Tag Archives: Bush tax cuts

How close are we to a deal or the fiscal cliff?

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Think Progress: The House will vote on two separate proposals to extend the Bush tax cuts for people making $250,000 and below or for people making $1 million and below on Thursday.

Steve Benen - Obama, Boehner inch closer to debt deal: “This is no small concession of the president’s part. He proposed higher marginal top rates on income above $250,000, while Boehner counter-offered with a $1 million threshold. Obama, despite a strong public mandate on the issue, has moved his figure to $400,000 in this latest offer, with the expectation that the Speaker will be similarly flexible.

“The president has also lowered his overall tax revenue target to $1.2 trillion, from his initial offer of $1.6 trillion.

“On the other side of the ledger, Obama is offering $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, including $400 billion in health care savings, $200 billion from other mandatory programs such as farm price supports, $100 billion in military spending cuts; $100 billion from domestic programs, $290 billion in savings from lower interest on the debt, and $130 billion is savings from “chaining” the Consumer Price Index. More on that in a moment.

“As part of the same package, the president would expect an extension on unemployment benefits, new infrastructure investments, another Alternative Minimum Tax extension, and a two-year debt-ceiling increase (it’d be up to the administration to do the paperwork, though Congress could try to vote for default if it wanted to).

“Is this a good deal? At a certain level, it doesn’t matter, since Boehner says it’s not good enough and it wouldn’t pass the House. But since it may very well serve as the framework for an eventual agreement, it’s worth paying close attention to its most glaring flaws.”

Greg Sargent – Should progressives accept emerging fiscal cliff deal? The big picture: With this deal Obama will have broken the GOP’s fundamentalist opposition to raising tax rates on the rich (albeit only on income over $400,000) something that would have been deemed very unlikely a year ago. He will have held the line against the GOP demand for two years of Medicare — a victory. Debt ceiling hostage taking will have been deferred for two years, meaning it won’t get tied up in the next elections. He will have obtained stimulus spending — on infrastructure, and in the form of an extension of unemployment benefits — and as Paul Krugman notes, that wouldn’t happen if we go over the cliff. (I’m told the talks have not focused on the exact sum of stimulus spending the White House wants.) The price: The expiration of the payroll tax cut and the cut in Social Security benefits. That’s bad, but the damage could be limited, if the White House insists on it. Obama told us both sides would have to get out of their “comfort zones” in the quest for a deal, and it has been apparent for some time that he prefers a deal to going over the cliff. We now are beginning to see what getting out of that comfort zone looks like.

Paul Krugman - Rumors of a Deal: But the cuts are not nearly as bad as raising the Medicare age, for two reasons: the structure of the program remains intact, and unlike the Medicare age thing, they wouldn’t be totally devastating for hundreds of thousands of people, just somewhat painful for a much larger group. Oh, and raising the Medicare age would kill people; this benefit cut, not so much.The point is that we shouldn’t be doing benefit cuts at all; but if benefit cuts are the price of a deal that is better than no deal, much better that they involve the CPI adjustment than the retirement age. But is this rumored deal better than no deal? I’m on the edge. It’s not clear that going over the cliff would yield something better; on the other hand, those benefit cuts are really bad, and you hate to see a Democratic president lending his name to something like that…

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No cuts to Social Security: 

 

Fix the Debt: plutocrats are turning up the volume on the class war

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“Listening to these people talk about the national economy is like listening to a burglar tell you that you should really polish the silver more often.” – Charles P. Pierce

“The important thing to understand now is that while the election is over, the class war isn’t.

The same people who bet big on Mr. Romney, and lost, are now trying to win by stealth — in the name of fiscal responsibility — the ground they failed to gain in an open election. […]

Consider, as a prime example, the push to raise the retirement age, the age of eligibility for Medicare, or both. This is only reasonable, we’re told — after all, life expectancy has risen, so shouldn’t we all retire later? In reality, however, it would be a hugely regressive policy change, imposing severe burdens on lower- and middle-income Americans while barely affecting the wealthy. Why? First of all, the increase in life expectancy is concentrated among the affluent; why should janitors have to retire later because lawyers are living longer? Second, both Social Security and Medicare are much more important, relative to income, to less-affluent Americans, so delaying their availability would be a far more severe hit to ordinary families than to the top 1 percent.

Or take a subtler example, the insistence that any revenue increases should come from limiting deductions rather than from higher tax rates. The key thing to realize here is that the math just doesn’t work; there is, in fact, no way limits on deductions can raise as much revenue from the wealthy as you can get simply by letting the relevant parts of the Bush-era tax cuts expire. So any proposal to avoid a rate increase is, whatever its proponents may say, a proposal that we let the 1 percent off the hook and shift the burden, one way or another, to the middle class or the poor. […]

So keep your eyes open as the fiscal game of chicken continues. It’s an uncomfortable but real truth that we are not all in this together; America’s top-down class warriors lost big in the election, but now they’re trying to use the pretense of concern about the deficit to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Let’s not let them pull it off.”

— Paul Krugman: Class Wars of 2012

While finance executives urge Congress and the President to rein in spending, finance companies are raking in profits. [...] Meanwhile, workers are struggling. Average hourly pay, when adjusted for inflation, has fallen 0.7 percent over the past year, according to the Labor Department. And the unemployment rate in October was 7.9 percent — it was at a low of 4.4 percent in May 2007 before the recession. It’s a “zero-sum game,” Moody’s Analytics economist Aaron Smith told The Huffington Post in February. Companies are earning record profits largely because they are squeezing more productivity out of their workers without paying them more. — Corporate Profits Reach Record High, While Workers Struggle

Several CEOs — under the guise of a campaign known as “Fix the Debt” — have recently called for cuts to Social Security and other entitlements. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, for instance, said that “there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised.” “The solutions [to the fiscal cliff] are – it’s the retirement age; means testing Social Security and Medicare,” said Aetna CEO Mark Berolino. [...] Blankfein has nearly $12 million in retirement assets, while Bertolini has $1.5 million. Adding insult to injury, many of the CEOs calling for cuts to the social safety net are underfunding their workers’ retirement accounts — CEOs Looking To ‘Fix The Debt’ By Cutting Social Security Sit On Huge Retirement Accounts

The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks – IPS: The Fix the Debt campaign has raised $60 million and recruited more than 80 CEOs of America’s most powerful corporations to lobby for a debt deal that would reduce corporate taxes and shift costs onto the poor and elderly.

Key findings:

  • The 63 Fix the Debt companies that are publicly held stand to gain as much as $134 billion in windfalls if Congress approves one of their main proposals — a “territorial tax system.” Under this system, companies would not have to pay U.S. federal income taxes on foreign earnings when they bring the profits back to the United States.
  • The CEOs backing Fix the Debt personally received a combined total of $41 million in savings last year thanks to the Bush-era tax cuts. The top CEO beneficiary of the Bush tax cuts in 2011, Leon Black of Apollo Global Management, saved $9.9 million on the Bush tax cuts. The private equity fund leader reaped $215 million in taxable income last year just from vested stock.
  • Of the 63 Fix the Debt CEOs at publicly held firms, 24 received more in compensation last year than their corporations paid in federal corporate income taxes. All but six of these firms reported U.S. profits last year.

Sign this petition to tell Congress that it’s time to let the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2% expire and that they must reject any Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefit cuts.

60 percent of Americans STILL support raising taxes on higher incomes

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Washington Post: “Sixty percent of all Americans back higher taxes on higher incomes in the new Post-ABC data. Earlier this month, an identical 60 percent of voters in the presidential election said income taxes should be raised on income over $250,000, according to the national exit poll.

In the new poll, 73 percent of Democrats support such tax hikes, including a majority, 57 percent, who do so “strongly.” Among political independents, 63 percent back an increase, while 59 percent of Republicans oppose such a move.

[...] Even fewer — 30 percent — favor raising the age for Medicare from 65 to 67, part of a bid by Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker to avert the automatic spending cuts and tax increases that would hit if there is no deal by the end of the year.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/files/2012/11/Graphic21.jpg

Notice a majority of Republicans oppose raising taxes on higher incomes — but that majority also opposes reducing deductions and raising the age of Medicare. Apparently Republicans favor MAGIC on all issues related to the federal budget.

No wonder they voted for Romney-Ryan, who promised them: (1) moar tax cuts, (2) no cuts to programs YOU use *wink*, (3) magic, (4) balanced budget!

It’ll trickle down. Go back to Dancing with the Stars.

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theamericanbear: It’ll trickle down. Go back to Dancing with the Stars.

from Mother Jones

Last Sunday, 9/24/2012:

Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes: Now you made, on your investments, personally, about $20 million last year. And you paid 14 percent in federal taxes. That’s the capital gains rate. Is that fair to the guy who makes $50,000 and paid a higher rate than you did?
Romney: It is a low rate. And one of the reasons why the capital gains tax rate is lower is because capital has already been taxed once at the corporate level, as high as 35 percent.
Pelley: So you think it is fair?
Romney: Yeah, I think it’s the right way to encourage economic growth, to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work.

It’s not for nothing that George W. is the headliner at the upcoming Cayman Alternative Investment Summit. He’s probably the reason there’s a Summit there to begin with:

Mitt Romney’s tax plan: doubling-down on the magical thinking of voodoo economics

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FOR SEVERAL weeks, we’ve been asking Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to explain how he can cut taxes, as promised, without adding to the nation’s debt, as also promised. Now he’s effectively let the cat out of the bag: He can’t.

“On Friday, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos put the question to the candidate. “No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less,” Mr. Romney replied. But then, the Harvard study shows, the math can’t work. His answer? “The biggest source of getting the country to a balanced budget is not by raising taxes or by cutting spending,” he said. “It’s by encouraging the growth of the economy.” In other words, we are back to counting on magic — to “dynamic scoring,” the voodoo economics of the Reagan era, the wishful thinking of President George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that helped turn a surplus into the deficit now weighing the nation’s economy. Cut taxes and hope the economy grows faster than predicted. At a time when the nation is already on course to build up a debt so large that interest payments alone will begin to drown us, Mr. Romney wants to reduce taxes further, with — it now appears — no plan to make up the difference.

“It almost takes your breath away.”

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There’s a reason Romney wants to double-down on the failed economic policies of Reagan and GWB:

Pres. Obama more than happy to work with GOP if they agree to higher tax on the wealthy

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Cut spending and bring in new revenue. It’s called balance, Republicans. It’s called doing two things at once to bring about a reduction in the deficit faster. From The Ticket:

President Barack Obama said in an interview partly broadcast Sunday that he would be “more than happy to work with the Republicans” to trim the swelling national debt — as long as they drop their opposition to raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. “You can’t reduce the deficit unless you take a balanced approach that says, ‘We’ve got to make government leaner and more efficient,’” the president told CBS’s Scott Pelley. “But we’ve also got to ask people –like me or Gov. Romney, who have done better than anybody else over the course of the last decade, and whose taxes are just about lower than they’ve been in the last 50 years – to do a little bit more.” Obama said he would be willing to make “some adjustments to Medicare and Medicaid that would strengthen the programs.” “The way to do that is to keep health care costs low. It’s not to ‘voucherize’ programs so that suddenly seniors are the ones who are finding their expenses much higher.”

I’m glad one political party in this country doesn’t pretend that giving the wealthy more tax cuts somehow (magically) reduces debt. Letting the wealthy have more tax cuts gives them more available income they can offshore into foreign bank accounts and gives America less money to pay off its debt. Why does this even need to be said? Because yesterday Romney said “I am not reducing taxes on high-income taxpayers:“

Romney’s plan, in reality, would provide the very richest Americans a $264,000 tax break. It also maintains current tax rates on investments that are otherwise set to expire at the end of the year, and it eliminates the estate tax, paid by only the richest one-quarter of one percent of Americans.

Does that work out to a tax reduction for the rich in your mind? It does for everyone who’s based in reality.

Romney is apparently arguing that he will raise enough revenue through the elimination of tax loopholes that benefit the rich to totally offset the tax cut he provides them, though an analysis from the Tax Policy Center found that to be a mathematical impossibility.

Like his tax returns, which loopholes Romney plans to eliminate remain a closely guarded secret until after the election.

You say you’re NOT better off now than you were four years ago? Guess what…

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via: christopherstreet

Boom!

But you’re going to vote for Romney-Ryan so the rich can get more tax cuts? That will help you how?

Jon Stewart on Paul Ryan’s “misguided policies” and the national debt

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Source: sandandglass

What sort of person…

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image: christopherstreet

This sort: The Republican Party, the tea party, the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Paul Ryan, Mitt and Ann Romney, John Boehner, CEOs of the most profitable corporations, and “Christian” leaders and the conservative voting base because ideology now matters more than their fellow citizens.

What the wealthy don’t know is that it only takes a difference of a few dollars in the average person’s paycheck to change their entire life dramatically — for good or bad. So shame on the conservative voting base because they know that all too well and still they turn on their own.

Believe it or not.

“Over a four years period from 2008 to 2011, Corning Inc. was one of 26 companies that managed to avoid paying any American income taxes, even though it earned nearly $3 billion during that time. In fact, according to Citizens For Tax Justice, the company received a $4 million refund from 2008 to 2010. That didn’t stop Susan Ford, a senior executive at the company, from telling the House Ways and Means Committee this week that America’s high corporate tax rate was putting her company at a disadvantage…” — Corporation That Paid Nothing In Taxes For Four Years Tells Congress It Pays Too Much In Taxes | ThinkProgress (via: diegueno)

And who wants to bet that the employees of Corning haven’t had a raise in pay or benefits that’s equivalent to the ever-increasing bonuses handed out to its CEOs?

The GOP-led House rejects Obama tax cuts, will recess until September

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“Bain Capital is the kind of small business that our Republican colleagues are trying to protect.” — Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.)

The Huffington Post reports that the House will recess this week — until September — without coming to an agreement on the Bush tax cuts and the wealthiest incomes: “The Democratic bill resembled President Barack Obama’s tax plan, which calls for letting the Bush-era tax cuts expire for incomes of more than $250,000 for couples and $200,000 for individuals. The Republican measure would extend all the Bush-era tax cuts for all income levels, but end breaks passed in 2009 that help about 25 million middle-class households.”

“Each side made stark arguments, with Democrats casting the issue as protecting the middle class, and Republicans countering that they were safeguarding small businesses and jobs.

“”The president wants to raise taxes on the so-called rich,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). “Well, let me tell you who the so-called rich are. About a million of those people that you want to increase taxes on are small business owners.”

“”Their priority is cutting taxes of the very wealthy in this country,” countered Rep. Sandy Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. “They want to give households that earn more than $1 million a year a tax cut –- on average –- of $160,000 next year.”

“[...] Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) derided the policy as “supply-side voodoo,” echoing criticism first made by George H. W. Bush. Pascrell noted that since the George W. Bush cuts were passed in 2001 and 2003, the income gap in America has grown.

“”To those members concerned with tax fairness, today, wealth concentrated with the top 1 percent is at the same level as the period immediately preceding the Great Depression,” Pascrell said. “So you shrunk the middle class with your great economic ideas between 2001 and 2008, and what you did, what you did is made the rich richer. I salute you.”

“[...] “These are not mom-and-pop businesses,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), arguing that only 3 percent of businesses with fewer than 500 employees would face tax hikes. “Bain Capital. Bain Capital [is] the kind of small business that our Republican colleagues are trying to protect.”

“Democrats also argued that with the expiration of the 2009 cuts — the child tax credit, a bigger earned income tax credit and a break on college tuition — middle-class families would face on average a $1,000 tax hike.

“[...] The failure of Congress to agree on taxes on the remaining 2 percent of Americans guarantees that the argument will be carried through to the campaign trail over the summer, and will be a prime debating point in the fall when Congress returns from its summer break.


Obama Plan Is 39.4% Just Saying… (via: randomactsofchaos)

And that’s 39.4% on the one percent!

Nothing radical

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“I’m not proposing anything radical here. I just believe that anybody making over $250,000 a year should go back to the income tax rates we were paying under Bill Clinton.” — President Obama, on taxes. (via theatlantic)

Related (things that actually are radical):

GOP Class Warfare: tax cuts for 20 million vs. tax cuts for 2 million

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It’s pretty easy to see who loses under the Republican Senate tax plan: More than 20 million families would lose tax credits under Sen. McConnell’s tax plan, compared to the 2.1 million high-income households that would lose some of their George W. Bush-era tax cuts under the Senate Democratic plan. (source: Center for American Progress)

amprog: It’s pretty easy to see who loses under the Republican Senate tax plan: More than 20 million families would lose tax credits under Sen. McConnell’s tax plan, compared to the 2.1 million high-income households that would lose some of their George W. Bush-era tax cuts under the Senate Democratic plan.

(source: Center for American Progress)

The GOP is holding tax cuts for 98% of us hostage until tax cuts for the wealthiest are extended

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America needs to regain some balance and the Republican Party needs to be reminded of that. For three decades the wealthy have unequally benefited from tax laws, taking home more money than the rest of us, paying less tax on their incomes than the rest of us.

The rich have stashed their extra money in offshore accounts while creating zero jobs. Actually, with less revenue coming into local, state, and federal treasuries, thousands of public sector jobs have actually been lost through layoffs and hiring freezes. Paul Krugman says the fall in public employment is “about 1.4 million jobs less than it would be if it had grown as fast as it did under President George W. Bush. And, if we had those extra jobs, the unemployment rate would be much lower than it is — something like 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent.”

That’s lost jobs, lost paychecks and benefits and pensions, lost buying power, lost business. Formerly middle class people now unemployed, homes foreclosed, some now living on unemployment and public assistance. And what for? So that the rest of us can continue to finance the one percent’s tax deductions / lifestyles – like the $77,000 deduction the Romneys took on their Olympic horse.

It’s time to let the Bush tax cuts expire for the super rich.

The Hill:

“In his weekly address, the President called for lawmakers to adopt a Democratic measure which would extend the expiring lower George W. Bush-era tax rates only for those couples making below $250,000, and forcing higher income earners to pay more.

“[...] Republicans charge that a tax increase on any Americans would further hurt the recovering economy, while Obama has threatened to veto an across-the-board extension, calling on the wealthy to pay more.

“In his address, Obama again called on the GOP to decouple the middle class rates from rates for higher income earners.

““If 218 Members of the House vote the right way, 98% of American families and 97% of small business owners will have the certainty of knowing that that their income taxes will not go up next year,” said the president.

““Everyone says they agree that we should extend the tax cuts for the middle class,” said Obama. “Instead of doing what’s right for middle class families and small business owners, Republicans in Congress are holding these tax cuts hostage until we extend tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

“Obama said the country could not afford more “top-down economics” and vowed that as soon as they sent him a bill to block a tax raise on the middle class he would “sign it right away.””