THE INFLUENCE GAME: Business aided by jobless bill

Emergency help for the jobless will be a huge windfall for Realtors, homebuilders, mortgage bankers and others, and that's no accident.

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Senate tax writer proposes middle-class tax cuts

The Senate's top tax writer on Thursday proposed an extensive tax bill that would make permanent some of the middle-class tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration.

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Dems pass tax breaks in committee

Tax breaks totaling more than $275 billion have been approved by a House committee, the latest success for President Barack Obama's economic recovery program.

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Obama stimulus plan boosts business tax refunds

President-elect Barack Obama's proposed stimulus package would provide businesses with billions of dollars in refunds on taxes they paid several years ago.

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The George W. Bush Presidential Center will be the centerpiece of President and Mrs. Bush's ongoing commitment to improving our nation and the world.

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Very interesting observations regarding the use of tax cuts to spur recovery. The evidence suggests GWB stopped reading his history after the tax cut chapter.Ronald Reagan signed a large tax cut in the summer of 1981, while the economy was in recession.

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Tax cuts don't work if you don't have taxable income

To my esteemed GOP colleagues that seemingly did not take or failed Economics 101, tax cuts do not work unless there is income to offset the tax cuts. Several members of the Conservative Caucus act as they have all the answers for the ills of the nation.

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Dow Jones 10,000 arrived on Wall Street on Wednesday for the first time in a year. It's a milestone of sorts, and it certainly represents a vote for investor confidence in economic recovery. Blowout profit reports helped fuel the day's 145-point gain.

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Suspending the tax cuts, though reasonable, is not likely to happen.This article points out that the 2004 tax cuts have cost the state about $776 million in lost revenue.

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I find the conversation in this article incredible. Coffee called OK State Question 744, which would require the Legislature to fund education at a level comparable to that of surrounding states, "one of the most dangerous things ever to go on the Oklahoma ballot."

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Fiscal Stimulus: Tax Cuts-Investments Versus Taxes

What results from expectation of future profits are primarily caused by investment decisions. The likes of expectations could be:

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It is like the 800lb Gorilla in the room, everyone knows it works. There is no way this is going to happen....

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Our research also shows that greater weakness in the economy raises the estimated multiplier: It increases by around 0.1 for each two percentage points by which the unemployment rate exceeds its long-run median of 5.6%.

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Fiscal Stimulus: Tax Cuts-Taxes versus Consumption

Besides government spending injection through increased government purchases - increased demand required ( necessary ) to raise output and employment levels could be brought about by increases in consumption.

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excerpt: "" Yesterday, President Obama spoke at Federal Hall in New York — right across the street from the New York Stock Exchange — to lay out his vision for reforming the country's financial regulations.

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excerpt: "" Thursday's annual Census Bureau report on income, poverty and access to health care-the Bureau's principal report card on the well-being of average Americans-closes the books on the economic record of George W. Bush. ""

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It's easy to see how America has been fiscally surprised. In 2008, federal spending was 21% of GDP and the deficit was 3.2%. Now, a year later, federal spending is projected to be 26.1% of GDP and the deficit 11.2%. Neither percentage has been so high since during World War II.

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Drowning Government in a Bathtub

Grover Norquist's infamous line, "my goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years," he says, "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub", a line that has driven conservative politics for years and has started to play out in this recession and have  …

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CNN did the honors for Tea Party Express today and gave them some free advertising.

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Things are still really bad out there. Where I live in Illinois, the local paper has few advertisements for jobs. And around town, there are few "help wanted" signs (I saw one at the supermarket and another at a convenience store).

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One thing I don't quite get has been the White House's reluctance to highlight the non-infrastructure parts of the stimulus package.

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excerpt: ""Last night, in a segment warning of the environmental perils associated with US population growth, The Lou Dobbs Show featured Ben Zuckerman — an anti-immigrant activist who attempted a nativist takeover of the Sierra Club back in 2004.

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On July 29, 1981, barely six months into his presidency and in the face of an economic crisis of historic proportions, Ronald Reagan succeeded in persuading both houses of Congress to pass dramatic tax cuts that set the stage for nearly three decades of vigorous economic growth.

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I had to read this three times. It's full of numbers and that usually sends me running in the opposite direction. But I'm glad I went to the trouble to try to understand it because now I see that it's really not very complicated at all. This is it in a nutshell:

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Brit Hume asserted that Democrats "could turn [the stimulus] into business-friendly tax cuts or personal income tax rate cuts," but that "those are Republican ideas." In fact, the recovery act included tax incentives for businesses estimated to total $75.9 billion in 2009 and 201 …

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We know what happens when movements or parties continue to stagger forward after running out of ideas: They become zombies.

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There are two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years.

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During the first four months of his administration, President Obama has committed roughly $1 trillion in federal spending: a $787 billion economic recovery package, and $350 billion in money to bail out the nation's banks.

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This article by Bill Gallagher is dated June 2003. Even then, there were warning signs as to the reckless consequences of the Bush tax cuts, quietly mixed with the meltdown of 2008 and surfacing now in 2009.

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