We’re constantly told that taxes don’t matter to business and investors, but listen to that noted supply-side economist, Alec Baldwin. The actor recently rebuked New York Governor David Paterson for threatening to try to help close the state’s $7 billion budget deficit by canceling a 35% tax credit for films shot in the Big Apple.  “I’m telling you right now,” Mr. Baldwin declared, “if these tax breaks are not reinstated into the budget, film production in this town is going to collapse, and television is going to collapse and it’s all going to go to California.” Well, well. Apparently taxes do matter, at least when it comes to filming “30 Rock” in Manhattan.

Well, lookie there – Alec doesn’t just play a Republican on TV! Or was this some pseudo live-art project he’s working on where he extends his character to enhance his method acting skillzzzzzzzz.  What – you mean businesses would move locations based on tax penalties or lack of credits to their tax collections. You don’t say! (Eye ROLL!)

The reality of it is that many people have a conservative mindset, they just assume they are liberal because they’re not thinking in terms of reality. Like when 90% of their supporting a liberal candidate is because of “social issues” when in fact most decisions/legislative propositions are about 10% social issues and 90% economic/business/tax issues. Or when “celebrity-soapbox” liberals get on Republican politicians about too many tax cuts and benefits for business but then turn around and complain when it’s their industry’s turn to get cut out of the tax cut benefit. And this is an industry that pays salaries at a minimum of $20 million a picture – for just the actors! I don’t hear of any CEOs getting paid a $20 million base salary. But, gee, it sure is Corporate America really ripping off the public by providing jobs, jobs, jobs, good and services, products and OH, jobs!

This is the nature and #1 problem of our economy with businesses making decisions based on tax benefits or penalties. These punitive tax laws should be abolished so that businesses can get back to making decisions based on promoting growth, improving customer service and supporting their workforce/operation. As Ed at HotAir notes:

Now, when Baldwin applies that lesson outside of his industry to the economy as a whole, he will come to the inevitable conclusion that Deadbeatonomics is the worst prescription for an ailing economy, and that lower taxes and investment encouragement are needed

Maybe Stephen Baldwin has done something even better in Hollywood than staring in Bio-Dome - turning his brother into a closeted Republican???

And just for fun, here’s a quote from Alec’s alter-(and better???)ego Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock:

I wish I had a Princeton reunion right now. Wipe that smug smile off Michelle Obama’s face.

Also, TryingtoGrok had Tom Coburn hitting the nail on the head with some of this frivolous spending.

We are going to spend $448 million to build the Department of Homeland Security a new building. We have $1.3 trillion worth of empty buildings right now, and because it has been blocked in Congress we can’t sell them, we can’t raze them, we can’t do anything, but we are going to spend money on a new building here in Washington. We are going to spend another $248 million for new furniture for that building; a quarter of a billion dollars for new furniture. What about the furniture the Department of Homeland Security has now? These are tough times. Should we be buying new furniture? How about using what we have? That is what a family would do. They would use what they have. They wouldn’t go out and spend $248 million on furniture.

Bottom line – this porkulus plan is going to cost an average of $10,000 from each household in America. Do you have an extra $10,000 you’d like to just hand over to the govt. and never see any of the benefit of it? I find it hard to believe if any people would be happy with that scenario. And if you need a lesson in how govt. spending doesn’t cure economic woes, then take a look at Japan in the 1990s.

The recession that happened in 2001/2002 was helped by the 2003 Bush tax cuts, the roaring US economy in the late 90s was helped in part to the driving interest of dotcom stocks but also the 1997 Tax Reform bill. I don’t think tax cuts are the only answer but at least we should have temporary ones put in place to give immediate and direct relief to families as well as business to help them keep employees or create new jobs. Not spending $500 million on the National Endowment for the Arts or HIV testing.  If we’re going to have to spend money under this administration let’s make it about funding more manufacturing, infrastructure and technology. 95% of that bill should go toward those initatives – not just 5%!

Not all of the news out there is just about the incoming president. Some people are using this time to reflect on where we’ve been the last eight years and what Pres. Bush did good as well as bad. And SURPRISE, not everyone is throwing stones, snickers, boos and jeers. Remember, we are all human and have imperfections. Presidents make some mistakes that are big, some that are small but none which are intentional. I don’t think any President takes the office with the goal to do harm to this nation, or turn its citizens against each other, or put them in a unfavorable light to the rest of the world. Despite President Bush’s mistakes, there were some successes. To deny this would be a skewed perspective – or what many conservatives call is Bush Derangement Syndrome. While I don’t think most of President Bush’s critics suffer from BDS, I do think that he got the brunt end of the stick more often than he deserved. Perspective is everything sometimes and it will be interesting to see how people judge President Bush in 10, 20, even 50 years. If Iraq & Afghanistan become self-preserving, capitalistic & democratic economies – President Bush should be given the credit he deserves. If they don’t I’m sure many of my friends when we are in our 70s will mock him without hesitation – and they will be justified. But remember it was President Truman who left office with a 20% rating and an environment much like the one we have now. It was President Lincoln who died with half of the country hating him so much so that one of his critics assassinated him for it. Now they are seen as a couple of our greatest presidents. I’m not saying that President Bush will be looked at as a great president, but to say he is one of the worst is to say so with tunnel vision (and ignore the entire Carter administration IMO).

To me, his best moments :

• The creation of Homeland Security
• Cleaning up Carter’s mess by leading the war against terrorism in Iraq & Afghanistan (this doesn’t make me pro-war BTW)
• The Bush tax cuts
• His rejection of the pathetic Kyoto global warming treaty (not because of global warming, but because of it’s exception to China & India)
• His support of Israel’s statehood
• Appointing a diverse cabinet (I’m a fan of Condi Rice!)
• Appointments of Roberts & Alito
• Support of faith-based programs
• Supporting the surge in Iraq even though it was the extremely unpopular thing to do at the time.

Now, I’m not 100% President Bush fan.  I leave out Katrina because I blame the govts. of LA and New Orleans more than the federal govt.(this is just my opinion, you may think I’m wrong – but honestly deal with it, my opinion on this isn’t changing). And everyone, including Mayor Ray Nagin seemed to get their act together the second time around – therefore they should be given credit for that.  His downfalls to me were:

• His communication skills (this is key when you are president and if he had done a better job at this I don’t think people would be harping on him as much as they do)
• Supporting No Child Left Behind (created by Ted Kennedy; just giving credit that this is not “a failed Republican” policy as many people incorrectly attribute it as)
• Supporting the $700++ billion bailout
• His low support/funding for science education programs.

I think how another blogger quoted Teddy Roosevelt is the most appropriate I’ve seen in the past few days to show the gratitude we feel for President Bush’s service:

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Leaders are put in positions of leadership to make the hard decisions, not win popularity contests. To deny President Bush’s leadership ability because he made decisions you don’t agree with doesn’t make him any less of the leader that he truly was. He recognized time and time again that the decisions made under his administration may not have been the popular ones at the time, but that they were hard decisions to make in order to protect the people of the land he was sworn in to protect as President. To that I say THANK YOU, President Bush. Here are some people that can more eloquently express this point. In fact, I’ve included both liberals and conservatives to illustrate that even those who were strong Bush critics can see there were some good years and decisions made by our outgoing president.

Liberal Reflections:
http://www.clareified.com/2009/01/18/farewell-to-president-george-w-bush/
http://www.slate.com/id/2209133/?from=rss

Conservative links:
http://jameshudnall.com/blog.php/site/comments/farewell-bush/
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/01/20/goodbye-mr-bush/
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1232292908169
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/bruce-anderson/bruce-anderson-history-will-vindicate-george-bush-1419292.html

And to those critics who say Obama’s administration has brought a new era of “change,” and were move to tears by the words in his inauguration speech, I offer this little video demonstrating how little then they paid attention to what President Bush had been saying to the American people the last 7 years.

Here’s Peter’s latest interview on Yahoo! Finance where he discusses the current proposal to get us out of this mess – the Porkulus.  Also with the article is a great video interview where he explains how pertinent for our economic policy to focus on freeing up capital and saving.

The problem, he says, is the government is trying to perpetuate a “phony economy” based on borrowing and spending. With the U.S. consumer tapped out, the government is “now taking on the mantle” of consumer of last resort, he continues, predicting the bond bubble will soon burst – if it hasn’t already – ultimately leading to a collapse of the dollar and an “inflationary depression worse than anything any of us have ever seen.”

If nothing else, Schiff is an nonpartisan critic of American policymakers, comparing President Bush to Herbert Hoover and President Obama to FDR, and neither in a favorable way.

The reason I listen to someone like Schiff is because if you see in the video he’s stuck to his guns for nearly 3 years even while everyone else in the room was demanding he was wrong and some even laughing at him. Well, look who has the last laugh I guess. This is why I think the most humble/confident guy, not the loudest or arrogant,  is usually the right guy. Why because he’s done his homework and he gives it to you straight. He’s not looking to sound super-smart or to get that zinger sound-bite. He’s just presenting it like “here are the facts, folks. It may not be pretty but it is what it is so we’ve got to own up to it and deal.”

But I think govt. is too busy looking at reality to understand we’ve just got to accept that we’re not going to get out of this right away and that spending like we have been the last decade is not the answer. It’s the American way though. I think Americans are too scared to go through “tough” times – you know times where they have to save their paycheck, not spend their entire income, take out multiple lines of credit to stay above water and keep debt at bay.  So instead of owning up to it and chinning up to go through a more fiscally responsible time, they vote in politicians who’s policy is “having a financial crisis – we’ll here’s the solution, let’s take more money out of the economy (or borrow an insane amount of debt that we’ll have to pay back for years and years through higher taxes) and spend even 10x the amount of money.”

If you were a credit counselor and you had a client that was to the point of suicide because they couldn’t get a hold of their finances. To the point that what they made didn’t even cover the interest, let alone the principle, of their credit/debt lines. What would you advise them to do? Spend more? Yeah right.

It’s time for Americans to realize that we’re in a recession. It’s time to focus on saving  and paying down our debt. It’s time for the govt. to start giving temporary income tax cuts to taxpayers so that they have a chance to save that money. It’s time to give business temporary tax cuts to reinvest in their businesses or so that they don’t have to layoff more workers. The current porkulus does not equal production and will only make things 1,000x worse down the line. Buckle up I think it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Obama: We are not going to get relief by turning back to the very same policies that for the last eight years have doubled the national debt.”

Fred 5676:  You mean OUT OF CONTROL SPENDING??  Yeah, let’s do some more of that.

No joke. Tax cuts would help give families and business immediate (key word here: IMMEDIATE) relief. What if a temporary income tax break of say 50% were enacted next week. And that tax break was only for a set time (end of 2009) so that it would truly serve its purpose in helping out in an emergency economic situation. Let’s look at my paycheck. I paid about $300 in just income taxes every paycheck. If I got a 50% break that means I’d have $150 more every week. I would turn around and either spend that money (which would increase the economy), invest that money in a banking account (which would increase the economy) or pay down some of my debt (which would help the economy with reducing debt). How then can you sit there arguing that tax breaks don’t provide economic growth. Honestly, WTF, Barry????  It’s not tax breaks that got us into this mess so quit trying to pin up all your problems on the Bush administration’s tax policies.

If you’re going to blame the last eight years on anything it’s spending! And you don’t seem to be opposed to that. In fact you seem to put on the earmuffs anytime somebody brings up questioning $1 trillion dollars in frivolous spending. Just because you now talk in a preacher’s voice doesn’t make the argument any more convincing.

And the other thing, I can’t stand it when politicians talk about the “best economists” out there. Just because you only surround yourself with Keynesian nutjob-economy theorists who tell you whatever you want to hear all the time (and nothing but) DOESN’T make them the best economists around.  The Keynesian-theory has been discredited by years of analysis. What makes me laugh the most is that its biggest supporters are critics of supply-side economics because they say “trick-down economics” don’t work. Ummm, riddle me this – what the FUCK do you think govt. spending is then – are you saying that’s NOT a form of trickle down?  Don’t be fooled. The Keynesian economics that Obama is peddling is taking money out of the economy (or from your pocket either by taxes or by your employer collecting taxes from your paycheck) and then using that revenue pool to then distribute money how they see fit – money from the top getting dispersed downward. If it was really a bottom-up policy you’d want to give the people at the bottom (taxpayers) directly more money in their pocket first, not take money from them and trickle it down through pork projects to your party’s biggest industry supporters/contributors. So, how do you implement a bottom-up impact immediately…drum roooooooooooll: a tax cut. Not a tax credit. A TAX CUT.

There’s a book I’m reading by Henry Hazlitt called Economics in One Lesson. It’s a great book. It doesn’t even talk about political parties. It just breaks things down to the simplest formula when it comes to economic policy. Perhaps I should send Barry my copy - I think he needs it more than me. Hazlitt states that good economists look looks beyond the immediate effect. Bad economists look just at the immediate effect. So when Barry is just preeeeachin’ away about the immediate affect, and refuses to answer questions about tax increases, lack of capital, and the weak prospectus of job creation as a result of the porkulus I think that would qualify his “best economists around” as bad economists according to Hazlitt. Hazlitt’s book is fascinating and a real eye-opener. If you’ve never heard of the broken window fallacy, click here for an excerpt- it’ll put in reality how the govt.’s “job creation” isn’t really creation of production at all. Hazlitt’s book helps break it down how truly govt. spending or “public works” actually mean taxes and taxes discourage production as well as capital growth. Here’s one excerpt from the book that I think rings true to this situation of crazy govt. spending (ie, using more taxpayer money):

It (they group proposing govt. spending programs) sees the people into whose hands the capital is put; it forgets those who would otherwise have it. It sees the project to which capital is granted; it forgets the projects from which capital is thereby withheld. It sees the immediate benefit to only one group; it overlooks the losses to the other group, and the net loss to the community as a whole.

If you don’t have time to read Hazlitt’s book, in the meantime the Cato Institute also breaks it down so that a teenager could understand it.  Watch it:

Ultimately, I’m loving this. It’s meltdown, finger wagging, and preacher-voicin’-mania this week.