This is from an article from the AP:

Millions of Americans enjoying their small windfall from President Barack Obama’s “Making Work Pay” tax credit are in for an unpleasant surprise next spring.

The government is going to want some of that money back.
…
But new tax withholding tables issued by the IRS could cause millions of taxpayers to get hundreds of dollars more than they are entitled to under the credit, money that will have to be repaid at tax time.

At-risk taxpayers include a broad swath of the public: married couples in which both spouses work; workers with more than one job; retirees who have federal income taxes withheld from their pension payments and Social Security recipients with jobs that provide taxable income.

The Internal Revenue Service acknowledges problems with the withholding tables but has done little to warn average taxpayers.

I guess that’s what happens when you put a guy who can’t even manage to do his own taxes as the head of the Treasury.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union raised concerns about the effect of the tax credit on pension payments in a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in March.

Geithner responded that Treasury and IRS understood the concerns and were “exploring ways to mitigate that effect.”

Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, the top Republican on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said Geithner has yet to respond to concerns raised by committee members.

“So far we’ve got the, ‘If we don’t address this maybe it will go away’ approach,” Camp said.

That’s great, they screw up and then they don’t even let anybody know. We could have just sent out checks to everybody and been done with it. Now we have lots of people getting accustomed to having more money and many won’t know what to do when it gets taken away after the tax credit runs out. We also have millions more who are actually getting more than they are supposed to who are going get hit with an unexpected tax bill next April.

Remember what Reagan said the nine scariest words in the English language are, “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.”

Derek outlined a few of the details of, and pork found in, the Government’s Stimulus Package. There have been some updates since then. Sadly one of the primary changes was the reduction of one of the very few Republican ideas. Senate Republicans had originally insisted on a $15,000 Tax Credit to home buyers but this was reduced during the House and Senate negotiations to 8000$ and the deadline shortened to September.

The biggest change the average Joe will see is that they will not be getting the “Stimulus Check” they thought they were going to get. Besides reducing the “Stimulus Check” from 500$ a person to 400$ a person the way in which this money will be distributed has been changed. Instead of a check mailed out in one bulk payment we will each be getting 13$ a person a week. They plan to do this through our tax withholdings by withholding 13$ less per week than they would have otherwise.

What this means is that they don’t want us to be able to use our stimulus money responsibly. Instead of allowing consumers to pay off their car, add to their savings, pay a month of rent, we will be given 13$ a week that will vanish into the ether through small things people never notice: A trip to the local burger joint, an extra couple beers when you are out during the weekend, etc. The government believes that spending money loosely when you can’t afford it will repair the economy and they don’t believe that saving money and paying off your debts will improve your personal financial situation.

So everyone go out and tell little Tommy that someday he can be a Senator, all he has to do is start spending money and running up a massive debt early in life.

image from Gateway Pundit who got it from jwf

So I sat down in front of my TV this evening looking forward to another great episode of House. What I got was very disappointing. Our new President had a press conference instead. I wish House had been on as opposed to the fear mongering I was subjected to. I am really sick of hearing the phrase “worst since the Great Depression.” We are in a recession. Things are rough. Guess what, it isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last. At this point, the recession we are currently in can’t even compare to the recessions of the 70’s and 80’s let alone the Great Depression.
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3 Republican Senators have agreed to vote with the Democrats on the government stimulus package. Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania have all agreed to cross party lines and vote with the Democrats on the stimulus bill. With RINOs like these, the Democrats don’t need 60 in the Senate to avoid filibusters.

In this video Ron Paul discusses the stimulus package and the dollar.

Now, I really wish that those Senators would not go along with this spending bill. However, as Congressman Paul points out in the video, where were all the budget hawk fiscal conservatives for the last eight years when they actually could have done something. Keep in mind that our huge national debt has skyrocketed under a Republican Congress and White House. While the Democrats took control of Congress 2 years ago, there was still a Republican in the White House for the huge bailouts of the banking and auto industries.

The Republicans in the Senate are going to have to grow some backbone or the spending that occurs in the next four years could cripple our nation for a long time. This bill is just the start.

There is a “Buy American” clause in the stimulus package currently being debated by Congress. Both the $819 billion stimulus bill passed by the House last week and the Senate version currently being debated require that any projects in the stimulus package use U.S.-made iron and steel. The Senate bill just softened a provision that would have required all manufactured goods used in the projects be U.S.-made. It now matches the House bill only including iron and steel.
Read more…

Hope flavored sprinkles are what you need to think that this stimulus package is anything other than a joke.
Read more…

Update

It’s been around a year since this was originally published so I thought I’d go back and tell a little of what has happened. Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you know that our Congress eventually passed this bill and President Obama signed it into law. You may have heard Obama talking since then about how this was necessary and that it saved or created 1.5 million jobs. That sounds great on TV when he’s giving the State of the Union address, but in reality it is a pathetic waste of our taxpayer dollars.

When it was passed they said it would keep unemployment from rising beyond 8%. It is at 10% now. Doing a little math shows you how much they wasted. The cost to the taxpayer was around 862 Billion dollars. That is 862,000,000,000. That is a lot of zeroes. The jobs, not just new jobs but also “saved” jobs, were 1.5 Million by the White House’s own accounting. That means that we spent an average of about 575,000 dollars per job. Mind you most of these jobs are construction or maybe teaching jobs making around 30K a year. This is simply a great example of government waste and not much more.

The real problem is that in Obama’s recently released budget there is 300 Billion more dollars modeled on last years stimulus package. For those that don’t know, the definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior expecting different results. I don’t think they are insane though (usually), I just think they are happy with a government stimulus package. They are happy spending more and more of your money because that means power. If they can make you believe that you need them to help, they have accomplished their goal. Just to make it clear, you don’t need the government stimulus package to help you find a job.

Original Post

Congress currently has a “stimulus package” in the works. Unfortunately the only thing it is really going to stimulate growth in is government. There is so much pork in this bill, the Wall Street Journal said this about it, “This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.” Suffice it to say there is more money in “pet projects” than there is in any sort of economic stimulus. That is why every single Republican representative voted against the stimulus bill. This is apparently the change we can believe in.

Here are some of the, shall we say, not very stimulating proposals in the government stimulus package:

$1 billion to Amtrak who hasn’t made a profit in 4 decades
$2 billion in child-care subsidies
$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts
$400 million for global-warming research
$2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects
$650 million to pay for digital TV conversion coupons
$600 million for the federal government to buy new cars. Their current budget already includes $3 billion a year on its fleet of 600,000 vehicles
$252 billion is for income-transfer payments - i.e. Medicare, unemployment, and food stamps
$66 billion for education

As the WSJ put it:

This is supposed to be a new era of bipartisanship, but this bill was written based on the wish list of every living — or dead — Democratic interest group. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, “We won the election. We wrote the bill.” So they did. Republicans should let them take all of the credit.

Thankfully it looks like the Republicans are going to give this joke of a government stimulus package to the Democrats. All but 11 of them voted for this bill. At least a few were smart enough to see this for what it is, a waste of money sending America even further into debt.

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