Democracy can be messy, of course, and the usual unsatisfying prescription for addressing its flaws is to wait until the next election, or the one after that, or maybe the one your children’s children will vote in decades hence, when politicians will surely be more upstanding than today’s jackals. Then you’ll be able to throw the bums out and send better people to Washington. But the retail sector may have a better model, which works for Amazon and Walmart and Apple and any company, really, that cares about its customers: If you screw up, offer them a refund.
This would be simple to do. For every day the government is shut down, every American's 2013 tax bill would be reduced by one day's worth of income taxes. Here’s the math. The average family earns about $50,000 per year and pays about 12 percent of that in federal taxes. That works out to about $16 a day. Might not sound like much, but a two-week shutdown would generate a rebate of about $230. If you earn $100,000, the rebate would be close to $500. If the shutdown lasts for a month, you’d be pushing a $1000 rebate.
Unfortunately the 'shutdown' is an illusion. 83% of the government is running on all cylinders and spending like their is no tomorrow. Of the remaining 17% that is suppose to be idol, they have for the convenience of someone in Washington continued to work or as we can clearly see working overtime at the behest of the president to force people to see that the government is shut down...
ReplyDeleteThis current "shutdown" is actually an illusion,therefore the only shutdown is in areas where the general public has a direct visibility.
ReplyDeleteThis is done so the general public feels "pain",thus proving a political point.
Of course the so called shutdown is a gimmick, we all know that. However, as the politicians dicker and dodge, they are not doing the jobs we hired them for. Since they aren't doing their jobs we shouldn't pay them. So, like any good employer, we should keep their would-be paychecks for ourselves. QED. Tax rebate time.
ReplyDeleteI think we should pay them what they're worth. That is once they reopen the rim of the grand canyon and the Atlantic ocean.
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