Posts tagged Tax cuts don't solve everything
Cognitive Dissonance
"Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!" -- Allen Ginsberg
We’ve had 30 straight years of pretty much unabated tax cutting for the rich. And yet a random comment that perhaps the rich aren’t actually undertaxed on Twitter gets me lots of angry retorts–from a lot of people I’d bet aren’t rich themselves. The idea that ‘you can’t tax success’ is ridiculous on its face: that’s what we do every single time we pay income taxes. We certainly didn’t manage to find a way to tax failure, or else Wall Street would be out of business.
Threatening to essentially tank the economy again if you are taxed is economic violence.
“Returning to the Scene of the Class War” by Sarah, on Feministe
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Tax the rich. Now.
When even conservative economists are calling for taxes to be raised on the rich, maybe it’s about time. We’re living in this delusional la-la land, where if Warren “El capitalismo espectacular” Buffett suggests raising taxes on the rich, he’s a socialist. If the economy has hope of ever rebounding, spending cuts are not the only answer. We must also raise revenue. The temporary Bush tax cuts must be allowed to expire.
The super-rich must not be allowed to hold the economy hostage any longer. One percent of the country cannot, logically, dangle the futures of the other 99% off of a cliff without an outcry… can they?
Former Sen. Alan Simpson told Lawrence O’Donnell it’s time to “peel all the layers of the onion” and figure out just why people seem to listen intently to Grover Norquist.
In an interview on The Last Word tonight, Simpson noted that Norquist had challenged Republican Sen. Tom Coburn on a $6 billion cut on ethanol subsidies he had called “tax increases,” which incensed Simpson greatly. “Grover and his happy band of warriors are trying to call that a tax increase– that’s a damn lie and he knows it,” he told O’Donnell. “And if he can get away with that, elect him President.”
Simpson continued to question Norquist’s power throughout the segment, arguing that “he can’t kill you, he can’t burn your house, he can defeat you in reelection,” and if a public servant thought the latter was enough to obey him, they didn’t deserve the spot.
He also told O’Donnell several times that “if Grover Norquist is more powerful than the President of the United States and the Congress, he should run for President” … On that note, Simpson called for an investigation. “Grover Norquist should be examined into– where does he get his money?” In times where people amass so much power, he argues, it becomes necessary to “peel all the layers of the onion.” “Anytime anyone gets this powerful,” he argued, “you want to dig in… who is he slave to?”
He clarified that he did not mean “salacious stuff and his personal life,” but how Americans for Tax Reform operated and why so many people in Congress feared him, because based only on his status as leader of an anti-tax group, “you must be chicken if you fall for that crap.”
I have a soft spot for former Sen. Alan Simpson. He’s part of the Reagan era, yes, and that’s where the accelerated sell-out of my generation began. However, he also has a streak of common-sense conservatism sorely lacking in the Republican Party. He’s pro-gay rights (including marriage) and pro-choice, which puts him to the left of nearly every Republican out there.
I agree with Simpson. Let’s find out where Grover’s getting his bucks.
[Warren] Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income…
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare. “There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
Ben Stein, “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning?” The New York Times, November 26, 2006.
I’d like to point today’s GOP to Mr. Buffett’s nearly five year old quote, thank you very much.
Some perspective… look at the Bush-era tax cuts compared to everything else, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Shameful.
'Give It Back For Jobs' Helps Affluent Return Tax Cuts
For affluent Americans outraged by the fiscal and social consequences of tax cuts handed to them by President George W. Bush and recently extended for two more years, a trio of similarly dismayed academics has furnished a way for them to put their money where their mouth is.
Their new website, giveitbackforjobs.org, invites high-income Americans to calculate the value of their tax cut under the extension and then pledge to donate that money directly to charities that the site says encourage “fairness, economic growth, and a vibrant middle class.” The site doesn’t accept contributions directly, but links users to those charities.
The site has been engineered to offer Americans who view the tax cuts as misguided a means to personally direct dollars toward countering the effects, while also registering a protest for broad policies that have exacerbated economic inequality.
“It’s like civil disobedience,” said Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, and one of the three academics behind the initiative. “You’re not committing a crime, but the government says, ‘This is what you should give,’ and you’re saying, ‘No, I should give more.’”
This just made me happy.
One year after electing a Tea Party candidate, one of the wealthiest counties in America is broke.
MINEOLA, N.Y. — Facing a huge budget deficit when he took office in January, Nassau County Executive Edward P. Mangano did not impose a hiring freeze. He did not stop borrowing to subsidize some of the richest school districts in the country. He did not eliminate the Police Department’s beloved mounted unit.
Instead, Mr. Mangano, a Republican who won one of the first upsets of the Tea Party era, did what he had promised: He cut taxes, adding $40 million to the county’s deficit, which has since reached nearly $350 million.
Now, with its bonds suddenly downgraded and a state oversight agency preparing to seize its checkbook and credit cards, Nassau is on the verge of a full-fledged fiscal crisis.
Okay, so Nassau already had some problems, and the whole county isn’t super rich, but seriously. How’s that borrow-and-spend trickle-down economics working out for you guys?
Wow. Who would have thought that cutting taxes and bringing in less revenue wouldn’t work? I’m looking at you, Colorado Springs.
(Source: cosmicfingertips, via greenstate)
By Felix Salmon
Stephen Culp has another striking chart today.
This chart should be ingrained in the mind of anybody who cares about fiscal policy. The main things to note:
- Federal taxes are the lowest in 60 years, which gives you a pretty good idea of why America’s long-term debt ratios are a big problem. If the taxes reverted to somewhere near their historical mean, the problem would be solved at a stroke.
- Income taxes, in particular, both personal and corporate, are low and falling. That trend is not sustainable.
- Employment taxes, by contrast—the regressive bit of the fiscal structure—are bearing a large and increasing share of the brunt. Any time that somebody starts complaining about how the poor don’t pay income tax, point them to this chart. Income taxes are just one part of the pie, and everybody with a job pays employment taxes.
- There aren’t any wealth taxes, but the closest thing we’ve got—estate and gift taxes—have shrunk to zero, after contributing a non-negligible amount to the public fisc in earlier decades.
If you were structuring a tax code from scratch, it would look nothing like this. But the problem is that tax hikes seem to be politically impossible no matter which party is in power. And since any revamp of the tax code would involve tax hikes somewhere, I fear we’re fiscally doomed.
Individual taxes have taken a dramatic dip, but I find the corporate tax structure flat-out offensive.
(via greenstate)
