What Do You Think Bush Meant By His Tax-System Comments?

[Syrinx]

In his acceptance speech Thursday night, George Bush said,

“The American people deserve, and our economic future demands, a simpler, fairer, pro-growth system. In a new term, I will lead a bipartisan effort to reform and simplify the federal tax code.”

Sounds to me like he's talking about eliminating the income tax, and replacing it with a national sales tax. In other words, putting the entire national tax burden on those who are not wealthy. And he'll get it passed too, if he wins, and the Republicans still control Congress.

This is a big election.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. Flat Tax.

Grover Nordquist masturbates to the thought of it.

[Cat Atomic]

3. Yep- that's it.

[Syrinx]

4. either way, it'll be bad news for the non-wealthy

And for the country in the long run. We'll end up with the wealthy and poor, no middle class. The US will be like, well, Iraq or something.

[MissB]

7. Ayup.

That is exactly what they have in mind. Shift the burden to the working class.

[ignatius 2]

8. I agree, remember he mentioned a flat tax a few weeks ago, then on

Larry King said somehting like, this is politics, poeple put words in your mouth.

His mouth, other people's words. More like other peoples thoughts and he mimicing them. At any rate, that is what Cheney and Rove have planned.

The first four years were for starting war, the second four will be fpr continuong those wars and for raping the economy and the middle and lower class. Like locusts, they will devour everything in their path.

[Warpy]

2. Reaganomics, redux

Reagan promised us a "fairer, flatter tax," one that would be so simple we could send it in on a postcard. He eliminated all the deductions for things like medical care and credit card interest that had helped working folks, and allowed Congress to pad the whole thing with sweetheart deductions for favorite fatcat contributors. Thanks to the tremendous loss of revenue from granting such largesse to the rich, he found it necessary to hike FICA six times and use the overpayments to pad his books, NOT shore up social security the way it had been sold.

Bush will likely pull the same sort of scam. The only tax shelter people of modest means still have is the one they live in, via the home mortgage interest deduction. Bush will very likely try to abolish that to raise revenues on working people.

He will NOT be giving the billionaires a dime of tax increase.

[Tangledog]

14. I thought that was Forbes

I think it was Steve Forbes who wanted to print the 1040 on the back of a postcard. He was a flat-tax guy.

In fairness, Reagan signed a bill in 1986 that did simplify the tax code; Bill Bradley was the Senatorial mastermind. It was probably the first time I was able to do my taxes without having anxiety attacks.

Since then, it's gotten more and more complicated, thanks to the nice folks that have been running things lately and who now are going to straighten it out for us. Meaning no disrespect to our elected officials, of course, but B* is blowing smoke up his audience's ass with this one.

PS Remember Carter's "disgrace to civilization" comment? That was about the internal revenue code, too.

[Old and In the Way]

5. Exactly.

There's no free lunch, wait'll the middle/lower class Bushbots start scratching their heads wondering why their paycheck just isn't going as far as it used to. I can hear them now. "Gee, Mabel, why are we running out of money before the next paycheck? We have the same budget, our dear Leader W has cut our federal taxes (those damn Democrats are raising our state and local taxes, though) and says our economy is doing well. So why are we running out of money and making up the diffrence on the credit cards?"

[stray cat]

6. Shift tax burden even more to working americans.

At the very minimum he wants to make permanant his tax cuts and elimination of the estate tax. He is in favor of a flat tax which will shift the burden even more strongly onto lower income brackets. Pro-growth to Bush always means tax relieve to large corporations and upper income brackets ie top 2%. By calling it " simper and fairer" he thinks he can sell it to americans when it really stabs 98% of us in the back - its worked for him in the past.

The same thing goes for his tort reform. In general a good idea but not the way Bush plans on implementing it. His goal is to prevent americans from bringing any type of law suit against crooked corporations, gun manufactures etc. His goal is to protect corporations by destroying the voice of the american people.

This is a huge election.

[UTUSN]

9. The Short and the Long of It

***********QUOTE***********
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/08/25/bush_second_term/index.html

And you thought his first term was a nightmare
What Bush has planned for America if he wins.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Charles Tiefer


Aug. 25, 2004 | .... Under Bush's slogan of an "ownership society," the Republicans intend a long-term effort, using changes in Medicare, Social Security and taxes to pit better-off and worse-off Democrats against each other, offering all-but-irresistible incentives for some to desert the others -- and any progressive national coalition. .... A second-term Bush agenda will constantly impale Democrats on the dilemma of abandoning their poorer, sicker, older and minority groups, or seeing their better-off, healthier and younger members lured off to the other party. If it sounds like a political nightmare for the Democrats, that's because that's what it is planned to be. ....

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040906fa_fact

.... When the President pledges to create an “era of ownership,” he is not talking merely about encouraging people to buy their own homes and start small businesses. To conservative Republicans who understand his coded language, he is also talking about extending and expanding the tax cuts he introduced in his first term; he is talking about allowing wealthy Americans to shelter much of their income from the I.R.S.; about using the tax code to curtail the government’s role in health care and retirement saving; and, ultimately, about a vision that has entranced but eluded conservatives for decades: the abolition of the graduated income tax and its replacement with a levy that is simpler, flatter, and more favorable to rich people. ....

...the theme of ownership. He may well talk about establishing investment accounts within Social Security, as well as Retirement Savings Accounts and Lifetime Savings Accounts outside of Social Security, and health savings accounts, which his economic advisers view as a step toward individual, portable health-care coverage. .... “The biggest demographic shift in the past thirty years is not the number of people who speak Spanish; it is the number of Americans who own stocks,” Norquist told me. “It was twenty per cent of adults when Reagan was elected. Now it is sixty per cent, and seventy per cent of voters.”

...returning to a balanced budget will be even harder this time around. A decade ago, it took “tax hikes, a sharp contraction in military spending, and an unprecedented economic expansion to achieve fiscal consolidation,” the I.M.F. noted. None of those things are on the horizon now. ....

“It is the height of deception to say we can only budget till 2009 but we are going to have massive tax cuts from 2010 onward,” Gale said. “That is what the Administration has done.” ....

...a historic restructuring of the American system of government. .... If Bush’s economic agenda was fully enacted, the vast bulk of these payments wouldn’t be taxed at all, and labor would end up shouldering practically the entire burden of financing the federal government. ....

********UNQUOTE*******

[stray cat]

13. Nice sumary! How do we get it some attention?

Americans need to wake up to what Bush is really trying to accomplish while he tries to keep us focused on the "evils of John Kerry" and his "plan to keep Americans safe".

If BUSH IS ELLECTED WHO WILL KEEP 98% OF AMERICANS SAFE FROM HIM?

[stray cat]

10. Kerry/Edwards needs to dissect this for the media and Americans

What this means needs to be explained because the media and most americans don't get what it really means and most american would be against it if they understood how it would really impact them.

[unblock]

11. i don't think he's going to propose ANYTHING, he's just channelling hatred

everybody hates the irs and the tax code, so it's cheap politics to say you're going to reform it. it costs nothing and has universal support.

once you put forward an actual plan, you start running into trouble. so i don't think shrub is going to do that. he's just going to bash the current code and let people think he's going to replace it with something better.

if he still has power after january 20, then he's just loot what's left of the treasury.

[Seabiscuit]

12. Nothing.

He meant nothing. Absolutely nothing.

His entire speech meant nothing. Absolutely nothing.

His promises during the past four years to the present all meant nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Bush is a compulsive liar and bullshitter. End of story.