Math Challenged Democrats

I just saw a news article on MSNBC relating to the Senate vote which failed to pass legislation which would have extended tax cuts for 'all but the highest' income levels. Accompanying the story was a picture of Democrats standing next to a big poster with the headling 'GOP Plan'. The poster was supposed to show how unfair the Republicans are being to the middle class and said the following:

Middle class family making $60,000 ... get $2,500 Make $1 million ... get $43,000 Make $100 million ... get $3,800,000

This information is supposed to show you how unfair the Republicans are to working people. However, if you think about this information for more than a few seconds you would actually see that all three income groups are being treated fairly equally. Unfortunately there is a large percentage of the population, including most of the media, who would simply look at these raw numbers without actually thinking about what they represent. Naturally Democrats would rather pander to laziness or ignorance than to have an honest debate about the subject. There are two things to consider with the information presented by Democrats. First is the notion that any taxpayer is getting anything from the government. Taxpayers don't get money from the government when they get a tax break, they get to send less money to the government. Obama and Democrats continue to act as if all income belongs to them and they get to decide how much each person gets to keep. Since this isn't the case, a more honest wording would be:

Middle class family making $60,000 ... send the government $2,500 less Make $1 million ... send the government $43,000 less Make $100 million ... send the government $3,800,000 less

This still leaves us with the second problem that the uninitiated would still have the impression that high income earners are somehow getting a better deal than middle class workers. As usual, the Democrats, and those involved in class warfare, like to fool people with big numbers. However, if you break down the chart by percentage a different story would be told:

Make $60,000, send the government 4.17% less in taxes. Make $1,000,000, send the government 4.3% less in taxes. Make $100,000,000, send the government 3.8% less in taxes.

Doesn't quite have the same 'evil' ring to it, does it?

Stimulus?

Regardless of whether or not you believe that an economy can be 'stimulated' by government spending, it would seem that if you are trying to get out of a recession, you would spend the stimulus money now, not later. However, according to the Congressional Budget Office, of the $787 billion appropriated in the final bill, $236 billion won't be spent until 2011. That's 41% of this monster. If the true nature of this bill was to stimulate the economy, $236 billion could have been cut and still provided the necessary stimulus. The truth is that this bill is a sham and will burden current and future generations with a mountain of debt. George Bush and Congress (both parties) took 8 years to dig a deep deficit hole, it has only taken Obama and Congressional Democrats days to dig a deeper one.