Re: U.S. $3500-4500 cash for clunkers program

Looks like Michigan sure showed them how they ought to willingly subject themselves to confiscatory taxes.

Now, instead of reasonable tax rates with workers paying state tax, Michigan has a liability. California has lost businesses for the same reason, along with other liberal-run states.

Basic economics escapes left-wing morons (excuse the redundancy).

If you haven't noticed, the states that are in the best economic condition today are the 22 states that have a balance budget requirement in their Constitutions?

Is it any wonder WHY the dims have always fought a balanced budget amendment to the US Constitution?

Nope. I never wondered.

No wonder at all.

Although I lived in Arkansas, which has a balanced budget requirement. Bill Clinton found a way to 'cook the books'. The next guy in the Governor's Mansion (after he'd aired it out to get the pot smell out) got whammed with having to raise taxes to cover the things Bill and Hillary had 'buried'. And impeached. That's how Mike Huckabee got to be governor. And he did the same thing with the US budget. The surplusses weren't really surplusses under the Clintons, just budgetary slieght of hand that came back to bite us in the Bush years.

Charles Grozny

No big deal. Big companies move all the time. If it saves them money, one should ask why they didn't do it 10 or 20 years ago.

Enough of the Japanese bashing. If GM has a CFO that incompetant, and not hard to believe, then another reason why GM should go down.

For it would be easier to rebuild GM from scratch than to weed out that incompetance. Which is what is a happing.

GM down over 20% on the day. I wouldn't doubt we will get an announcement this week. The one where GM will take it's first real steps in 30 years to fix the problems and to get the hell out of the taxpayers pockets.

That's not true. The companies that are owned by Toyota in the US are organized as US companies and pay state, federal and local taxes, just like companies that are organized as US companies and owned by US companies.

Yet, the US subsidiaries are actually US companies and pay US taxes.

jeff

I don't know anything about the Arkansas budget but would you care to explain how Clinton "cooked the books" to create a surplus in the US budget? When Bush came in, he promised a tax cut (mostly to the wealthy) because he told us the surplus should be given back. (Never mind that we still had to pay off a huge debt run up during the Reagan/Bush years.) When the economy weakened and the surplus disappeared, he said we had to give a tax cut because the economy was weak. He then started spending like a drunken sailor and cooking the books in his own way by not including Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget, as if we didn't know we were going to spend money there when we had 100,000 plus troops deployed. As a result, the deficit exploded (again, like under Reagan) and the economy ended up crashing. Obama is now trying to spend our way out of the worst crises since the Great Depression and maybe it is working. We will be paying for it for a long time and yes, higher taxes are inevitable.

What profits?

And they have universal health insurance too.

What Clinton (as well as earlier and later presidents) did in terms of the "surplus" was to not include the money borrowed from the surplus of the Social Security trust fund as a debt.

Obama's between a rock and a hard place right now. If he doesn't prop up the banking and insurance industries with borrowed money, the recession will turn into a depression. If he does prevent a total collapse, he'll be doing it in a way that burden future generations with the cost of cleaning up the Bush/Reagan mess.

The Onion headline "Black man given Nation's Worst Job" was funny, but it was not all that off the mark. It's always been left to Democrats to clean up the financial messes left by Republicans, and a lot of people resent that they finally have to pay for the drunken party that they'd enjoyed for so long, and start screaming "tax and spend Democrats" when they should be screaming "borrow and spend Republicans."

The longer we wait to raise taxes to a level that will cover expenses, the worse off we'll get. Bush never included the cost of his wars in the budget, all that money needs to be paid back eventually. But of course if he had went to the American people and said, "listen, we need each family to pay $2000 a year to finance these wars," he would never have been able to start the wars in the first place.

It was a great party while it lasted. Too bad it fell to Obama to tell people that the party's over.

But this was nothing new under Clinton. I believe that the SSI surplus was always included in official revenue figures. Even then, I seem to recall that the revenue surplus exceeded the SSI surplus in 99 and/or 2000.

It would be easier to take if the Bush Administration were in jail.

"party" is hardly over. Obama is moving it to a different part of the globe.