Weekend Reading

'Here we go again': Rand Paul clashes with Fauci (for the 4th time)

You misrepresented someone's argument to make it easier to attack.

When the Top U.S. Tax Rate was 70 Percent—or Higher

Both Fox News and Russian state media are trying to get Biden to debate Putin

Republicans have perfected the troll two-step: The art of being a jerk and then playing the victim

Sheldon Whitehouse Is Following the Money Around Brett Kavanaugh

Biden’s Planned Tax Hike to Hit People Earning Over $400,000 Hardest

Wisconsin Republicans authorize Assembly investigation of elections administration

The Future of Conservatism?

America’s Richest 1% Dodge Taxes On More Than A Fifth Of Their Income, Study Finds

America Is Now in the Hands of the Vaccine-Hesitant

US sinks to new low in rankings of world's democracies

Weekend Reading

The Oceans We Know Won't Survive Climate Change
Tax Aversion And The Legacy Of Slavery
How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism
Amid Trade War, Farmers Lean On New Crop: Hemp
Federal Judge In Trump Tax Case Picks Apart DOJ Rule Barring Indictment Of President
How To Get Away With Gerrymandering
For The First Time In History, U.S. Billionaires Paid A Lower Tax Rate Than The Working Class Last Year
Federal Deficit Estimated At $984 Billion, Highest In Seven Years
No More Half-Measures On Corporate Taxes
How A Brief Socialist Takeover In North Dakota Gave Residents A Public Bank

If Only We Could All Be As Out Of Touch As The Mega-Wealthy

Bill Gates Has Some Harsh Words for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Tax Plan

Bill Gates says he’s fine with the idea of higher taxes for the rich, but plans like the one being championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which target the top income brackets, are too extreme—and could encourage the wealthy to hide their money in offshore accounts.

“I believe U.S. tax rates can be more progressive. Now, you finally have some politicians who are so extreme that I’d say, ‘No, that’s even beyond,'” Gates said. “You do start to create tax dodging and disincentives, and an incentive to have the income show up in other countries and things. But we can be more progressive without really threatening income generation—what you have left to decide how to spread around.”

First of all, the wealthy already hide their money offshore and dodge taxes.

High tax rates, such as those proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, led to a single breadwinner being able to provide for a family - a car, a home, a college education, etc.

Ever since the Reagan revolution, of tax cuts and deregulation, households with multiple workers can barely get by.  Tax rates aren't a disincentive to create wealth.  They are a mechanism to correct the greedy urges of those whom control the means of production.

Since we can't count on the Walmarts, Amazons, Kochs and all the other greedy oligarchs to do what's right and pay their employees a living wage, to provide retirement and health care to their employees, and to pay a fair share of taxes to help the infrastructure that their businesses and we all depend on, we need to tax them.

Trickle down doesn't work.  It hasn't worked.  Taxes are the only way of giving workers back income that they helped to produce and/or putting it toward more public goods.       

The U.S. Is NOT Overtaxed!

[source]

For Further Reading:

Sorry America, Your Taxes Aren’t High

Tax Cuts Have Been Bad For The Middle Class

U.S. Corporate Tax Avoidance

From The Transcript:

Avoiding taxes has become a hallmark of America’s business icons; Apple, Google, GE, and many more of the Fortune 500. The nation’s largest corporations are sitting on more than $2 trillion in cash while revenue from corporate income taxes have plummeted from just below 40 percent in 1943 to just below 10 percent in 2012. Government and big business have colluded to create what’s tantamount to an “unlimited IRA” for corporations. 

That’s not my term, although I wish I had thought of it, because it explains so much about what’s gone wrong in a country where some 20 million workers who would like a full-time job still can’t get one. Yet the upper one percent of the population takes home a staggering 22.5 percent of America’s income while their effective federal income tax rate has dropped.

Tax Rates Since 1913

Tax Rates Since 1913

Tax Cuts Do Not Boost The Economy

A recent Congressional Research Service report documented what many already knew: giving tax breaks to the rich helps concentrate wealth at the top, but it does not boost the economy (as reported here).

Taxes & The Economy: An Economic Analysis Of The Top Tax Rates Since 1945.

Remembering The Bush Years (In Charts)

Closing The Book On The Bush Legacy:

• Consider first the median income. When Bill Clinton left office after 2000, the median income-the income line around which half of households come in above, and half fall below-stood at $52,500 (measured in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars). When Bush left office after 2008, the median income had fallen to $50,303. That's a decline of 4.2 per cent. That leaves Bush with the dubious distinction of becoming the only president in recent history to preside over an income decline through two presidential terms. "What is phenomenal about the years under Bush is that through the entire business cycle from 2000 through 2007, even before this recession...working families were worse off at the end of the recovery, in the best of times during that period, than they were in 2000 before he took office," says Lawrence Mishel, president Economic Policy Institute.
• When Clinton left office in 2000, the Census counted almost 31.6 million Americans living in poverty. When Bush left office in 2008, the number of poor Americans had jumped to 39.8 million (the largest number in absolute terms since 1960.) Under Bush, the number of people in poverty increased by over 8.2 million, or 26.1 per cent. Over two-thirds of that increase occurred before the economic collapse of 2008. When Clinton left the number of Americans in poverty stood at 11.3 per cent; when Bush left that had increased to 13.2 per cent. The poverty rate for children jumped from 16.2 per cent when Clinton left office to 19 per cent when Bush stepped down.
• The story is similar again for access to health care. When Clinton left office, the number of uninsured Americans stood at 38.4 million. By the time Bush left office that number had grown to just over 46.3 million, an increase of nearly 8 million or 20.6 per cent. 

 

 

  

 

U.S. Taxes Are Low & Regressive

Excerpted from Just How Progressive Is The U.S Tax Code:

"In this post we examine the progressivity of the U.S. tax code and highlight two facts: the current U.S. tax system is less progressive than the tax systems of other industrialized countries, and considerably less progressive today than it was just a few decades ago."

"Over the last fifty years, tax rates for the wealthiest Americans have declined by 40 percent, while tax rates for average Americans have remained roughly constant. This is illustrated in the figure below."

"This decline in tax rates for the wealthy has coincided with an increase in income inequality, where most of the wage gains have been concentrated among a relatively small portion of the American people. For example, since 1979, earnings for households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution have risen by over 250 percent. At the same time, many households at the middle and bottom of the income distribution have experienced stagnating incomes or even declines in earnings (figure below, blue bars). This means that the very people who have received the biggest income gains in the past three decades have also seen the largest tax cuts (figure below, red bars)."

"But the reason why the share of taxes paid by the top 10 percent has increased is because their share of income has increased."

"In 1979, the top 1 percent of Americans earned 9.3 percent of all income in the United States and paid 15.4 percent of all federal taxes. While the share of income earned by the top 1 percent had more than doubled by 2007—to 19.4 percent—the share of federal tax liability paid by that group only increased by about 80 percent, to 28.1 percent. The share of taxes increased less for this group because high-income tax rates fell by more than the tax rates for everyone else—reductions that made the system less progressive."

Taxes

A Guide To Understanding Taxes In One Place
High Tax Rates Won't Slow Growth
Just How Progressive Is The U.S. Tax Code?
The Case For A Progressive Tax
There's No There There: Low Tax Rates & Economic Growth

Taxes At Historic Lows

h/t CBPP

Sunday Reading

Bad Year For Wall St. Not Reflected In Chiefs' Pay
Destructive Austerity, USA
Distorting Facts On Keystone XL
Fortune 500 Companies That Lobby & Avoid Taxes
How Conservatives Lie About Government
How The Great Recession & The Slow Recovery Compare Historically
How The U.S. Lost Out On iPhone Work
Milwaukee Gets Arty In The Third Ward
No, Doctors Don't Hate Obamacare
Private Inequity
Reformers Playbook On Failing Schools Fails A Fact Check
The Right To Work Assault On The Middle Class
Top Marginal Tax Rates: 1916-2010
Walker: "We're Heading In The Right Direction."

Weekend Reading

Obama Sings "Let's Stay Together"
Government Bonds Will Disappear
Are The Wealthy Paying Too Much In Taxes?
Tax Rate For Richest 400 Has Plummeted
Mitt Romney To Occupy Protestor: Love It Or Leave It

Two Americas

Some illustrative graphs from Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot.

Taxes: Our Friend. Republicans: Not.

Taxes, the perpetual Republican Boogey Man, supposedly hurt development and growth, or so their story goes. Yet, the post WWII period (primarily financed by government investment in employment and infrastructure - beginning in the mid 1930s and accelerating prior to WWII) until the early 1970s saw the highest growth rates the U.S has experienced. The paradoxical, as far as the "taxes hurt us" cabal is concerned, element to this is that during this period the U.S. also had it's highest marginal tax rates -- from around 63 percent in 1936 to 91 percent in 1963.

We've lived off the infrastructure built during this period, lessening inequality and creating a middle-class. But also, sadly, wringing every last bit of profit we could from it without making the necessary investments and improvements to maintain our standard of living. We spent less on our collective goods and services and allowed more and more of our profits to go to the bosses and the CEOs. Workers were producing more (and paying more in taxes) yet receiving less in services, and garnering less of the fruits of their productivity. All while watching the infrastructure - that made us so productive - crumble.

Beginning in the late 1970s and seeing it's full fruition with Ronald Reagan, a new individualist era of low taxes and uber free markets emerged. Since this, CEO pay is now roughly 400 times the average workers wage - in the 1970s it was only 40 times as much. Wages for the majority of workers have stagnated since then. Inequality has been steadily increasing. And, life, in general, has become much more volatile for the majority of wage-earners.

History seems to show us that taxes are good for everyone. With taxes at their highest, the economy was booming it's most. Business as well as workers benefited during this robust time.

The argument Republicans are trying to frame today - they would like us to believe it's about government spending badly, taxes being too high and hurting growth, and taxes generally inducing all-around inefficiencies - is really about who gains from productivity and what proportion. They want to make sure the "smart" guys, the Haves, concocting the lazy, usurious, corrupt money-making schemes (not the peon workers producing real things for the real economy) are the ones seeing all the gains and living a luxurious life-style.

The Republican platform represents and benefits the interests of roughly the highest earning 1 or 2 percent of the population. Their wish to kill the estate tax (which effects less than 1.2 percent of the population). Their obsession with continually lowering the capital gains tax (which effects only the top 5-10 percent of the populaton, the majority declaring capital gains). Issue after issue that they choose to fight over only matters to the most well-off among us.

Prophets of Doom

The Journal-Sentinel’s praise of Paul Ryan as of late is getting scary. They have a new editorial bestowing the virtue of his “Road Map for America’s Future,” with a few caveats. This editorial repeats many of the lines they gushed in a previous piece. The problem is that it's mostly rubbish.

First of all, Social Security is fine. For the mainstream media to keep pushing these ominous threats about Social Security's impending doom is inexcusable. Even the Congressional Budget Office admits that Social Security is solvent, as is, without any changes until 2052, and up to 80 percent after that. And the idea that somehow privatizing it, making it dependent on the whims of the stock market, is the answer, is a myth. Wake up, people! This is simply one more, in a long line of Republican schemes to loot the Treasury for their own benefit.

Medicare is a quandary, but not because of it’s entitlement issue. It’s because of managed care and the pharmaceutical industries skyrocketing profits. For our health care we spend twice as much as any other developed nation, we get worse results, and 50 million are uninsured.

Also, the push for 10 percent and 25 percent tax rates, "simplified" rates, or a flat tax has been debunked since the first charlatan plotted it. How about we just remove the write-offs, deductions, exemptions, subsidies, and other nefarious tax code ploys that merely benefit the uber wealthy?

This all ties in neatly with our current recessionary woes. Much of this is due to deregulation. Those whom are merely guided by the profit motive cannot be counted on to regulate themselves. This travesty is just more reinforcement for the case for government intervention. Why do we pay $100's for pills while other nations charge pennies? Because the pharmaceutical industry pays for the politicians that allow such. And it's the same reason why the services provided by private managed care companies are so deplorable.

Ryan should be applauded? I hope this is the Journal's attempt at sarcasm. He’s wrapped the same old greedy, exploitative, reward-the-rich Republican idiom in modified rhetoric and snappy one-liners. Just when I believe the Journal-Sentinel cannot not possibly sink any lower as a newspaper, the bottom falls out.

All of these proposals have been laughed at by actual economists (not pretend ones like Paul Ryan) and proven to be Trojan horses attempting to push through typical regressive Republican policies.

What does Paul Ryan have to say about the war? The money we’ve spent on that travesty could shore up Social Security and Medicare for decades. (Not to mention what could be achieved by simply making corporate tax avoiders pay their fair share.) And the real ludicrous part is that the Journal-Sentinel sees nothing wrong with applauding Ryan’s ridiculous proposal, but can’t connect the dots between money being spent in Iraq and money to take care of our nation's sick and elderly.

The media allowed our horrible president, and has continued to allow him, to spend billions on a fabricated and misguided war. This money could have been spent on our real priorities – Medicare and/or fixing the health care system, public infrastructure, education, etc. In economics that’s called an opportunity cost. But I’m sure Paul Ryan and the Journal-Sentinel, being the great economists they are, knew that.

For Further Reading:
Alarming Parallels Between 1929 and 2007
Bat Boy Lives! As Do Myths About Social Security
Debunking The Social Security Myth
Deregulation & The Financial Crisis
Don't Privatize Social Security
Flat Wrong
Inventing A Crisis
Myth of Social Security's Imminent Collapse
Simple Arithmetic Of Flat Taxes
Tax Plan A Con
What Social Security Crisis?
Why Not The Best?