The article Dealing With the Budget Deficit: Does the Middle Class Have to Take the Hit? by Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research, provides the ammunition for my claim that tax raising must come before any discussion of entitlement cuts.

In short, there is little reason to be talking about imposing increased burdens on the middle class any time soon. For the near term, the budget deficit is clearly not a problem. The financial markets are willing to lend the country large amounts of money at very low rates. Over a longer term, the deficit will pose more of an issue, but most of this pressure will come from health care costs. If these costs can be contained, and we get additional revenue from the top 1 percent and restrain the military budget, then the need for the middle class to bear additional burdens can be pushed out well into the future.

At some point, we likely will need more revenue from the middle class since we will probably want to increase government spending in some areas like infrastructure, education, and research and development. However, this is not a near-term prospect and quite possibly not even something that will be necessary over the course of a decade. Furthermore, if the need for additional revenue comes at a time when the unemployment rate is again down in a 4-5 percent range and real wages are rising, it will be much easier for the middle class to bear.

Don’t let the politicians including our own Senator Kerry fool you into accepting any compromises he seems inclined to permit from the Deficit Reduction Super Committee. If we had Elizabeth Warren sitting where Kerry is now sitting, I would feel much more secure in the knowledge that someone was looking after our interests.

In the article Wall Street v. Elizabeth Warren, Simon Johnson expresses his opinion of the Karl Rove attack ad against Elizabeth Warren.

Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS group has launched the first attack ad against Elizabeth Warren, presumably because she is now running hard for the Senate in Massachusetts.  This ad is not a big surprise, but the line that Mr. Rove takes could well backfire.

Again, I commented on this subject:

By the way, radical wealth redistribution has been going on for the last 30 years. There has been an upward gusher of wealth from the middle-class to the wealthy.

Elizabeth Warren’s research and writings have helped provide the Occupy movement with the knowledge to start asking for their money back.

Felons always consider it a radical idea to pay restitution to their victims.

It is not exactly a response to Karl Rove’s attack ad. What do you think of this ad?

According to The New York Times article Deficit Panel Seeks to Defer Details on Raising Taxes,

With a little over a week left to reach a deal, members of the Congressional deficit reduction panel are looking for an escape hatch that would let them strike an accord on revenue levels but delay until next year tough decisions about exactly how to raise taxes.

This is ridiculous.  If you read my previous post How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich, then you know there are trillions of dollars of foregone taxes that are not being collected.

The first thing the committee needs to do is to put a plan in place to collect those taxes.  There is no possibility of needing to cut any spending now or in the future to balance the budget.

Call Senator Kerry and let him know that he will be held personally responsible for any cave-in of the Super Committee. Phone: 202-224-2742.  No cuts until revenue is raised as much as possible.

I like the comment on the post Liberals Slam Super Committee Dems For Caving On Taxes — But Did They?

island liberal

“There could be a two-step process that would hopefully give us pro-growth tax reform,” Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, the top Republican on the panel.

“Pro-growth tax reform”. GOP code for more tax cuts for the uber-rich; tax hikes and benefit cuts for all the rest.

“Two-step process”. GOP code for “take from the poor and the middle class; give to the rich.”

Any deal that cuts benefits for the middle class and the poor before we have 5 solid years of actual, massively increased tax revenues from the rich and corporations is a sell-out.

Give us 5 straight years of good old GOP taxing at the rates in effect in the 1950s (89% personal income tax rate at the high end; effective corporate income tax at ~ 49% of profits). After 5-straight years of tax revenues from the wealthy and corporations at rates that were good enough for the GOP in the 1950s, then take a look at the state of the economy and see whether any cuts to Social Security and Medicare are needed. Not before.

Yes, I know it will never happen. But I suspect a large segment of the population would like to see the rich and corporations give more BEFORE the middle class has to give up any Social Security or Medicare benefits.

I am looking to either join or start a group of volunteers to work in Sturbridge, Massachusetts for Elizabeth Warren for US Senate.

If you live in Sturbridge and know of such a group or want to form such a group, send me an email at SturbridgeForWarren@ssgreenberg.name.

I have a few pieces of literature from the Warren campaign’s volunteer recruitment meeting in Worcester on Saturday, November 12, 2011.  We could start by my sharing this information.

Rolling Stone has published the very interesting article How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich.

In this 8 page article, I got stopped dead in my tracks over this item on page 2.  I felt compelled to post this immediately, before even finishing reading the article.

The paragraph below is just a bit of the setup to what follows.

Clinton repeatedly blocked Republican demands for further cuts. “He vetoed one tax cut after another,” says Robert McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. In 1999, in a triumph for fiscal sanity, Clinton rejected a massive $792 billion cut to inheritance and investment taxes. The mood during the veto ceremony in the Rose Garden was festive. A five-piece band played “Summertime,” and the living was easy. Unemployment stood at 4.2 percent, and stocks were booming. “Our hard-won prosperity gives us the chance to invest our surplus to meet the long-term challenges of America,” Clinton declared. The Republican tax cuts, he warned with eerie prescience, would return America to a period of “deficit upon deficit” that culminated in “the worst recession since the Great Depression.”

Here is the payoff:

Then came the election of George W. Bush, the first president of the Party of the Rich.

Within months of taking office, Bush delivered a tax break to the rich that trumps anything he accomplished through the actual tax code. “The most important thing the Bush administration did in the whole area of taxes,” says Johnston, “was to kill tax harmonization.”

“Tax harmonization” was economic jargon for a joint project by the world’s developed countries to shut down offshore tax havens in places like the Cayman Islands. At the time, such illicit havens were costing U.S. taxpayers $70 billion a year. For Republicans, going after big-time tax evaders should have been as American as apple pie. As Reagan once said of such cheats: “When they do not pay their taxes, someone else does – you and me.”

I have long been cognizant of the problem of the rich just shifting their wealth to tax havens if we were to raise the tax rates high enough to make it worth their while to do this kind of tax evasion.  I have always felt that the only solution to this problem was for the countries of the world to get together to harmonize their tax policies.  I was unaware that such an effort had been started, and that the Bush administration had put a stop to it.

It never ceases to amaze me of the many ways the Republicans have screwed us without our even imagining them.  It should be interesting to now go back to the article and read the remaining six and one half pages.

After reading the rest of the article, I can safely say that if the above excerpt from the article bothers you even slightly, then do not read the rest. Your head might explode.

That bald spot that covered about 90% of the top of my head before is now splattered all over the ceiling of my office.

The tax giveaways in the following table are only a small portion of the money that is being given away instead of being used to fund items this country needs.

Even the above table does not properly frame the task of the special committee. The committee is not charged with cutting the budget. It is charged with cutting the deficit. Cutting a budget implies cutting spending. Cutting a deficit could entail raising revenues more than raising spending (no spending cuts required at all.) So one phrasing implies spending cuts while the other phrasing could encompass spending increases.

The McClatchy Commentary: How money-handlers muzzled WikiLeaks starts off with the following:

A comment posted to London’s Guardian newspaper said it best: “Censorship, like everything else in the West, has been privatized.” The writer, somebody called “edensasp,” was referring to news that WikiLeaks — the online whistleblower that has been embarrassing governments and corporations worldwide by disclosing their secrets — was suspending operations.

Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union, Amazon and Bank of America cut off processing contributions to WikiLeaks.  Contrary to what the commentary may seem to  imply, I doubt very much that these companies took it upon themselves to take a concerted effort to close down WikiLeaks.  I would suspect that there was the hand of the U.S. government coordinating if not coercing these companies to take this action.

To me, this effort is very reminiscent  of the action the government took to shut down the anti-war news organizations just prior to World War I.  In that case they removed the second class mail privileges for the newspapers and magazines to distribute their product at an affordable rate.  Of course, what few remained  that were able to keep publishing found that their editors were put in jail for violating the newly minted and unconstitutional  anti-sedition laws.  No doubt, if Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, had found a way to continue, he would have ended up in jail.  Sweden was in the process of doing just that for allegations of sexual misdeeds.  Sweden may yet succeed.

We live in very dangerous times when the so-called progressive administration of Barack Obama sees no problem with illegally silencing the voices of dissent.  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.  And take to the streets in protest much like the Occupy Everywhere movement is doing.  If we don’t protect what our Bill of Rights “guarantees” us, you can be sure no one else will.  There is no guarantor of these rights but we the people.