My Life As A Dog

It has been said time and time again that there are only two things in this life that are for certain… Death and Taxes.  I wonder if death would not be so certain if we were not “taxed to death.”   I am in that middle ground group of people.  I earn too much to get any of the tax deduction / credit benefits, but I don’t earn enough to be considered wealthy.   After doing my taxes, I calculated that if I were to earn $9,000 less than I do now, my 2008 income statement would have netted the same amount.  I would have paid less taxes and gained more credits.  There is something wrong with a system that removes motivation for earning more.Ahh, but who do I have to be upset with?  I can’t take my frustrations out on anyone or anything except for an intangible object called the government.  So, I just keep on going.  Moving forward and paying my taxes all while becoming one day closer to death.  Things that are for certain… death, taxes and that I will be walking the dogs as soon as I finish typing this blog entry. 

As I was walking the dogs this morning, I was thinking.  I have been down before.  My finances were not what I wanted them to be.  My first thought was, “what am I going to do to fix this.”  My solution was to cut back, save more and be smarter with my spending.  It worked.  It was tough for a while.  But now, I know that I fixed it.  Still now, there are things that are not the way I want them to be with my finances.  I am making it better on my own.  The point is that to make things better, I know that I have to do something.  I may have to go without now so I can have what I want later.  But, I am the one who has to do the work to make my family better.

This nation seems to have a lot of people who have houses worth less than they paid, in debt, without a job, or some other hardship.  This group of people have their hands held high screaming “save me!”  They want someone else to solve their problem(s).  Enough of those people are waiting for Barack to be their savior.  From the punk on the street yelling, “Obama will have yo badge!” to the officer to the guy with the $700,000 house that is worth half that. 

The more I read about the stimulus package, the more I realized that our new president thinks that spending money is the answer to stimulating the economy.  $100 to clean a park or $100 to the poor or $100 to clean up a school that is not in use… it does not matter as long as we are spending.  Too bad.  This is not likely to work.  I hope I am wrong though.  Because if it does not work, we’ll be $1,000,000,000,000 more in debt and have nothing to show for it.

In trying to scare us into backing this plan, Dave Obey writes:

The economy is in such trouble that, even with passage of this package, unemployment rates are expected to rise to between eight and nine percent this year. Without this package, we are warned that unemployment could explode to near twelve percent. With passage of this package, we will face a large deficit for years to come. Without it, those deficits will be devastating and we face the risk of economic chaos. Tough choices have been made in this legislation and fiscal discipline will demand more tough choices in years to come.

In translation, we are in trouble and this plan is not going to be the answer.  With the package we are going to have a large deficit, high unemployment and there will be more … of something to come.  This paragraph reads as a scare tactic and promises little.  If we pass this package, things are still going to be bad.

A lot of attention has been given in the media about the O’bama stimulus package.  It is easy to hear threats of what will happen if this does not get passed.  It is equally easy to hear what will happen if it does.  So I found a copy of the press release that details the plan from the US House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations dated January 15, 2009. 

My dogs could care less about the package.  They’d be more interested in what kind of dog gets to live in the white house, but quite frankly, they don’t care about that either.  I thought that even though I can do little about getting the passed or not, I should still shy away from being the ‘dog’ and understand this a little more.  Over the next few posts, I will give my comments as I read it…

The economy is in a crisis not seen since the Great Depression.
Credit is frozen, consumer purchasing power is in decline, in the last four months the country has lost 2 million jobs and we are expected to lose another 3 to 5 million in the next year.
Conservative economist Mark Zandi was blunt: “the economy is shutting down.”

This is the start of the summary written by a Democrat who supports the bill.  I find if humorus (for lack of a better word) that he decided to quote the conservative “Mark Zandi” when it benefits him…  More later as I read