Think about how “universal health care” became “health care reform”. Now watch how a jobs bill becomes a tax cuts bill with the help of Obama’s greasey magic.

I suspect that after the November elections the “jobs” part of this bill will cease to be talked about, and the “tax cuts” portion will morph into some form of extension of Bush’s tax-cuts for the rich.

Always remember the theme of the Obama administration: ordinary people ARE NOT to benefit.

I have yet to see where tax cuts provide jobs. Anyone? Do you have an example or know of any elite person that has rec’d. the tax cuts to start business hiring?

Anybody? Come on, don’t be shy.

Oh, and I forgot to add: make sure to get out there and vote for Dem candidates this November. Obama and his party have a secret jobs program to help us; they’ll implement it RIGHT AFTER the elections. If the Dems don’t win big, then Obama will be FORCED to give the Repubs all kinds of tax cuts…

Alternatively, we can try another tax cut.

Hey…that’s a really good idea. More money for the banks, too. This economy will be booming by mid-September…

Why do we even HAVE a Labor Day holiday anymore? I think the focus should be shifted to pregnant wimmin in the current anti employment climate.

The Republicans have no ideas, just “tax cuts.”
Now the Democrats are coping them.

That should turn around the November elections.

Well, maybe in China or Thailand or….any of the other countries we have “free trade’ agreements with

Jane has a fresh cross-post ready: Time to Raise Hell About the Catfood Commission

Wouldn’t expect much from the Democritters

A tax cut is good. I’ll use mine for a new car, wait that doesn’t help much as it’s made in Japan. I’ll also buy a new computer, but that doesn’t help much as it’s made in China. I can always buy some new clothes, but they’re made in Indonesia. Darn, I guess the US is just screwed.

This, yet again, shows how vacuous the economic team at the WH, and the WH really are. Intractable, dogmatic and incapable of learning from history or use of common sense. My pathetic mantra is, how much worse it’d be under McCain/Palin, but that’s running thin right now.

The whole business of our elites is to loot. They have zero interest in passing legislation that actually works. At best, it either gives them something else to loot or provides distraction for looting elsewhere.

I’m sick of hearing about “small businesses”. When that phrase is thrown out it’s really code for “big companies not in the Fortune 500″. The truly small entrepreneurs are not who the politicians and deficit hawks have in mind.

Look at the situation. It couldn’t be more dire for the Democrats. Down 7-10% in the Generic Congressional Ballot. Trailing 20-30% in Voter Intensity polls. Obama teetering on a plunge to Bush levels of (lack of) popularity.

And even with all of that….they STILL aren’t backing off their Cat Food Commission, and tax cuts are their preferred way to stimulate the economy. It is pointless to hope the Dems and Obama will ever not embrace right wing policy.

Obot extraordinaire Josh Marshall, says there is only one pissed off professional leftist with 8 friends. I guess the assumption is if we don’t get off our whiny asses and vote for Team Obama—we won’t be missed.

Think about how “universal health care” became “health care reform”.

Which became “Health Insurance Reform”, which became the “Health Insurance Industry Profit Guarantee and Enhancement Act of 2010″.

The small business owners I know are all on the verge of bankruptcy, if not already over that cliff.

Tax cuts next year do nothing to pay their employees, their bills, their mortgage, NOW.

What they need is customers NOW, you know, people with jobs who can buy NOW.

Creating infrastructure jobs creates workers with money in their pocket.

I’m also talking doctors with a small practice about to shut their doors NOW because their patients can’t even afford a copay, even the ones who can still afford to keep health insurance.

Tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts: are what got us where we are now, the government with no money coming in, and a giant deficit.

Which the Republicans are well aware.

Interesting idea: cut taxes on the non-existent profits of small businesses. So, where’s the revenue going to come from for these grand infrastructure projects that will put people to work? I saw this morning that B of A profits are up 21%. How about ADDITIONAL taxes on the sources of profits? We hear that big corporations are awash in cash. If that’s the case, then their upper management and CEO’s are also awash in cash. That’s where the money is. Alan Simpson should be critical of them for not supporting their nation rather than being critical of the nation’s veterans for actually taking the benefits to which they are entitled and suggesting that it is unpatriotic of them to do so. Fire Simpson! Tax the rich! Invest in infrastructure by allowing the Bush upper income tax cuts to expire.

Import Certificates. Revenue neutral and will put Americans back to work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Import_Certificates
Seeing as it is the 75th Anniversary of Social Security, instead of cutting Social Security, expand it. Look at the original 1935 economic security report, recommendation 1, employment assurance:

Since most people must live by work, the first objective in a program of economic security must be maximum employment. As the major contribution of the Federal Government in providing a safeguard against unemployment we suggest employment assurance– the stimulation of private employment and the provision of public employment for those able-bodied workers whom industry cannot employ at a given time.
http://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/ces/ces5.html

No wonder Christie Romer bailed.

When is the White House going to learn that the Republicans in Congress are not going to take the tax cut bait?

When is the White House going to learn that the Republicans in Congress are not going to take the tax cut bait?

But they almost got to kick the football last time.

A few thoughts about tax cuts. If you’re collecting unemployment (like me) they’re essentially meaningless. When I was working and we did get a tax cut, yes it put a few extra bucks in my pocket but it never did anything to affect my spending habits. As a middle class wage earner, a tax cut can be a pretty passive event.

What would be really stimulating would be a job! Especially one that offered an opportunity to utilize the skills developed over 35 years as a first line supervisor with a science degree background. And one other thing……it should pay more than 10 dollars an hour.

OT– The global financial death star of hedge funds appears to be leaving for its new centralized home in the EU:

It was Morgan Stanley who put me on the track to this brilliant solution a couple of weeks ago when they announced the launching of its first UCITS III Fund on the Firm’s FundLogic trading platform.

[..]

Since then, I’ve discovered that all the big US, and all global non-European, banks are doing the exact same thing.

They are in practice outsourcing their investment bank activity to Europe.

[..]

But the financial industry seems to have found an alternative in EU’s UCITS III Funds. (Undertakings for Collective Investments in Transferable Securities).

And the alternative is about to get even better with the introduction of UCITS IV in 2011.

In fact, it’s so good that several financial institutions are bringing their offshore accounts from places like Calman Island and Bermuda onshore – inside the EU area.

[..]

Last month it emerged the world’s third largest hedge fund, Paulson & Co, is coming to Europe.

Founder John Paulson, who made a 589% and 351% profit in his two Credit Opportunities hedge funds on the US subprime collapse, is making himself available via a UCITS fund later this year.

But neither Paulson is the first to make his skills available to retail investors via funds domiciled inside Europe.

Others are bringing Caribbean-based product onshore because of the EU’s plans to regulate hedge funds in such a way that non-EU managers, including Paulson, and offshore funds, would be barred from taking money from European investors.

One way for such managers to get around this is launching portfolios in Europe.

Marshall Wace is shifting all its Cayman Islands portfolios to Europe.

- from “Guest Post: Flight to Mystery,” Sept. 1, 2010

Service sector taxation can not be via a VAT or GST – it must be income tax. And as long as the EU insists on in-country value added, rather than world wide income less tax credits for tax paid elsewhere, they will be a zero tax area for financial service operations for the most part (we would actually determine “what would a gentleman pay” (the Brits talk like that) and we would work out the requirements so as to pay that amount – couldn’t pay zero, you know).

Caymans were useful for totally hiding profits or for double counting expense – I doubt that the folks on the Street have not found a replacement Island for that function – besides EU regulations of Financial activities is getting a better reputation than US regulation (don’t try to think about what that says about US regulation) so a hedge fund in Europe has more sales because of better regulators going for it – if that exists.

Health CARE reform? Nah, Obama always saw it and made it a health insurance reform with profit protection built in for the Big Insurers.

Or, better in tune with the times, a MOTUs Day!

We can all genuflect and grovel before their magnificance. And hope to be noticed for a job of some sort….

The Dems wouldn’t have rolled over for McCain Repub shite the way they did for Obama’s Repub shite.

Obama may not have met all expectations of his bosses, but he’s got this down pat. Form commission, stack with deficit hawks and SocSec cutters, stay the course. Get to a vote in the Senate and then it’s required in the House. Repubs and ConservaDems pass it. Obama signs it. Mission accomplished.

If you’ve ever been involved in running a small business, you have to laugh at the idea that tax cuts will inspire small business owners to hire more workers in a shitty economy, especially when errors in prediction of consumer spending are headline business news every month. Even if you currently run a small business, in which case you will laugh very quietly as you wire more money to your Chamber of Commerce.

What you do with tax break cash in a bad economy is take it and sit on it. But the “small business owner” constituency is considered so sacred to American values – and its supposed, self-appointed big-business ‘defenders’ are such big contributors – that, like the decades-old corn-ethanol swindle and “American farmers”, government giveaways are now just the cost of doing business in Washington.

I was surprised to learn, as I find many others I tell are surprised, that France’s universal health care is called – of course – “Social Security”.

It’s amazing that Social Security (uppercase) in America is considered inviolable by so many, and social security (lowercase) is considered intrinsically evil. Woodrow Wilson put it this way in 1886:

Institutions which one generation honors as only a makeshift approximation to the realization of a principle, the next generation honors as the nearest possible approximation to that principle, and the next worships as the principle itself. It takes scarcely three generations for the apotheosis.

Obot extraordinaire Josh Marshall, says there is only one pissed off professional leftist with 8 friends. I guess the assumption is if we don’t get off our whiny asses and vote for Team Obama—we won’t be missed.

That statement is completely out of context for what Josh was trying to say.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/08/overdetermined.php

You read it and decide. TPM provides a lot of valuable reporting and commentary for rationally thinking people, and they deserve our support.

Cutting Social Security is only popular with people that either don’t need it, too stupid to think or too old to remember they get it.

Anyway, Infrastructure is always a good thing and nut cases don’t care, but there a few Republicans that would jump behind it, I can see it passing especially if will bring something to their home districts. Much of the rail projects here in LA only lack funding at this point, not planning for example.

We still need to upgrade the Electric Grid and Broadband Ethernet.

So there’s plenty to do, no question. But we’re broke, some people understand that, I understand that. The first stimulus was filled with useless tax cuts and they’ll need another one. The Oil and Gas industry is already gearing up for any type of clean energy legislation talking about raising fuel prices.

Like I’ve been saying the thing is almost hopeless. Every moment you want to do something that will help the majority of Americans, they find a couple of actors and run some advert that will lie about any pending regulation.

I keep saying it, the Fed needs to do what it can with the Congress it has to work with.

At the State level we need to rebuild the party from scratch. If you don’t…. its pointless.