On Spending
Posted by Will Shaver on 01 Mar 2009 at 06:51 am | Tagged as: Life
“The great irony of where we are today is that we had a Bush-Obama big-spending program that was bipartisan in its nature. We got big spending under Bush, now we’ve got big spending under Obama.”
-Newt Gingrich
Prior to the election I long maintained that we were really being presented with the following options:
a) Tax me at a high rate and spend the money killing people.
b) Tax me at a high rate and spend the money helping people.
While I’m not too happy with the first part of either of these two options, the second half was clear. I’d rather have a big spending on building back home than bombing somewhere else.
It sure beats “tax me at a high rate but don’t tax the people in whose hands you wish to concentrate the wealth, and then spend the money you don’t have bombing people.”
I had a discussion today about the Bush presidency and his long string of failures. This person I was talking with was of the Opinion that Obama is the worst president we’ve ever elected. I countered that the honor for a modern president goes to Geo. W. Bush, (Unless you consider W. Wilson a modern president). The “O-man” is still in contention, however, we should probably give him a few more years to catch up.
Both presidents are/were “way big” into taxes, but Bush’s version was to tax us via devaluing our dollar – arguably a bit less honest. In addition to every dollar we knew we were paying in taxes under Bush, every dollar we managed to hang onto is worth less – a lot less. According to several sources, the dollar fell in value at least 41% during his “reign.” In my bracket, that is an effective tax rate of over 70%! Ouch.