Steve's Politics Blog

The UK Daily Mail has the story Presidential candidate Mitt Romney owns offshore company which means he could be even RICHER than the estimated $250million.

The use of offshore companies such as Sankaty is allowed under U.S. tax laws. They are typically set up as shell corporations by private equity and hedge funds to route investments from large foreign and institutional investors, such as large pension plans, into corporate takeovers.

The money is used to provide equity and buy up debt. In turn, the investors gain U.S. tax advantages by passing their funds through the offshore ‘blocker’ corporations, avoiding a high 35 per cent tax on earnings that the Internal Revenue Service describes as ‘unrelated business income.’

This story has details of tax dodges that most of us could never even imagine.  If Romney and his ilk were not so adept at using their financial clout in Congress to mold the tax laws to their liking, they would not be nearly as rich.  It is easy to win a game by following the rules scrupulously, when you, yourself, make up the rules to follow.

If members of Congress cannot be convicted of accepting bribes for enacting this tax treatment, then perhaps they could at least be convicted of conflict of interest.  Who do you suppose is going to bring these charges and prosecute the cases?

In the article America the greatest?, Leonard Pitts, Jr. sums it up perfectly:

True greatness, after all, is not declared. It is achieved.

This is part 1 of a three part series on The Real News – Ed Herman on Global Finance.

The three parts of the interview are titled:
Ed Herman, Co-Author of “Manufacturing Consent” Pt 1
Ed Herman on “Humanitarian Imperialism”
Ed Herman on Global Finance

I’ll include the first video below to whet your appetite, but it isn’t even the most controversial part of the series.

I don’t find it too hard to accept what Herman says in parts 1 and 3, but part 2 is the most challenging for me. My mind just does not want to believe that aggression in defense of humanitarian causes can never be justified. It is easy to accept the premise that aggression in defense of humanitarian causes is a concept that can and is abused. It is going to take me a while to digest part 2.

Anything that is that challenging is probably worth the time to consider. At least it is when presented by a person who attempts to discuss it rationally. I don’t think you will ever convince me that it isn’t a waste of time to listen to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, for instance.

I find the following ad to be more effective than the one in my previous post What a president believes matters. What do you think?

I found the current ad and some supporting data in the link,

Learn More: http://OFA.BO/Vu7cxb, that came from the previous post.

What do you think of this political ad from President Obama?

Learn More: http://OFA.BO/Vu7cxb

What a president believes matters.

Mitt Romney’s companies were pioneers in outsourcing US jobs to low-wage countries. He supports tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.

President Obama believes in in-sourcing.

He fought to save the US auto industry, and favors tax cuts for companies that bring jobs home.

Outsourcing versus in-sourcing. It matters.

Truth Out is carrying Robert Reich’s piece Justice Roberts’ Switch. There may be some interesting points made in the article.  However, just because I like Robert Reich and agree with him on most points doesn’t mean I can’t recognize when he uses a silly argument.

Roberts nonetheless upheld the law because, he reasoned, the penalty to be collected by the government for non-compliance with the law is the equivalent of a tax – and the federal government has the power to tax. By this bizarre logic, the federal government can pass all sorts of unconstitutional laws – requiring people to sell themselves into slavery, for example – as long as the penalty for failing to do so is considered to be a tax.

Robert Reich is guilty of the same syllogistic logic the court usually uses. If a bill to sell yourself into slavery were enforced by a tax, it would be similar in this aspect to the current decision about the mandate which is enforced by a tax.  Just because it is similar in this one aspect of judging its constitutionality, logic doesn’t permit you to draw the conclusion that it must be similar in every other aspect of judging its constitutionality. So you couldn’t rule the slavery bill unconstitutional on the tax argument, but you could rule it was unconstitutional for many other reasons.

Just like you can find some aspects in which a corporation is like a person, that does not mean that you can conclude that a corporation is like a person in every other imaginable aspect. Each aspect has to be judged on its own as to whether or not a corporation is like a person. The path of logic is that you judge an aspect on its merits and then you put it into the like or the not like category. You don’t just start a like category, use logic to find something to put in that category, and then based on this one item automatically put everything you can imagine into the same category without examining each item on its own merits.

If someone told you that corporations were formed by the sexual mating of a male corporation and a female corporation, would you accept this despite your own reasoning just because you do believe that corporations are like people in some ways?

Maybe Plato was assuming that people would get his irony when he described the absurd results of applying Socrates’ syllogisms as described in The Republic. From my experience in college, even professors think that Plato was describing a good logical argument used by Socrates.

In fact “reductio ad absurdum” is a Latin term meaning to reduce a logical argument to an absurd result in order to prove the logic is faulty.  Which doesn’t mean that “reductio ad absurdum” proofs cannot be absurd themselves.

To be “fair”, I am including this weeks Republican address to the nation.

I only watched the first minute or two before I was overwhelmed by the duplicity of this address.

Nobody says that the Supreme Court decision is a seal of approval of Obamacare. The decision merely says that the law is constitutional. It passes no judgment on whether it is good or bad.

The tax that the Republicans are talking about only applies to people who could afford to have health insurance, but refuse to do so. Of the people making less than $250,000 a year to whom the President says this does not raise their taxes, how many fall into the above category? If there are any, we could just call this a stupidity tax. If you are making less than $250,000 a year and can afford to buy health insurance, you would be pretty stupid not to do so, unless you had liquid assets large enough to cover unexpected medical bills that could be in the millions of dollars.

Here is an unusual weekly address from President Obama. The usual ones are forma set-pieces from the White house.

Of course the press will always turn this into a contest as in the article Obama focuses on Colorado wildfires.

President Barack Obama won a major victory this week when the Supreme Court upheld his health care law, but it was Republicans – and Republicans alone — who were eager to discuss the decision during Saturday’s dueling radio addresses.

Yes, I do get the irony that I have done the same think by adding the link to and quote from the article. Actually, I suppose it is a good thing, for a change, that the article can merely point out the difference without trying to find that in some way the reaction of the two sides of the Supreme Court issue are morally equivalent.

JaneS sent this to me in email.  I just had to post it.

I expect Mitt Romney and Scott Brown to tell us the sky is falling.

The Los Angeles Times and CBS News have the simplest and most concise telling of the story that I have found so far, Supreme Court upholds healthcare law as tax measure.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of President Obama’s healthcare law Thursday, ruling the government may impose tax penalties on persons who do not have health insurance.

If you want to get ahead of CBS News, see how fast you can read the 193 page decision.

You don’t suppose any of the media will cover the story of how they all read “the body language” of the Supreme Court Justices to mis-predict the outcome?

So the Supreme Court isn’t completely hopeless after all. Despite the poor presentation of the Obama administration, the court did manage to find its own reasons why this law is Constitutional. (I have to walk that last statement back. Upon reading some of the 193 page decision, I see that the tax angle was part of the Government’s case.)

On page 15 of the decision, I found:

The Government advances two theories for the proposition that Congress had constitutional authority to enact the individual mandate. First, the Government argues that Congress had the power to enact the mandate under the Commerce Clause. Under that theory, Congress may order individuals to buy health insurance because the failure to do so affects interstate commerce, and could undercut the Affordable Care Act’s other reforms. Second, the Government argues that if the commerce power does not support the mandate, we should nonetheless uphold it as an exercise of Congress’s power to tax. According to the Government, even if Congress lacks the power to direct individuals to buy insurance, the only effect of the individual mandate is to raise taxes on those who do not do so, and thus the law may be upheld as a tax.