ALPERN AT LARGE-Talking Head #1: “Pssssst! Heard about the way we can raise taxes to balance our (federal/state/local/fill in the blank) governmental budget deficit? There’s growing support for it!”
Talking Head #2: “Pssssst, right back at ya! We consumers have our own personal debts to pay down first!”
Talking Head #3: “And how about us banks? I know you Occupy Wall Street folks hate us, but we’re now on the hook for all the overspending Main Street did, (link) and we’ve been downgraded by Standard and Poor’s!”
Talking Head #1: “To hell with you banks and to hell with Standard and Poor’s—you all fiddled while the world’s credit burned over the past decade with the subprime mortgage messing things up! Thank goodness we’ve got the Dodd/Frank bill to prevent you thieving bastards from doing this again!”
Talking Head #3: “Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank? Those two are the real bastards in the subprime mortgage mess, and all they’ve done is to throw new unnecessary regulation when those two could have followed our already-sufficient rules years ago when they were overseeing Fannie and Freddie. They just covered their tracks, and both have now fled Congress in shame! (Link)
Talking Head #2: “Too bad Dodd, Frank and all the creeps in Washington and other levels of government aren’t stuck with the crumbs we have to live off of. Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment are what we’re living off of—and don’t think that unemployment is really less than 9%, because when you add UNDERemployment that number is up to 25%! (Link)
Talking Head #1: “Which is all the more reason why we need to have the idle rich fat cats in the 1% pay their fair share of taxes while the rest of us suffer through this Great Recession, Great Depression or whatever you want to call it!”
Talking Head #3: “Oh, yeah? Well, it might be time to grow up and smell the coffee, because that 1% already pays a monster share of taxes to cover all the freebies that up to 40% of all Americans enjoy … but if it makes you feel any better, those “Wall Street fatcats” are facing pay cuts, (link) and what do you think THAT will do for our deficit once the big sugar daddy is gone?”
Talking Head #2: “Well, you’ve got no sympathy from me about the fat cats, but it does make the argument that everyone needs to pay something so that we’re not putting our eggs into one basket!
Talking Head #1: “Which is the beauty of California Governor’s tax plan—it raises taxes on the very rich but also has a sales tax so that everyone pays into the system!”
Talking Head #2: “Oh, and that is just sooooo reassuring, considering that our tax money is being spent sooooo well! Like the way we’re giving UC administrative fatcats huge raises while college tuition rates are going up! (Link) http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/02/local/la-me-uc-raises-20111202
Talking Head #3: “To say nothing of homeowners getting dumped on for the financial burden to repair their own sidewalks in Los Angeles! (Link) http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/28/local/la-me-sidewalks-20111128 Are THEY all part of the idle rich 1%?”
Talking Head #1: “Actually, we probably COULD raise another billion a year from the 1% to pay for those sidewalks NOW!”
Talking Head #2: “Maybe, but would that money actually GO to fixing the sidewalks and roads? Or would it go to public sector union fatcats who’ve decided they’ll be the upper middle-class 5-10% right below that 1%, but at taxpayer expense and with money chucked away to connected L.A. insiders!”
The Rest of Us, getting a collective headache that acetaminophen and ibuprofen just aren’t touching:
“You three may ALL be right AND wrong at the same time. We’ll need more revenue, and taxes are probably it’s easier to approve if everyone pays, but if there’s no assurance the revenue will be spent well, you can kiss taxes goodbye.
It’s pretty horrible, painful and miserable, but we may have to have a few more years of cutbacks and transparency before we can really pull off the governmental reform needed to restore taxpayer confidence in government to get our economy and revenue efforts back on track.”
(Ken Alpern is a former Boardmember of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Vice Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected]. . He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.) –cw
Tags: taxes, increasing taxes, fat cats, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Dodd/Frank
CityWatch
Vol 9 Issue 97
Pub: Dec 6, 2011