Bush signs Tax Bill that continues encouragement of financial irresponsibility
An estimated 94 million Americans will be affected by the tax relief, which keeps three middle-class tax breaks from expiring on January 1. It also revives other tax incentives for businesses.
I want to focus on two of the bigger points of the tax break I think are very wrong.
Keep the per-child tax credit at $1,000 for five years
Why do we give people money for having children? In reality, people are not receiving a check for $1,000 in the mail from the government for simply having a child, but we are rewarding people for having children. Why does the government reward and punish people for making life decisions? One could make the weak argument that having children benefits our country by providing it with a work force, but would people really stop having kids if this tax-credit disappeared tomorrow? Would people throw away millions of years of reproduction because the US has stopped giving people a tax credit?
Another argument is that people who have children need a break. Raising a child is expensive! You have to pay for medical bills, food, clothing and education; raising a child takes much more money than you can hope to get out of it. Personally, I feel that if you are going to make a life-changing decision such as having a child, you should be financially prepared to take on that responsibility. If you have a child and you are not able to financially provide for that child, you are irresponsible. People who use this tax-cut as a crutch to make their child-raising experience more favorable are placing a strain on our country. That’s $1,000 per couple per child that could have been spent better elsewhere. Plain-and-simple this tax break is only beneficial to irresponsible people and therefore reinforces that behavior.
Retain for four years a provision giving married couples relief from the so-called marriage penalty.
Never heard of the marriage penalty? It’s a phantom “penalty” that people have made up so that people will feel sorry for them. The idea behind it works like this. For example, Jacqui and Me separately are each in the 25% tax bracket. For talking purposes lets just say we both make $50,000 a year. That means that each year we owe the government $12,500 each for a total of $25,000. If we were to get married, our joint income would be $100,000 and we’d then be in the 28% tax bracket. We’d then be paying $28,000 in federal taxes each year. Therefore, as a couple, we’d be paying $3,000 in “marriage penalty.”
At first thought you might be thinking to yourself, wow that’s harsh! The government is punishing me for being married! After a bit of inspection and contemplation, however, you might come to the realization that by consolidating your finances and income into a single entity you are no more or less culpable than any other incorporation. You are now a single entity that generates enough income to be placed into another tax bracket and you now are more able to contribute to society via taxation.
This provision/tax-cut for married couples is a government’s endorsement of married people. It says to the American people that married couples have special privileges over other types of incorporations. People who get civil unions will not get this “provision.” People who incorporate their finances under other methods will not get this provision.
Why is the government and this administration so intent to push their moral agenda on us? You’d think that a hard-core republican president like ours would support a government that didn’t dip its fingers into everyone’s personal life, but points like these on a tax cut illustrate perfectly why some people can never understand where George Bush stands politically.
So these tax cuts have been and will continue help our economy, right? I’m not so sure.
The tax relief will cost $131.4 billion in government revenue over the next decade. In addition, Republicans added provisions to extend 23 tax breaks for businesses that were set to expire.
131.4 BILLION dollars in government revenue will be lost over the next 10 years. All of that while we continually ramp up spending on our perpetual war-on-terror. Some people will say to you: “hey, these tax cuts are going to stimulate the economy! People are going to have more money and they’ll buy more stuff and it’ll produce more jobs to create that stuff! Just you wait and see!” President Bush said pretty much the same line 4 years ago when he began cutting taxes and our economy has been getting worse ever sense. More jobs lost than under any other president. Unemployement at its highest point in 10 years. A budget deficit greater than even that of our last republican president.
