Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Connecticut unemployment fund goes broke

Worth reading. It ain't over till it's over. Remember, Connecticut is the nation's 2nd richest state. According to the article, it is now one of 25 states where the unemployment fund is insolvent, and states are borrowing from the US Dept of Labor.

So yeah, we need to keep paying taxes, and anticipate rising tax rates.

The other morning, in fact, I was musing over coffee that what the Obama administration really needs to do is communicate a plan for raising taxes over the next few years, probably starting in 2011, so that businesses could plan for it. And then I read the Economist, which advocated the same thing. Which means that either I'm deucedly clever, or that my thinking has been too swayed by years of subscribing to one publication.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

yeah, that's excellent logic, raise taxes to fund unemployment benefits, i'm sure that will increase consumer spending thus spurring economic growth. The US is losing jobs at an alarming rate, some industries no longer exist domestically. corporations trawl the world for lax regulatory environments and cheap labor, screwing US employment growth in the process. Bravo! maybe someday we can look forward to our children opting to become unemployed wards of the state or slog to some job in the service sector, earn a living and pay 75% of their income to our benevolent, progressive, government.

Cleric Mikhailovich de Troi said...

Anonymous, I didn't say raise taxes, I said communicate a plan to raise taxes in the future. It's going to have to be done, period. Maybe top marginal rates don't have to go higher than they were under Clinton, when we grew fast and ran a surplus. But more revenue will need to be raised, at least for a time, and the whole supply-side theology has been convincingly shot down. It's not about a big welfare state, it's about the nation having been hollowed out under Bush and the legacy of his wars and his own obscenely lax regulatory climate.

Obama does not have all the answers, for sure. But he shies away from them less than W did.