Obama, Progressives Renew Wary Embrace

he does pay minimum. legal or not isn't the real issue. I think your real problem is they don't look like you! now I won't be wasting any more time on you so good bye.

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You call me a racist, run away and expect that's the end of it?  Not by a long shot, friend.  

Immigration to the US is a problem when the people emigrating are competing with Americans for work and driving wages down.  

I've long ago dismissed commenters who base their opinions on apocryphal people they know; it's impossible to have an honest discussion that way.  My experience is contrary to your "neighbor's" - Every gardener I've ever interviewed (for bids on work) hires illegals and pays them cash under the table, a flat rate for a day's work, and it's nowhere near minimum wage.  They are housed in flophouses where they sleep many to a room, and they tend to send the bulk of the money they've made back to their families in Mexico.  The money leaves the country - We don't even get the benefit of that money spirring American businesses.  

I ask you again, what are out of work Americans to do to survive?  
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Let me also add that I don't know anyone who has said that when they grew up they wanted to be a garbage man.  Yet, we pay people very well to do that job because we value it.  We need it.  In order not to be overrun with rats, and disease, and stench, and filth.  
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What is it about them that's different from the Irish or Jews or Turks?  

About a hundred, hundred fifty years.  

Let's sort out what kind of immigrants we're talking about - Legal versus illegal.

Any immigration bill that gets passed is going to require employers to hire legals only.  Your neighbor is not going to be able to get away with hiring the same kinds of people he's hiring now.  He'll have to pay, at least, minimum wage and he'll pass that cost onto his customers.  

If you and your neighbor prefer the status quo, what do you suggest out of work Americans do?  Emigrate to another country, like illegals do here?  Or turn to a life of crime, robbing you and your neighbor, perhaps winding up in prison where you'll be paying a privatized prison system (for profit) bloated expenses?

What people need are living wages.
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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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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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Hit the streets.  Start organizing for 2014 now.  You have to not only be willing to put your body on the line, but to actually do it; put your body on the line.  You have to risk your worst fears (a Romney winning, a Teabagger winning, getting arrested, etc.) by peaceful protest, by voting for third party candidates and not returning an incumbent Democrat to Congress.  

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/once_again_--_death_of_the_liberal_class_20121112

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_im_voting_green_20121029/

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/criminalizing_dissent_20120813/

There's never going to be a good time, a better time, a safer time, to dissent.  It's all going to get worse.  Now is the safest, best time (before the election would have been better).
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Not to mention putting through an immigration reform bill that also will take jobs from Americans.
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The time to do it is before an election, not just after.  That's the only time that we, the People, have any leverage.  

Remember that the next time progressives/liberals tell Obama's (the DLC/No Labels/Third Way candidate's) 'most ardent supporters' that he must be primaries.  Or, barring that (too late, he's the candidate) that "we must vote for the lesser of two evils".  It's the same product (as Republicans), just different packaging, different sales pitch.
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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 JointCommittee on Taxation, 49 percent of households are paying 100 percent of taxes coming in to the federal government­." At the same hearing, CatoInstitute Senior Fellow 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, Fox Business host Stuart Varney 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 doesn't mean that these households pay no federal taxes at all. Far from it: Nearly all working Americans pay payroll taxes to fund Medicare and SocialSecurity. 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 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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There should be tax HIKES on corporatio­ns and the rich. There should be massive cuts to the military. Banks should be threatened with nationaliz­ation unless they begin lending to small businesses­. There have been more than 3.5 million home foreclosur­es but there are 11 million more in the pipeline — There must be principal write-down­s.

Democratic politician­s should be beating this drum and pushing the People’sBudget instead of working off of a set of corporate lobbyists’ plans. It reduces the deficit by $5.1 trillion and it beats Obama’s AND Republican­s’ plans.

As Krugman has said, the Progressiv­es’ budget:

“balances the budget through higher taxes and defense cuts, plus some tougher bargaining by Medicare (and a public option to reduce the costs of the Affordable Care Act). The proposed tax hikes would fall on higher incomes, raising the cap on payroll taxes (takes care of SocialSecurity’s solvency forever)..­. and unlike the Ryan plan, it actually makes sense.”

But Obama telegraphs that he's "not wedded" to vetoing cuts to Medicare and Social Security, taking solutions that work for the People off the table. Obama kneecaps and handicaps the Democratic voters who put him and Democrats into power. By taking the People's position off the table before entering talks, he sets the stage for squeezing the rest of the dimes from the poor and middle classes. What began with part 2 of Bush’s MedicareReformAct of 2003 (high-pric­ed junk health insurance that has no cost controls), continues with more *AFTA treaties (outsourci­ng more Americans’ jobs) and “payroll tax ‘holidays’­” that lead to the end of SocialSecurity.  

We need single payer, Medicare for all, and we need it now!:

The five largest commercial and investor-owned health insurers — UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint, Aetna, Cigna and Humana — posted a massive cumulative profit of $3.64 billion in the third quarter of the 2012 fiscal year. 

This past quarter's results were up 18.6 percent compared with the third quarter of FY 2011 as four out of the "big five" insurers posted gains. UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurer in the United States in both revenues and enrollment, led the pack with $1.56 billion in third-quarter profits — or roughly 43 percent of the total.

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