[econjack]

One of the best things Obama could do is let Rangel use his get-out-of-jail-free card and start cutting both corporate and personal income taxes. The fastest growing economy on the planet right now is Ireland. Oddly, it also has the lowest corporate tax rate. How many European companies would set up offices here if we had a 10% corporate tax rate? Does Obama really think that threatening the rich (who create jobs in the first place) is going to help our economic system? Did he miss the fact that the largest single day swing in the stock market happened right after he was elected? Who does he think such market swings reflects, the poor? Hell no, it shows what the people who create jobs in this country think things are going to be like once he takes office.

Rangel and the other bozos in Washington don't get it. Corporations don't pay taxes, the people buying their products pay taxes. Stimulus checks like we saw last summer are a joke, because they do nothing to alter the demand for durable goods, like home and cars. The big ticket items are unaffected by such voting-getting schemes. Permanent tax cuts are needed to induce consumers to alter long run consumption plans. Make a permanent tax cut and suddenly that new home, car, or college education becomes possible. Higher take home pay means it's possible to fund a little more debt for cars, homes, education, etc.

The best thing Obama could do is cut taxes permanently for all income levels, especially the rich since the top 10% pay 66% of the tax burden as it is. The cut corporate tax rates. After that, Mr. Obama, just stand back and watch how the system fixes itself.

[Leisler]

I don't see that happening. Even Republicans were wacking Bush for the little tax cuts he did.

I watch the financial and I'd say even on Fox, half or more of the supposed economists and business types think Hoover did nothing, and FDR's programs ‘worked’.

I was a big WW II history nut. Now I am just a nut. Anyways, I read, as a kid, Cornelius Ryan's, The Other Side of The Hill. Basically, what the German Generals were thinking. So, then I started reading more scholarly works on the arguments of how the Reich should fight. The politics and economics outside of rational decision making was immense. Ditto Tojo and the Imperial War Staff.

Basically, they both were in fundamentally loser positions. Since, as an organization, they would not admit it, they took in all sorts of schemes. Right to the end.

That is where the US is. We have been made into an unproductive, anti-manufacturing state that rewards financial engineering and plundering by legal and political means.

Since, both parties are run and lead by elites that have grown up in this ‘system’, they can not, in sufficient numbers, conceive of anything else.

No different than many Germans and Japanese that knew that from the get go their situation was hopeless over time.

...........

We'll see. I hate to be so mechanistic, so Marxist.

[Lou L]

Does Obama really think that threatening the rich (who create jobs in the first place) is going to help our economic system?

[snip]

The best thing Obama could do is cut taxes permanently for all income levels, especially the rich since the top 10% pay 66% of the tax burden as it is. The cut corporate tax rates. After that, Mr. Obama, just stand back and watch how the system fixes itself.

All of that of course, under the assumption that Obama has the best interests in mind for all Americans.

If he does not, and only wants to take America to become a second-rate country, making good economic sense of his policies will be of little concern to him.