Another update about the $300bn tax cuts. Apparently, businesses that have shown a loss in the past five years will get a huge new benefit as part of the plan. This is likely part of an effort to woo the business community, and their Republican benefactors, into supporting the package. But the benefit would do nothing for small businesses, particularly sole proprietors who don't take "losses" even if they only make $10,000 a year (if you work for yourself as a consultant, even if you make $20,000 this year instead of $100,000, it might not technically be a "loss," so you'd get no benefit under this new provision).
(And, as an aside, larger businesses that don't post a loss - i.e., business that actually do their job and succeed - don't appear to benefit at all from this provision. It's a bit like the mortgage mess - if you actually pay your mortgage on time, and/or wisely didn't gamble on a mortgage bigger than you could afford, no one has plans to bail you out.)
At some point, these tax plans and stimulus packages have to start helping more people than just the working poor (for whom, apparently, an extra $19 a paycheck is going to save both them and the economy) and big business. A lot of people are in the middle, and are tired of constantly being left out by both Democrats and Republicans. One of our readers commented on this yesterday:
As an upper middle class wage earner let me say how overjoyed I was when people got their "stimulus" checks but I was told I made too much to get a check designed to be spent on "stuff" (does that make sense?). I'm so tired of people yelling about the "upper middle class" and "rich people" getting all the tax breaks, I pay almost a third of my income to various taxes, and if I'm the supposed beneficiary of the largess of politicians, someone is smoking the good stuff.
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with my taxes being used to help out people less fortunate than me, but stop making people in my income bracket out to be a bunch of bandits making out with all the money. I don't have the money to pay a super-duper tax attorney/accountant to find enough loopholes for me to benefit from the current tax law so I guess I get the honor and privilege of getting hosed on both sides.
