Republicans And Business Groups Unable To Find One 'Job Creator' Who Opposes A Tax On Millionaires
From the article:
NPR put out a request to Republican offices and the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax to find business owners who'd be affected. Unsurprisingly, Republican leadership and the business groups came up empty:
We wanted to talk to business owners who would be affected. So, NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.
So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to. A group called the Tax Relief Coalition said the problem was finding someone willing to talk about their personal taxes on national radio.
They are probably unwilling to talk about it because it would expose their greed and selfishness. If the number of Millionaires who said they support increased taxes on the wealthy was increased by two, we would be that much closer to reversing the income inequality trend begun under the Ronald Reagan Presidency.
We are writing to ask you to do the right thing for our country and REJECT ANY Super Committee deal that does not raise tax rates on incomes over $1 million to AT LEAST 39.6%, REGARDLESS of how many deductions are eliminated.
Private jets shouldn't have been tax deductible in the first place.
Thank you,
Patriotic Millionaires and Patriotic Americans
Love it. Poll after poll after poll shows Americans - even Indys and Republicans - agree. The politics of the day say Democrats should pound this message home hourly. But our congressional millionaires, Jared Polis and Michael Bennet have been clearly corrupted by the air in DC and are faint examples of what a Colorado Democrat can be.
Shame on both of them. They are shamed by their Peers in the One Percent: Millionaires who urgently want to preserve the Middle Class, Millionaires who can afford and want to pay more taxes so everyone in America can participate and thrive within a democracy that could be the most wealthy nation in history.
Some workers at Amazon.com's Allentown, Pennsylvania warehouse are reportedly willing to contend with working at a brutal pace in dizzying heat so long as it means having a job.
Only one out of 20 Allentown-based current or former Amazon employees interviewed by The Morning Call reported that the online retailer was a good place to work. During summer heat waves Amazon had paramedics on standby to treat any employees who couldn't stand the heat, the paper reported. But many workers pushed through difficult working conditions after seeing what happened to other employees who didn't meet expectations - they were fired and escorted out of the warehouse.
Some employees worked 11-hour days during the holiday season and others were forced to maintain their productivity levels, even during the summer heat...
No doubt the Amazon CEO is proud of his employees' high productivity - I won't even bother to look up the quote.
Amazon.com told many of its Colorado online business affiliates Monday that it would sever its business relationship with them, a move that could slice into the revenues of thousands of Web retailers.
The company blamed state lawmakers for enacting a law requiring it to notify those who purchase Amazon merchandise through a local website that they owe state sales taxes.
Any CEO in America would be drool at prospects of sitting in the CEO's chair at Amazon. But is this the new American Dream? A dream where the CEO can vanquish his competitors, break the backs of his employees, and abuse the society and institutions that, while making him rich, are under ever-increasing pressure to provide even more to those at the top?
Amazon.com is a shining example of what's gone wrong is society, not the ideal. Its CEO Jeff Bezos and its Board do not support the American Dream, do not support the middle class. They work daily to kill them and abuse those who have paved the way for their success.
The first order of business to correct this situation should be to have them pay their taxes. The second should be to sue them for abuse of their employees. Then maybe they can start working for a gold star, but not a minute before they start acting like responsible citizens and good neighbors, something we all strive to do.
This, from House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson is decent, but rare:
"The American people get it. They are weary of the theater and the political drama because they understand that it is their pensions, their savings, their mortgages and their 401Ks that the Republicans are playing with. This shouldn't be about who's going to be the next President or who's going to control Congress, it should be about who's going to protect their savings, their mortgages and their 401Ks in this crisis. Republicans continue to hold in disregard Americans true needs: jobs and financial security.
"For the sake of the nation, it's time to forget the politics and vote a clean debt ceiling increase, as was done seven times for President Bush."
The sheer incompetence of our employees on our side is staggering. It adds insult to injury, and I hope it leads to a massive refudiation of the Democratic Party Establishment, because they are failing massively before our very eyes.
I am having a problem with a word, it is one that we're hearing a lot lately, seriousness. Now having been 'round the block a few times I have come to the conclusion that when I hear Right Wing talkers like Robert Samuelson and Republicans using a word over and over then I tend to think they are in the process of redefining it.
Today's little nugget of nothing from Samuelson is all about the false equivalence between the supposed lack of seriousness on both sides. Of course La Samuelson goes after the Dems first insisting that we look at cutting entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare and then conflating those two expensive and troubled programs with the much more solvent and non-deficit producing Social Security.
He does take a half hearted swipe at the Republicans and their abject failure to even consider increasing taxes at all to bring down our deficits. But Samuelson has a point that he wants to make in this "A pox on both your houses" column. Here, I'll let him make it:
Our budget problem is conceptually simple. Government's spending commitments, driven by more retirees and uncontrolled health costs, vastly exceed the existing tax base. There is an argument about how fast changes should be made to protect the economic recovery.
He is right as far as he goes. The problem is that Samuelson is not really, um, err, serious about this issue himself. Yes we do have a problem that we don't have enough money for our commitments and yes health care costs are going up and that is squeezing the budget more as we keep our commitments to the poor and elderly to provide them with health care.
However, the solution is not finding a way to slash these programs so that they provide less care and do nothing to control costs. The solution is to fix the underlying problem, that our health care markets are fundamentally flawed.
"We are thrilled to offer interested job seekers diverse positions with limitless opportunity at a global company," said Kelly Frieze, store manager of the future IKEA Centennial. "At IKEA, we realize that the ability to do the things in life that bring success and happiness is extremely valuable to our coworkers. It also is as fun to work at IKEA as it is to shop at IKEA."
IKEA plans to hire 400 people in Centennial, officials said.
So, now that House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan has unveiled his steaming tightly coiled pile of a budget the argument in the media is starting. It is to be strongly hoped that the Traditional Media outlets will look at the facts of this budget.
You know the little problems like the draconian cuts are not going to actual deficit reduction because they are being used to pay for tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. Just to raise your blood pressure a little this morning, let me give you and example. Under this budget a single person making $75,000 a year (a nice chunk of change) would pay the same tax rates as people who make multiple millions a year.
Another issue that has to be brought up again and again is that this budget would gut the newly minted financial regulations, would gut the EPA, would gut the Social Security Administration (setting up the argument that it is poorly run and needs to be ended all together) as well as ending Medicare and Medicaid as we know them within ten years.
As if all that shite were not enough, there is the fact that like all of the proposals that Rep. Ryan puts forward, the numbers don't work. He assumes that if we pass his budget in 4 years, just 48 months, the unemployment rate will fall to 4%.
I'd love that to happen, but I have this mental defect, I can't get behind something that has no basis in reality, or as in this case is actually counter factual. Over the last two years the only thing that has kept the economy afloat was major federal spending. Business is sitting on 1.4 trillion in cash and has shown no sign of wanting to use it to stimulate demand. Rep. Ryan wants to slash hundreds of billions from the budget every year for the next decade. Is there really anyone out there who thinks that the resultant loss of jobs is going to improve the growth rate or the unemployment numbers?
If there was anything to this, then we would have had the boom that Rep. Ryan and the Heritage Foundation both predicted from the original Bush tax cuts. Instead of job growth we lost 600,000 private sector jobs in that time period. I think we have been "trickled down" upon enough to show that it is insane and does not work.
There is one piece of the Republican push that I do agree with; there is no plan from the Democrats, yet. For all its flaws (and lets face it they are legion) the Republicans have put forward an ideological marker for budgets. Everyone can see they want to slash government at the expense of the young, the poor and the elderly. I think it is more than a little bit of political suicide, but this is what you get when the inmates run the asylum as has happened with the modern Republican Party.
There are many ways to fall into bad habits, but the easiest is when one tries a vice and then is rewarded for having done so. This is where the nation is with the Congressional Republicans. Their vice has been economic hostage taking, and like all successful hostage takers, when they want something they look around of the nearest economic crisis to grab a hold of and insist that they get their way.
Which is exactly where we are with the impending, and probably inevitable, government shut down; their least reasonable members, newly elected (thanks midterm voters) have been signaling for months that if they did not get every little mean spirited and economically moronic thing they wanted, they would shutter the Federal Government.
Now with Speaker Boehner (Putz-OH) reneging on his privately agreed to cuts, there is little chance that there will be an agreement and a vote. In fact there would have to be a bill published today in order to be able to follow the new House rule of 72 hours before a vote, for there to be anything to vote on by the deadline on Friday.
It is not like the Republicans think that the public is going to be kind to them on this issue. Their leadership remembers how it played out in 1995 and they don't want to go into another presidential election with weak candidates and a sour taste for their party in the mouths of the electorate.
Which is why they are trying to do everything they can to pin this on the Democrats. Too bad the facts are all against them. Today they are going to introduce another Continuing Resolution that would extend spending for another week. Sounds good until you hear what the price tag is.
There is often a bit of cognitive dissonance when one finds oneself agreeing with even part of the agenda of ones political opponents. I find myself there, in small part, with the desire of the Republicans to simplify the tax code, at least in some areas. Of course the devil is in the details of what should be simplified and who pays the cost, and there, of course the Republicans and I part ways.
Pretty much everyone is familiar with the Alternative Minimum Tax. It is a tax provision that was put in place to prevent deductions from completely wiping out income tax obligations. It was enacted in its current form without an indexed increase for inflation, so it has been monkeyed with in an ad hoc basis as more upper middle class folks started making more money and running afoul of it.
What you might find shocking in the wake of the news that General Electric is not only paying no tax this year but getting around 2 billion in tax benefits (what a person would call a refund, but not really) is that it applies to corporations too.
In fact the threshold is rather low, with a corporation falling into the Corporate AMT at just $310,000 of income. The problem is that that companies like GE and B of A have all kinds of things they can do to avoid paying this tax.
We're flat broke. What do you think of when you read that? Having been busted more than a few times in my life it means no money and no prospect of getting any. Pretty simple and straight forward, unless, of course, you are the Speaker of the House; then "broke" can be parsed and spun and twisted.
We have all seen the great orange Speaker saying "We're broke" over and over again as he tries to sell a justification for what his masters (the Freshmen Republican "Tea Partiers") insist on him doing with the budget. It is really an effective statement, powerful, short and direct. It would be perfect if it were not for the fact that it is flatly a lie.
The United States has a deficit. That is true. The United States also has a lot of debt, but to say that we are "broke" is ridiculous. It is just another half truth scare tactic from the party that has made a performance art-form of the practice.
ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper hosts a very special roundtable discussion with exclusive appearances by Governor Jan Brewer, R-Ariz., Gov. Deval Patrick, D-Mass., Gov. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., and Gov. Nikki Haley, R-SC, to discuss the federal and state budget crises and constituent responses to the shortages.
Bless his soul, Deval Patrick is a true Democrat. But I'm guessing Hick will be hard to distinguish between the Tea Party/Republican governors in the discussion:
I'm sure he won't talk TABOR, it's destructive legacy and how even an economic boom won't be able to fix the damage it has done to our state budget or the fact that businesses keep pushing for more tax breaks.
Those things are obvious. What I am afraid of is Hick will be another in a long line of Colorado Democratic Leaders (I almost put "Democrat" cuz I'm so tired of their wimpiness) that would be ashamed to run as Republicans yet can't find the principle to stand up for truly democratic - and Democratic! values - even as those who live and represent those values knock on the door and stare them in the face.
Over the course of the past couple of weeks we've been talking about how the War On Social Security was about to get under way and what happens when countries choose to privatize their systems.
Today we take on another bite-sized chunk of economic analysis: how can you get to a situation where Social Security is financially stable for the next 75 years?
We'll describe some proposals that are out there-but the big focus of this conversation will be to look at one change that, all by itself, could not only solve the entire funding problem, but could actually allow us to lower the Social Security tax rate, immediately, and still achieve fiscal balance.
"Well, if that's such a bright idea" you might ask, "why haven't we adopted it already?"
That's a great question-and after you hear the proposal, you may well have explanations of your own.
We've known for a long time, then, that nothing good would come from the commission. But on Wednesday, when the co-chairmen released a PowerPoint outlining their proposal, it was even worse than the cynics expected.
After reminding us of Alan Simpson,...sending an abusive e-mail to the executive director of the National Older Women's League in which he described Social Security as being "like a milk cow with 310 million tits." He goes on to say
Start with the declaration of "Our Guiding Principles and Values." Among them is, "Cap revenue at or below 21% of G.D.P." This is a guiding principle? And why is a commission charged with finding every possible route to a balanced budget setting an upper (but not lower) limit on revenue?
Matters become clearer once you reach the section on tax reform. The goals of reform, as Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson see them, are presented in the form of seven bullet points. "Lower Rates" is the first point; "Reduce the Deficit" is the seventh.
So how, exactly, did a deficit-cutting commission become a commission whose first priority is cutting tax rates, with deficit reduction literally at the bottom of the list?
Actually, though, what the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases - tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class. They suggest eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans - the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest - and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate.
To hear the Republicans tell it, the problem with things, the reason they are likely to take over the House of Representatives tomorrow is all the spending that the Obama administration has engaged in. Personally I think a big part of it is all the spending groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Cross Roads GPS have done, but that is for another post.
The big push from Republicans as the campaign season is ending has been about the need to cut spending. They look at our deficit situation and they say that the reason we have such high unemployment is the massive federal spending. Things like the COBRA subsidy and unemployment benefit extensions. Of course this includes the stimulus bill with its 300 billion (300,000 million) in tax cuts, which all but the ultra wealth have received some share of in terms of payroll tax reductions.
There is something about Washington and taxes that seems to destroy the ability of law makers to do simple math. This seems to afflict Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats the worst. The Washington Post is reporting about the roll out of the Republicans Orwellianly named tax plan, the Tax Hike Prevention Act. Sen. Mitch McConnell (the man voted most likely to turn into a snapping turtle in our lifetimes) has put the idea on the table permanently extend all of the Bush era tax cuts, including the ones for the ultra wealthy, that top 2% of all earners.
From the WaPo :
"We have a spending problem. We spend too much. We don't have a taxing problem. We don't tax too little," McConnell told reporters Tuesday. "And if we want to begin to get ourselves out of this economic trough that we're in, the only way to do that is to grow the private sector."
As a lifelong (23 years) resident of Jefferson County, I am disappointed in who our county GOP has given blessing to run in HD23. I know this blog knows Edgar Johansson is a carpet bagger who moved to the district only days before the deadline to file for candidacy but now he's having a fundraiser hosted by Wayne Allard who was one of the most extreme Senators Colorado ever had. In step with the rest of the national GOPs unbridled duplicity, here are the reasons cited in the fundraiser invite to support Edgar Johnasson.
Here are some other great reasons to support Edgar:
- Having a true friend of the Aerospace industry in the State Legislature will bring much needed understanding and appreciation of just what we do for the economy of this state.
- Even though as an industry, we play mainly at the Federal level, the Colorado laws, regulations and taxation policies can have a real impact on our bottom line. With Edgar's knowledge, we can get a "head-ups" if anything is proposed that will affect our industry.
The message here is that if elected, carpetbagger and "true friend" of this so-called private industry-Johansson will not only use his position to force taxpayers to subsidize this industry, just like what happened in New Mexico, but he will also use his position to alert his cronies about anything the state may be doing that would effect their "bottom line". If that doesn't make you angry, I'll break it down a little more for you.
First, according to CNBC, Colorado is ranked as the third most friendly state for business beat only by Texas and Virginia. For many of the last several years, Colorado has seen about half a billion dollar budget cutsjust from education. Business is doing as well as it can in Colorado. Any more "incentives" for business, which are really taxpayer subsidies, and we won't have a civilized society in this state. But that doesn't matter to the ultra-rich for which the aerospace industry is their patent playground. They have their wealth and their stated goal is their bottom line so they'll use their wealth to more purely concentrate their wealth, especially if that means buying a seat on the legislature by moving a Downtown Denver resident to the district at the last minute. <---- It's the American dream, right?
Wrong!
The principles on which this country is founded are fundamentally democratic. A crony of a special interest that is not in the greater interest of the people is an enemy of our state. Johansson very unethically moved to our district to try to seize a spot on the legislature where his rich buddies could use our money to pad their "bottom line".
Those who read my posts (and there are a lot more of you than I ever thought there would be) know that I am not really a fan of divisive politics. This comes from the teachings of my Mom, who spent her political career reaching out to Republicans to get things done in Washtenaw County. Her argument was always that while you might hammer your opponents in today's fight, you're probably going to need them to get tomorrows work done. It is generally good advice, but it is predicated on the premise that your opponents want to get things done and really are working for the best solution for everyone.
Sadly Mom's good advice can not be used right now. There has been too big a shift in power in the nation for us to look at the Republicans as any kind of honest partner in anything. The efforts of the folks like the ultra-wealthy Koch brothers have shifted our discourse so far to the right that things which would have had politicians thinking about spending more time with their families in the past can be said with a straight face and taken as serious.
Republicans have a real problem. Well, they have a lot of them but we are not talking about moral, genetic or hygienic problems, we're talking about a political problem. They pulled a fast one with their double round of tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. At the time we were told (against all evidence, and common sense) that if we cut the tax rate for the ultra-wealthy, if we allowed them to pass on their enormous wealth to their heirs without taxing it that there would be a robust economy, that millions and millions of jobs would be created. It was the old trickle down economy idea, dressed up for the big time.
The thing was even their own numbers showed that any positive effect would be wiped out in 10 years and then it would become a major problem in terms of budgets. So rather than face the music and the voters with this news, the Republicans put a sunset provision in the bill. It would only last 10 years, then revert to the same level of tax that the Clinton economic expansion had. This all looked pretty sweet to Republicans. They would be able to move the burden of paying for government to from wealth to work, and would have a whole decade to get these cuts made permanent.
It must be nice being a Republican these days. Everything is so simple when you believe that tax cuts are the answer to every problem. I was going to write something about this on my blog, spoonfighter.com, when I realized that it would be funnier as a movie. So, here you go:
