Taxes

Congratulations! The "grand compromise" will cut nearly thirty nine billion dollars in needed government spending, which proves how "serious" everyone is about reducing the deficit. The grand compromisers could have cancelled the next ten years of tax subsidies for oil companies and cut the deficit by forty billion, but apparently that's not how serious people do things.

If the Republican Party were singing to its base today, the song would be the theme from Friends, "I'll Be There For You." And the Democrats would be singing "You Always Hurt the One You Love." We're being told we should celebrate a "compromise" in which Democrats gave up $38.5 billion in spending cuts, when the original Republican demand was for $32 billion. That means the Democrats only gave the Republicans 20% more (20.2135%, to be precise) than they originally demanded.

Okay, guys. You get an extra 20% -- and not a penny more!

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Who is our country for? Is this a country for We, the People, where all of us are banded together to protect and empower each other, together? Or is this a country where a powerful few reap all the benefits, and the rest of us are little more than "the help?" That is what the coming budget/deficit/debt/shutdown battles are about. more »

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What was the lesson of the 2010 election? Since the election conservatives and the DC opinion elite have been claiming that the public voted for budget cuts. But before the election they ran ad after ad saying Dems cut your Medicare and didn't provide jobs. Now every single poll shows that the public wants jobs not cuts. more »

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In 1983 NY hotel-chain-owning billionaire Leona Helmsley said, "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes..." As our country migrates from democracy to plutocracy, this more and more appears to be official policy. more »

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The rising public clamor for higher taxes on America's wealthy has conservative ideologues increasingly uneasy. For good reason. They don't have the numbers on their side. Or much history either.

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The country’s huge debt was caused by tax cuts for the rich and increases in military spending. But debt-cutting recommendations from the D.C. Elite never suggest restoring taxes on the rich and cutting military spending. Go figure. Instead they suggest cutting the things government does for We, the People. The D.C. Elite is not We, the People. Let's stop this in its tracks. more »

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Congress passed tax cuts for the rich and cut the estate tax way down, adding $800 billion to the deficit and placing Social Security on the chopping block. more »

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Right-wing billionaire Pete Peterson continues to use the Washington Post as an outlet for deceptive anti-tax and anti-government propaganda. His "Fiscal Times" is a factory for churning out James Frey-like mendacity, which the Post then deceptively packages and distributes as "journalism." For those of you who have forgotten, James Frey's deception, in his book A Million Little Pieces, was to pose as a former drug addict who got clean through the force of his own unaided will.

The Washington Post, on the other hand, poses as a newspaper.

The latest Peterson production, "Analysis examines what it's like to be a 'rich' family in America," is a grab-bag of misinformation and fiscal ignorance. This "analysis" was written by the latest Frey from Peterson's shop, someone named Karen Hube, and it's based on two phony premises: First, that "President Obama and others have repeatedly used (that level of income) to define what it means to be 'rich' in America today," and second, that it's a hardship to get by on $250,000 a year. more »

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The tax cut pact the Obama administration announced last week has angered a good many Americans. But the pact's lavish generosity toward America's rich should not have given anyone a surprise.

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Yesterday I wrote that the President may have sacrificed his long-term vision on trade and economic/industrial policy to day-to-day concerns and politics. The tax-cut deal is another indicator that a big-picture vision has been sacrificed. more »

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