Tag Archives: teapublicans

24-hour warning: By the way, red states take in more federal money than they pay in taxes

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Paul Begala thinks it’s a shame that sequestration cuts can’t be limited to states which take in more federal money than they pay in taxes and are represented by politicians who refuse to pay for the spending that their constituents demand (and have come to expect):

“This could be fun. Oklahoma so hates Obama’s big spending that every single county in the state voted for Mitt Romney. Oklahoma has twice the percentage of federal employees than the U.S. average, and Okies get $1.35 back from Washington for each dollar they pay in taxes. So close the massive FAA center in Oklahoma City. Move it to Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district, where they love big government. Two years ago I made a similar argument about Kentucky, calling on Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul to put the Bluegrass State in detox for its addiction to local pork. No such luck. But perhaps the principle can apply to the sequester: enforce it only in states whose elected representatives won’t support the taxes needed to fund the spending they want.” — A pox on one of their houses

Some facts:

Mother Jones: Even as Republicans gripe about deficit spending, their states get 30 cents more federal spending per tax dollar than their Democratic neighbors:

It’s no secret: The federal budget is expanding faster than tax revenues, a trend that’s been fueled by the rapid growth of entitlement programs and exacerbated by the recession. As a recent New York Times article documents, even as fiscally conservative lawmakers complain about deficit spending, their constituents don’t want to give up the Social Security checks, Medicare benefits, and earned income tax credits that provide a safety net for the struggling middle class.

This gap between political perception and fiscal reality is also reflected in the distribution of tax dollars at the state level: Most politically “red” states are financially in the red when it comes to how much money they receive from Washington compared with what their residents pay in taxes.

A look at 2010 Census and IRS data reveals that the 50 states and the District of Columbia, on average, received $1.29 in federal spending for every federal tax dollar they paid. That means that some states are getting a lot more than they put in, and vice versa. The states that contributed more in taxes than they got back in spending were more likely to have voted for Obama in 2008 and were more likely to be largely urban. (There are some clear exceptions: For instance, New Mexico, a rural, Democratic state, gets more federal money per tax dollar than any other state.)

Added to that is “the world’s least surprising chart” from Brad Plummer: 

A new survey from the Pew Research Center finds that most Americans like the idea of cutting federal spending in the abstract — they just can’t agree on any specific areas they’d actually like to cut…

[...] Foreign aid is far and away the most popular suggestion for the chopping block, but even here, it’s a close call — 48 percent of respondents said cut it, 49 percent said keep it the same or increase it. (Foreign aid makes up less than 1 percent of the federal budget.) In no other spending area is there majority support for cuts.

The tide has turned… and it’s turned away from career war profiteers in Congress:

Think Progress: A new poll released by the Hill newspaper has found that more voters favor slashing military spending versus cutting spending on domestic programs like Medicare and Social Security in order to reduce the debt and deficit.

Voters are tired of funding the GOP’s Forever Wars and think there should be spending cuts — but they think the cuts should be to all those other programs and services they personally don’t like or use (like foreign aid — only 1% of the budget). And while everyone in the country continues to subsidize the red states’ appetite for federal cheese, red state conservatives will continue to tell themselves that they deserve more federal cheese than blue states (or that it’s not federal cheese – it’s freedom cheese!). So we’ll see how long Teapublicans can hold out on their belief that only Democratic states and Democrats will be ‘hurt’ by the sequester.


Source: questionall

Want to see how much your state will lose with sequestration cuts? Go here.

It’s a shame American Christians don’t care about the economy or their own incomes

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If fundamentalists spent even one quarter of their time and attention on what the GOP was doing for the wealthiest Americans (at the expense of the poor, working and middle classes) as they do on social issues like gay marriage and abortion rights, we wouldn’t be living through a time of  income inequality that’s even greater than during the Great Depression.

Instead of worrying about the incomes and living conditions of their own families and friends and neighbors, these Christians are more worried about legislating what strangers should do with their privates lives. Meanwhile, they continue voting for the wolves who have been shoveling money up to their benefactors for the past three decades. Political Wire reports that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would reward the wealthy even more, while placing an even greater economic burden on the rest of us. And it will be the fundamentalists who vote for Romney:

A new Brookings Institution/Tax Policy Center study finds Mitt Romney’s plan to overhaul the tax code would produce cuts for the richest 5% of Americans — and larger bills for everybody else.

The Washington Post notes the researchers seemed “to bend over backward to be fair to the Republican presidential candidate” but “none of it helped Romney.”

“His rate-cutting plan for individuals would reduce tax collections by about $360 billion in 2015, the study says. To avoid increasing deficits — as Romney has pledged — the plan would have to generate an equivalent amount of revenue by slashing tax breaks for mortgage interest, employer-provided health care, education, medical expenses, state and local taxes, and child care — all breaks that benefit the middle class.”

A year ago, Think Progress reported that “crucial services and public investments for Main Street America are being gutted as taxes on the richest Americans are the lowest they’ve been in a generation. …ThinkProgress has assembled the following graph, which demonstrates that the United States is now about as economically unequal as Uganda and more unequal than countries like Pakistan or the Ivory Coast:”

Imagine the level of inequality if Romney and a Teapublican Congress get their way. What does it say about modern Christianity when all the fundamentalist rubes are capable of paying attention to are the social issues that the GOP distracts them with on an almost daily basis? Instead of helping those less fortunate, is trying to force your religious beliefs on others and being associated with what you hate really what Jesus intended?

If the top 1% had continued to pay the 1986 tax rate, the federal debt would be $1.7 trillion lower today

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1986 effective tax rate on the wealthy: 33.1%
2008 effective tax rate on the wealthy: 23.3%
Difference on the federal debt over the past 18 years: $1.7 trillion less if ETR had continued to be paid at 1986 rates.

Seems pretty simple to understand.

According to the Internal Revenue Service, in 2008, those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, with incomes over $380,000, had an effective tax rate of 23.3 percent. In 1986, a year when the real gross domestic product grew a healthy 3.5 percent, their effective tax rate was 33.1 percent. It has been much lower every year since.

If this group were still paying 33.1 percent, federal revenue would have been more than $166 billion higher in 2008 alone. That would be enough to reduce the budget deficit by about 10 percent this year. If the top 1 percent of taxpayers had continued to pay the same effective tax rate they paid in 1986 every year from 1987 to 2008, the federal debt today would be $1.7 trillion lower.

— Bruce Bartlett, The Rich Can Afford To Pay More Taxes (Via)

More revenue = less spending cuts.

Many Americans disagree with the Teaparty Republicans attempt to demonize the USPS

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There’s more RIGHT with our postal service than there is wrong. Here’s a reminder that all taxpayers have been subsidizing those who live in rural areas (the ‘real’ Amurika?):

There may be good reasons to keep post offices open in rural or low population areas, but keeping them because they are “lifelines” is not one of them. Post offices that serve a small population, like anything else,  must be subsidized by the income generated from larger population areas.  I have no problem with this model – it has served our country well since its founding.  However, we are now told by many people that we can no longer afford to carry the people the who don’t pull their own weight, and that surely applies to rural people.  If offices are closed throughout Alaska and the hinterlands, the people have a choice to either do without or move to a place where there is a post office.  Don’t like those options?  Welcome to the real world, where the rest of us have to move to get a job, receive good health care, or enjoy abundant water supplies.

It’s this cognitive dissonance that Americans believe that they should be able to live where ever they choose, and that everyone else has to subsidize their choice with new roads, infrastructure, post offices, cheap utilities, affordable housing, free quality schools, and everything else.  But they don’t believe in “handouts” or raising taxes to pay for the things they refuse to pay for themselves.  It isn’t even a matter of socialism – it’s a matter of doing the best for all concerned, and they are the beneficiaries.  But they can’t understand the concept that if they benefit, so should others, and everyone needs to pay something towards it.   Are people really that ill-informed?

This is just another example of federal programs and services on the cutting block because the Teaparty-GOP’s refusal to let Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy expire.

More revenue = less spending cuts.

Consequences of budget cuts, demonizing government: response to extreme weather imperiled

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And just when the East Coast needs government the most — the earthquake in Virginia yesterday combined with the approach of Hurricane Irene. From Think Progress:

Last week, Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), warned that federal budget cuts will force the agency to go without building a satellite that helps detect extreme weather events five years from now:

Without money to build a new satellite, the federal government will no longer be able to forecast severe weather events far enough in advance for communities to take life-saving action five years from now. That was the message that Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, delivered on Wednesday at a town-hall-style meeting in Denver. [...] “Whether the gap is longer than that depends on whether we get the money”— $1 billion — “in the next budget,” warned Dr. Lubchenco, an environmental scientist. “I would argue that these satellites are critically important to saving lives and property and to enabling homeland security.”

Unfortunately, some of the nation’s budget cuts are already hurting the ability of local communities to respond to the incoming Irene. In Palm Beach County, Florida, budget cuts have forced a cutback in the emergency management budget by 16 percent. In South Carolina, another state likely to be battered by Irene, budget cuts have led to a third of the emergency management divisions’ staff being lost. “We’re going to do what we can with less and we think we can be effective in that regard,” said Joe Farmer of the division.

As the far-right continues to demonize government and demand even more austerity, it is important to remember that government spending on things like disaster preparedness not only keeps important employees working but is crucial to saving lives.

But according to Teaparty Republicans, feds who don’t carry guns are just the unnecessary, nonessential, paper-pushers who basically suck at the federal teat anyway. It’s also more important to get those tax cuts for the wealthy extended by cutting some waste, like the government responding to extreme weather emergencies. Heaven forbid we take in more revenue so we can cut less to balance the deficit.

Related:

“Let us all remember who the real enemy is. The real enemy is the TeaParty.”

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— Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) at a Miami town hall

She went on to say, “The Tea Party holds the Congress hostage. They have one goal in mind, and that’s to make President Obama a one-term president.”

After all that’s been said and done for the past 3 years, it’s good to see the Congressional Black Caucus throw some anti-Teaparty rhetoric around. The Tea Party’s worked hard for the distinction of being labeled Public Enemy #1. It’s time we all give them what they’ve earned.

Related:

Republicans have finally found a group they want to tax: poor people.

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The GOP nearly brought the USA to its knees over the debt ceiling and the president’s proposal for new revenue combined with spending cuts. But Obama was talking about new revenue by ending the ‘temporary’ Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest 1-2%. The GOP said no way. Now look: the Teaparty GOP wants to end tax cuts on everyone else. So the GOP wants more tax cuts for the wealthy — and wants tax increases and spending cuts for the rest of us. That’s a pretty clear position on further bottom-to-top income redistribution. Where are you on that plan, working- and middle-class teabaggers?

From Dave Weigel:

The [WSJ] called this position the “new GOP orthodoxy,” which it is. When he announced his presidential bid two weeks ago, Perry told a room of conservative activists and bloggers that “we’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax.” He was following on Bachmann, who’d just told the South Carolina Christian Chamber of Commerce the very same thing.

“Part of the problem is today, only 53 percent pay any federal income tax at all; 47 percent pay nothing,” said Bachmann. “We need to broaden the base so that everybody pays something, even if it’s a dollar. Everyone should pay something, because we all benefit.”

[...] The percentage of people paying no income taxes spiked up to 47 percent and stayed there. When the Tea Party started rallying in 2009, it wasn’t protesting higher taxes, because federal income taxes were lower, with more loopholes. It was protesting the perception that productive Americans were shelling out for an ever-expanding class of moochers. And Republicans have taken the Tea Party’s lead.

This could be the start of a sea change in how Republican politicians—the people who actually need to win votes—talk about taxes. In 1994, the GOP won the House and Senate with a promise to introduce a $500 child tax credit. The promise was kept. That became one of many tax credits intended to make middle class life a little easier.

People who pay no federal income tax are “moochers”? Hardly. And they do pay taxes. From Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post:

As the Tax Policy Center’s Roberton Williams has explained, “a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 will pay no federal income tax this year because their $11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700 each reduce their taxable income to zero. The basic structure of the income tax simply exempts subsistence levels of income from tax.’…

Of those households that do not owe income taxes, about a third earn $10,000 a year and a slightly smaller share earn between $10,000 and $20,000. More than three-fourths earn $30,000 or less….

Two-thirds of the households that pay no federal income tax still ante up for payroll taxes. Fewer than one in five — 18 percent of all households — pay neither income nor payroll taxes. Nearly all of these are elderly (10 percent) or have incomes below $20,000 (7 percent.)…

Examining the total tax burden — state, federal and local — Citizens for Tax Justice calculated that the top 1 percent of households (average income, $1.3 million) earned 20.3 percent of income and paid 21.5 percent of taxes in 2010.”

“So raising the income tax rate on the top 2 percent of earners would raise $700 billion dollars, but taking half of everything the bottom 50 percent have in this country would do the same. I see the problem here: we need to take all of what the bottom 50 percent have.” — Jon Stewart

Related:

Rich people pay a lower effective rate than you. Boom. Reality.

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Confirmed by none other than Henry Bloch, founder of tax preparation company H&R Bloch: “That’s so baloney. Rich people don’t create jobs. Companies create jobs. [...] You probably pay a higher rate than I do… and yet my income is probably many times what yours is.”

Via: Bob Cesca

Rick Perry’s Texas: It’s a miracle more Texans aren’t complaining

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Miracle fail:

(Via: TexasWatch)

Related:

The Teaparty / GOP base totally deserves Rick Perry

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“You can’t be calling Bernanke a traitor and you can’t be questioning whether or not Barack Obama loves America, that type of thing,” — Rep. Peter King (R-NY)

Just One Week Into His Campaign, Rick Perry Disavows His Nine-Month-Old Book

Last November, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) published Fed Up, a 240-page ode to tentherism, which argues that everything from child labor laws to the Clean Air Act to Medicare violates the Constitution. As it turns out, however, claiming that America’s entire social safety net is unconstitutional isn’t a very popular position — so Perry’s now trying to take it all back just one week into his presidential campaign.

If only people could secede from their own books.

Rick Perry Compares Civil Rights Movement To GOP Fight For Lower Corporate Taxes

“Listen, America’s gone a long way from the standpoint of civil rights and thank God we have. I mean we’ve gone from a country that made great strides in issues of civil rights. I think we all can be proud of that. And as we go forward, America needs to be about freedom. It needs to be about freedom from overtaxation, freedom from over-litigation, freedom from over-regulation. And Americans regardless of what their cultural or ethnic background is they need to know that they can come to America and you got a chance to have any dream come true because the economic climate is gonna be improved.” — Rick Perry

The author of the article comments: “To compare the “struggles” of corporations who often pay virtually nothing in taxes to the plight of black Americans in pre-Civil Rights America is remarkably ignorant, even for Perry.”

That’s true — until you remember who Perry represents: the Tea Party. A politician’s motto for that group must be: The dumber, the better. Amen.

Rick Perry’ said “in Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools.“ Steve Benen comments:

“Perry may have no idea what goes on in Texas’ public schools, but if they’re teaching “both creationism and evolution,” they’re violating the law. It’s not even a gray area — the Supreme Court has already struck down a law that called for “balanced treatment for creation-science and evolution-science in public school instruction,” concluding that the law violated the separation of church and state. Teaching religion in science class is illegal under the First Amendment.“

And, no, they’re not teaching both. Rick Perry 2012: The Anti-Science Choice!

Government spending helped fuel Rick Perry’s “Texas miracle”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has leapfrogged to the top tier of Republican presidential candidates largely on the strength of one compelling fact: During more than a decade as governor, his state created more than 1 million jobs, while the nation as a whole lost 1.4 million jobs. Perry says the “Texas miracle” rests on conservative pillars that he would bring to the White House: minimal regulation and government, low taxes and a determination to limit the reach of Uncle Sam. What he does not say is that much of that job growth has come because of government, not in spite of it. With a young and fast-growing population, a large and expanding military presence and an influx of federal stimulus money, the number of government jobs in Texas has grown at more than double the rate of private-sector employment during Perry’s tenure.

In this case, what’s good for Texas would be good for the entire country. More stimulus, more jobs!

How’s this for a jobs miracle? The Texas unemployment rate hit 8.4 percent in July — its highest mark since 1987. [...] Overall, the unemployment rate in Texas ticked up by 0.2%. During the same period, it dropped by 0.1% in the nation as a whole. (DailyKos)


(image: curtcole)

Standing applause of the day: “As far as I’m concerned — the Tea Party can go straight to Hell.”

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— Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, speaking to her constituents at a town hall event over the weekend.

THANK YOU, Rep. Waters! Someone had to say it. Here’s why:

  • Via Joe Romm | Think Progress: If you’re anti-science (like the Tea Party), you’re anti-jobs. “I think this is an important message to deliver.  I would have said it’s important message for progressives to deliver, but the fact is it is an important message for everybody not in the extreme anti-science crowd to repeat.  Indeed, “moderate” conservative GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman said this weekend that being anti-science is as counterproductive for the nation as it and self-destructive it is for his party.”
  • If you’re anti-eduction (like the Tea Party), you’re anti-future, anti-reality, anti-science, and anti-jobs: As a state senator in 2002, [Michele] Bachmann produced a bizarre film called Guinea Pigs II, which compared Minnesota’s Profile of Learning curriculum standards—instituted in 1998 by Republican Gov. Arne Carlson—to Nazism and communism. As Tim Murphy of Mother Jones wrote of Bachmann last week, “She was Tea Party before the Tea party was cool. In 2002, with a Republican president in the White House and the Tea Party a full seven years away, she cited the 9th and 10th amendments while railing against No Child Left Behind as an unconstitutional abuse of power.” [...] These Christian right organizations lobbied against curriculum standards and state and federal regulation of home-schoolers, and recruited thousands of school board candidates—many of them churchgoing moms like Bachmann—in an attempt to wield influence over curricula and textbooks. The movement paid special attention to how public schools dealt with issues such as homosexuality, contraception, and abortion, but also sought to promote an uber-nationalist view of American history, in which the evils of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans were downplayed or sometimes totally whitewashed.
  • Only in the Tea Party could famegoblins like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin be venerated for making ignorant statements on a regular basis and for their divisive, fundamentalist ideology — which at times is in direct opposition to the Constitution — and be seriously considered as candidates for President of the United States.
  • Only the Tea Party base wanted to see the U.S. default by not raising the debt ceiling — for ideology that is based entirely on Obama being a one-term president, and tax cuts that, at this point, only benefit the wealthy and already profitable corporations.
  1. have a low regard for immigrants and blacks (*ahem* racist?!),
  2. are disproportionately social conservatives,
  3. have a desire to see religion play a prominent role in politics
  4. seek deeply religious elected officials
  5. approve of religious leaders engaging in politics
  6. want religion brought into political debates
  • Only the Tea Party base (and their benefactors) are not in favor of higher taxes and higher spending on federal programs and services. Actual survey data:

  • You only hear the Tea Party treating labor unions and public employees (at ALL levels) as Public Enemy #1: such as the Tea Party GOP Wisconsin Senate who voted to strip collective bargaining rights from state employees without any Democrats present.

The Tea Party isn’t popular, they don’t have large numbers, yet with the media and Congress they are over-represented when it comes to their demands and ideology that affect all of us. We need to ask why and demand accountability and equal time from DC and the mainstream media. And those who didn’t vote in 2010 need to realize how they helped push this non-party into such a prominent position in our country’s political discussions. Pure apathy gave them all this power. That needs to be corrected.

USA’s best known corporations want a second ‘one-time’ tax holiday, won’t reveal jobs in U.S. vs abroad

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WHAT ARE THE NUMBERS OF TOTAL JOBS HERE IN THE U.S. VS JOBS ABROAD for some of America’s best-known multinational corporations? UNKNOWN. They stopped revealing those numbers publicly about 10 years ago. Via the Washington Post:

So secretive are these companies that they hand the figure over to government statisticians on the condition that officials will release only an aggregate number. The latest data show that multinationals cut 2.9 million jobs in the United States and added 2.4 million overseas between 2000 and 2009.

Some of the same companies that do not report their jobs breakdown, including Apple and Pfizer, are pushing lawmakers to cut their tax bills in the name of job creation in the United States.

In other words, they want ANOTHER “one-time” tax holiday to bring money they’ve ‘parked’ overseas into the U.S. with a tax break, in order to “create jobs.”  Apple and Pfizer are part of a coalition of companies pushing Congress for this second one-time tax holiday — and, along with AT&T and Hewlett Packard, haven’t reported their U.S. to overseas employment breakdown since 2000. The FIRST “one-time” tax holiday for multinationals was in 2004. Here’s what Matt Taibbi has to say about it:

Here’s how it works: the tax laws say that companies can avoid paying taxes as long as they keep their profits overseas. Whenever that money comes back to the U.S., the companies have to pay taxes on it.

Think of it as a gigantic global IRA. Companies that put their profits in the offshore IRA can leave them there indefinitely with no tax consequence. Then, when they cash out, they pay the tax.

Only there’s a catch. In 2004, the corporate lobby got together and major employers like Cisco and Apple and GE begged congress to give them a “one-time” tax holiday, arguing that they would use the savings to create jobs. Congress, shamefully, relented, and a tax holiday was declared. Now companies paid about 5 percent in taxes, instead of 35-40 percent.

Money streamed back into America. But the companies did not use the savings to create jobs. Instead, they mostly just turned it into executive bonuses and ate the extra cash. Some of those companies promising waves of new hires have already committed to massive layoffs.

[...] I’m shocked there isn’t more of an uproar about this. Could you imagine what the Tea Party would be saying right now if there was a law on the books that allowed immigrants to indefinitely avoid taxes on income sent back to family members in the old country, in Mexico and Venezuela and India?

Imagine the uproar if Barack Obama, in the middle of this historic revenue crunch and “We’re so broke the world is going to end tomorrow!” debt-ceiling hystgeria, decided to declare a second “one-time tax holiday” for, say, unwed single mothers, or recipients of public assistance? Middle America would be running through the streets, firing shotguns out its truck window, waving chainsaws in mall lobbies, etc. Read it all…

It shouldn’t go unmentioned that these companies have become really, really good at hoarding extra cash as well.

Which multinational companies keep their U.S. vs. overseas employment numbers a secret?

  • AT&T — The phone and digital giant does not include its employee breakdown in its Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Reed Saxon / AP
  • Apple — Apple chief executive Steve Jobs holds up the new MacBook Air at the MacWorld Conference in 2008 in San Francisco. Apple also does not reveal how many of its employees are based in the United States. Apple and Pfizer are part of a coalition of companies pushing for Congress to give them a tax break on money they have parked overseas, saying that any money brought back to this country would spur hiring. Paul Sakuma / AP
  • Hewlett-Packard — HP is among the multinational companies that do not disclose the breakdown of their job numbers. Jeff Chiu / The Associated Press
  • IBM — IBM stopped disclosing its U.S. head count in 2009. Dave Finegold, dean of the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, estimates that 2009 marked the first time the company had more employees in India than the United States. IBM chief executive Sam Palmisano has also met a number of times with the president for discussions on the economy. Sean Gallup / Getty Images
  • Pfizer — Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug company, hasn’t reported the breakdown of its workforce between the United States and overseas since 2000. Mary Altaffer / AP
  • Procter & Gamble — Tide is a brand of Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest consumer products company. You won’t find P&G’s U.S. head count in its filings, either. When initially asked for the number, company spokesman Paul Fox said: “We do not track nor report U.S.-specific jobs numbers vs. jobs overseas.” After it was pointed out that P&G’s chief executive, Bob McDonald, had cited such figures in an op-ed piece, Fox acknowledged that company did track that data. The number of U.S. employees is 35,000 out of 127,000 total, or 28 percent. Daniel Acker / Bloomberg News

Via the Washington Post

Maybe THIS TIME they’ll create some jobs in the U.S., right? Maybe this time they won’t just take this extra money from the U.S. Treasury and give their shareholders extra income and themselves massive bonuses, then hoard what’s left over — OR create some more jobs in China and India. Because the downside is only that we’ll have more unemployment, less federal revenue, meaning we’ll need to cut federal benefits and services to the rest of Americans who aren’t millionaires or multinational corporations — just like the Teaparty Republicans have been planning.

Bottom-to-top income redistribution is no biggie according to the modern GOP (and their voter base of useful idiots).