Quickly now, who wrote this:
According to AP, congressional leaders have reached a deal on those economic stimulus checks. And rather than being geared towards helping the economy, they’re apparently geared towards redistributing wealth (that would be our wealth) to the poor. What a surprise. Folks in the middle (i.e, those who are not rich or poor) are screwed by the Democrats (and Republicans) yet again.
Okay, I know I kind of gave it away with my clever title and all, but damn. What kind of entitled, ignorant, overreacting shit is that? Try to keep in mind, he’s burning down the house over a $300 to $600 check. In order to miss out on it, you have to gross $300 every working day**.
Here’s some more from John A.:
That means that if you make $75,000 or more a year, no check for you. Forget that fact that you live in NYC or DC or San Francisco, where prices from property to food are outrageous. No, forget that. Some guy living in a mansion in Topeka making $74,999 a year will get his little gift from the US Treasury and you, living in NYC making $75,001 out of a 300 sq ft studio apartment will get nothing. How about my friend who bought an entire house in Baltimore for $275,000 when that would get you a very small studio in DC.
I’m not saying I’d love to commute from Baltimore to DC, but you can fucking do it. Or from Arlington. Or Brentwood. Or Capitol Hill, if you’re willing to lower yourself to a rowhouse. And I’m definitely not one to micromanage the sacrifices people make in their personal economics, but I’ll happily refrain from shedding a tear over someone who’s going to get upset over the difficulty of affording life in Midtown rather than Jackson Heights, or Noe Valley rather than…well, he may have a point about San Francisco, actually.
That’s because far too often the Democrats don’t give a damn about anybody who isn’t a minority or starving to death (both valid causes to be sure, but are they the ONLY causes out there?).
Look, I don’t care if you live in a co-op made of gold brick smack dab in the geographical center of Highrent Island , there is no circumstance under which an American making $75,000 a year is worthy of the bullshit sentence above. Don’t get me wrong, people at all salary levels can struggle - bankruptcy bill, anyone? Universal health care? - but for fuck’s sake, John. “Both valid causes to be sure”? Don’t break your arm throwing that bone, okay?
The thing is, maybe there’s a discussion to be had.
And don’t think this is only about a stupid $300. It’s about health care. It’s about education. It’s about every single issue you care about. The powers that be simply aren’t in this to help people in the middle. The Republicans want to help the big pharmaceuticals and the big business hospitals, while the Democrats want to help uninsured poor people and kids. And while all of that’s nice, what are the rest of us supposed to do when our premiums hit $2000 a month and, God forbid, something catastrophic hits us?
And you know what? He might be right, but it’s really hard to tell, what with his being covered with the remains of the people he disemboweled on the way to the point. The Democrats definitely don’t give a shit about the middle class, but $600 seems like an awfully strange rock on which to make that point. As one of his commenters mentioned, you have to draw the line somewhere, and nearly 350% of the national median income*** seems like a passable place for it.
Plus, I’m not sure John “Treo” Aravosis has a shit-ton of personal economic credibility.
———————
** Assuming a five day work week, etc. etc.
*** Household income, based on the $150,000 two-person income limit for the proposed tax rebate.
81 Responses to “John Aravosis Just Broke My Writer’s Block”
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Speaking as a Hayward resident, he wouldn’t even have a point in SF. SF is a square a little under 7 miles on a side. You can live on MUCH less money in Daly City or Pacifica and commute. I did it for five years.
You have to admire his implication that a couple making $100K or a single person making $65K are “the poor.” This is a guy who apparently hits the door lock button while driving past scary crowds of college professors and Web designers.
That’s because far too often the Democrats don’t give a damn about anybody who isn’t a minority or starving to death (both valid causes to be sure, but are they the ONLY causes out there?).
It’s be nice if you decided to learn about those folks, John.
He’s one of those people who just makes me want to say, “I hate gay white men.”
“It’s be nice if you decided to learn about those folks, John.”
Quoting from Wiki: “Aravosis is a lawyer and worked on Capitol Hill as a foreign policy advisor for Ted Stevens, a Republican senator in the late 1980s and early 1990s before becoming a Democratic activist.”
Maybe you can take the man from the Rethug party, but you can’t take all of the Rethug from the man…
I hate rich white men. Most of them anyway.
Mrs Nice Guy
I remember reading that and thinking Aravosis was being an ass. This is an economic stimulus package. It is going to the people most likely to take the money and spend it in order to spur the economy. This is priming the pump, and as you said a line has to be drawn somewhere.
Also, his attack on the proposed healthcare plans is just ignorant. Edwards and Clinton mandate universal healthcare and Obama focuses on making sure everyone can afford it. That is directly focused at the middle class. The whole SCHIP fiasco was also focused at the middle class.
Basically, it’s hard to sympathize with anyone who wants to wage class warfare against the poor.
NEWSFLASH: It isn’t the poor who have made a killing off of this economy, it’s the extremely wealthy.
I remember reading that and thinking Aravosis was being an ass. This is an economic stimulus package. It is going to the people most likely to take the money and spend it in order to spur the economy. This is priming the pump, and as you said a line has to be drawn somewhere.
Also, his attack on the proposed healthcare plans is just ignorant. Edwards and Clinton mandate universal healthcare and Obama focuses on making sure everyone can afford it. That is directly focused at the middle class. The whole SCHIP fiasco was also focused at the middle class.
Basically, it’s hard to sympathize with anyone who wants to wage class warfare against the poor.
It was fascinating to find out that my husband and I are working poor since we make less than $75K put together. We were pretty sure we’re middle class since we live comfortably, but I guess I should start demanding my food stamps now that I’m officially one of the poor people who’s hanging on Aravosis’ sleeve and stealing his damn tax money.
What an ass.
He’s also totally missing the point. This is not supposed to be “congratulations you’re a good person the government wuvs you” check, it’s supposed to be something given that will be put straight back into the economy, to help the economy, not you. What happens if you give rich/middle rich people a little extra dough? It goes in the bank, in an overseas stock, or in a vacation account. Poor people? They spend the bitch. On food, supplies, stuff they desperately need. And they’re going to their local store to do it. So all he really achieves is the endless whine of the greedy libertarian, without even a drop of awareness that (SHOCKER!) it’s not all about him.
Well now, if it’s just sooo hard to be him, I’m perfectly willing to trade places. From the output above, it doesn’t sound like his job is very hard.
This reminds me of an old Lewis Black routine on the last time the Bush administration sent out checks: “All $400 will do is remind you how fucked you are!”
We can’t precisely target money to people with the highest marginal prospensity to consume, but it seems like poorer people probably have higher MPCs. If your objective is stimulus, then, targetting poorer people for tax credits is just economic efficiency (this is from an orthodox, marginalist, Samuelsonian perspective that a lot of commenters here probably think (not without some justification) is bullshit, but anyway…). Except, of course, Aravosis is too involved in his upper class class warfare to care about efficiency, let alone the poor. The tradeoff here isn’t between efficiency and equity, but between efficiency and inequity.
That said, if Aravosis is remotely accurate that a $74,999 income guy receives a $300 check and a $75,001 income guy doesn’t, that does sound like it’s slightly bad in terms of incentives. It’s not a huge deal, but maybe a phaseout of say 10% over a $3,000 income range would be better, although the added complexity might not be worth it.
I’m not saying I’d love to commute from Baltimore to DC, but you can fucking do it
I’ve been doing it for SEVEN YEARS. It sucks, but the asshat in question doesn’t seem to understand that Housing prices in Baltimore are lower for SEVERAL reasons:
1. Jobs in Baltimore are scarce and pay relatively lower then their DC counterparts.
2. Baltimore does have a bit of a crime/poverty issue that most people like John Asshat think has to do with Choices Poor People Make. (yeahhhh right) and this combo tends to scare Rich White Men and Women straight to the ‘Burbs to the safety of their comfy McMansions.
I work with a lot of Rich White Men and I’ve heard this bullshit all week. They literally belive that we are TAKING THEIR MONEY and—God forbid, Giving it to a “Poor Person” who is “Undeserving” because they simply didn’t “work Hard enough”
I’m so tired of that bullshit argument.
I have to get the hell out of this town……
If this bothers you, don’t read Megan McArdle’s take on it. Her argument is (literally) “it’s good that they got rid of the food stamp part of the bill ‘cause we shouldn’t give poor people food stamps cause they’re too fat anyway!”
Too Late, Ugly In Pink….Too Late.
Not to burst your bubble or distract from your larger point …
but you CANNOT buy a rowhouse for $275,000 in Arlington. Or Brentwood. Or Capitol Hill.
Roxanne….NO KIDDING!
I was mostly irritated that they would be cutting money from the food stamp program (from people who can’t even afford to buy food for themselves) to give the money to middle-class people. They can keep my $300 if it means taking it away from folks with even less than I have.
The original post over at Americablog is gone…?
awww…poor little rich John Aravosis.
Every so often, he reverts to being a Republican.
All these ex-Republicans do.
Not that I want to keep ‘em out of the party or the movement. Markos, Media Matters, and the like are good for the left. Even if they used to be republicans. Of course, John errs more than most.
Though some of that also undoubtedly comes from being a Villager as well. Villagers really suck. No connection to reality.
…aaaaaaaaand john deleted the post.
Isn’t that kind of a major no-no in the blogging world? where everything is supposed to be perpetual? No deletions - updates perhaps, but no deleting posts?
Guess he couldn’t take the entire world tearing into his Village mentality.
I wonder if $74,999 is enough to buy a clue.
…not in the village…
…aaaaaaaaand john deleted the post.
Not surprised. When I looked at it yesterday, it had 600 comments and maybe 1% of them were supportive. Every other comment was, “Oh, boo-hoo, I wish I made $75K a year!”
This isn’t even a tax credit. It’s just an advance on your tax refund that you would have gotten in 2009.
If you make lots of money and want to feel like you also got an extra $800? Just pay $800 less on your quarterly filings. Problem solved.
…not in the village…
Hee!
This is a guy who apparently hits the door lock button while driving past scary crowds of college professors and Web designers.
And faints dead away at the site of public school teachers, cops, and social workers. Boo!
Good dog. “Sight”. No more computer for me.
I commuted from Baltimore to DC for about two weeks. Worst two weeks of my life. Boyfriend still lives there and I live in Arlington. We could easily buy a house together if I lived/worked up there.
I live in an attic apartment in a run-down brick house in Arlington. $1,000/month. The houses in my neighborhood are pretty nice; they remind me of my parents’ modest home. They’re all between $700,000 and $2 mil.
Mrs. F and I gross about $95k between the two of us. The hell do we need $600 for? This was our take on it from the get-go. If the gov’t sends me $600 of my own damn money, it’s going straight into the bank or the money market fund. I’m not going to spend it on crap any more than I would any other $600 I have.
Now some couple grossing half that, with children we don’t have, and/or medical expenses we don’t have, they’ll spend it and “stimulate” the economy.
Jeebus, we’re ruled by dipshits.
This isn’t even a tax credit. It’s just an advance on your tax refund that you would have gotten in 2009.
So if God forbid the recession should come and I’m out of work in 2009, is the IRS going to come after me for that $800?
I really wonder how folks like Aravosis would have reacted to the last neighborhood I lived in, Mission Hill. For those who remember it, that’s the area Charles Stewart was in when he killed his pregnant wife and sent the city into a tizzy looking for the (non-existent) black man who did it.
Behind my apartment building was a large housing project. Several small apartment buildings surrounding a couple of high rises. The neighborhood itself was an interesting mix of poor folks (generally, black, latino, and asian) and medical students (lots of teaching colleges) and undergraduates (lots of area colleges). Just down the road a mile or so was another housing project, but this one tended toward row-houses rather than high rises. There are folks that would be terrified to travel in those neighborhoods. It’s honestly been on of my favorite housing locations thus far (just wan’t sure if i’d still be in the city when they asked me to re-up the lease…and I found one a lot cheaper).
The higher up folks move on the economic ladder, the more the lives of everyone else seem like a fictional novel to them.
The problem he’s describing isn’t that no one cares about the middle class. It’s that they didn’t adjust the cut-off point based on local cost of living. I live in DC and earn more than $75,000; if I had the same job someplace else, I’d probably earn less than $75,000. But they had to draw the line somewhere. This is, at best, a clumsy tactic for getting some money into the hands of people who will spend it. Theoretically, those of us earning more than $75,000 will benefit from the economy not falling apart.
Frankly, if I did receive a lump sum check from the govt, I’d probably use it to pay down my credit card, which wouldn’t stimulate the economy the way spending it would. So for the purposes of this legislation (stimulating the economy and preventing a bad recession), I’m really not the person they need to be giving money to anyway.
You’re clearly not from DC. Rowhouses on Capital Hill are Very hot property. And, depending where you work, one of the shortest commutes around.
“…is the IRS going to come after me for that $800?”
What do YOU think? If they let people like us get away with it, just imagine the chaos that will result!…
This isn’t even a tax credit. It’s just an advance on your tax refund that you would have gotten in 2009.
The problem with poor people is that they don’t understand delayed gratification. …oh, wait.
Isn’t Aravosis Greek for “talks out of his ass”?
Do I have the verb tense wrong?
It really was one of the more ludicrous things I’ve read in awhile. On the bright side, I got to delete Americablog from my RSS feed.
Sans statistics, let me be the first (second? third?) to say I don’t think this tax cut is going to stimulate the economy. The minor, temporary increase in consumer spending we’d see won’t do anything to temper the effects of the housing bubble collapse, which is really where this downturn is coming from. Uncle Sam may as well send my tax rebate directly to Visa, because that’s where it will eventually end up, at the end of my next billing cycle. I expect a lot of other people worried about job security and economic stability are also likely to be focusing on paying down debt right now, not making big ticket purchases. In short, I think we’ll have wasted $160 billion so Democrats can avoid the “tax and spend” meme going into the ‘08 elections.
What was he going to do with that $300? If he was thinking of using it to buy a clue, I’ll be the first to take up a collection!
Sans statistics, let me be the first (second? third?) to say I don’t think this tax cut is going to stimulate the economy.
Not a cut, a rebate. Comes out of next year’s return (just like last time they pulled this one).
You can get a perfectly lovely townhouse in Columbia - right between Baltimore and DC for a mere $300K! And the commute into downtown DC is only 1 hour and 30 minutes on a good day!
/eyes roll
Based on the limits, I and the husband are getting some cash here. Which will probably go straight into an investment account. And while we don’t live in SF or NYC, our area tends to rank pretty high on those various comparisons of cost of living expenses that come out now and then.
“Not a cut, a rebate. Comes out of next year’s return…”
…but the money they’ll be giving to the Wall Street boys to save them from
their follythe fickle hand of The Marketplace will be real - real borrowing from our future, and our children’s future, but real enough…Ouch. I think I need to read further on this. Are they at least trying to make a judgment call on who will be getting a refund versus paying? We usually try to balance our withholdings to end up pretty close to $0. I don’t want money I’m just going to end up paying them back again.
God I hope your comment about columbia is snarky—I think it is…..but damn…I grew up in columbia. Worst place to grow up evah. IMHO.
Not a cut, a rebate. Comes out of next year’s return (just like last time they pulled this one).
How does that work in the case of persons getting the rebate who don’t make enough to pay income taxes?
There’s a small 2 bd townhome on Kramer St available right now. And there’s at least one neighborhood in Arlington with a median home price below $275,000. But it’s not my town, so as I’m well aware there’s a lot of things that can be deceptive.
How does that work in the case of persons getting the rebate who don’t make enough to pay income taxes?
You owe taxes a year from April, so far as I can tell.
Isaac wrote, well above:
That’s the common argument, but it isn’t true, because it assumes that the people who don’t need the money for an immediate consumer need will sew it up in a mattress somewhere. At the very worst, they’ll simply put it in the bank, which winds up stimulating the economy as well.
The rebates are simply an attempt to increase the “velocity” of money, or how many times a given dollar is spent over the course of a year. By taking the money out of the treasury and giving it to consumers, that money is expected to be spent by consumers, and move more quickly through the system. But, in the end, it has to be paid for, and the immediate result is that the government will have to borrow more to meet immediate operating costs. Eventually that money has to be repaid, which means removing it from the consumer economy and paid out to the people who finance the government via bonds and t-bills.
Most of the people on this site are concerned about the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor and middle class. Well, that is exactly what deficit spending does: it enriches the wealthy, the people who can make money with t-bills, by transferring the tax money paid by the middle class (the poor really don’t pay federal income taxes, though they get socked for all of the corporate taxes that get passed along) to the t-bill holders, whether they are wealthy people living in the Hamptons or in Beijing.
Hey Dana, remember when the deficit was a lot smaller? Now, when was that? Which administration?
Was there actually a surplus at one point?
Sarah wrote:
In the meantime, we live in — and own — a 2,220 ft² Victorian home (over four floors) that cost us a whopping $87,500 in 2002, and on which we owe less than one year’s net income, because we picked a small town in which to live; our mortgage payment is less than Sarah’s monthly rent. That meant a 66 mile commute for me (to the Philly burbs) for three years, until I got a just-as-well-paying job locally.
Now, this means that we don’t have all of the major urban luxuries; dinner at a good Japanese restaurant is a half-hour ride rather than a walk down the block. But it also means that we don’t have to worry about money nearly as much, our money goes a lot further, and if we forget to lock the front door at night, it’s no big deal.
A good part of the current economic troubles are the result of skyrocketing home prices; people thought that prices would keep going up and up, and not only bought in, but bought big. Interest rates climed, and people with ARMs saw their payments jump, and other people who might have considered buying up stayed put. As a result, home sales decreased 12.7% nationwide for 2007.
There will be a correction in home values, and the housing market will turn around in about a year to eighteen months; some people will remain “upside down,” but if they just hang on and tough it out for a few years, their home value will recover. The same thing happened in the late eighties.
If I’m going to be paying that $300 back in 2009, that means it’s really worth the difference between having it now and having it then. Figure I can get 4% interest if I find the right CD, so that would be about 12 bucks. Or if inflation goes up, $300 now might buy as much as $320 in 2009, so 20 bucks. Woo Hoo!
And of course if the economy is still in the toilet in the first quarter of 2009, it will be just great to learn that tens of millions of people will have $300 less to spend…
Yeah, I do remember the couple of surpluses during the Clinton Administration. Some of it was smoke and mirrors, due to an economy which was wildly overstating the value of profitless tech companies, but some of it was just plain higher taxes.
Well, come 2000, we were given a choice: do we want a huge tax cut (George Bush’s $1.3 trillion) or Al Gore’s $750 billion? 98% of the public voted for a tax cut! the only people not promising a tax cut received less than 2% of the vote.
The problem is that we have voted for tax cuts (which we all want) but don’t really want spending cuts.
Hey, y’all could elect me president, and you’d get both: further tax cuts and spending cuts, huge spending cuts.
At the very worst, they’ll simply put it in the bank, which winds up stimulating the economy as well.
Well, no. At the very worst they’ll take the money and spend it in another country, which, when you’re talking about the jet-setting rich, is a very real possibility.
Hand the same check to the middle or lower class, and the probability that the money simply goes to someone else’s economy is much reduced. It makes a lot more sense.
Paul wrote:
Except that there’s more to it than that. It also means that the $300 that was borrowed by the government to give you that early rebate has to be paid back to the creditors, with interest, so of the taxes you pay in 2009, a slightly larger percentage will be going to one of the wealthy people who can invest in treasury bills.
The only people who will come out ahead in this are the ones with so little income that they won’t be paying federal income taxes in 2009 — and the t-bill investors.
Chet, if that’s the way you want to look at it, then half of the people in the northeast — the ones who use fuel oil to heat their houses — will be sending that money out of the country.
Let’s say that you take your $300 and spend it on consumer goods, which is what the government wants you to do. If so, the odds are that you’ll be sending it to China.
Hey, y’all could elect me president, and you’d get both: further tax cuts and spending cuts, huge spending cuts.
Yeah, that’s the solution to our crumbling infrastructure — cut funding even more!
The HolyFatman - you too? I grew up (at least the beginning parts of growing up) in Columbia. It was so-so, which turned into a wonderful fond memory of how good things used to be when we moved to Rochester (NY), which was horrible.
I did not know this. Now this makes me want it even less than I did before.And I think someone mentioned it above with the taxes. Didn’t the last “rebate” require that you paid for it in the year after that, because it was “income”? (I didn’t qualify for it then, so I don’t really remember, but I think that’s how it went.)
If so, I just don’t want it. The government can just keep the money and let poor people fucking buy food. It’s what I pay my taxes for. (Well, and this ridiculous war, but that’s another rant.)
These stupid little checks are so pointless. The problem that middle class and poor people have isn’t paying too much in taxes. Its stagnant wages, low job security and high costs of living.
I live in SF. I make too much to get this check. If I made what I make now when I lived in Denver I would feel pretty well off. Right now I am solid middle class. But I am not going to cry about the check, I have a good salary I make a good living.
I would like to note, however that its interesting that people can’t afford to live in cities anymore and are moving to suburbs not because they want to escape the poor, but because they can’t afford to live in the cities. San Francisco is a good example. I don’t know when the above poster looked into real estate in Daly City, but its way to expensive for most middle class families to afford it. I don’t have a solution, but the fact that middle class people can’t afford to live in America’s big cities is kind of depressing. That might be what John is reacting to. Its whiny I know, but it seems kind of unfair that middle class people have to live in god-forsaken suburbs in order to afford a home. Or they have to move to other parts of the country that are cheaper, but the jobs are available.
And commuting isn’t a good solution, we need less of that, not more. Nobody wants to commute two hours a day. I don’t know what I am rambling about, mostly it just bums me out that I can’t afford to buy a house and I make too much money for those checks.
Speaking as a Hayward resident, he wouldn’t even have a point in SF. SF is a square a little under 7 miles on a side. You can live on MUCH less money in Daly City or Pacifica and commute. I did it for five years.
Kind of OT to the thread, but would you have any advice on where to look for affordable housing if one is a south bay resident? I’ve not lived around here very long and I’m trying to figure out what my options are insofar as housing with reasonably-sane-commute access to the Santa Clara/Mountain View sort of area. Most of the best options seem to be pretty far north though…
“…further tax cuts and spending cuts, huge spending cuts.
Yeah, that’s the solution to our crumbling infrastructure — cut funding even more!”
Well, since the Chinese and the Oil producing countries own us anyway, why not.
When it was OUR country, it was worth it to fix things up and keep them maintained. You know, pride of ownership and all that.
But since the gold and platinum parachutes have been sprouting and drifting away - and taking with them the last economic juices from the country’s desiccated body - we’re headed to receivership.
So, fuck it. Let’s just finish running the place down just for the shits and giggles. We don’t want them to get anything good anyway…
Hey mcc, avoid sunnyvale. SJ is probably your best bet. But there is no “affordable” housing. Hayward, San Leandro and further afield are a lot cheaper.
Let’s say that you take your $300 and spend it on consumer goods, which is what the government wants you to do. If so, the odds are that you’ll be sending it to China.
I think maybe you missed my point Dana, as usual. I wasn’t talking about spending money on a consumer good that pays mostly to a corporation in the US which ultimately passes along some of that to a supplier in China.
I was talking about the fact that if you pass off a $600 check to somebody rich, they’re more likely than other people to simply hang onto it and say “oh, great, I can blow that next month in Milan.” They’re more likely to spend that money entirely in someone else’s economy because they’re far more likely to be in someone else’s economy.
Even the people in the Northeast you refer to are being billed by local companies for their heating oil. It’s a local expenditure. They’re not being billed by Venezuela.
I remember thinking WTF when I read that.
Just a wild guess, but my partner and I won’t qualify as “a couple” under the terms of the rebate legislation, right?
Good point, teac, and probably a good guess. Also a valid complaint Aravosis might have considered raising if he hadn’t been so busy ranting about the damn poor minorities.
Stephen,
i believe John has said he lives in DuPont Circle…one of the pricier gayborhoods around.
at any rate, i left Ablog before and came back…maybe this time i will leave for good…too much drama and too many hissy fits.
Here’s the problem with the plan: you’re giving money to people who didn’t contribute taxes. This is “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Pure socialism, and fucked up.
Hey, y’all could elect me president, and you’d get both: further tax cuts and spending cuts, huge spending cuts.
No. You wouldn’t.
Go read “The Education of David Stockman” some time.
teac,
I’d assume that you and your partner wouldn’t qualify as a couple, you would qualify as two individuals (and the check for a couple is the same as the check for two individuals). The point of the couples thing is just to ensure that when money goes out to middle class married people, they don’t get fucked like poor married people do (the EITC counts the total income of a couple just the same as it counts the income of an individual, so a married couple with no kids stops getting EITC at a combined income of ~ $14,000 (I think, I haven’t qualified in a while, so I can’t remember the cutoff), but an unmarried couple is treated as two individuals, and still gets the EITC if either person makes under ~$14000, for a potential combined income of $28000 as the cutoff.
If this fiasco was handled the same way as the EITC, married couples would start getting phased out at $75000 (and contra Aravois, it does phase out, not cut off instantly), while unmarried couples could have a combined income of up to $150000 before it started to phase out.
Whatever. This has to be one of the dumbest attempts at a recession stopper we’ve ever had, but the Dems in congress know the American people are too stupid to recognize this as useless and too greedy to care that none of this money actually goes where it would do any good (food stamps, unemployment extensions, public works funding) either to ameliorate the hurt or lift the economy. As long as we get a little spending cash and they claim they are doing something about the recession, who cares how useless and stupid the plan is.
Total aside: why isn’t there a vision impaired friendly work around for the anti-spam measure?
mcc, manufactured homes (mobile homes) are a lot cheaper than their traditional counterparts. And while it’s a specialized branch of loans, there are real estate loans available, both for in parks and construction loans to buy land as well and put it all together (which even in this market will tend to create equity fast). There are some parks throughout the Bay area.
I’m VERY sorry to put something spammish in this, but I am a regular, and like I said– finding loans for these is a specialized area of real estate. One my husband seems to be the main specialist in for much of northern California. Email me at helenkrummenacker@gmail.com if this message is allowed through moderation, and if you are interested, and I can get you and DH in touch with each other.
teac wrote:
If you’re not legally married, no. But since the rebates are tied to “taxpayers,” if you both filed separate income tax returns, then you’ll both get the single person’s rebate.
I’d guess that the biggest impact difference would be in unmarried couples where one made over the $75,000 threshold and the other did not, and as a couple did not exceed teh $150,000 married couples’ threshold.
What universe do you live in where people making less than 75k/y don’t pay taxes, cause I might want to move there. Even if someone is so destitute that they don’t pay income tax, they’re certainly paying sales tax.
Chet wrote:
I do buy heating oil — though we’re looking into conversion to natural gas — and while I write my checks to a local company (and a friend of mine), in the long run some of that money goes to Hugo Chavez.
The same is true of buying something from WalMart: it goes to the local store, and some to the walton family, but a good part of it goes to the People’s Republic, or to Myanmar or any of a host of other places beyond our borders. That’s one of the prices we pay for not doing our own consumer goods manufacturing anymore.
I’m not opposed to this rebate plan, but I don’t think very highly of it, either. It’s like getting novacaine at the dentist’s office: novacaine doesn’t eliminate pain, but simply postpones it until you’re out of the chair so that the dentist can do his work. The $1,500 we’ll (supposedly) get (married couple, with one child still a minor, though the numbers and calculations may change before this is passed) will come in useful when it arrives, but we’ll have to pay for it next year, when the $1,500 would also be useful.
And, as I think about it, it might be more painful in 2009: our younger daughter turns 17 this July, so we’ll no longer be eligible for the per-child tax credit for her in tax year 2008 and 2009. In a way, we’ll be getting the advance payment for her for tax year 2009 when she won’t be eligible as a tax credit in 2009!
In what city can you live in the suburbs at less than an hour commute from the city and pay *less* for a house than you could pay for a townhouse in the city?
Here in Baltimore, a 2000 sq ft house in Hampden (an up-and-coming neighborhood that is gentrifying) cost us $220 K in 2005, which was near the height of the boom in home prices. We even got a yard. The same house in White Marsh, Columbia, or Towson would have had a much bigger yard but cost over $300K. To get a *cheaper* house I’d have had to live in Harford County, where overdevelopment and lack of infrastructure ensures that I would spend a half hour commute going *anywhere*, including the grocery store.
My parents live in New York State. They are an hour and a half away from the City, in another massively overdeveloped and under-roaded area where going anywhere takes half an hour or more, and yet their modest ranch house is valued at $400K or something. Try to get closer to the City than that and you could spend close to a million for a modest house. of course the City itself is insane, and any frther out than my parents is genuinely rural and has *nowhere* to shop … not just “half an hour to the Japanese restaurant” but “half an hour to the grocery store because there are hardly any of them.” Which is why I recommend living nowhere near New York State.
But houses in Baltimore can be had for much more reasonable prices than the same size house in the suburbs. So I’m not sure where the “cities are too expensive” meme comes from, unless cities include “all of the suburbs within any kind of reasonable commute distance”.
In my opinion, not being a racist and being willing to live somewhere you might actually run into a lot of black people produces a sizable housing discount. More white people should try it. If you’re lucky and you do your research ahead of time you can even find a decent school in a reasonably priced area, as long as you’re not scared of your kids meeting black people at school.
Move to the Bronx. The bad part.
Charles and Dana,
You inferred something I did not imply - that I am currently paying taxes.
I am moving into a second career so I am in school. I do not work. I do not at present earn any income. Further, my partner’s income puts her just over the individual cut-off amount.
So we lose on many many counts.
(I can read, you know - I understand statutory construction. And also newspaper articles.)
Thanks for playing, though.
Alara, I think it depends on the city and the types of suburbs surrounding it.
I’m sure some suburbs of Boston are less expensive than the city while others are much more expensive.
Depends on population, the local economy, presence of arts/culture/education/extent of gentifrication…
teac: If you didn’t file an income tax form for tax year 2006, (I don’t see how they could base it on 2007, since most people haven’t filed their 2007 taxes yet) you just might be ineligible for the rebate. Since the government is talking about such rebates even to people who haven’t been paying taxes, you might wind up eligible, but since the bill hasn’t actually been passed yet, no one knows.
Alara Rogers asked:
My previous job was for a ready-mixed concrete producer in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and I had a 62 minute commute from small-town Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, to Conshohocken. I could have lived up to fifteen minutes closer in Lehighton or Franklin Township.
But that was more of an “exurbs” commute than a suburbs one. I knew guys who lived only 10 miles from the plant who still needed about 45 minutes to get to work!
Philadelphia is on the knife-edge of change — and no one knows in which direction it will fall. If the people living in the city can take control of their neighborhoods, there are people who want to move into the city and fix it up. But if the gang-bangers get any worse, whole sections of the city (North Philadephia and Northeast Philly) could wind up like huge prison camps.
My experience is that crime in cities (barring other developments such as authoritarian crackdown or ramming a freeway through the middle of the liveliest parts) gets worse as the local economy takes a dive, and improves as the economy does. It’s quite striking. I wonder if there could be some kind of correlation…
“It’s quite striking. I wonder if there could be some kind of correlation…”
[wingnut]
Nah. Some people/races/cultures are just incapable of behaving properly…
[/wingnut]