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Saturday, December 31, 2011
Franking privilege
"Privilege" franking is a personally pen-signed or printed facsimile signature of a person with a "franking privilege" such as certain government officials (especially legislators) and others designated by law or Postal Regulations. This allows the letter or other parcel to be sent without the application of an actual postage stamp. In the United States this is called the "Congressional frank" which can only be used for "Official Business" mail
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If your image is that we’re deeply in hock to foreigners, that our extravagance has condemned us to a future of debt peonage, you’re wrong.
US Net Investment Income
BY PAUL KRUGMAN
How’s that for a sexy blog post title? But this actually matters.
I’ve been arguing that the nature of US debt now is not, despite appearances, all that different from debt post-World War 2, when we pretty much entirely owed the money to ourselves. Now, of course, some of the money is owed to foreigners; but as I pointed out, America has large assets abroad, not too much less than its liabilities.
But wait, there’s more. American assets. often taking the form of foreign subsidiaries of US corporations, earn a higher rate of return than US liabilities — especially now, when there’s a lot of foreign money parked in Treasuries, but this was true even before the crisis. As a result, income from US-owned assets abroad — the blue line below — consistently exceeds payments on foreign-owned assets in the United States, the red line: (read the article & source)
Again, if your image is that we’re deeply in hock to foreigners, that our extravagance has condemned us to a future of debt peonage, you’re wrong.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Why the Republican Crackup is Bad For America
by Robert Reich
"............The watershed event was Newt Gingrich’s takeover of the House, in 1995. Suddenly, it seemed, the GOP had a personality transplant. The gentlemanly conservatism of House Minority Leader Bob Michel was replaced by the bomb-throwing antics of Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay.
"............The watershed event was Newt Gingrich’s takeover of the House, in 1995. Suddenly, it seemed, the GOP had a personality transplant. The gentlemanly conservatism of House Minority Leader Bob Michel was replaced by the bomb-throwing antics of Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay.
Almost overnight Washington was transformed from a place where legislators tried to find common ground to a war zone. Compromise was replaced by brinkmanship, bargaining by obstructionism, normal legislative maneuvering by threats to close down government – which occurred at the end of 1995." read the article
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
And now a word from a true believer......
The real “haves” are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real “have nots” are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor.
Eric Hoffer
The Defining Issue: Not Government’s Size, but Who It’s For
The defining political issue of 2012 won’t be the government’s size. It will be who government is for.Americans have never much liked government. After all, the nation was conceived in a revolution against government.
But the surge of cynicism now engulfing America isn’t about government’s size. The cynicism comes from a growing perception that government isn’t working for average people. It’s for big business, Wall Street, and the very rich instead.
In a recent Pew Foundation poll, 77 percent of respondents said too much power is in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.
That’s understandable. To take a few examples:
Wall Street got bailed out but homeowners caught in the fierce downdraft caused by the Street’s excesses have got almost nothing.
Big agribusiness continues to rake in hundreds of billions in price supports and ethanol subsidies. Big pharma gets extended patent protection that drives up everyone’s drug prices. Big oil gets its own federal subsidy. But small businesses on the Main Streets of America are barely making it.
American Airlines uses bankruptcy to ward off debtors and renegotiate labor contracts. Donald Trump’s businesses go bankrupt without impinging on Trump’s own personal fortune. But the law won’t allow you to use personal bankruptcy to renegotiate your home mortgage.
If you run a giant bank that defrauds millions of small investors of their life savings, the bank might pay a small fine but you won’t go to prison. Not a single top Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for Wall Street’s mega-fraud. But if you sell an ounce of marijuana you could be put away for a long time.
Not a day goes by without Republicans decrying the budget deficit. But the biggest single reason for the yawning deficit is big money’s corruption of Washington.
One of the deficit’s biggest drivers — Medicare – would be lower if Medicare could use its bargaining leverage to get drug companies to reduce their prices. Why hasn’t it happened? Big Pharma won’t allow it.
Medicare’s administrative costs are only 3 percent, far below the 10 percent average administrative costs of private insurers. So why not tame rising healthcare costs for all Americans by allowing any family to opt in? That was the idea behind the “public option.” Health insurers stopped it in its tracks.
The other big budgetary expense is national defense. America spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany combined. The basic defense budget (the portion unrelated to the costs of fighting wars) keeps growing, now about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation.
That’s because defense contractors have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their plants and facilities in politically important congressional districts.
So we keep spending billions on Cold War weapons systems like nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and manned combat fighters that pump up the bottom lines of Bechtel, Martin-Marietta, and their ilk, but have nothing to do with 21st-century combat.
Declining tax receipts are also driving the deficit. That’s partly because most Americans have less income to tax these days.
Yet the richest Americans are taking home a bigger share of total income than at any time since the 1920s. Their tax payments are down because the Bush tax cuts reduced their top rates to the lowest level in more than half a century, and cut capital gains taxes to 15 percent.
Congress hasn’t even closed a loophole that allows mutual-fund and private-equity managers to treat their incomes as capital gains.
So the four hundred richest Americans, whose total wealth exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 150 million Americans put together, pay an average of 17 percent of their income in taxes. That’s lower than the tax rates of most day laborers and child-care workers.
Meanwhile, Social Security payroll taxes continue to climb as a share of total tax revenues. Yet the payroll tax is regressive, applying only to yearly income under $106,800.
And the share of revenues coming from corporations has been dropping. The biggest, like GE, find ways to pay no federal taxes at all. Many shelter their income abroad, and every few years Congress grants them a tax amnesty to bring the money home.
**
Get it? “Big government” isn’t the problem. The problem is big money is taking over government.
Government is doing less of the things most of us want it to do — providing good public schools and affordable access to college, improving our roads and bridges and water systems, and maintaining safety nets to catch average people who fall — and more of the things big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy want it to do.
Some conservatives argue we wouldn’t have to worry about big money taking over government if we had a smaller government to begin with.
Here’s what Congressman Paul Ryan told me Sunday morning when we were debating all this on ABC’s “This Week”:
If the power and money are going to be here in Washington, that’s where the influence is going to go … that’s where the powerful are going to go to influence it.
Ryan has it upside down. A smaller government that’s still dominated by money would continue to do the bidding of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, oil companies, big agribusiness, big insurance, military contractors, and rich individuals.
It just wouldn’t do anything else.
If we want to get our democracy back we’ve got to get big money out of politics.
We need real campaign finance reform.
And a constitutional amendment reversing the Supreme Court’s bizarre rulings that under the First Amendment money is speech and corporations are people.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Plutocrat Piracy
Why do Republican voters, whose financial net worth is far less than one million dollars, continue to routinely vote for politicians that have nothing but unbridled contempt for those who fall far short of millionaire incomes?
Gop worried about voter fraud???
AFP Wisconsin ballots have late return date
Americans for Prosperity is sending absentee ballots to Democrats in at least
two Wisconsin state Senate recall districts with instructions to return the
paperwork after the election date.
Monday, August 1, 2011
What is the Death Tax?
FOR estate planning, the big headline to emerge from the tax deal last December was that the estate tax exemption would be raised in 2011 to $5 million, or $10 million for married couples. Anything over those thresholds would be subject to a 35 percent tax.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/yourtaxes/13estate.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/yourtaxes/13estate.html
The death tax (a.k.a., the federal estate tax) is a tax applied to the transfer of a person’s assets at death. It is defined by the Internal Revenue Service as “a tax on your right to transfer property at your death.”[1]
Under current law, the is rate of 35 percent with an exemption of $5 million.
Michele Bachmann Top Ten
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/06/16/246618/bachmann-craziest-quotes/
#(2) BACHMANN CLAIMED ABOLISHING THE MINIMUM WAGE WOULD CREATE JOBS: While testifying in front of the Minnesota Senate in 2005, Bachmann said, “Literally, if we took away the minimum wage — if conceivably it was gone — we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.” This isn’t remotely true. Even simply reducing the minimum wage would, as Paul Krugman noted, “at best do nothing for employment; more likely it would actually be contractionary.”
#(2) BACHMANN CLAIMED ABOLISHING THE MINIMUM WAGE WOULD CREATE JOBS: While testifying in front of the Minnesota Senate in 2005, Bachmann said, “Literally, if we took away the minimum wage — if conceivably it was gone — we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.” This isn’t remotely true. Even simply reducing the minimum wage would, as Paul Krugman noted, “at best do nothing for employment; more likely it would actually be contractionary.”
Bonuses for Billionaires
Republicans won’t extend unemployment benefits, even in the worst downturn in 70 years, because that makes people lazy about finding jobs. They’re right: We should be creating incentives for Americans to rise up the food chain by sending hefty checks to every new billionaire. This could be paid for with a tax surcharge on regular working folks. It’s the least we can do.
House Republicans don’t have a jobs plan. That’s unfair! Granted, the Republican-sponsored Cut, Cap and Balance Act would eliminate 700,000 jobs in just its first year,according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, but those analysts are no doubt liberals. America’s richest 400 people own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans, and the affluent would feel renewed confidence if the Republican plan passed. We’d see a hiring bonanza. Each of those wealthy people might hire an extra pool attendant. That’s 400 jobs right there! (NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF))
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/opinion/21kristof.html?_r=1
Bachmann declared that the American tax code creates "a similar death and a similar taking away" as Hitler's extermination of six million Jews during the Holocaust.
"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it" - Adolph Hitler
Fascism comes to America
"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross" - Sinclair Lewis
Corporations
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because
it is a merger of state and corporate power" - Benito Mussolini
Poster Boy for the New Republican Party
DeLay, who swore an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic," chose instead to make himself the most powerful legislative enemy of representative democracy.....the following link is extremely comprehensive. http://www.thedubyareport.com/delay1.html
Thomas Dale "Tom" DeLay ( more backround and history)
Are Taxpayers Getting Their Money's Worth? New Report Exposes the True Cost of Congressional Compensation
Most taxpayers think that Members of Congress should be adequately compensated for their efforts. However, it is excessive when the salaries and benefits paid to members of Congress make them among the best compensated employees in the American workforce......... http://www.protectingtaxpayers.org/index.php?blog&action=view&post_id=56
Sloppin' er up from the public trough
What Happened to the $2.6 Trillion Social Security Trust Fund?
...........the federal government has borrowed all of that trust fund money and spent it.http://blogs.forbes.com/merrillmatthews/2011/07/13/what-happened-to-the-2-6-trillion-social-security-trust-fund/
"Nobody seems to know, where did the money go......"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a3DZsO36cA
"Nobody seems to know, where did the money go......"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a3DZsO36cA
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Founding Fathers: A good tax
Adam Smith is often quoted, the so-called "Father of Economics" has rarely been read. Consequently he is often misunderstood.
Smith, who made such a strong stand against the protectionist mercantile system of trade of his day, devoted over ONE THIRD of his work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, to discussing the subject of government revenue and the methods by which it may be best collected, including new taxes. This is not generally known.
Examining the different forms of taxation, Smith adheres to four maxims which a good tax should conform to:
1. "The subject of every State ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the State."
2. "The tax each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary. The time of payment, the manner of payment, and the quantity to be paid, ought all to be clear and plain to the contributor, and to ever other person."
3. "Every tax ought to be levied at the time, or in the manner in which it is most likely to be convenient for the contributor to pay it."
4. "Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the State."will we be fooled again??
Smith, who made such a strong stand against the protectionist mercantile system of trade of his day, devoted over ONE THIRD of his work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, to discussing the subject of government revenue and the methods by which it may be best collected, including new taxes. This is not generally known.
Examining the different forms of taxation, Smith adheres to four maxims which a good tax should conform to:
1. "The subject of every State ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the State."
2. "The tax each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary. The time of payment, the manner of payment, and the quantity to be paid, ought all to be clear and plain to the contributor, and to ever other person."
3. "Every tax ought to be levied at the time, or in the manner in which it is most likely to be convenient for the contributor to pay it."
4. "Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the State."will we be fooled again??
Shields and Gerson on Debt Bill Scramble, Reid's Next Moves
The Republican Wreckage (The Republicans have dimmed the futures of millions of jobless Americans)
House Republicans have lost sight of the country’s welfare.....
....... when they win another concession, they walk away.
...............They have made the federal government a laughingstock around the globe.
read more..........
....... when they win another concession, they walk away.
...............They have made the federal government a laughingstock around the globe.
read more..........
The Terror From Within
Most threats and violence tend to emerge from within a society, not from outside it.......We prefer, however, to imagine threats as emanating from aliens and foreigners. Talk of a “clash of civilizations” is, while inaccurate, oddly reassuring because it suggests that the enemies are outsiders who can be easily identified.
.............Despite the commandment to love thy neighbor, why do we frequently hate him (or her)? Proximity is certainly one reason. A neighbor’s barking dog or loud music elicits more anger than the imagined threat of an unseen stranger.read more..........
Saturday, July 30, 2011
My Ass
Remember, not only did you contribute to Social Security but your employer did too. It totaled 15% of your income before taxes. If you averaged only 30K over your working life, that's close to $220,500. If you calculate the future value of $4,500 per year (yours & your employer's contribution) at a simple 5% (less than what the govt. pays on the money that it borrows), after 49 years of working (me) you'd have $892,919.98. If you took out only 3% per year, you receive $26,787.60 per year and it would last better than 30 years, and that's with no interest paid on that final amount on deposit! If you bought an annuity and it paid 4% per year, you'd have a lifetime income of $2,976.40 per month. The folks in Washington have pulled off a bigger Ponzi scheme than Bernie Madhoff ever had.
I didn't try to clean up the language in this message. It makes a better impact as it is.
Entitlement my ass , I paid cash for my social security insurance!!!! Just because they borrowed the money , doesn't make my benefits some kind of charity or handout !! Congressional benefits , aka. Free healthcare , outrageous retirement packages , 67 paid holidays , three weeks paid vacation , unlimited paid sick days , now that's welfare , and they have the nerve to call my retirement entitlements !!!!!!.....Anonymous
I didn't try to clean up the language in this message. It makes a better impact as it is.
Big Business Dictates the Presidency
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HvGy2gY0eM&NR=1
Noam Chompsly
"Campaign funding is a remarkable predictor of election, and also of policy," says linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky. He asserts that the Supreme Court is currently considering a lawsuit that would allow corporations to "buy elections directly, instead of indirectly."
"....undocumented aliens are not persons by law......"
Noam Chompsly
"Campaign funding is a remarkable predictor of election, and also of policy," says linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky. He asserts that the Supreme Court is currently considering a lawsuit that would allow corporations to "buy elections directly, instead of indirectly."
"....undocumented aliens are not persons by law......"
The Millionaire Migration Myth
Don't Fall for This Anti-Tax Scare Tactic
Virtually every state in the country has a tax system that heavily favors the rich. Despite this fact, only a handful of states responded to the revenue slump brought on by the Great Recession with any sort of tax increase on this favored group. What gives? With so many states looking for ways to balance their budgets, why isn't there more interest in finally making the rich pay their fair share?
The answer lies partially in one of the most effective, yet most absurd anti-tax scare tactics to be used in recent memory: the so-called "millionaire migration" epidemic. State lawmakers across the country have heard again and again that wealthy taxpayers will pull up stakes and move in response to just about any progressive state tax increase. In most cases, however, even a cursory look at the facts shows that these fears are unjustified. With tax day nearly upon us once again, let's take just a moment to make those facts known.
In New York, it was a business-backed group called the Partnership for New York City that first began spreading misinformation about the state's income tax surcharge on the rich. In a Februaryreport, the Partnership claimed that
"New York's high taxes risk pushing jobs, tax revenue, and talent to neighboring states. ...Since the imposition of New York's surcharge in 2009, there has been a 9.4% decrease in the state's taxpayers who are worth $1 million or more, decreasing from 381,786 in 2007 to 345,892 in 2009."
That sounds pretty scary, but the same data used by the Partnership shows that every state in the country saw its millionaire population decline between 2007 and 2009, and that a whopping forty-three states experienced declines exceeding New York's 9.4 percent drop. Apologies for stating the obvious, but these declines were a predictable result of the recent recession.
Making matters worse, the original press release accompanying this data made very clear that the U.S. as a whole saw its millionaire population decline by nearly 14 percent between 2007 and 2009. It's therefore a little strange, to say the least, that the Partnership would interpret New York's 9.4 percent drop as providing any evidence whatsoever that could be useful in its crusade against taxing high-income earners.
Oregonians also had to listen to their share of uninformed anti-tax nonsense during the course of the last few months -- this time coming from pundits living clear on the other side of the country. In December of last year the Wall Street Journal's editorial board suggested that a recent voter-approved income tax increase on upper-income families caused up to 10,000 Oregonians to pack their bags and head to Texas. Their "evidence" in support of this claim? 10,000 fewer taxpayers were affected by the tax increase than the state originally expected.
Of course, there's at least one other perfectly reasonable explanation for why fewer Oregonians would be affected: the recession lowered their incomes enough to bring them beneath the starting point for the new tax brackets (only taxpayers earning more than $125,000 - or $250,000 in the case of married couples -- were affected by the tax increase). Unfortunately for the Journal, the data strongly suggest that this is the case.
After just a quick glance at the data, my group -- the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) -- found that while the state's revenue estimators overestimated the size of Oregon's "rich" population by roughly 34,000, it also underestimated its middle- and low-income population by more than 60,000. Simply put, some 26,000 more Oregonians filed tax returns than the state originally expected. They just earned less income than usual due to the weak economic climate.
What makes this story especially troubling is that, as in New York, there was very clear evidence available refuting the Journal's claims -- had anyone there taken the time to look for it. Almost a full week before the Journal's piece was published, the Oregon House Revenue Committee held a hearing in conjunction with the release of the new data at issue. As is usually the case, that hearing gave the state's revenue estimators an opportunity to offer some very useful context, such as the fact that the 10,000 return discrepancy was due to taxpayers being "driven down the income distribution because [of lower than expected capital gains income], and they [moved] from the affected category to the unaffected categories."
No discussion of millionaire migration would be complete without a look back at the debacle in Maryland. Thanks in no small part to a pair of misleading editorials published by the Wall Street Journal, Maryland's legislature failed to approve legislation early last year that would have extended its temporary tax bracket on incomes over $1 million. Since then, much of the hubbub surrounding the Maryland "millionaires' tax" has died down, but the effect that the Journal's misinformation campaign had on shaping the conventional wisdom on "millionaire migration" makes the issue worth revisiting.
As in New York and Oregon, the question in Maryland revolved around whether high-income taxpayers were migrating or simply becoming less rich. When the Maryland Comptroller released data showing a roughly 30% drop in millionaire filers between 2007 and 2008 (the year Maryland's "millionaires' tax" first took effect), the Journal enthusiastically seized on this figure as proof that the "redistributionists" and "class warriors" had failed in their scheme to "soak the rich."
To its credit, the Journal did exercise a modicum of caution in its first two editorials by reminding its readers that much of this decline was due to the recession, though it continued to insist that the "millionaires' tax" just had to have something to do with this drop as well. ITEP responded to theJournal in multiple reports and an unpublished letter to the editor explaining that more detailed data, provided by the Comptroller's office upon request, indeed confirmed that the vast majority of "migrating" millionaires had simply moved to a lower tax bracket.
Fast forward to last December when the Journal revived the Maryland migration myth in the context of Oregon. This time, the Journal threw caution to the wind and stated flatly that "one-third of [Maryland's] millionaire households vanished from the tax rolls after [tax] rates went up." Of course, this flew in the face of its published claim from nine months earlier that: "one-in-eight millionaires who filed a Maryland tax return in 2007 filed no return in 2008." But that was back before the Journal forgot about the recession. (For the record: even the "one-in-eight" figure wasan exaggeration.)
In all three of these states -- New York, Oregon, and Maryland -- the anti-tax crowd ignored a lot of fairly obvious evidence running counter to their claims. Unfortunately, that's the way it's been whenever the "millionaire migration" issue has made its way into statehouse debates. Any shred of "evidence," no matter how meaningless or out of context, has been seized upon by those seeking to construct the anti-tax, vote-with-your-feet narrative they desperately wish was true.
With so much bad information floating around, it's not surprising that most states have been reluctant to eliminate the massive preferences for the wealthy built into their tax systems. But what lawmakers need to know -- and what the Wall Street Journal and others have been refusing to tell them -- is that once you scratch the surface of the millionaire migration issue, it becomes abundantly clear that the anti-tax side's claims have no substance. It's long past time to stop letting the millionaire migration myth get in the way of progressive tax reform. link
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