Calculators
There is a lot of money being spread around in the last week of this endless election, even though everyone seems to think it is all sewed up for Senator Obama.
The Senator is going to have a half hour infomercial on all the principle networks tonight, with some selected cable outlets in the larger media markets. It is supposed to cost around a million per channel, but that is hardly important at this point. It is all or nothing, no prisoners and no tomorrow for Senator McCain, and I suspect for Senator Biden as well.
As to the others, Governor Palin appears to think she has plenty of tomorrows, and Senator Obama, even if his defeat is unlikely, is a very young man with many seasons to come.
I should think that like President Clinton, he would already be worried about how to spend the time after his second term until he is eligible for Social Security, not that it will be there.
President Bush may be done cutting brush in Crawford by then. He never should have had it planted in the first place.
Anyway, one of the helpful things that the Obama campaign has done is set up a portal on their web site that will calculate your tax rebate under his tax plan. It is really cool. The instructions are pretty simple. You plug in your annual income, filing status, number of kids in college, and Presto! It calculates the amount that the IRS will refund to you upon filing under the Obama plan.
I tried it a couple ways and it didn’t work out the way it does on television. The nice man on the television says quite plainly that taxes won’t go up for families making less than a quarter million a year. The calculator won’t tell me what I will owe under the plan.
I tried it a bunch of different ways and didn't have much luck. It appears that I am part of the five percent that are going to finance the big change. I don’t seem to be a family, or something, and don’t have any dependents anymore. The college debt has already been incurred, and with my retirement savings gone, I am flat out of options. I tried estimating all the ways I could calculate what I make, and all of them had a message that could have come from Alan Greesnpan:
“You will probably not get a tax cut under the Obama-Biden plan.”
Duh. I knew that already, but I don’t make A quarter million a year. I tried doing my complete tax return to enter the Adjusted Gross Income, and tried to factor in the Alternate Minimum Tax. The best I could get, with a tail-wind, was a rebate of $34 bucks.
At the Class Six Store that amounts to less than two bottles of Absolute Vodka, slightly more than three of Popov, if I do the right thing and drink domestic.
Since I know that is not what is going to happen, I wished there was a different calculator- one that includes the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, and the elimination of the cap on Social Security taxes, and the inflation that is sure to come with the blizzard of greenbacks flying around.
I know why there isn’t one. After filling in all the blocks and mashing the button, a little message would flash up, saying to pack the money in a valise and take it down to the Post Office.
Of course it doesn’t have to be that way. Rep Barney Frank, D-MA, has come up with a bright idea. He thinks we can slice 25% off DoD and the intelligence community to finance a lot of overdue stuff at home, like the creative lending practices he mandated on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back in the day. He is going to return as the Chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee in the new Congress, if they don't tap him to be Secretary of Defense.
Since the average age of our airplanes is about that of the people who fly them, and since the Navy is struggling to keep 300 ships afloat, and the Marines and the Army have to replace all the equipment they have worn out on the two active wars that are still going on, that amounts to unilateral disarmament.
I brightened a bit. At least someone has thought this through, and I wondered why they haven’t talked about the Barney Frank Plan in more detail.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com