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.

His Royal Highness Mitt Romney Really Cares About The Workers

His Royal Highness Mitt Romney Really Cares About The Workers

Speaking to reporters tonight in Des Moines, Iowa, a worker laid off by a company owned by Bain Capital accused former Bain Capital CEO and current Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney of being “out of touch” with the concerns of average Americans.  Randy Johnson and more than 250 of his fellow workers at a Marion, Indiana American Pad and Paper (AMPAD) facility lost their jobs after Bain decided to close the plant amid a labor dispute.  Johnson, who noted that he personally reached out to Romney during the labor dispute, said, “I really think [Romney] didn’t care about the workers. It was all about profit over people.”  In addition to the layoffs and eventual bankrupting of AMPAD, Bain Capital under Romney’s leadership drove several other firms into bankruptcy and caused thousands of layoffs.

Conservatives and of course the radical anti-American movement known as conservatism finds nothing wrong with this kind of dog-eat-dog crony capitalism. Fair and humane capitalism in the tradition of American values is considered communism by the rabid fake patriots like Romney.

This Is What Evil Looks Like

No Apology From Rush Limbaugh For Defending ‘Christian’ Terrorists

Rush Limbaugh is nothing if not stubborn. He’s now obstinately resisting an international outcry over his incendiary comments about Africa’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

This band of child-abductors, rapists and killers is acknowledged as bad news by pretty much everyone. Everyone, that is, except for Limbaugh, who took to the air shortly after President Obama announced he was dispatching 100 military advisers to help take them on.

    “Now, up until today, most Americans have never heard of the Lord’s Resistance Army. And here we are at war with them. Have you ever heard of Lord’s Resistance Army, Dawn? How about you, Brian? Snerdley, have you? You never heard of Lord’s Resistance Army? Well, proves my contention, most Americans have never heard of it, and here we are at war with them. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. It means God. I was only kidding. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan.”

Much to Limbaugh’s amusement, this passage is now part of the Congressional Record, as last week Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) quoted it on the Senate floor. Inhofe cited this exchange between Limbaugh and his helpers, and then moved on to tackle Limbaugh for taking the vicious LRA’s religious claims at face value.

“I want to make sure everyone knows that [the LRA’s leader] was officially disavowed by the Catholic Church in Uganda,” Inhofe said.

Limbaugh did not respond to this part of the criticism. Instead he tried to wriggle his way out. He completely ignored the dressing-down about the LRA’s well documented brutality, and instead conceded that he had been “misinformed” about whether the advisers President Obama deployed were intended for active combat.

The radio host then noted that Inhofe’s smack-down had included a mention of Limbaugh’s studio assistants, Dawn, Brian, and Snerdley. He transformed this into one big joke, while also implying that Inhofe’s umbrage had come from the fact the crew had never heard of the LRA, rather than the fact that they had fallen for the group’s propaganda hook, line, and sinker. From Limbaugh’s transcript:

    “I wanted to play the sound bites primarily ‘cause you three are now in the Congressional Record. All three of you. And you’re in the Congressional Record because you didn’t know something. How does it feel?”

At no point did Limbaugh address the fact that he had in effect defended a reviled group first listed as terrorists by President George W. Bush.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this wasn’t enough to stop the story from spreading. On Monday the Times of London ran an article about a young woman, Evelyn Apoko, who it said had been “horribly mutilated while working as a human ‘mule’ for the LRA.”

Limbaugh obviously has a staff of assistants who could have done some research. perhaps it would be expecting too much for the mulch-millionaire pundit who makes a living telling other people what to think and feel because he knows it all, to do some research himself. All Limbaugh knows is that sending military advisers to Africa is president Obama's idea. Anything Obama is for, Limbaugh is against. Limbaugh is not pro good or pro America, he is pro conservatism. If that means being pro evil it doesn't bother Limbaugh or his lunatic followers.

Congressional Republicans Are Running Real Death Panels

America’s real death panels

Remember the good ol’ days when Republicans were running around the country screaming that the Democrats’ proposal to fund voluntary end-of-life counseling would somehow create a government-sanctioned death panel? Oooh boy, the heartland was ablaze back then. Racked by anger at a Democrat occupying the White House, an enraged middle America was genuinely scared about the prospect of a secret group of bureaucrats putting together a “kill list” of citizens deemed to be too much of a nuisance.


For example, at the state level, the death panel commonly called the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles recently opted to execute Troy Davis, despite compelling evidence calling his conviction into question. Similar death panels continue to operate inside the criminal justice bureaucracies of other states, even as more questions emerge about the fairness and accuracy of America’s capital punishment system.

Likewise, at the federal level, Washington, D.C., has become a city of death panels.

For instance, the death panel known as the U.S. House Agriculture Appropriations Committee(chaired by a Republican), despite having seen the latest news of the listeria outbreak, is right now trying to slash funding for food inspections. That effectively continues to sentence 3,000 Americans a year to death via food-borne illness. Additionally, this very same death panel is also considering cuts to food stamps at a time when Louisiana State University researchers report that between 2,000 and 3,000 elderly Americans are already dying of malnutrition every year. Meanwhile, a separate death panel inside the Obama administration last month opted to block a proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulation to reduce smog — a move guaranteeing that the pollutant will continue to annually kill thousands of Americans.

Even the assembled ambassadors at the United Nations often act as a grand death panel in crafting international policy. Last month, in fact, these diplomats were asked to pony up more aid to fight the East African famine, and so far, that aid has not been forthcoming, potentially allowing 750,000 starving Somalis to die.

The point here is that politicians never have to make up stories about death panels that don’t exist when we’re living in the age of government-by-death-panel. We just don’t notice many of them. Why? Because for all the manufactured anti-death-panel hysteria surrounding the Obama healthcare bill, we’ve come to accept that our political leaders are now regularly making blood-soaked decisions that cost people their lives.

Over time, that has made the most coldly calculating death panels all but invisible to us — and regardless of whether that acquiescence is subconscious or not, it undoubtedly represents an ugly form of complicity.



    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." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado.

About 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution, concludes a Cornell researcher. Such environmental degradation, coupled with the growth in world population, are major causes behind the rapid increase in human diseases..yet conservatives claim(without any compelling evidence) that we do not need regulation. Regulation would get in the way of their death panels by negligence.

VIDEO: Mitt Heaps Praise on Romneycare "Parent" Ted Kennedy


Ron Paul Calls Out Herman Cain For Lie Over Fed Audit During GOP Debate

Fannie-Backwards - How did Gretchen Morgenson, one of America's best financial reporters, get the story of Fannie Mae's role in the financial collapse so wrong? Despite having no facts conservatives are committed to the evil lie that poor Americans and Fannie May caused the recession, deflecting blame from their pals on Wall Street.

Solely For the Sake of Political Grand Standing, Republicans Are Holding The Country Hostage for The Second Time in Four Months, This Time Over Disaster Relief

Solely For the Sake of Political Grand Standing Republican Are Holding The Country Hostage for The Second Time in Four Months, This Time Over Disaster Relief

Sometime next week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will officially run out of money if Congress doesn’t act. Unprecedented demands and gamesmanship by Republicans in the House of Representatives are threatening a funding bill for the agency, along with disaster relief for Americans affected by the recent hurricanes. Watching the spectacle unfold, it’s impossible not to marvel at short Republican memories—it wasn’t that long ago that playing politics with FEMA proved disastrous for the GOP.

By many accounts, the federal government’s failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans was a turning point in George W. Bush’s presidency. His administration was shown to be incapable of even basic functions of government—helping desperate citizens in desperate need following a natural disaster. After they left the White House, several Bush aides acknowledged that this was the moment that the Bush presidency was irredeemably lost:

    Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin.

    Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: Katrina to me was the tipping point. The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn’t matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn’t matter. P.R.? It didn’t matter. Travel? It didn’t matter. I knew when Katrina—I was like, man, you know, this is it, man. We’re done.

    

In the weeks and months after the disaster, FEMA and Bush’s appointee to lead it, Michael Brown, quickly became the focal point of the botched administration response. Brown was the former head of the International Arabian Horse Association before coming to the agency, which needless to say didn’t give him much experience in dealing with natural disaster response. But he was a close ally to Bush during his political career, and that’s what counted.

It turned out that FEMA had been hollowed out as part of deliberate strategy—one based on the conservative philosophy that the federal government simply shouldn’t have a large role in people’s lives, even if it meant rescuing those lives from disaster. Bush’s first appointee to head FEMA, Joe Allbaugh, told the Senate during his confirmation process that “Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management…. Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.” As the years went on, career FEMA employees complained that “our professional staff are being systematically replaced by politically connected novices and contractors.” The deliberate neglect culminated in Brown’s appointment, followed by hundreds and hundreds of potentially unnecessary deaths in a major American city.

This anti–federal government philosophy led to both a human and political disaster. Yet today, Republicans in the House of Representatives are less than seventy-two hours away from leaving FEMA without any money to operate as they continue a crusade against federal spending.

When Hurricane Irene walloped twelve states in late August, FEMA took emergency measures to divert funding from many other projects to respond to the destruction. Now, the agency has only $215 million on hand, which is far below the $1 billion the agency wants to have access to at all times in case disaster should strike again. It could completely run out of money as soon as Monday.

Over the past couple of weeks, a non-controversial bill to extend government funding through mid-November suddenly heated up when Republicans refused to allow the additional FEMA funding without also including offsetting cuts from other programs, which is an unprecedented move—there has generally always been bipartisan agreement on providing immediate disaster aid. But Republicans passed a bill last night that offsets some of the disaster aid with $1.5 billion in cuts from a loan program for energy efficient vehicle production, along with rescinding $100 million in loans to the scandal-plagued company Solyndra.

The Senate has already passed—with the help of ten Republicans—a bill that provides the disaster relief with no strings attached, and majority leader Harry Reid has already pledged to kill the House bill.

House Republicans knew the Senate would not accept their bill, but are intent on catering to the hardline fiscal conservatives. “Change like this is hard,” House majority leader Eric Cantor defiantly said Wednesday. “We’ll find a way forward so that we can reflect expectations that taxpayers have that we are going to begin to start spending their money more prudently.”

Clearly, Republicans don’t find it “prudent” to ensure money for fundamental government functions like helping citizens after natural disasters. As Ben Adler has noted, the GOP candidates running for president show a similar contempt for the role of the federal government. The party was bitten badly by this philosophy once before—but clearly they drew no lessons from it.

Conservatives like to claim government can do no good. They were very hard to make sure that becomes the new reality. Americans are a proud bunch and like to do as much on their own as possible, but everyone runs into some situation eventually that is a little overwhelming. Hurricanes, floods and tornadoes are such events. They can cripple and even destroy small towns and individual lives. Conservative Republicans seem to be OK with that.

Has Republican Conservatism Become a Cult

Has American-Style Conservatism Become a Religion?

As the American right lurches from traditional conservatism – a go-slow approach to governing that stresses the importance of continuity and social stability – to a far more reactionary brand typified by acolytes of Ayn Rand and Tea Party extremists waving misspelled signs decrying Democrats' "socialism," the time has come to ask whether modern “backlash” conservatism has become a religious faith rather than a pedestrian political ideology.

Ideology is grounded in the real world. It offers us a philosophical lens through which we can efficiently process what's happening in the world around us. Religion is different. It's a fixed belief system, based on faith, and it is immune to – or at least highly resistant to – challenges mounted by objective reality. Which better describes the belief system of a typical Rush Limbaugh fan or Tea Party activist?

Like religious faiths, the hard-right reveres an original text – the Constitution – and, like all religious fundamentalists, conservatives claim to adhere to a literalist interpretation of it while actually picking and choosing from among its tenets. Just as the vast majority of Christian fundamentalists don't actually stone their daughters to death when they're obnoxious to their fathers, the Tea Partiers conveniently ignore more or less the entirety of Article 3. Also like other fundamentalist sects, most conservatives actually have a poor understanding of what the text they revere actually means.

Like the Manicheans – adherents of one of the world's great religions at one point in history – they tend to see a world defined by a conflict between the forces of light and darkness. The forces of good are decent, conservative, "real" Americans – mostly white, married Christians, but with exceptions made for others who keep the faith. They stand opposed to a wide array of diabolical figures: liberals, gays and lesbians, Muslims, Mexicans, socialists and other foreigners, especially the French.

And like adherents of other religious faiths, they hold a special enmity for apostates. When stalwart conservatives like David Frum started talking about “epistemic closure” – “conservatives’ tendency to operate in an information bubble” – they were pilloried by their fellow travelers, accused of the worst offense: liberal heresy. Not only are moderate conservatives like Kathleen Parker or Christine Todd Whitman ripe targets, but so are red-meat Republicans who stray from the party line to any degree. Even people like former Utah Senator Bob Bennett can be painted as RINOS (Republicans in name only) if they stray from church doctrine even slightly.

Backlash conservatives also have their prophets and their saints. Just listen to Republicans talking about the Founders – a groups of liberals, moderates and conservatives of their day who agreed on very little but are assumed by the flock to have been staunch right-wingers. The faithful conveniently ignore the real-world foibles of their Holy Men. Yes, Ronald Reagan offered amnesty to undocumented immigrants, raised taxes 11 times and ran roughshod over the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution, but to the believers, he remains as pure as the Virgin Mary is to Catholics. (Reagan would be polling right there at the bottom with Jon Huntsman if he were running for the GOP nomination today.)

Perhaps the easiest parallel to draw between conservatism and religion is the right's vilification of climate scientists, 98 percent of whom agree that human activities are changing our world with dangerous consequences. The attacks are reminiscent of the Catholic Church's running battle with “Copernicans” who believed that the Earth revolved around the sun; a theory that flew in the face of church doctrine. In that sense, Michael Mann of “climate-gate” fame is like a modern Galileo (only Mann has been completely vindicated while Galileo was handed over for trial by the Roman Inquisition and lived out the rest of his life under house arrest).

Conservatives certainly claim they represent literal interpretation of the Constitution and the Bible, but in reality they actually pick and choose. Goodness knows they seem to completely ignore Jesus Sermon on the Mount. For even a peculiar brand of Christianity it is odd how much they love the blood, guts, violence and revenge of the Old Testament. When it comes to the Constitution they also pick what they like   - free speech for them and no one else. Freedom of religion for them and no one else.

Who Is To Blame For The National Debt and Debt Ceiling Debacle

Who Is To Blame For The National Debt and Debt Ceiling Debacle

Over the past weekend more than 35,000 protesters turned out to organize against the incumbent Governor of New Jersey. That's a medium sized protest by anyone's count. Nothing to scoff at. I suppose you could say that's a lot of tea baggers in one place protesting Democrats, right? Wrong. The protesters weren't tea baggers or even people purportedly against government spending. They were mainly school teachers and their supporters protesting cuts made by Republican Chris Christie. The Saturday protest quickly turned into one of the largest in New Jersey's history. Yes, substantially larger than the tea bagger protest that drew about 400 people earlier in the month.

Which protest do you think Fox News covered and helped promote? Well the Patriotic Freedom Fighters who shaved their nuts and showed up en masse to protest the very government services they so receive. Of course Fox News would. Whatever supposedly helps the Republican cause is what they are for.

To demonstrate just how much Fox loves the tea baggers, they are once again today promoting them on their front page.

Frustration with the growing debt crisis? They are a deranged people supported by a psychotic media organization. It's worth noting the $13 trillion debt Fox and the tea baggers are now so concerned about is largely the result of Republican Ronald Reagan, Republican George H. W. Bush and Republican George W. Bush. The three fiscally conservative Republicans account for 80% of the national debt. The "growing debt crisis" didn't by any stretch of the imagination just now begin. And no where throughout the history of the last 30 years was there a single tea bagger in the street or any concern from Fox News until now.

I'll try to make it slightly easier for Republicans to understand. 8 years of Reagan the debt increased by $2.7 trillion. 4 years of King George I the debt increased by 1.5 trillion. 8 years of King George II the debt increased by $6.2 trillion. Compare that to 9.5 years of Clinton and Obama the debt increased by $2.6 trillion combined. The combined total of two Democrats doesn't even equal Reagan, the Republican poster boy for "fiscal conservatism."

Just like how 400 people protesting is worthy of their promotions but 35,000 doesn't get a single mention, running up $10 trillion of debt by Republicans never garnered a single second of attention by Fox News or the tea baggers. Now that Republicans aren't in control anymore, Fox News and the tea baggers have them some concerns. Lying about it, of course, isn't one of them.

We as a nation are past irony or just so deep in it we do not recognize it. Conservatives have run up debts whenever they have had the power to do so. They would not enforce financial regulations just because they hate regulations; this is what largely caused the Great Recession. Now President Obama has proposed a super conservative budget that is to the Right of Saint Reagan and the tea baggers have rejected it. Completely unwilling to compromise for the good of the country. That sounds about like the wacky conservatives we have all come to know.