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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Whitebeard who wrote (422060)	4/15/2011 2:23:54 PM
From: Katelew	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793858

I had a neighbor once whose wife died of cancer leaving him with 3 young children. They had married young, and she had never worked outside the home, thus not made contributions to SS. He had a great job, big home with a pool and so on, but still got $2400 a month from SS....a check for each child and one to himself as surviving spouse with minority children. All of it tax-free. He remarried within two years but the checks continued until the last child turned 18. There was a time when this kind of SS check would have continued right through the child's college years---ending at age 22 if the child went to college. This illustrates what is maybe the greatest weakness of the govt. safety nets as a group. Too much of the money goes to people who don't actually need it. Same with the stimulus money. We were already about to replace our old furnace when the Obama energy tax credit came along, so the govt. gave us $1500 to do something we were going to do anyway. As for Reagan and the 1987 Omnibus Tax bill, the change that actually made me the maddest was the creation of the AMT. Our children all had UGMA accounts from childhood because they were beneficiaries of trust income from their grandparents. The details are too complicated, but now and then their accounts would be forced to pay an AMT. It wasn't because the value of these accounts was huge or anything, it was just a quirk in the law that would trigger the AMT. Made me furious. Generally speaking, we were unaffected by the Reagan tax cuts. What we gained in the lower marginal rates, we lost back in the reduced value of deductions. Pretty much a wash. The tax law changes that boosted our finances considerably were the Bush cuts.