Get your head out from under that rock -- There are NO JOBS.
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Monday, July 9, 2012
Obama Calls For One-Year Extension Of Bush-Era Tax Cuts For First $250,000 Of Income
If you don't pay federal income tax, do you think that that means that you don't pay any taxes?
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.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Obama Calls For One-Year Extension Of Bush-Era Tax Cuts For First $250,000 Of Income
Why Obama's JOBS Act Couldn't Suck Worse
Just because it has the word 'jobs' in it, doesn't make it so.
Obama could have and should have come out big, large, when he entered the White House and put that political capital of 10 million more people voting for him, a black man in racist America over the white war hero, to work. But he didn't. Because Obama isn't a populist, he's not a man of the people. He's a tool of the elites.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Obama Calls For One-Year Extension Of Bush-Era Tax Cuts For Those Making Less Than $250,000
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 any or enough (G.E. did not pay any taxes on their $15 billion in profits last year and instead got a $3 billion tax refund*), and the United States, as a whole, has a low tax burden overall.
*Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Boeing and Carnival Cruise Lines all had high profits and paid no taxes. Over the last two years, Wells Fargo earned $37 billion in profits but got a $4 billion tax refund. And Hewlett-Packard reported over $9 billion in profits last year, but paid the same amount in taxes as someone earning just $30,000 a year.
About Bush Tax Cuts
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Obama Calls For One-Year Extension Of Bush-Era Tax Cuts For First $250,000 Of Income
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.
KEEP READING
About Bush Tax Cuts
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Obama Calls For One-Year Extension Of Bush-Era Tax Cuts For Those Making Less Than $250,000
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."
KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Karl Rove Gave Secret Speech Outside Romney Donor Retreat
Who do you think that someone should be?
Yes, Republicans are scvm, but the fact of the matter is that Democrats aren't doing anything for the people. Democrats didn't need Republicans for passing anything. There's nothing that Bush did that Democrats didn't sign on to.
Once Obama got into office, Democrats enjoyed a greater majority in both houses of Congress than either party has in decades. Even without 60 (but the Democratic Caucus in the Senate had 60). But one example is that Obama didn't need 60 to pass real healthcare reform. All Democrats needed was 50 plus Biden (reconciliation), which is what they did in the end anyway, but for a corporate-pork-laden bill with no cost constraints that doesn't provide affordable quality medical treatment for everyone.
But Democrats didn't do that.
Democrats also have refused to exercise the discretion that Rule 22 allows: Making Republicans actually filibuster, instead of just threatening to do it.
Rule 22 gives the SenateMajorityLeader the discretion to actually make the call. Filibustering is hard on those soft, pampered bodies. HarryReid has refused to make them do it, letting them merely threaten. He should. Americans love reality TV. 'Survivor-Washington, DC'. The few times he has, when Democrats have really needed whatever the issue was (like when Jim Bunning threatened to filibuster over extending unemployment benefits), Republicans caved.
The DLC-controlled Democrats aren't forcing filibusters, and Obama isn't taking to the bully pulpit because it might actually work to get Democratic voters' legislative agenda made into the law of the land and do good for the People. And that's not what Obama and DLC-controlled Democrats are there for. They are there to do the work of the transnational corporations, and preventing that are the liberals.
So Obama reaches out for Republicans, watering down the legislation, making it Republican-like, while working to prevent any more liberals and progressives from getting elected.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Obama Calls For One-Year Extension Of Bush-Era Tax Cuts For Those Making Less Than $250,000
All that Obama's been doing is trying to save unregulated capitalism and the lock that the 1% has on the other 99%.
With Obama's deal to preserve Bush's tax cuts for the rich (making it Obama's tax cuts for the rich), 99ers were cut off. Of the 6 million people currently receiving unemployment benefits, Obama's deal covered only 2 million, & many of them will get crumbs from his deal because in spite of the 13-month extension, benefits will be cut off for many of those in the coming months when they reach 99-weeks. And only 25 states out of 53 states/territories in/of the US have 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, so that's even fewer still.
David Cay Johnston on Democracy Now! on Obama's deal to extend Bush's tax cuts "The worse off you are, your taxes increase":
The payroll tax 'holiday' in the deal sets SocialSecurity up for its end. That's what Bush and GroverNorquist planned and why Bush believes he'll be vindicated as a great conservative in history: For ending the GreatSociety programs, by having bankrupted the nation so there's no way to pay out those benefits. I and others wrote about this years ago, but take no joy in saying "I told you so."
"The bottom roughly 45 million families in America or households in America—and there are a little over 100 million households—they’re going to actually see their taxes go up. Republicans got an extraordinarily good deal, that raises, I think, basic questions about the negotiating skills of the President."
Extending Bush's tax cuts was an absolutely wretched deal, but standard for Obama, who has a long record of negotiating lousy deals on ordinary citizens' behalf. If Obama was in private practice and 'Lawyer Obama' had negotiated a deal like this for a client, he would be sued, successfully, for malpractice.
The purpose of the deal was so that Democratic political operatives could say, "Obama helped the unemployed"; most readers won't know the actual facts of how Obama sold out the American people. Again. Obama and Democrats have no jobs plan either. Both parties are thinning the herd.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Obama Calls For One-Year Extension Of Bush-Era Tax Cuts For Those Making Less Than $250,000
Did you know that Obama offered to make Bush'sTaxCuts permanent? Here's EzraKlein talking about it:
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 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 the table. That'd 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 the most leverage.
IOW: 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 - 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.
About Bush Tax Cuts
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Obama Calls For One-Year Extension Of Bush-Era Tax Cuts For Those Making Less Than $250,000
Obama Calls For One-Year Extension Of Bush-Era Tax Cuts For Those Making Less Than $250,000
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Here we go again.
The next best thing to making Bush's tax cuts permanent is to do it a year at a time. Obama will be happy to kick this can down the road, keep Bush's tax cuts in place, even if he has to do it a year at a time.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Karl Rove Gave Secret Speech Outside Romney Donor Retreat
And neither party has real campaign financing reform on their agenda.
Not one word from Obama or Democrats about eliminating corporate personhood, which should be and has to be the first (and ONLY) thing on their campaign promise list at this moment in our history.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
The Lethal Presidency Of Barack Obama, By Tom Junod - Esquire
Jeremy Scahill: "Torture Is Ongoing Under Obama!"
Did Congress Just Endorse Rendition for Americans? - You've heard about indefinite detention in the defense bill. But it also contains some eyebrow-raising language regarding the transfer of terrorist suspects to foreign countries.
U.S. Forces Transferred Afghanistan Detainees To Facility Known For Torture Despite Ban
A new report finds that U.S. forces have transferred Afghan detainees to facilities where evidence of torture was found, in violation of a ban against such transfers.
The report, conducted by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission with assistance from the Open Society Foundations, found 11 “credible cases” of U.S. forces transferring individuals to NDS Kandahar in violation of a July 2011 order suspending such transfers. Four of them reported being tortured in NDS custody. The commission is an organization consisting of a group appointed by the government but independent by law.
Others reported being tortured at a facility called "Mullah Omar's House," a residence of the former Taliban leader which was taken over by Special Forces soldiers and renamed Firebase Maholic. One man claimed he had been taken there and abused by Afghan forces. After sitting in the camp for several hours, he said, "suddenly lashes of cable struck my head and back very hard from behind, they beat me for one hour. They wanted me to tell them who I had relations with. They were all Afghans beating me, though the beating took place in the presence of Americans."
About Al Qaeda
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost