Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for August 20, 2010

…these anti-govt wingnuts sure don’t mind creating tax break laws..oooh they only hate laws that work against them(now..if there only were any)

what’s a dancing bug,anyway?

Yup, the small gov’t crowd doesn’t mind taxing and spending, just not on stuff THEY don’t want (see: the eight years of profligate, drunken sailor spending of the Bush years with hardly a peep.)

It is a monument to sheepherding that the Repubs can get their base to fiercely protect the income of the top 2% of the wealthiest!

@harleyquinn:

A fine theory except for two weensey little details: the money isn’t getting spread around, AND for some reason, “deficit hawks” don’t seem to like the Government SPENDING the money raised by taxes… so, what happens to the money when the government spends it?

Eight years of Ex-Pres Bush tax cuts not only did not stimulate the economy. After the end of eight years the economy was on the verge of the second great depression. The entire idea that Tax cuts alone will stimulate the economy failed for Pres Reagan, Bush Sr and Bush Jr. Still it is the only plan being put forward by Conservative Republicans

The economy during the 2000s ran on the ‘equity’ extracted from overvalued real estate. It was a bubble economy doomed to burst.

Money is like manure..neither one is any good unless you spread it around. Give a poor guy a buck and he will spend it, give a rich guy 100 bucks and he will start a factory business overseas. That is why Ragan Economics failed.

Hey Ruben, I’m removing you from my list of comics due to complete lack of any kind of balance. You are obviously an artist (good) who hasn’t a non-partisan bone in your body. (bad)

Tip to link to an article online:

Put its title (such as ‘Obama cited 'stimulus,' but the money is actually from Voinovich, Brown and Kilroy’) in square brackets, then put its URI (such a‌s http‌://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2010/08/obama_cites_stimulus_but_stimu.html) in parentheses, to get a link to it (such as Obama cited 'stimulus,' but the money is actually from Voinovich, Brown and Kilroy).

Also proofread and edit your comment if necessary.

By the way, I’m not sure that this is the best article for small-goverment advocates to link to. It says that the money that saved an Ohio government building didn’t come from the stimulus package, but it still came from the federal government. It came from pork-barrel earmarks!

give me $ and i’ll save it…

Badto Theboner:

You are in need of some real help my little chum. Go here:

http://www.moonbattery.com/

You can thank me later.

Job growth was the poorest during the Bush years. Thanks to giving tax money to rich people to put in their banks and bet with on Wall Street.

The Bushes, Reagan and other minimal-government advocates spent more money and added more to the national debt than any democrat president.

Don’t take my word for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_debt

Tell me, how is taxing a man at 35% giving the rich money?Every man equal, every man one vote, every man 15% of income. That is equality.

You want your lefty union job for 40 hours a week and 0 years schooling.That Doctor gave up his 20s to school and intern, couldn’t get married till his 30s (Divorce rate among Dr.s?) Is paying back $200k student loans, working 100 hour weeks, and pays more a year in insurance than you will pay in your life. You say it’s fair to tax him 3 times what your lazy bleeep gets taxed. Is it guilt or envy that you don’t make what he does? He paid his dues, you went and took an easy vocation, got married and probably had more kids than you could afford ($200k/kid w/o college) Who’s fault?

The man who invests in himself and his country gets taxed higher than the man who does nothing. You wanted to spend more time with family than working? What do you expect. You got your family. Don’t tax the man you gave that up to save your family’s health.You want safe 1% CDs? Great! Don’try to overtax the man who made money investing in his county.

Or move to a commie country. What? There are two left, right?

Donaldo: I did not click on your link and could care less what it says. I can’t get past the unbelievable idea that you think B.O. (our favorite Dem “president”) won’t hold the world record — by a long shot — for increasing the national debt. Do you HONESTLY think he will not hold that record by the time he’s booted out in 2012? Newsflash: HE’S ALREADY THERE my little chum! I thought Jhimma was going to be the all-time worst “president”. Enter B.O.!!!! Doofus!

C.A. Bobby: Your comment deserves no reply. It’s beyond stupid. It’s reached into the 7th Circle of Hell and re-defines the illness known as liberalism. I suggest you seek professional help. Now.

Go here for five minutes a day for a month for some free help as I know you probably can’t pay for help since you do not have a job:

http://www.moonbattery.com/

You can thank me later……..

Lewreader -

Or move to a commie country. What? There are two left, right?

Actually, if you define a country with progressive income taxation as a “commie” country, every major rich country on earth is commie. Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland, Japan, EU, etc, they all have progressive income tax.

If you want a country that does NOT have progressive income tax or social services, though, you have plenty of choices. There’s the tropical paradise of Haiti, or the historic and colorful nation of Somalia. Both of these offer additional advantages - no gay marriage, no local gun control laws, etc. If you don’t like the “complexion” of those countries, of course, there may be some former Soviet Republics that are more to your taste.

I find it amusing to think that Doctors are the “Rich” that we are taxing so heavily. Doctors have worked very hard and long and put themselves through school with lots of money or had to borrow lots of money. They are NOT the “Rich”, the typical small business owner is also not part of the “Rich”. They are both well paid servants. I do not begrudge very hard working people their success. Many hard working people do not make great money. Unlucky? Stupid? Lazy? You should really get to know some of these hard working people that are not rich.

Working hard or making sacrifices does not automatically make you rich. If you are part of the very fortunate you should not put down those that are trying very hard.

Capitalism encourages business creation and hard work. It does not guarantee success, most businesses fail within 3 years. Having started a few businesses and suffered a few failures I can tell you it affects family, friends, employees and also your own estimations of self worth.

I would gladly pay high taxes when I am making more than an adjusted gross income of more than $200,000 per year. When my business losses more than $250,000 per year for a couple of years in a row I don’t think taxing me would be fair. Doctors are not the only ones that work 100 hours per week. They are not the only ones that never see their families or suffer divorce because of it.

Rich does not mean hard working or even deserving. It just means money. Money that might be there to save your bleeep if your a Doctor that is shut down for malpractice for making mistakes, marriage falls apart(divorce) followed by bankruptcy and then no jobs because you are now too educated and too old to work. Guess what all you smart alecs that had life all figured out. Your broke, old and unemployable because of all that education. Your IRA and 401K are gone, your friends left with the ex as did the house. SS is starting to look like the only thing left to you.

Now the GOP and the “Rich” want to paint you as lazy, worthless and a drag on the country. You paid lots of taxes when you were making money and now they don’t want you on the streets. When you have it good, don’t complain so much about those that don’t.

Good points Lance and Nap. Funny, the people that help the “rich” are the working schlubs. How much does the cop that protects the wealthy man’s home make? How about the banker that invests his money? How about the soldiers that keep the country safe? Talk about class warfare. If you’re in the top 2% Lew then good for you and you need to pay for the services you get so yes you need to be taxed more. If you are in the bottom 98% with the rest of us then you’re fighting for the wrong team and trust me they don’t need your help.

Every man equal, every man one vote, every man 15% of income. That is equality.

Actually, any of these three would be equality in income tax:

Every person pays the same amount of income in tax. Every person pays the same percentage of income in tax and keeps the same percentage of income after tax. Every person keeps the same amount of income after tax.

Of course, you can’t have all three of these at once (unless all taxes and incomes are zero). So just pointing out that something in the plan is ‘the same’ doesn’t make that plan closer to equality than any other.

Equality under the law simply means that the same rules are applied to everybody, even if the rules are something in between (2) and (3) above (which a simple progressive income tax would be).

The Bushes, Reagan and other minimal-government advocates spent more money and added more to the national debt than any democrat president.

Although this is true for those three (nitpick: none of them were minimal-government advocates, unless you count lip service as advocacy), in longer terms I don’t see any correlation by party. According to the graph on the Wikipedia article that you linked, the public debt of the United States, relative to GDP, has changed as follows:

increasing under Roosevlet (D); decreasing under Truman (D), Eisenhower (R), Kennedy (D), Johnson (D), Nixon (R); increasing under Ford (R); decreasing under Carter (D); increasing under Reagan (R), Bush (R); decreasing under Clinton (D); increasing under Bush (R), Obama (D).

So we have a correlation lasting from Ford to Bush II, but it didn’t hold before, and Obama is on track to break it.

@ Chikuku

Yeah, awesome.

Despite the free-market economic lessons that showed up from time to time in those comics, the money bin never made any financial sense.

A recent study showed that when the rich benefit from individual tax cuts, they don’t stimulate the economy by spending it, they put it in savings. When they are not benefitting from individual tax cuts, then they spend more money instead of saving it. Although I personally doubt they spend much more - having worked in an affluent community for 24 years previously I can tell you that the rich didn’t get rich giving their money away - unless it results in a huge tax writeoff!

PS I deduce that Lewreader may be a doctor himself. Certainly he’s rich, and probably retired. Plenty of time to write five or six paragraph diatribes on a COMICS page!