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)
Maybe Republican voters who earn $250,000 a year or less can explain how the Teaparty / GOP politicians they voted into office are working for their constituents and not for their wealthy donors. Get a load of this:
The Republican majority in the House have introduced a bill designed to extend tax cuts for the wealthy and make it harder to modify tax law. They want to bring the bill to a vote this coming week. That was fast, right? Why are they doing it? Because Democrats in the Senate extended the Bush tax cuts last week — but only for incomes of $250,000 or less. Suddenly the do-nothing, “party of no” is actually doing something — they’re going to protect the wealthiest one percent from a tax increase of a whopping 4.6% and give them even more of a tax cut.
The Raw Story: “Earlier this week, Democrats in the Senate scored a major coup in the fight over tax cuts. In a 51-48 vote, lawmakers passed legislation that would extend Bush tax cuts for the middle class, people making $250,000 a year or less, but not preserve tax breaks for the wealthy, which are set to expire at the end of the year. Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Jim Webb (D-VA) voted with Republicans.
“Republicans in the House have responded with legislation that calls for their own version of “tax reform,” a set of regulations that would shift the tax burden down the income ladder while giving millionaires an average of $187,000 in tax cuts in 2014. The Republican changes would encourage companies to invest overseas, reorganize tax brackets, reduce taxes on corporations and restrict them to a permanent rate of 25 percent or less …[and] increase taxes on families making less than $200,000 a year and repeal tax credits for low-income Americans signed into law by President Obama.”
Think Progress: ”If the House GOP bill were adopted, tax reform legislation would “have special protections in the U.S. Senate, limiting the opportunities for lawmakers to use blocking tactics.” But the GOP bill only calls for a certain kind of tax reform — specifically that which would benefit the rich and corporations. Under the GOP’s fast-track approach, a tax reform bill would have to consist of:
“As Citizens for Tax Justice noted, these changes would massively benefit the wealthy and corporations, shifting the tax burden down the income scale. In fact, consolidation of the tax code in the way the GOP envisions would give millionaires a $187,000 annual tax cut, while likely increasing taxes on the middle-class and working families, due to the elimination of deductions upon which they depend.”
And there you have the GOP’s idea of “tax fairness.” If you make less than $250,000 and you’re all for giving away your tax deductions to help finance bigger tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent, then by all means keep supporting the Republican Party. If you’re dumb enough, or brainwashed enough, to believe that Republicans in the House and Senate really care about gay marriage or any of the other social issues they use to get you to vote for them, you’d better read this again. Look at what they can accomplish and fast track when it’s something that really matters to them: protecting their wealthy benefactors.
How to buy the White House (aka political investing for profit):
“About four dozen donors and families have given at least $1 million to super PACs this election cycle, with three-quarters of them giving to the GOP. Combined, these four dozen donors have provided $130 million of the $308 million super PACs have raised this cycle (more than 40 percent) — a reflection of how much these outside groups are funded by extremely wealthy donors. And that goes double on the GOP side, where nearly half of the $228 million raised by super PACs has come from about three dozen million-dollar donors. [...] Topping our list, of course, is the family of Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, which has combined to give more than $36 million (including funds given by their children). Much of it has gone to a super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich in the Republican presidential primary, but more recently the couple gave $10 million to the top super PAC supporting Mitt Romney. [...] The point? Democrats are making the case that Romney is an extremely wealthy man propped up by extremely wealthy super PAC donors. And at least for now, with super PACs carrying the load for Romney in the early ad wars, there’s a lot of truth to that.” — The Fix’s super PAC Millionaires Club – The Washington Post
What do they hope to get for the millions they’re pouring into Romney? More money, more tax cuts, loopholes, and subsidies, paid for with austerity cuts for the rest of America.
Related:
Like Mitt Romney, the world’s super rich are hiding at least $21 trillion offshore (Where’s the tax returns?)
image: christopherstreet
Charles P. Pierce doesn’t think Romney’s trying to hide anything by not releasing his tax returns. Pierce thinks Romney considers us “The Help” who really have no business looking at his tax returns:
“It is helpful always to remind yourself that, in the mind of Willard Romney, there are only two kinds of people — himself and his family, and The Help. Throughout his career, and especially throughout his brief political career, Romney has treated The Help with a kind of lordly disdain…
“The Help has no right to go pawing through the family books, giggling at the obvious loopholes and tax dodges, running amok through all the tax shelters, and probably getting their chocolate-y fingerprints all over the pages of the Romney family ledger. And, certainly, those members of The Help in the employ of the president of the United States, who is also part of The Help, have no right to use the nearly comically ostentatious wealth of the Romney as some sort of scrimey political weapon. He does not have to answer to The Help. I mean, jeepers, he’s running for office.
“This isn’t stubbornness. That’s often an acquired trait. What this is, fundamentally, is contempt. Contempt for the process, and contempt for the people who make their living in that process, and contempt for the people whose lives depend on that process. There are rules for The Help with which Willard Romney never has had to abide, and he has no intention of starting now. My dear young fellow, this simply is not done.”
Stan Sorscher argues that Americans are currently living “the cookie joke” — because income inequality is all about political power:
“A CEO, a Tea Party member and public employee sit at a table, with 12 cookies on a plate. The CEO grabs 11 cookies and tells the Tea Party member, “You better watch him. He wants your cookie.” The CEO took 11 out of 12 cookies. This isn’t a question of what’s fair. The CEO has the economic power to take 11 cookies, and he does.
“I found a conservative blog that explained this point of view. The CEO deserved 11 cookies. Without the CEO, the 12 cookies would never have been baked. No one would have anything without the CEO. Not only did the CEO deserve 11 of the 12 cookies, but if we somehow had 15 cookies, the CEO would deserve 14. If the CEO made 24 cookies in China, he should get 23. The Tea Party member and the public employee should thank the CEO for their one cookie. The conservative blogger acknowledged that his interpretation wasn’t funny.
“[...] By shoveling 93% of new income to the top 1%, we are currently living the cookie joke in full measure. This isn’t working. If trickle-down policies could ever work, then our figurative cookie-bakers would already have hired millions of new employees. They didn’t. It hasn’t worked for the last 35 years.
“It doesn’t work.
“Well… it doesn’t work for 99% of us. Stiglitz puts it this way, “We’ve been shaping our society to create people who are more selfish.” Increasingly, policies are created by the richest 1%, and for the richest 1%. Their interests are placed first, through globalization, privatization, deregulation and insanely expensive political campaigns.
“Meanwhile, 99% of us are put at risk. We risk losing our jobs, our economic security, our homes, health care, education for our children, and economic opportunities.
“As always [the rich] seem to be the winners from the policies that they advocated and that imposed such high costs on others.”
“This is bad for democracy, bad for our future as a nation, bad for our ability to solve serious problems on national and international levels, bad for the environment and the planet, and just plain bad.
“We could just as well shape society to restore balance to our social, political and economic life. We start with a rehabilitation of the Social Contract. We need each other to prosper. That is,our neighbors must prosper for us to prosper.
“We need to restore trust in institutions of civil society. That includes government.”
It’s no coincidence that the GOP / one percent want the good old reliable conservative voter base to keep buying into the Republican ‘ideal’ of less government, smaller government, government can’t be trusted, government is baaad, the only good government is currently drowning in a bathtub. And it’s funny because as the rabble expect less of government, and as they elect politicians who promise them less government (and who, when elected, actually give them government that truly doesn’t work, as promised), somehow the rich wind up with more for themselves – from government, in the form of policies, tax laws, and benefits. And the rich get even richer while the rest of us get poorer.
If conservative voters opened their eyes, they’d see the elite don’t use “boot straps” to get ahead. They’re using government.
via: christopherstreet
Paul Krugman remarks on why the ultimate purpose of corporations would never be good for America:
“Consider one of Mr. Romney’s most famous remarks: “Corporations are people, my friend.” When the audience jeered, he elaborated: “Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets.” This is undoubtedly true, once you take into account the pockets of, say, partners at Bain Capital (who, I hasten to add, are, indeed, people). But one of the main points of outsourcing is to ensure that as little as possible of what corporations earn goes into the pockets of the people who actually work for those corporations.
“…if Bain got involved with your company, one way or another, the odds were pretty good that even if your job survived you ended up with lower pay and diminished benefits.”
“Why, for example, do many large companies now outsource cleaning and security to outside contractors? Surely the answer is, in large part, that outside contractors can hire cheap labor that isn’t represented by the union and can’t participate in the company health and retirement plans. And, sure enough, recent academic research finds that outsourced janitors and guards receive substantially lower wages and worse benefits than their in-house counterparts.
“Just to be clear, outsourcing is only one source of the huge disconnect between a tiny elite and ordinary American workers, a disconnect that has been growing for more than 30 years. And Bain, in turn, was only one player in the growth of outsourcing. So Mitt Romney didn’t personally, single-handedly, destroy the middle-class society we used to have. He was, however, an enthusiastic and very well remunerated participant in the process of destruction; if Bain got involved with your company, one way or another, the odds were pretty good that even if your job survived you ended up with lower pay and diminished benefits.
“In short, what was good for Bain Capital definitely wasn’t good for America. And, as I said at the beginning, the Obama campaign has every right to point that out.”
A corporation’s ONLY purpose is to maximize profits for the owners, by any means necessary.
Flip your burgers and be grateful, proles!
