Fight For Your Own Money, Please

Yesterday, I spent the evening watching talking heads speak about Tea Bagging. I watched Rachel Maddow giggle with glee as she marveled at the protestors ignorance of the colloquial meaning of Tea Bagging. I listened as Keith Olberman derided the Tea Baggers as puppets of the grand corporate marketing scheme. I even witnessed Anderson Cooper admit to not being able to effectively talk while being Tea Bagged. And it was all good stuff.

But with all the Liberal pundits spouting off about the hilarious double entendre of Tea Bagging, I had to stop and wonder exactly what they were protesting. Just like every protest, some random, non-related people showed up to join in the protesting fun. Racists freaks, anti-Government bums, Christian "Rights" groups, and even pro-war protesters (whatever the fuck that means) showed up to join in the fun. I swear, it's like a gay rights march in reverse. The problem I had though is that the talking heads tended to focus on those fringe characters to deride the protestors as Crazy or Insane when the fringe participants were hardly representatives of the majority there. They weren't shunned in most cases, mind you, but I hardly think one man carrying a racist, anti-Obama poster counts as the totality of the message the larger group was trying to convey.

I'm willing to set aside a few of the fallacies of this "grass-roots" movement to examine the concept. Sure, it wasn't a grass roots movement, it was backed by and supported by corporate lobbyist firms. And sure, many of the protestors were protesting Obama's bailout package… even though they supported Bush's less-stringent version just a few months ago. Putting that all aside, do these people have a point? Will the raising of taxes on the wealthiest Americans (which, by the by, would not affect the overwhelmingly vast majority of the protestors in the least) really do anything to save our country? And will these bailout packages make a difference?

In my opinion… well, I have no idea if the bailouts will save us. Finance is not my area, and it's obviously not the area of most of the talking heads on TV. Most of the experts seem to think they will help, but I've grown weary of partisan experts anyway, so it's hard to say. What I can say is that if you get a chance to watch last night's Daily Show, you should probably do so, as their guest did a great job at explaining why the past 10 years of deregulation have led us to this point, and how re-regulating industries rife with greed can only benefit us all. If we need to bail out all the financial institutions in this country in order to reign in their practices, than so be it.

What else I know is that I'm still amazed at how easily poor and middle class Americans can be manipulated to fighting for rich people. I did not hear of many wealthy people showing up at these Tea Parties, the people that are actually affected by Obama's tax increases. Instead I saw tons of middle-class white people crying. Why? I still have no idea. Just like yesterday's post about the fight for Marriage, I am baffled at why middle-class people that will NEVER be in that top 1% of the wealth curve insist on fighting for rich people's right to have, keep and make more money than them. It's as if they are still disillusioned into believing they'll be there some day, if only they buy enough lottery tickets…

I just don't understand is all. We've got A LOT to fight for in our lives, and these people choose to fight over some one else's money. Let the rich people complain about their money themselves! Stop fighting about what isn't yours in the first place and get back to working on things that will actually affect your quality of life.

Lamentation For Taxes And The Economy

I'm very frustrated lately with the entire issue of economic stimulus. It seems to be a war completely at odds with itself. The federal level of the government is able to do a few things that can help the American public out (and a few things that screw us over… thanks AIG-fiasco), and they can "finance" that aid through foreign investment and by simply printing more money. Meanwhile, the state and local level governments are running into the same economic "crisis" level as everyone else, yet they don't have the ability to simply make money appear. Instead, they have to take money out of their constituents pockets to make ends meet, who are in turn simply trying to make ends meet.

As an example of why this is frustrating me, let's look at the great state of Illinois. Obama's recent stimulus bill has already started to benefit many of us, myself included, by padding our pay checks with anywhere from $10-25 each pay day. Some say that's just silliness, but really it makes a bit more sense than a lump of $500 or so, even though it adds up to roughly the same. We'll actually spend that money because we consider $20 to be basically negligible. It doesn't make sense to us to throw $20 into the savings account, so we go ahead and go to the movies or buy a t-shirt or something with that money, which helps to fuel the economy. Personally, I'm a fan of this method.

Here's the catch in Illinois though, and probably many other states. Our Illinois State Income Tax is 3% flat. Generally speaking too, with your standard deduction on your yearly taxes, you aren't getting a dime back from the state, and if you are, most of us don't think it's even worth filing for. However, our new Governor has decided that he needs to hike our State Income Tax to 4.5%. Guess how much that tax hike works out to be for the average worker? If you guessed $10-25 a pay check, well then you're a smart cookie!

So Illinois wants to make our economic stimulus work out to a zero sum game. In theory, we'll receive a much higher Standard Deduction, but let's be real, states aren't in the business of giving money back to their people. Being a Liberal, I should be excited that my state wants more taxes, because that should mean more programming or better transportation or a CTA that's worth a damn. But I'm not excited about this measure, because all this does is "balance the budget," which is really another way of saying "raises for state legislators."

The economy will not improve if we get all the money that's coming back to us taken away by another entity. Point blank. Here in Chicago, the city thought it'd be fun sell off all the parking meters in the city to an outside company, who promptly raised the cost to park and increased the hours we are required to pay for those spots. Want to park on a street near downtown? Perfect, that'll be $3.50 a hour please. Want to take advantage of the Sunday parking holidays to go shopping in another neighborhood (and spur the economy…)? Oh, that's cool and all, but now you have to pay to park on Sundays. $2 an hour. Until 10pm.

These aren't things that will spark our economy! Instead of doing what we are asking our major corporations to do, which is cut down on expenses and needless spending to maintain profitability, our local governments are simply raises prices. Ask ANY company what happens when you raise prices in a recession. Go ahead. I'll give you a minute to do a quick Google search and check it out. That's right! Your sales drop and profits disappear! It's like magic! The only difference here is that when it comes to governments and taxes, we don't get the option to not shop there anymore. Well, I suppose we do, but there's a HUGE barrier to doing so.