Posted by antonsirius on 7/27/2011 2:48:00 AM (view original):
Posted by silentpadna on 7/26/2011 12:26:00 PM (view original):
With Obama's warchest, I find it difficult to see a scenario where we are not stuck with 4 more years of ......
Much to my own dismay. I'll be successful either way because my life doesn't depend on who is president, but I do envision myself working much later into my life that I had planned, and he's a huge part of it....especially when the tipping point is reached and the only remaining answer will be to monetize the debt. That will hurt everybody much worse than the "draconian" cuts of entitlement programs.
Obama is not at all a huge part of that, sorry. You want to point a finger at anyone for delaying your retirement, point it at the fine folks on Wall Street.
Growth of my retirement accounts are not my focus (on this particular point), although it's an important issue in and of itself. The only reason a regular Joe like me has a retirement account based on ownership in the first place is to hedge my risk against inflation. For 100+ years, the stock market has always been the best vehicle to do that because you can't find a 20-year window or longer where the market doesn't grow, despite its downturns.
The Obama/liberal finger pointing (by me anyway) is directed at the fact that the only real way "out" of this mess will have to be to print more money, which will invariably lead to high inflation and interest rates.
It's the inflation that will hurt the retirement accounts more than anything. The growth part of the retirement accounts will be hurt because businesses will not be able to grow when they spend their next marginal dollar on taxes, rather than investing.
If you want to point the finger at "Wall Street", be my guest. I'm not denying there are shady insider deals going on, or that that hurts people like me. I just think it pales in comparison to what's coming.
The problem is government spending, pure and simple. By both sides of the spectrum. Only one side wants to use this particular crisis to deal with "raising revenue" - despite the idea that raising taxes and/or closing loopholes has no guarantee of doing any such thing. For the record, I'm am
for closing some of the loopholes out there, but absolutely against the idea that raising taxes on those above 250K/yr simply to "pay more of their fair share". There is a point in the "progressivity" of the tax code where the next dollar spent to earn a dime (10% return) becomes a nickel instead and then is not worth the effort or risk. This slows economic activity down. If I have a choice to spend a dollar now to earn a nickel, or wait and spend it next year to earn a dime, which do you think I would do? I realize some people's thresholds are different, but at some point, the risk and effort are not worth it.
Back when the highest marginal tax rate was 90%, if you were in the bracket, what incentive is there to invest the next dollar into earning more? Not spending effort is actually worth something too. If I was a service provider, and I found myself up against that marginal rate, it would be worth a lot more to me to spend liesure time with my family than to spend the same effort to 10 cents on the dollar that I spent to make 60 cents earlier. Obviously the days of a tax bracket like that are over, but the concept of how tax rates affect activity is illustrated. You may say, as a lot of folks do, what's the real difference between 35% and 39.6%? Well, maybe not much to you and me, but to those savvy in business, it might be the tipping point between expansion, holding fast, or deciding to move to somewhere better for the risk. There going to be some segment that it affects and some people will lose jobs or not be hired to one that would have been there.
No, I don't want another 4 years of someone telling me that we need to spend like this and take as much revenue from the "fat cats" as we can to pay for everything. I like wealth. I like the idea that I may be able to attain it. I haven't (yet), and I may not, but I like the idea that I have a chance to do it. I also like the fact that because wealth is created in the first place, for now there is a job for me to take care of my family with, so even if I do not become wealthy, I benefit from wealth.