Joe the Plumber, a new spin

iVillage Member
Registered: 10-16-2008
Joe the Plumber, a new spin
166
Fri, 10-17-2008 - 4:16pm

The appeal of Joe the Plumber is that he puts a face to a tax number. Even if he's really not earning that much or isn't even a plumber. I am married to someone who makes that much and let me try to make the same point from a different perspective.

Go ahead, raise my taxes Obama. You are right, I can afford it. But first I'd like you to meet Mike, Steve and Emily. I don't own a business or anything, but I do spend my money (you know, since I'm one of the have's, that's what we do). Obama wanta to spread my wealth around and here's how it will affect 3 people in the middle and lower income brackets.

Mike - Mike is a music school teacher. He does private lessons on the side to make a little extra, in addition to volunteering in a community band. He loves teaching and playing music. He teaches one of our children and we pay him $100/mo.

Steve - Steve works full time doing private music lessons. He has two kids who he pays child support for and he lives on the edge of poverty. Private lessons is his only source of income. We pay for him to instruct three of our children and me every week. We pay him $364/mo.

Emily - Emily works full time but became a mom at age 18 yo, has no education past high school and lives near the poverty level. She is on her own being recently divorced. She helps us out once or twice a week, earning $120-$160/mo.

I recalculated Obama's tax proposals and realized it will only cost my family $1,350/mo on average. I can cover almost half of that by cutting my budget back, not hiring the babysitter and doing away with private music lessons (they are luxury items anyway).

I'm sure Mike, Steve and Emily will be glad to know that instead of earning money from my family, they will get $500 refundable tax credit next year under Obama's plan. And maybe even if $300 stimulus check like they got from Bush in the past.

Make less and pay less in tax, that's Obama's plan for the middle class.

Pennsylvania Mom http://openlettertobarack.blogspot.com/

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iVillage Member
Registered: 05-30-2008
Sat, 10-18-2008 - 10:05am
I love teachers but earnings are based on
iVillage Member
Registered: 05-06-2007
Sat, 10-18-2008 - 10:15am

But my point is, why are certain skills, skills that are needed to keep this country running, so undervalued? You certainly don't have to be a rocket scientist to do many of the jobs that pay exorbitant amounts of money in relation to their actual value

Chrissy
mom to Aidan 8/21/03
Grayson Blaine 12/30/07

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-23-2008
Sat, 10-18-2008 - 11:22am

I'm not sure what the answer is, which is why I'm glad I'm not running for president, LOL. Whoever gets the job is going to have a lot of decisions to make and I just hope that he surrounds himself with the most intelligent, informed economist and historians out there to help him come up with a plan. I agree that immediate tax hikes could have a psychological effect, but I also think that once the initial "shock" wears off, people will go back to their spending habits unless they are really financially hurting. Could this totally be prevented by gradually raising taxes? Maybe - I don't know.

The economy is really bad right now and I agree that it would be sort of like kicking people while they are down to raise taxes. However, I am also very uncomfortable with how far in debt our country currently is (to countries like China!). I think that the economic policies of the last 8 years has been a lot like those homeowners who got mortgages they could not really afford. We, as a country, have been living above our means with the tax cuts. The economy didn't need the "stimulation" of those tax cuts - the small amount they *may* have helped wasn't worth the damage they caused to the deficit. We need to find a way to balance the budget as soon as possible. The deeper we get into this hole, the harder it will be to get out and we are ultimately leaving that burden behind to our children. I am also really uncomfortable with that. Again, I'm not sure what the answer is - do we leave things the way they are and wait for the economy to get better before raising taxes? Perhaps - but we have to look at what is happening to the federal debt in the meantime.

One big thing that I believe needs to be done is to end the Iraq war as quickly as we can without being irresponsible about it. I don't think the right answer is to jerk our troops out of there on day one of the new administration, but I also don't think it is reasonable to expect us to stay for 100 years. Our military interests lie in Afghanistan and Pakistan right now. Unfortunately, I feel like we have wasted a large sum of money in Iraq when that money could have been much more intelligently spent combating the true terrorist cells and, if needed, the countries that harbor them. I'm no military expert so my opinions here could be totally wrong, but I think that a HUGE chunk of our current economic problem is this war. Complaining about it now doesn't do much good, but I hope that future administrations can look back on this example and avoid making these mistakes in the future.

As for the subprime mortgage crisis - what a mess. The federal government in general is to blame for the regulation aspect of the crisis. I'm no expert on this, so you may want to take some of this with a grain of salt and if anyone notes a mistake, please feel free to correct me.

From what I understand, the fed is responsible for overseeing the regulation of these mortgage backed securities, but instead of doing it themselves, they enlisted private corporations to do it for them, ignoring that these private corporations had a conflict of interest. The regulators were responsible determining how risky the securities actually are. Instead of doing this they used private corporations to "rate" these securities. This rating is generally acknowledged to convey the amount of risk inherent in the investment. By privatizing the regulation out to these rating companies, the government lost a key piece of oversight because they (and investors) took these ratings at face value. The problem is that the ratings made these securities look MUCH safer than they were, so people invested in them in droves because not only were they "safe" according to their rating, they were also a whole lot cheaper and promised bigger returns than other investments of the same "safety" rating. It made them seem to good to be true, and most people know that what seems too good to be true probably is.

Anyway, that was the government's role. I don't *think* that the president has that much control over the fed, so I am not entirely sure of how responsible Bush and the rest of Congress are for this lack of oversight - but I think that the general push toward deregulation made it seem more reasonable for the fed to use these private companies. From what I understand, pretty much everyone turned a blind eye to this until it was too late.

Of course while the federal government should have checked out these ratings, other people were certainly at fault including: Mortgage Brokers (for selling people loans that they HAD to know would fail), Real Estate Agents (for encouraging buyers to buy larger houses than they could afford), Lenders (for buying the risky mortgages), Investors (for taking the ratings at face value), and let's not forget the delusional home buyers who signed on the dotted line for a mortgage that a grain of common sense should have told them was crazy.

It just all got out of hand - it's like a kid who drinks and tries drugs at a party - "Everyone's doing it, it must be fine. We can't all get in trouble." The government should have stepped in, but people should also have a little more sense.





~Ashley~




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~Ashley~

Lilypie 1st Birthday Ticker

iVillage Member
Registered: 10-08-2008
Sat, 10-18-2008 - 11:40am
I'm glad you said this.

 

iVillage Member
Registered: 10-08-2008
Sat, 10-18-2008 - 11:41am

I love teachers but earnings are based on

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-03-2008
Sat, 10-18-2008 - 11:45am
Maybe if your mortgage is 3,000 a month, and the tax on your property is 20,000 a year. We should be so fortunate to make over 250,000 a year!
iVillage Member
Registered: 01-12-2008
Sat, 10-18-2008 - 11:55am

"No, you're right, teaching is actually a talent that not many rocket scientists would have. Good teachers, ones who can inspire children to love learning for learning's sake, to be intellectually curious for the rest of their lives, those ones are few and far between."

My thoughts exactly!



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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Sat, 10-18-2008 - 1:43pm

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I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-09-2007
Sat, 10-18-2008 - 1:55pm
I couldn't have said it better myself!!
Jess


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iVillage Member
Registered: 08-30-2004
Sat, 10-18-2008 - 2:13pm

"If you increase the taxes on higher incomes it will trickle down. "


It hasn't, and it won't.

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