None of the 2012 Republican Presidential Candidates Are Serious About Deficit Reduction or Stopping Redistribution of Wealth to the Wealthy

None of the 2012 Republican Presidential Candidates Are Serious About Deficit Reduction or Stopping Redistribution of Wealth to the Wealthy

The 2012 Republican candidates are largely in lockstep when it comes to economic policy, wanting to give huge tax cuts to the rich and corporations while doing next to nothing to boost consumer demand or help the middle class and the unemployed who have been battered by the Great Recession. In fact, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, the average tax cuts received by the richest 1 percent of Americans under the Republican plans would be 270 times as large as the cut received by the middle class:

    The share of tax cuts going to the richest one percent of Americans under these plans would range from over a third to almost half. The average tax cuts received by the richest one percent would be up to 270 times as large as the average tax cut received by middle-income Americans.

Perry wins the award with a tax cut for the richest 1 percent that is 270 times larger than his middle class tax cut, while Gingrich’s is 190 times larger. Santorum and Romney pull up the rear with tax cuts for the rich that are 100 times larger than the cuts for the middle class, while CTJ did not analyze Jon Huntsman or Ron Paul’s plans. (CTJ uses a current law baseline, rather than a current policy baseline, to calculate its cuts. Using a current policy baseline, millions of middle class families would see a tax increase under Romney’s plan.)

CTJ also noted that “the cost of the tax plans proposed by Republican presidential candidates would range from $6.6 trillion to $18 trillion over a decade.” Therefore, “even the meager tax cuts that would go to low-income and middle-income taxpayers under these plans would almost surely be offset by the huge cuts in public services that would become necessary as a result.”

The conservative field of candidates are classic example of robbing Peter to pay Paul, or putting a little more money in one pocket of the middle-class and taking it out of the other. One of the results of progressive taxation is that a little bit of the extraordinary wealth accumulated at the top goes back to help pay for bridges, roads, medical research, firefighting equipment, public universities and so forth. All of those things and more will suffer even more budget cuts. For what? So multimillionaires and billionaires can hoard even more unearned income than they already have.

Six Myths Explained About Taxing The Wealthy

Six Myths Explained About Taxing The Wealthy

On Saturday, the Obama administration unveiled the "Buffett Rule [1]," a proposed tax on millionaires and billionaires named after celebrity investor Warren Buffett, who has long argued that the federal government should demand more of the wealthy. The millionaires tax is certain to become a major point of contention in the 2012 presidential campaign, and Republicans have wasted no time in heaping it with calumnies. Here are the six most popular conservative arguments against a progressive tax code, and why they're wrong:

It's class warfare! [2]
Yeah right. Three decades of laissez-faire economic polices have allowed the rich to double their share of the national income while paying tax rates a fifth lower than before. The result, notes Kevin Drum [3], was "wage stagnation for everyone else, a massive financial collapse that ravaged the middle class, an enormous deficits that they'll be asked to pay off eventually." If the millionaires tax is the only blowback, the wealthy should count their blessings.

It's a tax on small business [4]
"Don't forget that most small businesses file taxes as individuals," House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said on Fox News Sunday. "So when you are raising top tax rates, you are raising taxes on these job creators." Except when you aren't. ThinkProgress's Pat Garofalo points out [5] that fewer than 2 percent of the nation's small businesses fall into either of the top two tax brackets. Plus, many of the small business filers in the upper brackets are merely investors who have nothing to do with running the business. And if small businesses don't want to pay taxes as individuals, they can file as corporations.

It reduces incentives to work and invest [6]
Experience shows otherwise. As Nancy Folbre points out [7] over at Economix, "average annual rates of growth in gross domestic product in the high tax era between 1950 and 1980 exceeded those of the last 30 years. Increases in the top tax rate under President Bill Clinton were followed by robust economic expansion."

It's an unstable source of revenue [8]
A recent essay [8] in the Wall Street Journal argued that the high volatility of upper-level income makes it impractical to rely on taxing it. But this concern is vastly overblown [9] and can be easily dealt with by establishing rainy day funds.

It's unfair [10]
In the libertarian view, the rich are entitled to their gains because they worked for them. But this ignores how structural changes in the economy such as globalization, financial deregulation, and the rise of the knowledge-based economy have disproportionately rewarded the wealthy [11]. At the same time, we've failed to reinvest in government programs that once leveled the playing field, such as financing for community colleges and public universities [12].

The rich will leave the country [13]
Good riddance, writes [14] Don Peck in a recent Atlantic essay on how to save the middle class: "America remains a magnet for talent, for reasons that go beyond the tax code; and by international standards, none of the tax changes recommended here would create an excessive tax burden on high earners. If a few financiers choose to decamp for some small island-state in search of the smallest possible tax bill, we should wish them good luck."
Source URL: http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/6-dumb-arguments-against-taxing-rich-explained

Links:
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/us/politics/obama-tax-plan-would-ask-more-of-millionaires.html?pagewanted=2
[2] http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/obamas-millionaires-tax/
[3] http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/paul-ryan-insults-our-intelligence-yet-again
[4] http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/fox-news-sunday/2011/09/18/rep-paul-ryan-rips-obamas-jobs-plan-herman-cain-defends-his-999-tax-proposal
[5] http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/19/322193/small-business-taxes-lies/
[6] http://spectator.org/blog/2011/09/18/thoughts-on-obamas-buffett-rul
[7] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/11/taxing-the-rich/
[8] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704604704576220491592684626.html
[9] http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/wsj-story-exaggerates-price-taxing-rich-cherry-picks-data
[10] http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/30/taxing-the-rich
[11] http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-labor-union-decline
[12] http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/why-expanding-colleges-wont-fix-income-inequality
[13] http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?193824-Maryland-Tax-Raise-Backfires-When-Millionaires-Flee
[14] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/can-the-middle-class-be-saved/8600/?single_page=true

Perhaps the biggest myth surrounding the wealthiest 10% of U.S. citizens is that they are the "producers". Most of us have little problem with a business owner taking large compensation if earnings are high. Yet those owners and everyone else needs to keep one fundamental fact in mind - all capital starts with and is perpetrated by some doing some labor - in modern times that means making a product or providing a service. Take away labor and those so-called producers are just people with day dreams. The wealthy and conservatives especially have gotten very arrogant about how valuable they are. They'll be shocked to find that if they packed and moved to some no tax island tomorrow not only will America survive, we'll be better off without them.

The Millionaires Who Act Like Scrooge and Those Who Act Like Patriots

The Millionaires Who Act Like Scrooge and Those Who Act Like Patriots

It's holiday season, and mean-spirited misers abound. GOP legislators have Dickensian plans for the 99 percent, aiming at shredding our social safety nets, undermining our healthcare, and making us pay for the financial crisis created by reckless financiers. Naturally, they decry even a modest income tax surcharge on millionaires, channeling Scrooge-worthy logic to justify their worship of Big Money at the expense of everyone else.

Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase honcho Jamie Dimon, the highest paid executive among the six biggest and most dangerous banks, whines that he doesn't deserve our ire: "Acting like everyone who's been successful is bad and because you're rich you're bad, I don't understand it," said Dimon, whose 2010 take totaled $23 million.

Let us help you understand it. We don't hate you because you're rich, Mr. Dimon. Americans actually tend to admire people who make lots of money and, say, contribute useful things to society and promote the public good. Witness the recent outpouring of love for Steve Jobs. No, we itch for our pitchforks because you are greedy. You want to horde everything at the top and you refuse to acknowledge that you have any responsibility toward your fellow Americans. In fact, the way you make your money makes you look like a public menace. You dealt in risky derivatives and mortgage schemes that helped tank the global economy. You defrauded your investors. Your bank has even had the gall to foreclose on military families. Back in October, thousands of us stood outside your swank apartment on Park Avenue holding signs and telling you in plain English why your statements that bank regulations are "un-American" and such are both stupid and harmful. But apparently the message didn't get through. I guess we'll have to keep coming back until you do get it.

There are plenty of 1 percenters who support Dimon's view of the world, in which crushing ordinary people in the name of greed is something to be applauded.

But not all. And, like Warren Buffett, whose op-ed "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich" sent shockwaves through the country back in August, they are becoming more and more vocal. Philadelphia lawyer and philanthropist Dan Berger, a member of the Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, has been hitting the airwaves and writing for months explaining why current tax policy unfairly favors the rich -- and why that's dangerous for everyone. Berger is concerned about the social pathologies and dysfunction created by the concentration of wealth at the top, and worries that we have unlearned the lessons of the Great Depression -- the last time such concentration devastated the country. "We are in a golden age of the cult of wealth," he warns. "Economic, social, and political life by, of, and for the one percent is an old story in the history of world civilization--one which inevitably ends badly."

Over the last decade, incomes for the richest 1 percent of Americans grew faster than that of any other group. CEO pay has soared 300 percent since 1990, while that of the average worker has risen a paltry 4 percent. If 1 percenters can't be convinced that such disparities are morally wrong, Berger suggests they conjure up some "enlightened self interest" in order to grasp what might happen if society becomes further unbalanced. He sees the Occupy Wall Street movement as the mere "tip of the iceberg."

Billionaire hedge fund manager Jim Chanos has also gone public expressing his support for Occupy Wall Street and his objection to tax policies weighted toward the 1 percent: "I have a problem with private capital asking for lower tax rates on certain forms of income that I believe are income, not returns on capital, than say teachers, soldiers, fireman and policeman.” Chanos explained to AlterNet why 1 percenters who can't see why Americans are angry are seriously out of touch: "They say we live in an 'aspirational society,' but many of those in the 1 percent accuse the Occupy Wall Street movement of class warfare and bemoan the fact that the president dubs them millionaires and billionaires. Well, I'm pretty sure most of the 99 percent would still aspire to be called the same thing!"

The aspirational dreams encoded in our American DNA have been increasingly crushed by policies and practices that channel money toward the top and leave students saddled with debt, workers struggling to support their families and elderly people unable to live in dignity.

We do live in a society that redistributes wealth. Every worker in America makes their contribution towards producing the GDP or Gross National Product. At the end of the day the pie (GDP) is divided up. The top one percent get most of the pie and the crumbs trickle down to everyone else. Conservative Republicans want you to believe that the top deserves it because they produce most of the work. Yep, hard to believe anyone would believe that mountain of BS, but many Americans do, just listen to Anti-American Fox News. They will be glad to tell you that supply-side trickle down economics is good and raising taxes just a little on the top is pure communism.

How Private Banks Caused the Economic Crisis

The CDO Daisy Chain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The CDO Daisy Chain (Guide to graphic above)

Here's how the Wall Street Money Machine worked in the run-up to the financial collapse: Banks created CDOs from mortgage-backed securities. Banks often retained the large top portion, called the "Super Senior." The bottom portion, or "Equity," was often sold off to hedge funds. The middle portion, or "Mezzanine," often went into new CDOs. The main buyers of those new CDOs were once again the banks.


How Private Banks Caused the Economic Crisis

A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks -- primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others -- bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged.

The products they were buying and selling were at the heart of the 2008 meltdown -- collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.

As the housing boom began to slow in mid-2006, investors became skittish about the riskier parts of those investments. So the banks created -- and ultimately provided most of the money for -- new CDOs. Those new CDOs bought the hard-to-sell pieces of the original CDOs. The result was a daisy chain that solved one problem but created another: Each new CDO had its own risky pieces. Banks created yet other CDOs to buy those.

Individual instances of these questionable trades have been reported before, but ProPublica's investigation, done in partnership with NPR's Planet Money, shows that by late 2006 they became a common industry practice.

An analysis by research firm Thetica Systems, commissioned by ProPublica, shows that in the last years of the boom, CDOs had become the dominant purchaser of key, risky parts of other CDOs, largely replacing real investors like pension funds. By 2007, 67 percent of those slices were bought by other CDOs, up from 36 percent just three years earlier. The banks often orchestrated these purchases. In the last two years of the boom, nearly half of all CDOs sponsored by market leader Merrill Lynch bought significant portions of other Merrill CDOs.

ProPublica also found 85 instances during 2006 and 2007 in which two CDOs bought pieces of each other. These trades, which involved $107 billion worth of CDOs, underscore the extent to which the market lacked real buyers. Often the CDOs that swapped purchases closed within days of each other, the analysis shows.

There were supposed to be protections against this sort of abuse. While banks provided the blueprint for the CDOs and marketed them, they typically selected independent managers who chose the specific bonds to go inside them. The managers had a legal obligation to do what was best for the CDO. They were paid by the CDO, not the bank, and were supposed to serve as a bulwark against self-dealing by the banks, which had the fullest understanding of the complex and lightly regulated mortgage bonds.

It rarely worked out that way. The managers were beholden to the banks that sent them the business. On a billion-dollar deal, managers could earn a million dollars in fees, with little risk. Some small firms did several billion dollars of CDOs in a matter of months.

"All these banks for years were spawning trading partners," says a former executive from Financial Guaranty Insurance Company, a major insurer of the CDO market. "You don't have a trading partner? Create one."
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The executive, like most of the dozens of people ProPublica spoke with about the inner workings of the market at the time, asked not to be named out of fear of being sucked into ongoing investigations or because they are involved in civil litigation.

Keeping the assembly line going had a wealth of short-term advantages for the banks. Fees rolled in. A typical CDO could net the bank that created it between $5 million and $10 million -- about half of which usually ended up as employee bonuses. Indeed, Wall Street awarded record bonuses in 2006, a hefty chunk of which came from the CDO business.

The self-dealing super-charged the market for CDOs, enticing some less-savvy investors to try their luck. Crucially, such deals maintained the value of mortgage bonds at a time when the lack of buyers should have driven their prices down.

But the strategy of speeding up the assembly line had devastating consequences for homeowners, the banks themselves and, ultimately, the global economy. Because of Wall Street's machinations, more mortgages had been granted to ever-shakier borrowers. The results can now be seen in foreclosed houses across America.

The incestuous trading also made the CDOs more intertwined and thus fragile, accelerating their decline in value that began in the fall of 2007 and deepened over the next year. Most are now worth pennies on the dollar. Nearly half of the nearly trillion dollars in losses to the global banking system came from CDOs, losses ultimately absorbed by taxpayers and investors around the world. The banks' troubles sent the world's economies into a tailspin from which they have yet to recover.

The banks did what we usually see in sitcoms where the character uses one credit card to make payments on another and yet another credit yard to pay another and so forth. Similar to a Ponzi scheme. It is not in the interests of citizens who support and open and healthy capitalist free market system to try and shift blame for what these super big banks to the working poor. Such thinking and myth making only makes it more likely there will be another collapse. As a matter of fact since conservatives in Congress have fought to keep new financial reforms from actually being acted on, the banks are back to buying and selling CDOs.

Over The Last Forty Years America Has Often Followed The Path of Conservative Economic Policy - That Path Has Come Back to Haunt The Middle-Class

Over The Last Forty Years America Has Often Followed The Path of Conservative Economic Policy - That Path Has Come Back to Haunt The Middle-Class

A few weeks ago, as the Occupy Wall Street protests were first spreading, something amazing happened: For 10 whole seconds, the local reporter on my TV screen actually talked about the realities of the recession. He even uttered the phrase “economic inequality.”

My guess is that you’ve seen something similar on your local affiliate — and that’s no minor event. When even the most local of television journalists are compelled to acknowledge this crushing emergency in a country whose media aggressively promotes American dream agitprop, it means the Occupy protesters have scored a monumental victory. You can almost imagine a Wall Street CEO turning to an aide and muttering a slightly altered riff off LBJ: “If we’ve lost Ron Burgundy, we’ve lost Middle America.”

In response to this stunning turn of events, conservative politicians are retreating to non sequiturs. They seem to think that if they shout the phrase “class warfare” enough, the nation will go back to not caring about the divide between the rich and poor.

But something has changed.

For most of the post-World War II era, we tolerated relatively high inequality because we envisioned it as a necessary side effect of an exceptional economy that (supposedly) guaranteed opportunities for advancement. As the Wall Street Journal put it, we believed that “it is OK to have ever-greater differences between rich and poor … as long as (our) children have a good chance of grasping the brass ring.”

However, the last three decades have invalidated our standing hypothesis. After the conservatives’ successful assault on the New Deal, America has lived a different reality — one perfectly summarized by a new Federal Reserve study revealing that today’s increasing inequality accompanies comparatively low social mobility.

“U.S. family income mobility has decreased over the 1969-2006 time span, and especially since the 1980s,” notes the Fed paper, adding that “a family’s position at (the) end of (the) 2000s was … more correlated with its start position than was the case 20 years earlier.”

Of course, some class mobility still exists. The trouble is that it’s primarily of the downward kind. As the Pew Charitable Trusts reports, roughly a third of those who grew up in the middle class have now fallen below that station in adulthood.

This is why, for all the right-wing mythology about “Eurosocialism” snuffing out upward mobility, data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that social mobility in uber-capitalist America is actually lower than in most industrialized countries.

This is why almost three-quarters of respondents just told the Hill newspaper’s pollsters that income inequality is a problem.

This is why my local TV news is suddenly airing pieces on economic inequality between sports, weather and all the “you stay classy” small talk.

And this is why, among all the fights over economic policy, the debate about taxes is the most crucial of all.

As the Fed noted in a separate report, the federal tax code — which remains vaguely progressive — has been the one proven way to “mitigate income inequality.” But with congressional Republicans gradually flattening federal income tax rates and with already-regressive state tax rates in GOP bastions like Texas, Wyoming, Tennessee, South Dakota and Mississippi, the tax system has lately been preserving or exacerbating existing inequality.

David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now."

Conservatives have been hyper shrill lately. Claiming that a return of the tax rates of the prosperous Clinton years will be a return to Marxism or even the end of our civilization. You can't reason with people like that, people who have clearly gone off the deep end. They seemed to have taken the zealotry of some religious cults to and applied it to economics. They believe what they believe and they want no part of being rational adults.

Mitt Romney Used To Have a Heart Now He is Running as a Far Right Conservative - Romney Supported President Bush’s Government Program To Refinance Mortgages

Mitt Romney Used To Have a Heart Now He is Running Far Right Conservative - Romney Supported President Bush’s Government Program To Refinance Mortgages

This week, in an attempt to boost the economy without having to deal with Congress, the Obama administration announced an overhaul of its mortgage refinancing program known as HARP. The changes will allow more people to take advantage of low interest rates, freeing up more money for them to spend elsewhere.

As we noted yesterday, this idea is supported by 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s top economic adviser, Columbia University’s Glenn Hubbard. Hubbard called Obama’s refinancing plan “a big deal.” “It looks like a good plan; I’m glad they’re doing it,” he said. And as it turns out, Romney himself supported a refinancing plan when President Bush announced one in 2007.
In late August 2007, as the subprime mortgage crisis built up, Bush introduced an initiative overseen by the Federal Housing Authority to “help struggling homeowners find a way to refinance” and stem foreclosures. According to Bush, while it was “not the government’s job to bail out speculators,” there were a lot of homeowners “who could get through this difficult time with a little flexibility from their lenders or a little help from their government.”

A week later, during an interview with Hugh Hewitt, Romney professed no concerns about the program:

    Well, the President has taken action that should calm a good portion of the market, which is he said look, these people who borrowed money from the sub-prime world with these reset provisions, where the payments go up in later months, and they were told by their mortgage banker in many cases don’t worry about that, we’ll refinance it when that time comes, well, now the mortgage banker’s gone, they can’t refinance it. And so he’s saying, the President’s saying let’s have the FHA refinance these mortgages. It’s not a bailout, but it is a setting which gives people stability, and will calm the markets to a certain degree.

In an interview last week with the Las Vegas Review Journal, Mitt Romney opined that the Obama administration has no right to provide assistance to homeowners facing foreclosure, saying that the foreclosure process ought to “run its course and hit the bottom.

However, he did add, “I think the idea of helping people refinance homes to stay in them is one that’s worth further consideration.” So given his prior support for the idea, is Romney on board with the administration’s effort?

Romney keeps drifting back towards being moderate when far right-wing conservatives who control the Republican Party like a brain dead cult want absolute purity. They don't want to help people stay in their homes, but have no problem with too big to fail banks reaping near pre-recession profits. How is it that Wall Street gets government backing and homeowners - who are not responsible for losing $17 trillion of America's wealth get all the protection conservatives can provide.

Because The American Middle-class Deserves a Future, We Are All Occupiers Now - The Mainstreaming of OWS

Because The American Middle-class Deserves a Future, We Are All Occupiers Now - The Mainstreaming of OWS

Perhaps the most significant mainstream supporters, though, are the only two most Americans have heard of. “Despite the Times’s finger-wagging that the movement is often muddled and misinformed, none of that is the point. The point is justice,” writes self-help guru Deepak Chopra, who visited Zuccotti Park and led meditations to help protesters turn “anger into awareness.” Suze Orman, who has made millions telling feckless consumers how to pay down debt and live on a budget, sounds like she’s channeling Naomi Klein: “To deride the movement because it has yet to formulate a well-delineated platform says plenty more about the critics than the protestors,” she wrote in the Huffington Post. “Revolutions tend to be messy, especially in the early going. The unholy alliance of much of Congress, K Street and Wall Street that has set the agenda from day one of the financial crisis is simply trying to protect its turf by casting aspersions on the ad hoc nature of the movement to date. I suppose I shouldn’t expect anything less. After all, there’s no way they could stage a substantive rebuttal based on facts.”

 After the New Deal, essentially starting Reagan America embarked on that great experiment known as trickle down or voodoo economics. That didn't work out so well for a middle-class that had enjoyed annual growth under New Deal policies. Time to correct course, start rewarding work instead of wealth.

Alleged ‘Skills Gap’ Takes Spotlight Off Who’s to Blame for Massive Jobs Shortageby Roger Bybee

Perhaps far too much attention has been devoted to the government role in job creation and retention, when American CEOs need to demand more from their employees and from the U.S. educational system to solve the jobless problem over the long term, this narrative suggests.

But in reality, this whole “Education, Training, and Skills” narrative serves to divert attention from the massive shortage of jobs and Corporate America's misdeeds to “failing” teachers and supposedly under-educated workers. Corporate America has failed to produce virtually any net gain in U.S. jobs since 1999; the period was the only decade when U.S. employment grew by less than 20 percent.

In short, the Education, Training and Skills "frame” on our economic problems plays several useful functions for the CEOs and the rest of the richest 1 percent. It takes the spotlight off CEOs' decisions to wipe out decent-paying job opportunities. As Gordon Lafer writes in The Training Charade,

    Workers are encouraged not to blame corporate profits, the export of jobs aboard, or eroding wage standards—that is, anything that they can fight—but rather to look inward for the source of their misfortune and the seeds of their resurrection.

Everyone, especially conservative loons like Herman Cain, Rick Perry and the conservative bloggers want America to blame anyone except corporate America for unemployment.

What Liberal Media - Most of President Obama's Accomplishments Go Unreported

What Liberal Media - Most of President Obama's Accomplishments Go Unreported

The teeming crowds of supporters who had cheered candidate Barack Obama’s agenda for “change you can believe in” receded quickly. The 2008 presidential election energized Americans who had never participated in politics before, particularly the young and minorities, and it attracted the interest and hopes of many independents, people who are usually less engaged in the political process. Once elected, the young president held to his word and pursued transformations in American social policy — healthcare reform, new tax breaks, and enhanced aid to college students — that vast majorities of Americans had long told pollsters they favored. Despite the usual travails of the legislative process, exacerbated in 2009 and 2010 by greater political polarization in Congress than at any other point in the post–World War II period, within 15 months Obama had already achieved much of what he set out to do on these issues. Yet Americans generally seemed unimpressed and increasingly disillusioned. The problem was that most of what was accomplished could not be seen: It remained invisible to average citizens.

The public had no trouble noticing the jockeying of special interests that sought favored treatment in legislation — that was plain to see — but the majority of Americans remained unaware of the contents of the president’s signature achievements, and they lacked a basic understanding of how they and their families might be affected by them. The first major piece of legislation that Obama had signed into law, the stimulus bill of February 2009, included a vast array of tax cuts: They totaled $288 billion, 37 percent of the cost of the entire bill. Among them, the Making Work Pay Tax Credit, one of his campaign promises, reduced income taxes for 95 percent of all working Americans. Yet one year after the law went into effect, when pollsters queried the public about whether the Obama administration had raised or lowered taxes for most Americans, only 12 percent answered correctly that taxes had decreased; 53 percent mistakenly thought taxes had stayed the same; and 24 percent even believed they had increased!

Healthcare reform represented Obama’s chief policy goal, and he expended a vast amount of political capital in pursuing it over his first 15 months in office. But in April 2010, just weeks after he signed the healthcare bill that extended coverage to the vast majority of working-age Americans and prohibited insurance companies from denying coverage to people who are ill, 55 percent of the public reported that they would describe their feelings about it as “confused.”

That same legislative package also contained sweeping changes in student aid policy that aimed to help more people attend college and complete degrees. Yet when Americans were asked how much they had heard about these changes, only 26 percent reported “a lot,” while 40 percent said “a little,” and fully 34 percent said “nothing at all.”

All told, the public seemed largely oblivious to the president’s major policy accomplishments.

While many who had voted for Obama grew complacent, grassroots mobilization emerged from another quarter, the insurgent Tea Party movement. Wielding placards at protests on tax day, town hall meetings and other public events, its supporters decried what they termed “government takeovers” of healthcare and student loans. At a gathering in Simpsonville, S.C., in August 2009, one man told Republican Rep. Robert Inglis, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Inglis said later, “I had to politely explain that ‘Actually, sir, your healthcare is being provided by the government,’ but he wasn’t having any of it.”

While as of March 2010 only 13 percent of Americans reported that they considered themselves “part of the Tea Party movement,” nonetheless the frustration that it embodied resonated with growing numbers of Americans: 28 percent considered themselves supporters.

With the content of Obama’s legislative accomplishments appearing so opaque and incomprehensible even as the calls of opponents resonated loud and clear, most Americans registered reactions that were tepid at best, and many grew increasingly hostile. By the fall of 2010, 61 percent of likely voters told pollsters they favored a repeal of healthcare reform.

It was a sharp contrast to the warm reception given to sweeping social welfare laws achieved by earlier presidents. After Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act of 1935, 68 percent of the public voiced support for its “contributory old age insurance plan … which requires employers and workers to make equal contributions to workers’ pensions” — even though its benefits were not scheduled to begin for six years.

When Congress passed Lyndon Baines Johnson’s plan for Medicare in 1965, strong majorities repeatedly said they approved of it, as high as 82 percent in a December survey that year.

Until Obama’s presidency, perhaps never before had major laws that aimed to improve the lives of vast numbers of ordinary Americans gone so unrecognized and unappreciated by so many.

What explains the public’s reticence, frustration and confusion? Certainly its reactions owe partly to the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression, with more than two years of near 10 percent unemployment. Some of the lackluster response was inevitable, furthermore, given the sheer scope and complexity of the policy tasks Obama took on. And a share of the blame belongs to his administration’s own public relations efforts, which many observers considered underwhelming. Yet while each of these commonly cited factors undeniably played a role, they do not, by themselves, explain Americans’ blasé response to major social policy accomplishments that reflected broadly shared values. Historical comparisons make this evident. The public voiced its high approval for the Social Security Act of 1935, for example, when the nation was still mired in the Great Depression and when twice the proportion of Americans, 20 percent, remained jobless. That legislation was also multifaceted and complex, and it was even more novel for the United States than the 2010 healthcare package, marking the first major involvement of the U.S. federal government in social provision for people besides veterans and their relatives.

The main difference confronted by Obama emanated from the types of policies that he sought to reform, ones that generate particularly formidable obstacles. Any leader who seeks to transform “politics as usual” is bound to confront resistance — challenges emanating from the policies, practices and institutions already in place.

But the nature and difficulty of the task vary depending on the particular goals that reformers select and the historical context in which they pursue them. Roosevelt confronted a political landscape that presented its own challenges — not least, a Supreme Court that served as a major roadblock to his policy ambitions. His administration had to attempt to fashion policies that would circumvent the court’s reach and to build as much as possible on what already existed, such as social policies adopted by some states. But Obama’s policy agenda, in the current political context, requires him to engage in a struggle more akin to that undertaken by Progressive Era reformers, who had to destroy or reconstitute deeply entrenched relationships if they were to achieve change.

He could not follow the path of Roosevelt, finding a way around political obstacles or merely building on top of what existed; rather, he had to find ways to work through them, by either obliterating them or restructuring them.

This is because Obama, given his policy agenda, had steered directly into the looming precipice of the submerged state: existing policies that lay beneath the surface of U.S. market institutions and within the federal tax system. Contrary to opponents’ charges that his agenda involved the encroachment of the federal government into private matters, Obama was actually attempting to restructure a dense thicket of long-established public policies, but ones that are largely invisible to most Americans — and that are extremely resistant to change. Efforts to transform these policies, which have become entrenched fixtures of modern governance, generate a deeply conflictual politics that routinely alienates the public, hindering the chances of success or the sustainability of the reforms.

The “submerged state” includes a conglomeration of federal policies that function by providing incentives, subsidies or payments to private organizations or households to encourage or reimburse them for conducting activities deemed to serve a public purpose. Over the past 30 years, American political discourse has been dominated by a conservative public philosophy, one that espouses the virtues of small government. Its values have been pursued in part through efforts to scale back traditional forms of social provision, meaning visible benefits administered fairly directly by government. In the case of some programs geared to the young or to working-age people, the value of average benefits has withered and coverage has grown more restrictive.

Ironically, however, the more dramatic change over this period has been the flourishing of the policies of the submerged state, which operate through indirect means such as tax breaks to households or payments to private actors who provide services. Since 1980 these policies have proliferated in number, and the average size of their benefits has expanded dramatically.

Most of these ascendant policies function in a way that directly contradicts Americans’ expectations of social welfare policies: They shower their largest benefits on the most affluent Americans. Take the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction (HMID), for example, which is currently the nation’s most expensive social tax break aside from the tax-free status of employer-provided health coverage. Let us assume that a family buys a median-value home and to finance it borrows $230,000 at an interest rate of 6.25 percent for 30 years. The richer the household, the larger the benefit: In the first year, the average family, with an income between $16,751 and $68,000, would owe around $3,619 less in taxes; those in the next income group, with earnings up to $137,300, would reap an extra $5,146; and so forth, on up to the wealthiest 2 percent of families, with incomes over $373,650, who would enjoy a savings of $6,673. Of course, in reality, these differences are likely to be much greater. Low- to moderate-income Americans usually do not have enough deductions to itemize, so they would forgo this benefit and receive instead only the standard deduction. Meanwhile, the most affluent are likely to purchase far more expensive homes; if a family in the top income category opts for a more upscale home and borrows $500,000 for a mortgage, it will reap a benefit of $14,506 from the HMID; if this family purchases a truly exclusive property and borrows $1 million for a mortgage, it will qualify to keep a whopping $29,012!

This pattern of upward redistribution is repeated in numerous other policies of the submerged state: Federal largesse is allocated disproportionately to the nation’s most well-off households. Such policies consume a sizable portion of revenues and leave scarce resources available for programs that genuinely aid low- and middle-income Americans.

Yet despite their growing size, scope and tendency to channel government benefits toward the wealthy, the policies of the submerged state remain largely invisible to ordinary Americans: Indeed, their hallmark is the way they obscure government’s role from the view of the general public, including those who number among their beneficiaries. Even when people stare directly at these policies, many perceive only a freely functioning market system at work. They understand neither what is at stake in reform efforts nor the significance of their success. As a result, the charge leveled by opponents of reforms — that they amount to “government takeovers” — though blatantly inaccurate, makes many Americans at least uncomfortable with policy changes, if not openly hostile toward them.  ***Rest of the article continues at the link.

What with internet access to many government sites and public policy think tanks if the public, especially right-wing conservatives uses the internet at all it is go to sites whose bias is evident in the serial lies that tell about Obama and Democrats. Some minds are simply closed to the truth and new ideas. The example above of the tea nut who wanted government to keep their hands off his Medicare is a good example - Medicare is a government health insurance program, what conservatives derisively call an entitlement program. It is an entitlement because individuals pay for it through their payroll taxes. It is not a government giveaway. It is not giving anyone a free ride.

The Latest Desperate Smear Of Occupy Wall Street Protests: The Nazis Like Them

The American Nazi Party put out a statement on Thursday that was supportive of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Rocky Suhayda, the party's chairman, said, "My heart is right there with these people."

The right-wing blogosphere saw an opportunity to associate the protests with Nazis, and the pile-on began. The Blaze quoted the statement, as did Fox Nation and Gateway Pundit blogger Jim Hoft.

On the Monday edition of Fox News' flagship "straight news" program Special Report, anchor Bret Baier also treated this endorsement as if it were significant:

Interesting fact about Suhayda: During the 2008 presidential campaign, he declared his preference for Barack Obama over John McCain.

In a June 2008 piece, Esquire magazine interviewed Suhayda along with three other white supremacists -- and three of the four preferred Obama. Esquire also interviewed a black nationalist who chose McCain.

Similarly, an Al Qaeda affiliate expressed its hope that George W. Bush would win re-election in 2004, and an Al Qaeda website offered its support for McCain in 2008.

So, does this mean that Obama is just like the Nazis, or that Bush shares Al Qaeda's goals, or that McCain is a black nationalist?

Of course not. These are all ridiculous associations to make. Fringe groups make provocative comments like this all the time, often in the interest of attracting publicity.

The right-wing media's promotion of Suhayda's statement reveals an agenda that is dead-set on delegitimizing the message of the protests, to the extent that they're willing to employ comically flimsy logic in an attempt to do so.

Reminder: If a Nazi says something nice about you, that doesn't make you a Nazi.

Republican Agenda Watch - States Making Deep Cuts Are Delaying Economic Recovery

New Fiscal Year Brings Further Budget Cuts to Most States, Slowing Economic Recovery

States have enacted deep cuts in education, health care, and other important public services in their budgets for fiscal year 2012 (which begins July 1 in most states). It is the fourth year in a row of budget-cutting for states, and the 2012 cuts are deeper than in past years. Of the 32 states that have enacted budgets, as least 24 are imposing significant cuts. These cuts will delay the nation’s economic recovery and undermine efforts to create jobs.

These enacted budget cuts will cause hundreds of thousands of Arizona families to lose health insurance, force the shortening of the school year for 86,000 preschoolers in Georgia, sharply increase university tuition in North Carolina and Washington, and cost jobless disabled individuals in Michigan one-quarter of their cash assistance, among a range of other impacts.

These and other budget cuts for 2012 are resulting principally from the lingering effects of the long and deep recession, which are causing tax collections in most states to remain well below pre-recession levels (despite modest recent improvements) and to lag far behind the growing cost of maintaining existing services. The cutbacks in services that many states enacted are not entirely necessary, because they have been exacerbated by federal and state actions and failures to act. The federal government, for example has provided $165 billion in emergency health and education funding to states, primarily through the 2009 Recovery Act, but those dollars are mostly ending June 30. For their part, many of the states that will implement very deep cuts in 2012 have failed to raise new revenue to replace some of the revenue lost to the recession. Some states even added to the cutbacks needed by reducing corporate taxes or other taxes — an ineffective strategy for improving economic growth that likely will do more harm than good.

Cutting state services not only harms vulnerable residents but also slows the economy’s recovery from recession by reducing overall economic activity. When states cut spending, they lay off employees, cancel contracts with vendors, reduce payments to businesses and nonprofits that provide services, and cut benefit payments to individuals. All of these steps remove demand from the economy.

Moreover, many of the services being cut are important to states’ long-term economic strength. For instance, research shows that in order to prosper, businesses require a well-educated, healthy workforce. Many of the state budget cuts described here will weaken that workforce in the future by diminishing the quality of elementary and high schools, making college less affordable, and reducing residents’ access to health care. In the long term, the savings from today’s cuts may cost states much more in diminished economic growth.
Majority of States Enacting Major Cuts in Important Public Services

As of June 27, a total of 32 states have enacted their budget for the coming 2012 fiscal year. Three-fourths of these states — at least 24 of 32 — are making major cuts to important public services. Five of the remaining six states did not have a shortfall that they needed to close for fiscal year 2012; the sixth state — Hawaii — raised substantial revenues to balance its budget and avoid crippling cuts.

...Because states still face these very large budget gaps, their best strategy will remain a balanced combination of modest spending cuts, new revenue measures to strengthen the revenue recovery, and (in a few states) utilization of remaining reserves. Instead, most states that have enacted budgets so far relied almost entirely on cuts to close their shortfalls — making the cuts they imposed deeper than necessary and impeding the economic recovery.

Only a few states raised revenue to help resolve their fiscal year 2012 budget shortfalls. Hawaii, for example, raised over $600 million in new tax revenue over the biennium by limiting tax exemptions for businesses and by eliminating the standard deduction and capping itemized deductions for higher-income individuals, among other actions. Illinois lawmakers enacted personal and corporate income tax increases to help address the state’s budget shortfalls for the current and upcoming year.

A few states made their problems worse by cutting taxes. Georgia, for example, enacted nearly $100 million in tax cuts, including $46 million to allow top income earners to claim unlimited itemized deductions on their income taxes. And Arizona reduced the corporate income tax rate and commercial property taxes, costing the state $38 million in fiscal year 2012, or 4 percent of the state’s 2012 budget shortfall.[3]

The cuts states have imposed since the recession began have impeded the nation’s economic recovery and cost hundreds of thousands of private-sector and public-sector jobs. State and local governments have cut 535,000 jobs in education and other areas since August 2008 and are forecast to continue to cut tens of thousands of additional positions each month. In addition, deep cuts in funding for services create a cycle of job loss in the private sector. When schools, universities, health agencies, police departments, and other units of government cut their budgets, they cancel contracts with private vendors and eliminate or lower payments to businesses and nonprofit organizations that provide direct services. As a result, the companies and organizations doing business with the state have less money to spend on salaries and supplies and may reduce the salaries of their workers or lay them off. When workers receive lower pay or lose their job, they consume less, and the ripple effect continues throughout the state’s economy, costing even more jobs.

States are facing these problems because of conservative Republican economic policies that are deeply un-American. Republicans could have prevented or made the recession much less severe if they had enforced those terrible regulations they're always complaining about. It would also have helped if they would have paid for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of charging them to future generations. Now rather than raise revenue conservative Republicans are taking Medical care from the elderly and poor while cutting taxes once again for wealthy individuals and corporations. If tax cuts were a magic dust that created jobs we would not have the high unemployment rate we have now. It appears that conservative Republicans are maliciously sabotaging the economy for petty and spiteful political gain. There is nothing patriotic about that.