Slashdot Mirror
Inside Obama's Twitter Blitz On the Payroll Tax
Hugh Pickens writes "Brandon Rittiman reports that White House officials launched a Twitter campaign Tuesday to put pressure on Congress to reach a deal extending the payroll-tax cut. Using the Twitter hashtag #40dollars, the White House successfully got thousands of people to respond and explain what a $40 cut to each paycheck would mean to them personally. By Wednesday morning, the #40dollars hashtag started 'trending,' which is what happens when Twitter's algorithms see a topic suddenly surge. It's not easy to create that kind of surge, but the White House has 2.5 million Twitter followers to call upon. Macon Phillips, the President's Director of Digital Strategy, says his team has managed to get a few Twitter topics to rise to the level of 'trending' before — most notably when they began tweeting about the death of Osama bin Laden. 'What's very important about a social-media campaign like this is that regular people are making the point about how this would affect them. It's not us here in Washington trying to argue on their behalf.' says Phillips. 'The #40dollars campaign puts a face on that amount to demonstrate the payroll tax cut's real-world impact on middle-class families.'"
The thing is, it's only Republican legislaters that are so darn against the millionaire's surtax. The majority of Americans are okay with it, and a great deal of millionaires are also okay with it. The only people fighting it tooth and nail are those who kissed the ring of Grover Norquist, and those whose districts are held hostage by the Tea Party. Oh, and delisional Tea Partiers who are retired or unemployed yet somehow believe they'll be making a million bucks a year ANY DAY NOW.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
should be the next tag the white house pushes. The US cannot afford spending $650 billion on a military we don't need.
Yeah, as much as I hate how biased Fox news is, CNN surprised me with something I happened to catch when I was in the grocery store and happened to see it on. They were talking to one of the Republican presidential hopefuls about what his view on the whole thing was and he was answering quite well I thought (in terms of explaining his view) that he didn't want to gut the money from elsewhere and that he thought that there needed to be some way to fund the tax cut and was being pretty clear that while he didn't like the idea of allowing it to expire he wasn't seeing an alternative that he thought would work, but the anchor would not let go of trying to ask him if he was in favor of raising taxes even though he was already being pretty direct at stating his view. The CNN anchor was clearly trying to corner him in to having to say something unpopular as opposed to having a dialog and talking about the issues it would cause. It was politics not news and appeared very clearly biased to me.
AJ Henderson
I hate to say it, because it's horribly unpopular from a political perspective, but this payroll tax "holiday" is just disastrous policy. Depending on what numbers and what year you're looking at, anywhere from 81 to 89 percent of the entire U.S. budget goes to two things: defense and entitlements. And of those entitlements, the biggest long-term liabilities and problems that we have are Social Security and Medicare.
When you hear these Presidential candidates talk about how they would fix the budget deficits by getting rid of things like the EPA, the IRS, the Departments of Commerce / Energy / Education, etc., then you know should know that they are not making any sort of good-faith effort at solving the problem, and that they cannot be taken seriously. The dirty little secret is that you could cut out 100% of the discretionary non-defense spending (i.e., everything except for the military and entitlements) and you would have barely made a dent in the problem as a whole.
The whole purpose of the payroll/FICA tax is to provide funds for Social Security and Medicate. Again, these are the two biggest problems that the U.S. has from a budget perspective -- biggest by leaps and bounds. So not only does this policy make the deficit problem worse, it makes it worse in the worst possible way. Politicians can claim that these tax cuts are "paid for", but everybody knows that these types of Washington claims are usually just shell games for political purposes.
For what it's worth, I like the fact that the payroll tax holiday disproportionally benefits those towards the lower end of the income scale. But there has to be a better way to do this, especially at this critical time in history when the Boomers are retiring and we're going to need these trust funds more than at any time in our history.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Are there really people out there that decide whether to hire or fire based on their personal income tax?
If a business is set up to make money to begin with, seems like it'd make more sense to base hiring and layoff decisions around meeting demand. And it would logically follow that policies that increase demand will benefit "job creators" more, unless their taxes are so severe (like, say, 100%+) that meeting increased demand costs them money.
People who make all their income from investments might not like it very much, but by the same token, how many of them hire and fire or base their investment decisions on their personal tax rate?
Especially when it's being used by politicians to manipulate people who don't actually have a broader understandimg of the issues at hand. Yep, great to see.
I think you forgot to mention one more detail that is important. The tax is marginal - you are taxed on income above 1 million! That is, anyone making 1 million a year will be unaffected by it and anyone making 1,000,100 will pay $2.5 (or $3.5, dollars, I forget) extra taxes. You have to make well over (i.e. several) a million to care.