I received this email from Senator Bernie Sanders. It talks so much sense about overturning the Citizens United Supreme Court Decision, Postal Reform, and Keeping Social Security Safe From Deficit Reduction, that I just had to post it here.
Talking Points Memo has an article, CHART: How Romney’s Tax Rate Stacks Up To Recent Presidential Candidates’, with an interesting comparison.
I maintain that this does not even paint the full picture of how much less the ultra-wealthy pay in taxes than the average middle-class person.
Instead of looking at income as these charts do, it would be interesting to look at how each person’s wealth changes from year to year. I don’t have figures, but I have some explanations that sound plausible to me.
Typically the very wealthy have their wealth tied up in investments. The value of these investments can go up substantially from year to year without causing any reportable income as far as the government is concerned. That increase in wealth that is not income is called unrealized capital gains. It may all be on paper, but the lifestyle of the wealthy is improved by these gains even if they are not realized right away.
The accountants among my readership will have to verify this, or you can believe Kiplinger’s article, Donate Appreciated Assets, but I believe that if a wealthy person gives away to charity some stock with unrealized capital gains, the wealthy person gets to deduct the full value of the stock. The difference in what the person paid for the stock and what the deduction is may be huge, but it has never been reported as income and it has never been taxed. The price the person paid for the stock plus the untaxed gain now becomes a tax deduction.
The wealthy person may have more cash in his or her bank account by giving money away. The extra cash comes from not paying taxes on reported income because of the charitable deduction. Pretty neat trick, huh?
Thus we have Romney paying at a rate of over 30% on the part of his income called ordinary income and 15% of his income from capital gains. Yet somehow the average of the over 30% rate and the 15% rate is less than 14%.
I have not gone into the pluses and minuses of taxing unrealized capital gains, so don’t leave with the impression that I am saying we ought to tax unrealized gains in the same way as we tax realized gains. However, you should go away with the idea that the inequity, as large as it appears in the above charts, is actually much larger than the appearance. Something needs to be done, but the details of that deserve a whole other blog post.
Well, what do you know? I have a couple of previous posts that may fit the bill.
Here is the ad by Presente Action.
Watch this hard-hitting television ad that reveals Rubios anti-Latino record…
The article Why All the Robo-Signing? Shedding Light on the Shadow Banking System by Ellen Brown finally provided me with the details about why the Robo-signing is such a big deal. I’ll try to give you a clue as to what is in the article with this teaser.
The robo-signing largely involved assignments of mortgage notes to mortgage servicers or trusts representing the investors who put up the loan money. Assignment was necessary to give the trusts legal title to the loans. But assignment was delayed until it was necessary to foreclose on the homes, when it had to be done through the forgery and fraud of robo-signing. Why had it been delayed? Why did the banks not assign the mortgages to the trusts when and as required by law?
This has nothing to do with signing documents without reading them as the lame stream press has reported. This has everything to do with forgery and back dating of documents to perpetrate a fraud that the lame stream media has not bothered to mention.
Having read Ellen Brown’s articles before, I have learned that she has a thing against fractional reserve banking. I fully expected her to go completely off the rails in this article in her usual way. I was pleasantly surprised to see that she relegated her prejudice to one small paragraph that can be easily ignored. It does not affect the veracity of the rest of the article.
This is just the latest minor part of The Boston Globe‘s attacks on Tim Murray, the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts.
The Boston Globe obviously has taken a dislike to Tim Murray. Why don’t they just come right out and explain why?
Wasserman may think it is cute to talk about Murray’s troubles while not making any mention of The Boston Globe‘s concerted effort to bring about his downfall, but I, for one, would like to know what is really going on here. What is the ulterior motive?
I have heard a rumor that Steve Grossman, our state treasurer, wants to run for Governor and is trying to torpedo Murray’s career. I have this from a not highly reliable source.
Nation of Change has this surprising editorial, A Crisis in Two Narratives. I wouldn’t be surprised if this weren’t a new attempt at the far Right, upper 1% to come up with yet another alternative to Keynesian economic prescriptions for what ails the world economy.
You might be entertained by reading the article. If you don’t immediately see the flaws in this silly argument, let me add my take on what is said in this article. The quoted sections come from the article.
This has got to be one of the most misguided analyses I have read in ages. I am surprised to see it in Nation of Change.
“But, as Tyler Cowen has argued in his book The Great Stagnation, once these “low-hanging fruit” were plucked, it became much harder to propel growth from the 1970’s onward.”
If, indeed, it became difficult in the 1970s, more likely the problem was the onslaught of wealth transfer from the bottom to the top.
“If this diagnosis is correct, advanced countries need to focus on reviving innovation and productivity growth over the medium term,”
If the diagnosis is correct, how is it possible that making companies able to produce more with less labor (productivity growth) going to put people back to work and increase demand?
The solution is much simpler and far more obvious. Start shifting the wealth back from the wealthy who have been taking it away from the middle class since the 1980s and put it back in the hands of the middle class so that they can put the demand back in the economy.
Reregulate the banks so that we can shift the focus of our economic growth away from money manipulation which destroys jobs, and toward making useful things that require workers. We need to stop the anti-union forces so that those workers share the benefits of productivity gains that they help make possible.
Finally, the government should rebuild infrastructure now while there is slack in the economy and it will be cheapest to do. We are running trillions of dollars of deficit on the infrastructure rebuilding that is necessary to do in any case, and now couldn’t be a better time to do it.
The Nation Of Change has the article, How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the ‘1 Percent’.
While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.
Didn’t the U.S. have a major power shift in the 1930s? How come the Swedes and Norwegians have managed to keep their shift longer than we did?
I don’t think the following articles are the answer, but they do show how far we have to go.
From Truth Out we have, Wall Street: The Candidate’s Friend.
President Obama may talk a good populist game and even kick some corporate butt when he goes on the attack against Wall Street “fat cats.” Yet he still enjoys the company of bankers — see our “On Democracy” essay on the subject — and for all their grumbling about his policies, the investment community is coming up with significant cash for his re-election; the kind of change they believe in.
The article from Truth Out points to the article from the Sunlight Foundation, Political Contributions from Financial Sector Increased 700% Since 1990.
A new analysis prepared by the Sunlight Foundation shows that wealthy financial sector donors gave $178.2 million in political contributions in 2010, more than ten times what they gave 20 years ago. More than any other industry, individuals from the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector, particularly those in securities and investments, are the key drivers of the overall growth of elite donors, or what Sunlight calls The Political One Percent of the One Percent.
I thought the above is a better title than The Herald News of Fall River, MA used, Senate candidate with Salem ties plans her election year.
I found the following quote in the article about Marisa DeFranco who is running against Elizabeth Warren for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator from Massachusetts.
DeFranco also took issue with some of the tough talk Warren had delivered about her stance toward Iran.
“I have clients, through my law practice, in Iran,” DeFranco said. “I have an on-the-ground perspective on what’s happening there. When Elizabeth Warren says that ‘nothing is off the table’ when it comes to dealing with Iran, to be blunt I think that’s reckless and ignorant. Saber rattling does nothing to help the situation there. Any action we took would have civilian casualties, and we couldn’t have a limited engagement because of Iran’s ties with Russia and China. There has to be a better way to deal with countries with whom we have serious problems in the 21st century.”
I may be one of the few other people in Massachusetts that finds her statements about Iran to be more sensible than those of Elizabeth Warren (or Scott Brown for that matter). It may not win her votes in Massachusetts. However, I don’t want a tough talking Senator who will help get us into a war with Iran to satisfy the oil companies’ need to control Iranian oil. I want a Senator that can calmly assess the situation and deal diplomatically with Iran.
The current administration of our country had to bribe the head of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to reinterpret the agency’s data to make the case that Iran’s nuclear program is a threat.
Even our own CIA knows that there is no current or imminent threat of nuclear weapons in Iran. Yet, knowing this, President Obama keeps rattling sabers and pressing for sanctions against Iran. I am waiting for Obama to quote the immortal words of Condoleezza Rice, “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
If you use the search box above to search this blog on the topic of Iran, here are a few of the items you will find.
Reader RichardH suggested the article, Bill Moyers: Fighting Back Against Corporate Personhood, to me. I’ll give you just a little teaser to encourage you to read the whole thing.
Citizens United is but the latest battle in the class war waged for thirty years from the top down by the corporate and political right. Instead of creating a fair and level playing field for all, government would become the agent of the powerful and privileged. Public institutions, laws, and regulations, as well as the ideas, norms, and beliefs that aimed to protect the common good and helped create America’s iconic middle class, would become increasingly vulnerable. The Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow succinctly summed up results: “The redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful.” In the wake of Citizens United, popular resistance is all that can prevent the richest economic interests in the country from buying the democratic process lock, stock, and barrel.
Each time I read another version of history, this time supplied by Bill Moyers, I learn some more nuance of our political past.
Moyer explains the antipathy of Jefferson, Madison, and Andrew Johnson to the bankers and industrialists of their time. From High School history, I learned that these founding ancestors were perfect people that we must revere. From the book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen, I learned that certainly Jefferson and Madison had some base, self-interested motives for their antipathy to northern industrialists. From Moyers, I learn that though Jefferson and Madison may have been paranoid conspiracy theorists (from the Lies book), there were some sensible principles behind their objections to some of the rules put in place at the formation of the central banking system. Nuance, nuance, nuance.
I am glad to see some of our country’s thought leaders coming to realize that street protest is going to be an essential part of getting our government back. Read the rest of the above article.
I found this version of the Associated Press article, Obama ‘putting colleges on notice’ on high tuition, to demonstrate to you what I heard on the CBS Evening News.
The article starts off with a summary of what the President said.
President Barack Obama fired a warning at the nation’s colleges and universities on Friday, threatening to strip their federal aid if they “jack up tuition” every year and to give the money instead to schools showing restraint and value.
In the article I found a rebuttal that I did not hear on the CBS Evening news. This agrees with my immediate thoughts when I heard the President’s words.
University of Washington President Mike Young said Obama showed he did not understand how the budgets of public universities work. Young said the total cost to educate college students in Washington state, which is paid for by both tuition and state government dollars, has actually gone down because of efficiencies on campus. While universities are tightening costs, the state is cutting their subsidies and authorizing tuition increases to make up for the loss.
“They really should know better,” Young said. “This really is political theater of the worst sort.”
The last thing we need is for President Obama to be out selling the Republican propaganda that it is elitist college administrators jacking up the price of a college education. In fact, Obama should be selling the idea that the efforts to reduce the deficit in the middle of a recession is cutting the funding for colleges and universities. It is this behavior promoted by Republicans that is putting the onus on the students to pay the rising tuition costs.
Where other countries in the world, including some of the developing countries that are eating our lunch in the competition for manufacturing jobs, are paying most if not all the costs for higher education, the United States is cutting government support for higher education.
It is unconscionable for the President to be selling the regressive idea that the government’s cutting support for higher education is a wise policy to save the government some money. This is an idiotic policy to turn The United States into a third world country.