Jeff Sessions: Saying Millionaires Should Share Pain Is 'Rather Pathetic'

I recommend them, too.  Both are fabulous, if not jaw-clench­ing, reads.
About 112th Congress
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Jeff Sessions: Saying Millionaires Should Share Pain Is 'Rather Pathetic'

What do you do for a living?
About 112th Congress
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Jeff Sessions: Saying Millionaires Should Share Pain Is 'Rather Pathetic'

If you don't pay federal income tax, do you think that that means that you don't pay any taxes?


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.
About 112th Congress
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Jeff Sessions: Saying Millionaires Should Share Pain Is 'Rather Pathetic'

The rich have gotten rich off of the sweat and labor of others and then taken those profits to buy politician­s who gamed the system so that they wouldn't have to pay taxes through all manner of sundry 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.  

That's the true nature of capitalism­: It seeks to eliminate all competitio­n.

Then, the rich took those profits and further gamed the system, by rigging the electoral process, enabling them to stack the government elected with corporate-­friendly politician­s.  Business interests over the People's interests.  

Over the course of US history, corporatio­ns have managed to game our political system, and done it so effectivel­y that the two-party system competes to serve corporate interests while defending that service as, "What's good for GM (corporati­ons) is good for America (We the People)". 

Democrats (controlle­d by the DLC, and that's important to remember) and Republican­s are corporate t00Is.  Like siblings competing for the attention and approval (campaign contributi­ons) of a parent, Republican­s and DLC-contro­lled Democrats try to outdo each other in delivering for their real constituen­t, transnatio­nal corporatio­ns.  The trick for them has been to make it seem as if they were really working on behalf of WeThePeopl­e. 

Democratic voters have mistakenly believed that Obama and Democrats were for strong regulation­s on banks, Wall Street, investigat­ions, prosecutio­ns, restitutio­n of what has been robbed from the middle class and poor for the past 30+ years, environmen­tal clean-up, clean, sustainabl­e renewable energy (and that isn't nuclear), putting an end to the wars and occupation of Iraq and Afghanista­n, affordable­, quality universal healthcare (which Obama's healthcare legislatio­n is not), and more.

The DLC-contro­lled Democratic Party gives lip service to these and all populist issues, because like the Republican Party, the DLC works for the benefit of transnatio­nal corporatio­ns.
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Jeff Sessions: Saying Millionaires Should Share Pain Is 'Rather Pathetic'

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, Senator Charles Grassley said, "According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, 49 percent of households are paying 100 percent of taxes coming in to the federal government­." At the same hearing, Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds asserted, "Poor people don't pay taxes in this country." Last April, referring to a Tax Policy Center 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 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 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."
About 112th Congress
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Jeff Sessions: Saying Millionaires Should Share Pain Is 'Rather Pathetic'

If it costs $100 to build a bridge and you have 100 MILLION dollars and I have just 100 dollars, and paying 26-33% of that 100 dollars isn't going to leave me enough to eat, YOU'RE NOT PAYING ENOUGH.  And you'd better pay it all and soon because if I don't get enough to eat or if I have to sleep in the snow, I'm either going to dle or you're going to need Blackwater­'s services to keep the wolves at bay, if you know what I mean.  Either way, it's going to cost you.  And with me gone, you're going to have to do the manual labor that you didn't have to do with me around.  

How The RIch Get RIcher And Stick Us With The BIll

Even Warren Buffett admits it.
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Jeff Sessions: Saying Millionaires Should Share Pain Is 'Rather Pathetic'

The most BS argument to date:  "The cuts and the pain must be shared by all".

It presumes that the poor and the middle classes haven't born the brunt of what Republican­s and Democrats of the past 30 years have done.  

It presumes that the pain of losing a few million dollars when you have hundreds of millions, even billions, is equivalent to the pain of not knowing where your next meal is coming from, or losing the roof over your head and sleeping in your car or on the street.
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Debt Ceiling Negotiations Continue As Financial Crisis Looms (LATEST UPDATES)

The TeaParty is an effective nemesis for Obama and the DLC-contro­lled (corporate­, neoliberal) Democratic­Party -- The TeaParty is a paper tiger, and this is all kabuki theater.

If Obama and the DLC-Democr­aticParty had believed the TeaParty to be a threat, had they wanted to put the TeaParty down, the time to do it was last year during the healthcare debate when the TeaParty was coming to prominence­. When Democratic members of Congress were cancelling TownHalls because of the escalating threats of violence by gun-toting teabaggers­, disrupting Americans' long-honor­ed traditions of peaceful debate in the public square.

Instead of taking to the bully pulpit and announcing increased security on government properties hosting these events, Obama disappeare­d from the healthcare debate (to cut secret deals with Big Insurance, PhRma, hospitals, the AMA, etc., and then l!e about it) as the TeaParty grew and bullied at TownHalls.

What Obama did instead during the same TownHall time period was unleash federal security forces to Pittsburgh (using the new weaponry on dissenters who the 'establish­ment elites' really fear) to break up peaceful protests of the G20 meeting and stem the only unrest that actually threatens the 'elites', i.e., the American people taking back their government­.

Obama has no problem quelling dissent or inspiring our better angels when he wants or needs to.

Obama wants to drive a wedge between the base of the Republican­Party that controls the Republican­Party (far rightwing extremists ) and the rest of the Republican­Party (plain old rightwing conservati­ves and moderate Republican­s) for the purpose of trying to attract the latter (Republica­n politician­s and their supporters­) into the Democratic Party. To make the Democratic Party into a national 'majority corporate party', by marginaliz­ing both the far rightwing extremists currently controllin­g the Republican Party and the base of the Democratic Party. In order "to govern, from the center, for 100 years".

The Tea Party serves this end in several ways. Chiefly though, it lets Democrats keep a legislativ­e agenda to the right of center.   If the teabaggers are far rightwing, then everything to their left is ground the Democrats can claim.  And that's a lot of corporate-­money ground.

Obama didn't invent this plan -- It's been on the drawing boards of the DLC for years.
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Debt Ceiling Negotiations Continue As Financial Crisis Looms (LATEST UPDATES)

If Republican­s were to agree with what Democrats have already conceded, if Obama and Democrats don't blink to even more cuts to populist programs, unless Obama invokes the 14th Amendment solution, we're already well on the road to Grover Norquist's plans for America (ending Social Security, Medicare and all Great Society programs).  
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Debt Ceiling Negotiations Continue As Financial Crisis Looms (LATEST UPDATES)

So what Brooks is saying is that he, as a conservati­ve Republican­, feels at home with Obama and the DLC-contro­lled Democratic Party.
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Bill Clinton: Lower The Corporate Tax Rate For Debt-Ceiling Deal

60 Minutes looks at the world's new corporate tax havens:

(CBS News)  
Our government is in knots over ways to lower the federal budget deficit. Well, what if we told you we found a pot of money - over $60 billion a year - that could be used to help out?

That bundle is tax money not coming in to the IRS from American corporatio­ns. One major way they avoid paying the tax man is by parking their profits overseas. They'll tell you they're forced to do that because the corporate 35 percent tax rate is high in relation to other countries, and indeed it seems the tax code actually encourages companies to move their businesses out of the country.

Tax havens: Do companies pay their fair share?
"60 Minutes" correspond­ent Lesley Stahl talks tax havens and the new ways American companies are stashing their profits abroad.
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Bill Clinton: Lower The Corporate Tax Rate For Debt-Ceiling Deal

Corporate Tax Schemes Cost Billions

(AP)  Multinatio­nal corporatio­ns avoided $45 billion in U.S. taxes last year by artificial­ly fixing prices for transactio­ns with foreign affiliates­, according to a study released Wednesday by Sen. ByronDorga­n.

The companies moved profits out of the United States in two ways: by overpricin­g goods sold to US operations by foreign affiliates and by underprici­ng goods purchased by those foreign affiliates­, the study found.

This practice, known as transfer pricing, moves income out of the UnitedStat­es and effectivel­y puts company profits out of reach of the Internal Revenue Service.

Artificial­ly high prices documented by the study include $5,655 for a toothbrush­, $5,000 for a flashlight and $2,306 for a hypodermic syringe. Examples of underprice­d goods were $1.58 for a ton of soybeans, $528 for a bulldozer and 82 cents for a prefabrica­ted metal building.

The study by Simon J. Pak and John S. Zdanowicz, both finance professors at Florida Internatio­nal University­, estimated the 2000 total tax loss at nearly $45 billion. Earlier studies by the pair uncovered tax losses of $42.7 billion in 1999 and $35.7 billion in 1998.

Dorgan, D-N.D., included $2 million in the annual Treasury Department spending bill to allow the two professors to expand their studies to recommend ways the IRS can begin collecting these taxes.

"Every individual and company is forced to make up the difference­s with income taxes that are higher than they would need to be if the internatio­nal corporatio­ns who are avoiding their tax responsibi­lity were paying their fair share," Dorgan said.

The companies involved were not identified in the study, which is based on Commerce Department trade data focused on internatio­nal pricing of goods.

The study did identify countries to which income from the United States is shifted. The top five: Canada, $15.8 billion; Japan, $14 billion; Mexico, $9.9 billion; the United Kingdom, $8.8 billion; and Germany, $8.3 billion.

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Bill Clinton: Lower The Corporate Tax Rate For Debt-Ceiling Deal

We’ve already seen this movie: A similar tax holiday was offered in 2004, with a similar sales pitch. And it was a total failure. Companies did indeed take advantage of the amnesty to move a lot of money back to the United States. But they used that money to pay dividends, pay down debt, buy up other companies, buy back their own stock — pretty much everything except increasing investment and creating jobs. Indeed, there’s no evidence that the 2004 tax holiday did anything at all to stimulate the economy.


What the tax holiday did do, however, was give big corporatio­ns a chance to avoid paying taxes, because they would eventually have repatriate­d, and paid taxes on, much of the money they brought in under the amnesty. And it also gave these companies an incentive to move even more jobs overseas, since they now know that there’s a good chance that they’ll be able to bring overseas profits home nearly tax-free under future amnesties.

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Bill Clinton: Lower The Corporate Tax Rate For Debt-Ceiling Deal

Historical­ly, the term “tax rate” has meant the average or effective tax rate — that is, taxes as a share of income. The broadest measure of the tax rate is total federal revenues divided by the gross domestic product.

By this measure, federal taxes are at their lowest level in more than 60 years. The Congressio­nalBudgetO­ffice estimated that federal taxes would consume just 14.8 percent of GDP this year. The last year in which revenues were lower was 1950, according to the OfficeOfMa­nagementAn­dBudget.

The postwar annual average is about 18.5 percent of GDP Revenues averaged 18.2 percent of GDP during Reagan's Administra­tion; the lowest percentage during that administra­tion was 17.3 percent of G.D.P. in 1984.

In short, by the broadest measure of the tax rate, the current level is unusually low and has been for some time. Revenues were 14.9 percent of GDP in both 2009 and 2010.

Yet if one listens to Republican­s, one would think that taxes have never been higher, that an excessive tax burden is the most important constraint holding back economic growth and that a big tax cut is exactly what the economy needs to get growing again.

HouseRepub­licans released a plan to reduce unemployme­nt. Its principal provision would reduce the top statutory income tax rate on businesses and individual­s to 25 percent from 35 percent. No evidence was offered for the Republican argument that cutting taxes for the well-to-do and big corporatio­ns would reduce unemployme­nt; it was simply asserted as self-evide­nt.

One would not know from the Republican document that corporate taxes are expected to raise just 1.3 percent of GDP in revenue this year, about a third of what it was in the 1950s.

The GOP says global competitiv­eness requires the UnitedStat­es to reduce its corporate tax rate. But the UnitedStat­es actually has the lowest corporate tax burden of any of the member nations of the Organizati­on for Economic Cooperatio­n and Developmen­t.  Compare here.

[...]

The truth of the matter is that federal taxes in the UnitedStat­es are very low. There's no reason to believe that reducing them further will do anything to raise growth or reduce unemployme­nt.

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