Tag Archives: 1. tax cuts for the rich

French-speaking multi-millionaire who won’t release his tax returns compares Obama to Marie Antoinette

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On Thursday, the Romneybot 2012 charged President Obama with being insensitive for discussing facts:

“When the president’s characterization of our economy was, ‘It could be worse,’ it reminded me of Marie Antoinette: ‘Let them eat cake,’” said Romney.

[...] “It is actually laughable that the ‘Quarter-Billion-Dollar Man’ would call President Obama out of touch — and use the example of a French monarch to make the point,” DNC spokeswoman Melanie Roussell said in a statement to The Huffington Post on Thursday evening. “This is the same guy who joked that he was ‘unemployed,’ offered a $10,000 bet as casually as one might buy a cup of coffee, and said ‘corporations are people.’ He’s also the same person who, as a former corporate buyout specialist for Bain Capital, made his fortune firing thousands of workers, cutting benefits, bankrupting American companies and outsourcing jobs overseas. He’s the one who won’t release his tax returns — most likely because we would all learn that he pays a lower tax rate than middle class wage-earners. Laughable.”

Tightening the screws a bit, Obama campaign Press Secretary Ben LaBolt quickly followed suit, tweeting out a link to a video of Mitt Romney speaking French for an introduction of the volunteers at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Obviously, the Romneybot has been programmed for self-parody. bleep! blork! blah blah…

Meanwhile in the Grand Ol’ Teaparty

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WHAT DOES A PIPELINE have to do with extending a payroll tax cut for the working and middle class? (Answer: Not a friggin’ thing.) — Rawstory

“If that bill comes over to us, we will make changes to it, and I will guarantee you that the Keystone pipeline will be in there when it goes back to the United States Senate.” — John Boehner, last night

THE EMPLOYMENT NUMBERS ON THAT PIPELINE are being greatly exaggerated: it’ll create 20,000 jobs? No. More like 3,500 temporary jobs, offset by job losses because of the increase in gas prices that it would cause. — Politico

ONLY A TEAPARTY PATRIOT (read: idiotic moron) would take a gun into LaGuardia Airport. — CBS News

CHRISTMAS IN AMERICA! Congress cuts winter heating aid for the poor while boosting  the defense budget. — Think Progress

AND WHO BETTER TO SIGN A “MARRIAGE PLEDGE” than Newt “the Ging” Gingrich? — NRO


image: godlessliberals.com

Full employment: the bourgeoisie hates it because it strengthens the working class #OWS

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“Full employment is no small demand to make. The bourgeoisie hates it, because it would strengthen the bargaining power of the working class. It, plus the other planks of an expanded welfare state mentioned in the Demands draft, would give people the confidence and freedom to think about a better world. This isn’t fictional: it happened in the 1970s, as the transformation of consciousness among middle-class college students spread into the working class. Quality of work life—in a real, not a GM sense—became a central concern in organized labor, at least among the rank and file. It was one of the things that alarmed elites, leading to the crackdown of the late 1970s and early 1980s.”

— Doug Henwood (via azspot)

Separation of Corporation and State: Occupy Together, Occupy Everywhere

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World’s richest country! We’re #1!!

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HUNGER BY THE NUMBERS: USDA Releases 2010 Household Food Security Report

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1 in 6 Americans struggled to put food on the table in 2010; USDA credits nutrition assistance programs for dropping number of households with”very low food insecurity…”

Read more…

Piss-Poor Americans – 50% of Us Earn LESS than $26.5K a year – TRICKLE UP POVERTY — (via)

(As posted below, many of the low wage earners are probably in Texas!)

Did you know one major factor in Rick Perry’s ‘Texas Miracle’ was government jobs?

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Jared Bernstein has a little fun with Perry’s declaration that as president he’d make Washington “as inconsequential in your lives as I can.”

Over the last few years, government jobs have been awfully consequential in Texas: 47% of all government jobs added in the US between 2007 and 2010 were added in Texas.

The chart shows that Texas employment wasn’t down much at all in these years, as the state lost only 53,000 jobs.  But looming behind that number are large losses in the private sector (down 178,000) and large gains (up 125,000) in government jobs.

Source: BLS

Now, this was a period when the nation lost close to eight million jobs, so this churning in Texas is a very small drop in that bucket.  But it sure doesn’t match the Governor’s anti-government rhetoric.

In fact, as the table below shows, the nation as a whole added 264,000 government jobs, 2007-10, meaning public-sector jobs added in Texas account for almost half of the nation’s public-sector jobs over these years.

Read the rest…

Here is irony: the miracle of public sector jobs making an anti-government guy who wants to be president look good. Also too: why didn’t wealthy and corporate Texans with all the tax breaks create more private sector jobs in the past 10 years? Could larger government actually be the solution for our nation’s troubles?

Related:

The Texas Miracle: #1 in adults lacking diplomas, tied #1 for low-wages, #1 for medically uninsured, #4 for poverty

Yes, it really is the Bush tax cuts. Yes, that has contributed to the deficit and income inequality in America.

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But the teaparty tells us, “NO COMPROMISE!!” They have been instructed to cut spending without increasing taxes on their donors and corporate masters. How do you negotiate with terrorists?

From Maddow Blog:

President Obama made his case to the American people Monday night, explaining why we’re so much in the red:

In the year 2000, the government had a budget surplus. But instead of using it to pay off our debt, the money was spent on trillions of dollars in new tax cuts, while two wars and an expensive prescription drug program were simply added to our nation’s credit card.

As a result, the deficit was on track to top $1 trillion the year I took office. To make matters worse, the recession meant that there was less money coming in, and it required us to spend even more – on tax cuts for middle-class families; on unemployment insurance; on aid to states so we could prevent more teachers and firefighters and police officers from being laid off. These emergency steps also added to the deficit.

At the heart of all that is the set of Bush tax cuts, including tax cuts for the wealthy, that were billed as temporary but have proved politically difficult to get rid of. Below, the New York Times chart James Fallows says should be included in every discussion of the debt ceiling.

While we’re talking about expiring the tax cuts for the wealthy, don’t forget these facts about the wealthiest 1% vs. the rest of us:

I hope those teabaggers who are riding around on their government-paid electric scooters are really listening to what their chosen leaders are saying and are aware of these facts:

“The top 1 percent now gets almost a quarter of the nation’s total income — a larger share than at any time since the 1920s. The top 1 percent have also received about 40 percent of the benefits of the Bush tax cuts.” — Robert Reich

“Average income went from that $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. Think about that: the average income of Americans increased just $303 dollars in 28 years. That’s wage repression.” — Bill Moyers

Here’s another chart for you:

MOTHER JONES: Productivity has surged, but income and wages have stagnated for most Americans. If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.

What do the teabaggers imagine they’re leaving to their children and grandchildren, again, if their reps in Congress crash the economy next week and the wealthy are never again required to pay their fair share of revenue? Idiots.

Teabag Christianity vs. Jesus Christ

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[image: divineirony]

‘What Would Jesus Cut?’: Christian Leaders Urge Obama To Protect The Poor In Debt Talks

An “unprecedented” coalition of religious leaders are coming together to urge President Obama not to sacrifice the needs of the poor in negotiations to reduce the nation’s debt. Leaders from the Episcopal Church, the Salvation Army, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the United Church of Christ all met with Obama last week to present their unified message… [...] The coalition focuses on those Jesus called “the least of these” (Matthew 25:45), which speaks to obligations to look to the less fortunate. One goal it to get lawmakers to consider, “what would Jesus cut?” (Actually, to ask the question is probably to answer it.)

How many more days until the “Republican strategy” is viewed as unpatriotic?

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“It would be myopic in the extreme to view the flow of oil to the United States as a legitimate national security issue but to view the flow of foreign capital into Treasury securities as a matter of no particular concern.”  — Bruce Bartlett, an economist who worked in George H.W. Bush’s White House 

How Default Threatens National Security | Mother Jones

[...] If the United States loses its ability to lead by economic example, that mantle could be taken up by its largest creditor nation and most credible military rival, China. And lesser powers with bones to pick with it—Iran, North Korea, Venezuela—could be emboldened. “Since the financial crisis, authoritarians and state capitalists have lost their respect for the United States,” writes Sebastian Mallaby, an economic research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Market capitalism is in disrepute; democracy is discredited. The budget fight is only deepening such feelings.”

[...] There’s a corollary to that argument. If forcing the debt crisis beyond August 2 erodes the United States’ military preparedness and diplomatic influence, the politicians most responsible for the gridlock—staunch conservatives who likely consider themselves defense hawks—might ultimately be seen as unpatriotic. As Balkin explains, “The Republican strategy of making America strong by bringing the American government to its knees is self-defeating.”

Read more: Mother Jones

The Republican strategy? It’s more along the lines of 51 Republican lawmakers signed a pledge to the Teaparty to not compromise, ever, with Democrats or the President. The strategy is that Republican lawmakers have said they want to make Obama a one-term president and this seems like as good a way as any. Any Republican strategy is being fueled by the rich and powerful from the Koch-funded Teaparty base up through DC itself, to ensure that they will continue to receive all the tax breaks, tax cuts, and tax loopholes they can. Would they want to bring the U.S. to its knees for personal / corporate financial gain? Haven’t they been doing exactly that for at least three decades already?

The cost of policy changes under BUSH and OBAMA

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Note that the Bush tax cuts are the biggest cost when compared to anything on either graph — even bigger than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and defense. Graph from the New York Times :

Ezra Klein’s explanation:

What’s also important, but not evident, on this chart is that Obama’s major expenses were temporary — the stimulus is over now — while Bush’s were, effectively, recurring. The Bush tax cuts didn’t just lower revenue for 10 years. It’s clear now that they lowered it indefinitely, which means this chart is understating their true cost. Similarly, the Medicare drug benefit is costing money on perpetuity, not just for two or three years. And Boehner, Ryan and others voted for these laws and, in some cases, helped to craft and pass them.

To relate this specifically to the debt-ceiling debate, we’re not raising the debt ceiling because of the new policies passed in the past two years. We’re raising the debt ceiling because of the accumulated effect of policies passed in recent decades, many of them under Republicans. It’s convenient for whichever side isn’t in power, or wasn’t recently in power, to blame the debt ceiling on the other party. But it isn’t true.

The true leader of the teaparty Republican Congress approved Boehner’s debt-ceiling plan yesterday

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Boehner had to get the approval of the GOP’s real (but unelected) leader before he moved forward with his debt-ceiling plan. And who better to guide Boehner on cutting safety net programs and services to the poor and middle-class while extending tax cuts, tax loopholes, and tax subsidies for the rich and powerful than Rush Limbaugh?

Boehner briefed Limbaugh on debt plan:

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) outlined the GOP’s debt-ceiling plan to conservative commentator [entertainer] Rush Limbaugh on Monday before showing it to his conference.

The conservative radio host said Boehner outlined his two-step plan that includes $1.2 trillion in spending cuts and a $1 trillion hike in the debt ceiling. In the second step, a commission would be appointed to come back with additional deficit-reduction proposals, which the Congress could then vote on.

I can’t imagine what would happen if Pelosi or Reid had to run a plan for some legislation by a liberal media person / entertainer — the Right would kick and scream all over cable news. But I have to say that I’m glad I can’t image Democratic leaders doing that anyway, because IT’S ABSURD!

I guess the teaparty and Republican congress take Rush’s tagline literally: “talent on loan from God.” For anyone who doesn’t know it — Rush made that up, okay? His “talent” (which we could argue about for a week) comes straight from an ego the size of his waistline and consists of “scar[ing] white men as they get in their trucks at lunchtime.”


Artist – David Fitzsimmons via BobCesca

Boehner’s new budget proposal is tantamount to a form of “Class Warfare”

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brooklynmutt:

“The head of the nonpartisan ‘Center for Budget and Policy Priorities,’ Bob Greenstein issued a scathing verdict on the new Republican plan.” - Lawrence O’Donnell