2% on a roll of toilet paper but Weyerhaeuser makes 10% on a smaller amount, the trucking company that took the wood to the plant and the paper to the store also paid taxes. But let’s just say 10%. So the taxpayer paid 35% of 10% of $15,000 or $525 or about the amount of one of these stimulus packages.

NL, four or five percent of Americans voted for some yet to be defined “change” the rest voted the way they always vote. When Republicans won the whole country there were people on my side that said America has finally come to its senses, it is move conservative finally, well, you’re back….

As you may remember, we just had an election last month, and elected a Conservative minority government. A minority government bascially means the opposition parties, combined, have more seats than the party in power.

Well, the Conservative government released their economic statement yesterday, without consulting the opposition parties, and it contains no stimulus or anything else to jolt the ecnonomy. Not only that, they stuck in legisialtion that would cut public funding for our parties (each party gets about $2 for each vote they receive). This has got the oppostion up in arms as for some of them, the public funding is a big part of their budget.

So a few things can happen

1 – The Opposition Parties could form a coalition government and ask our Governal General (GG) for permission to gain the confidnce of our House.

2 – The GG says no to that, and we head back to the polls for the second time in 3 months and the like the 5th time in 6 years.

3 – The Government backs down and sits down with the opposition parties to amend the legislation so it will pass. (This is the whole purpose of minority governments)

4 – The Opposition backs down and accepts the governments legislation.

There are all kinds of risks and rewards in the above for each party, it’s quite facinating to watch.

To make all this even more fun to watch, the Official Opposition Party – The Liberal Party – has just had it’s leadership campaign start for next leader of the party.

I know Americans could proabably care less about it, but it is quite remarkable and watching them live in House of Commons today should be pretty entertaining!

Knarls, you gotta be lovin this.