It's NOT A Tax Increase - You Just Have To Pay More Taxes

We tax all the others and pass the revenue on to you

WSJ.com quotes Ms. Pelosi on TCFR (tax cuts for the rich): "The sooner they are repealed, the less negative impact they'll have on our deficit." On CNN's Late Edition, Pelosi scolds that raising the marginal rate from 35% to 39% for the $250,000 tax bracket is "not a tax increase. We're repealing something they should never have had in the first place."

Does anyone else worry about government arbiters of what we should and "should never have had"? And wasn't that a previous congress's determination of what we should have? Do only Ms. P's opinions have value today? Guess so. Bush Derangement Syndrome.

And BTW... didn't TCFR increase revenue? If they did, how can it also be true that "The sooner they are repealed, the less negative impact they'll have on our deficit." Negative impact on deficit is Washington-speak and hard to get your mind around. Granting the benefit of the doubt, this might mean "the less our deficit will be." Since Ms. P is smack in the middle of creating the greatest fiscal deficit the free-market world has ever known -- which can only be paid down by future revenue or a catastrophic devaluation of the dollar -- why single out a policy that has increased revenue?

Ms. P's colleague Dick Durbin opines "The Obama administration believes that increasing taxes on any Americans at this point may not be the right medicine... " So Dick P sees paying more in tax as a tax increase? Dick, have you met Nanci?

Which is it?

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Can anyone tell me, citing primary sources, how much the bailout/stimulus is going to cost and what it's going to be used for?

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Catastrophic currency devaluation: Zimbabwe just introduced a $50 billion bill. Fifty billion Z-bucks. It's enough to buy two loaves of bread. Today. If you can find anyone with two loaves to sell. Zimbabweans are already used to being paid at least twice a day so that they can buy some basics at mid-day before the prices go up again. That's what happens when inflation is 231,000,000%. Yes, 231 million per cent. It's what happens when someone steals everything of value, everything, in an entire nation.

A Zimbabwean economist says (same link) "I am not really sure what these notes would be for," he said. "No one now accepts the local currency. It is a waste of resources to print Zimbabwe dollar notes now. Who accepts a currency that loses value by almost 100 percent daily?"

But they're printing it anyway? It's only money. Or not.

(Same link): "In August, the RBZ slashed ten zeros from the currency. But the zeroes have bounced back with more vigor." Ten zeroes look like this: 0,000,000,000. That was before the new $50B bill. Add the ten zeroes back on and it is a $50... I don't know what numbers with 20 zeroes are called? Bazillions, maybe? I thought that number was only from Calvin and Hobbes.

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Now it looks like the bailout/stimulus package may easily total 2 tril... (not quite bazillions yet) and we're not talking Z-bucks here... are we? Are you surprised that we have $2T available? How can we reconcile that with tax cuts for 95% of Americans? If we confiscated every cent from the top 5% of us (see Zimbabwe) how short would we still be and who, then, would repay it. Repay. You know, give money and interest to whomever is footing the bill for all this? And is that where we're heading?

What we need is some $50B bills. It's only money.