A Ledgie wants to know: Economy Edition

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by HejiraNYC

But tax revenue is collected no matter what. From everybody. So does that mean if I was reckless with my money and bought millions of dollars worth of dot-com stocks in the late 1990's, that I am entitled to a government-sponsored bailout because I paid my taxes?

Well, no. When times are good, there is way more tax to collect and the huge rev. generated by companies like Bear Stearns pays or generates much of it, which is what that article said.

And - the govt. sadly will never or rarely will help out individual people, though it did in the Bear Stearns instance because if that company went broke, the run on banks would have been devastating.

But, I agree, the govt. helps out corps in a way that is awful. I mean look at your phone bill. In Georgia and I suspect elsewhere because it is a Fed Tax, we pay something like $5.00 per phone line to subsidize AT&T's cost for providing phone lines to rural areas That is an INSANE govt. handout. Why the hell shouldn't AT&T, a private but regulated entity, revise the national average price per line and absorb the cost themselves instead of getting arguably BILLIONS a year if not month in that subsidy.