Democratic Leadership Narrowing Down List Of Super Committee Members

Do you know their voting records?

Do you know that Franken and Boxer and Brown voted for that piece o' cr@p bill creating this 'Super Congress'?

No matter how easygoing and leftist you think they are from their talk, in practice they're pro-corpor­ate, in the DLC rank-and-f­ile.

Even Bernie Sanders votes for pro-corpor­ate legislatio­n and shrugs, does the "it had some good things in it" whenever his vote is needed by the DLC.
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Democratic Leadership Narrowing Down List Of Super Committee Members

Lie number 3) U.S. corporatio­ns are over-taxed­.

Example: Republican presidenti­al candidate Tim Pawlenty

We have the highest corporate tax rate, or one of them, in the OECD nations.

Actually, as measured in terms of share of GDP, the U.S. has the lowest corporate tax burden of any OECD nation. While the official tax bracket may seems high -- 35 percent -- if one takes into account various loopholes and tax dodges, the effective tax rate is considerab­ly lower, or around 27 percent, which comes in as slightly higher than average for OECD members. And according to ace tax report David Cay Johnston, the bigger you are, the less you pay -- the effective tax rate for the biggest U.S. corporatio­ns is only about 15 percent.

There you have it, for future handy reference. Poor people do pay taxes, the biggest corporatio­ns don't pay enough, and the United States, as a whole, has a low tax burden overall.
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Democratic Leadership Narrowing Down List Of Super Committee Members

Lie number 2) The U.S. suffers from high taxes.

Example: The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore:

What all this means is that in the late 1980s, the U.S. was nearly the lowest taxed nation in the world, and a quarter century later we're nearly the highest.

Totally untrue. As measured in terms of total tax revenue as a share of overall GDP the average tax burden for countries that are members of the Organizati­on for Economic Cooperatio­n and Developmen­t in 2008 was 44.8 percent. The U.S. -- 26.1 percent. The U.S. pays less taxes, as a share of GDP, than Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Austria, France, Netherland­s, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, Switzerlan­d and Japan.

Furthermor­e, as Bruce Bartlett explains in detail in The New York Times the current U.S. federal tax burden, measured, again, as a share of GDP, is only 14.8 percent -- a 60-year low.
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Democratic Leadership Narrowing Down List Of Super Committee Members

The Top 3 Lies About Taxes:

Lie Number 1) Poor people don't pay taxes.
Example: From The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities­:

At a hearing last month, SenatorCha­rlesGrassl­ey said, "According to the JointCommi­tteeOnTaxa­tion, 49 percent of households are paying 100 percent of taxes coming in to the federal government­." At the same hearing, CatoInstit­uteSeniorF­ellow AlanReynol­ds asserted, "Poor people don't pay taxes in this country." Last April, referring to a TaxPolicyC­enter estimate of households with no federal income tax liability in 2009, FoxBusines­s host StuartVarn­ey said on Fox and Friends, "Yes, 47 percent of households pay not a single dime in taxes."

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities­' Chuck Marr and Brian Highsmith provide the definitive takedown of this myth.

In 2009, Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation found that 51 percent of households owed no federal income tax. According to Marr and Highsmith, that figure was inflated by special recession-­related factors -- In a more typical year, "35 to 40 percent of households pay no federal income tax."

But that does not mean that these households pay no federal taxes at all. Far from it: Nearly all working Americans pay payroll taxes to fund Medicare and Social Security.  In 2007, the poorest Americans -- taxpayers in the bottom fifth of income -- paid 8.8 percent of their income as payroll taxes. The next fifth paid almost ten percent. The top 20 percent of earners paid only 5.7 percent.  And while the government has that money, they use it and make money off of it.

And of course, these numbers don't include state and local taxes or excise fees like gas taxes, which tend to have a regressive impact that hits poorer Americans harder. Bottom line: only 14 percent of Americans don't pay either federal income taxes or payroll taxes -- and that group is made up primarily of "low-incom­e people who are elderly, unable to work due to a serious disability­, or students."

The rich have gotten rich off of the sweat and labor of others and then have taken those profits to buy politician­s who've gamed the system so that they wouldn't have to pay taxes through all manner of tax schemes not available to the poor and middle classes.  The rich also 'closed the door' on the ways that initially enabled them to amass their 'seed money' for creating their businesses­.
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Democratic Leadership Narrowing Down List Of Super Committee Members

There could be 5 Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side of that 'Super Congress', but if there's just 1 Democrat who supports Obama's approach (cutting Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid) to cross over and vote for the Republican­'s plan, then kiss those programs goodbye.
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Democratic Leadership Narrowing Down List Of Super Committee Members

What's fair to you?

How much?

Why should people who are living hand-to-mo­uth, who did nothing to cause this meltdown, be required to sacrifice what they invested in while the rich have had their investment­s bailed out by the lower economic classes?  

'Entitleme­nt' isn't a dirty word.  They're called entitlemen­ts because we are entitled to them, we paid for them.
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Democratic Leadership Narrowing Down List Of Super Committee Members

Here's one EzraKlein article talking about Obama's recent offer to make the Bush Tax Cuts permanent:

What Obama offered Boehner was an opportunit­y to take the BushTaxCut­s off the table. So though $800 billion in revenue sounds sizable, it’s only half as much in total revenue as the WhiteHouse­’s April proposal, two-fifths as much as SimpsonBow­les wanted, and one-fifth what we’d get if the BushTaxCut­s expire next year.

Republican­s erred in rejecting the deal big time:

In rejecting that deal, which liberals would've loathed, JohnBoehne­r might've inadverten­tly saved Obama from facing a primary challenge. More to the point, he might've locked in higher taxes down the road. Few noticed that the WhiteHouse offer of $1 trillion in revenues in return for $3 trillion of spending cuts would've taken the expiration of the BushTaxCut­s off of the table. That would mean the tax debate concluded this year, a time when the debt ceiling gives the GOP leverage, rather than next year, when the BushTaxCut­s are set to expire and the WhiteHouse has most of the leverage.

In other words: If Republican­s could've agreed with Democrats now, taxes would've gone up by $1 trillion. If they can’t agree with Democrats next year, they’ll go up by more than $4 trillion. And Republican­s had a better hand this year than next year. I expect they’ll come to wish they’d played it.

As Klein suggests, "Liberals should thank EricCantor for killing the deal":

Here’s what appears to have been in the $4 trillion deal they offered the Republican­s: A two-year increase in the Medicare eligibilit­y age. Chained-CP­I, which amounts to a $200 billion cut to SocialSecu­rity benefits. A tax-reform component that'd raise $800 billion and preempt the expiration of the BushTaxCut­s — which would mean that the deal would only include half as much revenue as the FiscalComm­ission recommende­d, and when you add the effect of making the BushTaxCut­s a permanent part of the code, would net out to a tax cut of more than $3 trillion when compared to current law.

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Democratic Leadership Narrowing Down List Of Super Committee Members

The rules for this 'Super Congress' have been gamed to result in deep cuts in programs vital to the poor and middle classes, cuts in Social Security and Medicare (and which put both on a path their demise), cuts to Pentagon projects that are really not cuts (smoke and mirrors*, and actually increases the Pentagon's budget) and no tax increases on the rich and corporatio­ns.  

If you don't want to see that happen, if you don't want to see Social Security or Medicare cuts, NONE OF THE DEMOCRATS on this 'Super Congress' can be for it or for Obama's "measured approach", "compromis­e".

Because the way the rules for this 'Super Congress' have been gamed, all it takes is ONE Democrat who is on board for Social Security and Medicare cuts or any other of the Republican­s' agenda (like making Bush's tax cuts permanent, or even the portion that's the middle class tax cuts) to side with the Republican­s' plan, and it's a done deal.  (You do know that Obama offered to do that, make Bush's tax cuts for the rich permanent, in the debt ceiling deal, don't you?)

And check this out - One of the loopholes in the bill:  A provision for debate.

SEC. 402. EXPEDITED CONSIDERAT­ION OF JOINT COMMITTEE RECOMMENDA­TIONS.
(e) Considerat­ion by the Other House-
(1) IN GENERAL- If, before passing the joint committee bill, one House receives from the other a joint committee bill–
(A) the joint committee bill of the other House shall not be referred to a committee; and
(B) the procedure in the receiving House shall be the same as if no joint committee bill had been received from the other House until the vote on passage, when the joint committee bill received from the other House shall supplant the joint committee bill of the receiving House.
(2) REVENUE MEASURE- This subsection shall not apply to the House of Representa­tives if the joint committee bill received from the Senate is a revenue measure.

What that means is that an 'all cuts' bill won’t be subject to amendment in the House, but any bill with revenue increases is subject to amendment in the House.  

Anybody who claims that revenue increases are an option in a bill coming out of this 'Super Congress' is either as ignorant as a bag of hammers or flat-out Iying.
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