Mitt Romney Makes ‘Redistribution’ Argument, Bolstered by Fox News, Conservative Media
Redistribution is a fact of life. The tax code, by it’s very nature, redistributes wealth. It has to, in order “to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States“.
The real question is: What kind of redistribution works best for the country?
The republicans have embraced upward redistribution, a strategy that is decimating the middle class. In a consumption economy, this is fiscal suicide.
The Democrats embrace a strategy that funnels more money back into the economy, empowering demand and driving sustainable growth. This is a strategy that built the United States into the superpower it is today.
This image depicts the Territorial acquisitions of the United States, such as the Thirteen Colonies, the Louisiana Purchase, British and Spanish Cession, and so on. Possible Errors There is a concern that this map could have errors. For discussion, please see the talk page. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It is a strategy that predates either modern political party. From the Louisiana Purchase to the Alaska Purchase, tax money has been used for expansion from the very beginning. Land given to farmers and ranchers, schools and land grant colleges.
And the transcontinental railroad, much of it wasted by corporate greed.
The G.I. Bill helped create a golden age of prosperity, even as the rich were heavily taxed.
State agricultural colleges and their extension services made farmers more productive. Hydroelectric dams, the interstate highway system, NASA, DARPA…all created opportunities or entire new segments of the economy.
We would not be who we are if not for the kind of government spending that republicans are opposed to.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Federal Government Disagrees With Ann Romney: Raising Children Not ‘Work’
We are seeing the fallacy of multiple definitions at work. Pun intended 😉
Pushing a weight up an inclined plane is work, scientifically speaking.
Raising children takes effort. A form of work that used to be called a labor of love. [sarcasm] Now that conservatives seek to demonize the word “labor”, we don’t hear that expression anymore. Maybe they’ll call giving birth “workforce expansion” instead of “labor”. [/sarcasm]
Ann Romney has worked at being a mother, but that is not the same thing as being a working mother. She may have made the effort and spent the money, but she has not worked for a paycheck. She did not have to earn the money she spent to raise her kids. She made a lifestyle choice that is available to fewer and fewer women every year. It is rapidly becoming elitist in the full meaning of the word.
Hilary Rosen leaving out the phrase “for a paycheck” does not grant Ann Romney license to claim to understand the plight of women who must be both mother and breadwinner. She has never been in that position, and never will be.
Conservatives have made hay out of substituting their choice of definitions for the meaning intended by Hilary Rosen. This is not honest debate, it is propaganda.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Related articles
- Hilary Rosen was right. Ann Romney doesn’t speak for women in the workforce. – The Washington Post (mbcalyn.com)
- Ben Romney Insists that His Mom Did Too Work Raising Five Little Romneys All on Her Own [Ann Romney] (jezebel.com)
- Rosen Attack On Ann Romney Not About Motherhood, But About Actual Jobs (lezgetreal.com)
- Democrats to introduce WORK Act to give all mothers the same choice Ann Romney had (dailykos.com)
- Did Ann Romney ‘Work’? (parenting.blogs.nytimes.com)
Eric Cantor’s Small-Business Tax Cut Faces Threat Of Presidential Veto
And a well-deserved veto it would be.
Holy Crap, Batman! Look at the numbers!
$46B added to the deficit in order to create 100K jobs. That’s $460,000/job. That’s likely 10 to 15 times the salary of the jobs created. There is no possibility that this would generate enough new revenues to pay for the cuts, even if the new jobs were taxed at 100%.
Cutting taxes for 22M “small” businesses to create 100K jobs means only 1 job would be created for every 220 businesses getting a tax cut – and that’s if the republican best-case scenario proves true.
Official portrait of Congressman . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I think that Eric Cantor and I have radically different definitions of “potent economic stimulus”. This is designed to be incredibly inefficient, ineffective, and wasteful as a “jobs” program.
Could the lies be any more blatant? Promoting this as a “jobs” bill is an insult to the intelligence of every American, and a clear demonstration that republicans are fiscally irresponsible in ideology and practice. After all, they can blame President Obama for not signing it, or the Senate Democrats for not passing it, and never face responsibility for passing it. I expect them to accuse the Democrats of playing politics in stopping this moment of insanity.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
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- Cantor ‘Puzzled’ That Obama Would Threaten To Veto The Latest GOP Tax Cut For Millionaires (thinkprogress.org)
- House passes small biz tax cut (politico.com)
- House Of Representatives Approves Cantor’s $46 Billion Tax Giveaway (thinkprogress.org)
- Eric Cantor Touts Analysis Concluding That His Tax Giveaway Would Cost $1.1 Million Per Job (thinkprogress.org)
- House will vote today on tax cuts for NASCAR/NFL team owners (dailykos.com)
Payroll Tax Cut Fight: ‘Wall Street Journal’ Editorial Rips Boehner, McConnell
The Wall Street Journal opinion piece passes out the business-centric blinders.
“No employer is going to hire a worker based on such a small and temporary decrease in employment costs, as this year’s tax holiday has demonstrated. The entire exercise is political, but Republicans have thoroughly botched the politics.”
True, but not the point of the exercise. Employers will hire when they see customers with money coming their way – which is the point of the tax holiday: Putting more money in consumer pockets. Wasn’t it the republicans who said that people know best how to spend their own money? Conservatives consistently devalue the necessity of funding the demand side of supply and demand. Instead, they are aggressively working to weaken the economic foundation of the middle class.
“Their first mistake was adopting the President’s language that he is proposing a tax cut rather than calling it a temporary tax holiday. People will understand the difference—and discount the benefit.”
So people will understand when it comes time to end the Bush “tax holiday” for the rich?
“Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he’s spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.”
Except that Obama44 has been cutting taxes. The “tax holiday” in question is only one example. Conservatives keep changing the definitions. Either the House republicans have voted for a middle-class tax increase, or we need to end one of the largest unfunded tax holidays ever.
Conservatives are nibbling at the edges of doublethink. The Obama44 cuts to payroll taxes and the Bush43 income tax cuts to income taxes are both temporary cuts. There is one notable difference between the two though. The Obama cuts are being paid for – how is a major point of contention. The Bush43 cuts went straight to the national debt.
The President and the Democrats want the rich to pay for extending the payroll tax cuts, and put some of that idle money back in circulation as an economic stimulus. The republicans want the middle class and poor to pay for it, which would negate the simulative effect and hurt the economy in the long term. Redistribution of wealth at its most ineffective.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Related articles
- Republicans lose the Wall Street Journal on tax cut ‘fiasco’ (dailykos.com)
- WSJ: GOP botched tax debate (thehill.com)
- How the Republicans lost the upper hand in payroll tax debate – Washington Post (blog) (washingtonpost.com)
- House GOP takes beating over payroll tax (cbsnews.com)
- House Passes Bill… for New Churchill Bust (newser.com)
- GOP senator says Republicans need to resolve payroll tax fight and ‘move on’ (thehill.com)
- Romney Boldly Refuses To Take Sides On Payroll Tax Holiday (alan.com)
“The Great Flabbergasting”: Rachel Maddow’s (Surprising) Blind Spot
“disingenuous” is the word I have been looking for. Yet I remain flabbergasted at the disingenuousness of the republican party. It shows utter contempt for the democratic process, the foundation of our national identity.
“A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman thinks of the next generation.”
~ James Freeman Clarke, Sermon
By their own admission, republicans have been focused on the next election since the beginning of Obama44. This has directly resulted in bad policy and bad government.
It is hard to believe that conservatives care about this country. They seem to believe in something that few people would recognize as America, or want to live in.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Labor Battles Heat Up In Florida Against Gov. Rick Scott
The GOP war on the middle class has reached a critical stage, where even republicans are beginning to see direct harm from the GOP agenda.
As more people realize that driving down working class wages is part of the GOP plan for job-creation, they will also realize that the GOP is attacking the financial resources of the vast majority of consumers – and attacking them from all sides. This will cripple 70% of the economy and kill millions of jobs. Republicans never have been very good at creating jobs.
As we can no longer borrow enough money to bail out conservative failures, this will lead to far more than defaulting on our debts and driving the world into another depression.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
“Moreover, fiscal consolidation programs that decrease the number and compensation of government workers increase the availability and reduce the cost of skilled labor to private firms. The combination of improved expectations about taxes and lower labor costs increases the expected after-tax rate of return on new business investment in non-residential fixed assets in the short term.” (page7)
http://www.speaker.gov/UploadedFiles/JEC_Jobs_Study.pdf
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- Republican Governor Rick Scott joins War on Teachers (dailykos.com)
U.S. Wages Aren’t Keeping Up With U.S. Productivity, EPI Says
This is pretty clear evidence that America is not the “meritocracy” that conservatives claim. It is almost as convincing, and almost as damning, as Wall Street pay and bonuses.
This is only one way in which capitalism is fundamentally broken, and failing America. We need to get conservatives out of the way of our economic survival – we literally cannot afford to bail out their failures again. Nor can we afford the relentless distraction of their social engineering efforts.
“It is not evidence that capitalism is broken. It is evidence productivity can rise faster than wages.
So what.”
So what?
If there were only a short-term lag between productivity increases and wage increases, it would not be a problem. Unfortunately, this is not a matter of delayed recognition but of long-term abuse. Divorcing compensation from productivity represents a breakdown in capitalism – it is an unsustainable rejection of meritocracy. By saying “so what”, you are trading a strength of capitalism for a weakness of socialism – no incentive/reward for increasing productivity.
Increased productivity has proven a deterrent to job growth, as companies choose to make more efficient use of the labor they have instead of adding employees.
Furthermore, 70% of the economy is consumer-driven. Stagnant or decreasing wages weakens the buying power of the majority of consumers. It is a trend that, if unchecked, can only end in economic failure.
What some call “legacy costs” is also known as “deferred compensation.” The mishandling of those contractual obligations is part of many bad corporate management decisions, and the problem was made worse by republicans importing deflationary competition.
Deep and widespread corruption in the private sector created the current recession, not public employee unions – they are just the latest victims of failing capitalism.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
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- EPI on Lagging Wages, Rising Productivity. (rortybomb.wordpress.com)
NASDAQ Nears Highest Level In A Decade
“The Nasdaq finished within 25 points of its highest level in a decade”
Much like the unemployment rate. Does anyone else see a disconnect here?
“Today, tech is hot again. Facebook – which hasn’t even gone public yet – is worth some $50 billion. Online content company Demand Media rose 33 percent on the day of its initial public offering last month.”
These are advertising-driven revenues. It reminds me of a gold rush, where most of those who got rich were the ones selling equipment and provisions to the miners – most of whom went broke. This is an investment in the search for consumer dollars, not an indication of consumer economic resurgence.
“Companies put off upgrading their computer systems and other large purchases during the worst days of the recession, and are making up for that now. Others are investing in new technology before they add employees.”
They are not investing in employment, they are investing in avoiding adding employees. This is not a healthy sign for the economy.
Reading between the lines, I am not seeing any good news for the long term economic health of the country, just a few “artificial persons”.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
The Madison Protests: It’s Not About the Money
Over the past few years, I have likened the ideological divide to a political civil war. The Democrats still embrace the Federalist view of government while the republicans now embrace the anti-Federalist perspective.
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
James Madison, Federalist 47
I am hoping that in this attack on the working class, people see the republicans as going a bridge too far. That this turns into a Ft. Sumter moment for working America.
The country cannot function with this much conservative extremism and hostility. The checks and balances have all broken down. The country is in decline. The political conversation has become all about picking sides and bundled agendas. We are facing a Constitutional crisis.
We need a major event. Something to rally around. Something that can push us past the propaganda. Something that can be used to make us take a serious look at ourselves and our future.
9/11 involved an external threat. It was irrelevant to a constitutional crisis.
We have two diverging interpretations of the Constitution. The liberal view is a more principled interpretation, which has benefited the general welfare of the country far better but still needs better definition of it’s limitations. The conservative view is a more literal interpretation, which is more appropriate to a sparsely populated isolationist society with an agrarian economy. Conservative policies have done real harm to this country for decades, and threaten to make our current problems insurmountable.
We need an event that will lead to something like a town hall constitutional convention. A widespread and in-depth public conversation on what we want and need the Constitution to mean. Only then can we decide with confidence how we want to enforce or amend it.
Ignoring the Constitution, or pretending it says something it does not, are not options in a nation of laws.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
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Scott Walker, Wisconsin GOP Poised To Start Economic Border Wars
Wisconsin State Capital
“He’s also signed into law tax cuts for businesses that relocate to Wisconsin”
“The competitions of commerce would be another fruitful source of contention. The States less favorably circumstanced would be desirous of escaping from the disadvantages of local situation, and of sharing in the advantages of their more fortunate neighbors. Each State, or separate confederacy, would pursue a system of commercial policy peculiar to itself. This would occasion distinctions, preferences, and exclusions, which would beget discontent. The habits of intercourse, on the basis of equal privileges, to which we have been accustomed since the earliest settlement of the country, would give a keener edge to those causes of discontent than they would naturally have independent of this circumstance. WE SHOULD BE READY TO DENOMINATE INJURIES THOSE THINGS WHICH WERE IN REALITY THE JUSTIFIABLE ACTS OF INDEPENDENT SOVEREIGNTIES CONSULTING A DISTINCT INTEREST. The spirit of enterprise, which characterizes the commercial part of America, has left no occasion of displaying itself unimproved. It is not at all probable that this unbridled spirit would pay much respect to those regulations of trade by which particular States might endeavor to secure exclusive benefits to their own citizens. The infractions of these regulations, on one side, the efforts to prevent and repel them, on the other, would naturally lead to outrages, and these to reprisals and wars.”
Federalist 7
The Founders understood the dangers of pitting one state against another. A lesson the republicans have failed to learn.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
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Save the American Dream
