Cattivo wrote:

I actually had to pay this year - over 600 bucks. My only consolation is that I'll get most of that back from the stimulus package.

Great! By then, that $600 will be worth $400 of today's money after they print all the extra currency it will take to make sure everyone gets their stimulus package!

The package reeks of desperation, especially when the money we're spending on the "war" post-Saddam hanging could've been used domestically.

Having said that, I filed my taxes February 2nd and had both refunds by February 7th. Long live H&R Block's TaxCut Online!

Red_Mage wrote:

Bingo. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars a week whilst cutting taxes enormously and we wonder why we're having so much trouble. 90 years of modern fiscal policy in this country and we still can't figure out that we need to pay the bills.

We did figure it out; it was called "the 1990's".

Cattivo wrote:

The 750 billion we've spent these last five years on Iraq is only one percent of our cumulative GDP for that time period. A drop in the bucket. Link In the 1990s, our budget was balanced at the cost of reducing our military severely, leaving us unprepared for the battles we had to start facing in the 21st century. As for the economy, it naturally goes up & down. We're due for a recession, especially when people and banks are foolish enough to fund houses that the buyer cannot afford. It's smacks of the 20s when people bought stocks on margin. Fortunately, we now have failsafes in place to lessen the impact of this idiocy. And yay, just when inflation was becoming a problem again because of oil and food prices/demand, the stimulus package is here to exacerbate matters! Like I said though, it's all part of the natural cycle. Just ride it out.

I'll agree that it's all cyclical and I sure as hell am not giving neither Clinton nor the Republican Congress the credit for the economic boom of the 90's. But I'd say there was a reduction in military costs because we weren't sticking our noses in everyone else's business and we didn't NEED to beef up the military.

In fact, intel people had been warning both Clinton and Bush for months before 9/11 and most of those people were rebuffed until it was too late, so I can't agree to either assumption (not necessarily made by you, but inferred at least) that a lack of funding led to the attacks or left us unprepared for a response. There aren't enough soldiers not because we can't afford it but because people don't want to go over there and fight someone else's civil war for them.

Did we need to go after Osama and the Taliban? Fuck yes; they attacked us. Did we need to depose Saddam while we were still searching for Osama (and failing to find him)? Probably not, though I can't say I regret us finding him. But do we still need to be in Iraq fighting their civil war for them? Hell no. And while 750 bilion might b a small percentage of our GDP, it's still a huge chunk of change when schools have been getting the shaft all over the country and people are losing their homes left and right. Let's not pretend that the money used to pay for the war we're in right now couldn't be put to better use here in America.

And I also agree that printing billions more in currency is not going to alleviate the current financial situation. I'm all for doing what NEEDS to be done to help America get through this, but making the money people have saved up in accounts and 401k benefits worth less just to give John Q. Moron a check for $600 bucks to make him feel better is moronic. It's the difference between weathering the recession and stretching it out longer than it has to go.