[Peace-discuss] A Tax Rebate Won’t Fix This Mess

[Brussel]

An economics lesson from Dave Lindorff… A Tax Rebate Won’t Fix This Mess
from http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/19/6477/

…So how about we just forget this whole stinking rebate idea. It  
ain’t gonna work, folks. It might sound good in an election year, but  
if you look at it closely, you can see it’s really just smoke and  
mirrors.

There is a solution, though. How about if they end the war in Iraq  
and bring all the troops home. The government will save several  
hundred billion dollars a year that’s being spent overseas blowing  
things up — and that is helping to depress the dollar and raise our  
tax bills. Some of that saved money can help reduce the deficit.  
Other chunks of it could be invested in America’s badly decaying  
infrastructure-repairing bridges, building new schools, etc., maybe  
building some major levees to protect our coastal cities from the  
next Katrina or from the global warming flood that we know is coming.  
And all that will mean jobs for people who need them.

We might also try to do something about reducing that massive outflow  
of dollars that’s making our currency do a disappearing act. An easy  
way to do that would be to slap higher taxes on gasoline and to tax  
cars based on how bad their gas mileage is. Before long, most  
Americans would be driving less and buying smaller, fuel-efficient  
cars, and we could significantly reduce the single biggest item on  
our import bill: oil.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll be happy to get that $1600 check George Bush  
is calling for. I’m certainly not going to return it to the Treasury!  
But let’s not be pretending that it’s going to jump-start the sick  
economy.
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