Millionaire Mitt Romney’s tax plan for the one percent / himself: topics for a quiet room

FIVE shocking things you may not know about Mitt’s tax plan… Shocking, of course, because the mainstream media doesn’t actually report on facts like this. It’s not like they’re the truth vigilantes. Both sides do it!!

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French-speaking multi-millionaire who won’t release his tax returns compares Obama to Marie Antoinette

On Thursday, the Romneybot 2012 charged President Obama with being insensitive for discussing facts:

“When the president’s characterization of our economy was, ‘It could be worse,’ it reminded me of Marie Antoinette: ‘Let them eat cake,’” said Romney.

[…] “It is actually laughable that the ‘Quarter-Billion-Dollar Man’ would call President Obama out of touch — and use the example of a French monarch to make the point,” DNC spokeswoman Melanie Roussell said in a statement to The Huffington Post on Thursday evening. “This is the same guy who joked that he was ‘unemployed,’ offered a $10,000 bet as casually as one might buy a cup of coffee, and said ‘corporations are people.’ He’s also the same person who, as a former corporate buyout specialist for Bain Capital, made his fortune firing thousands of workers, cutting benefits, bankrupting American companies and outsourcing jobs overseas. He’s the one who won’t release his tax returns — most likely because we would all learn that he pays a lower tax rate than middle class wage-earners. Laughable.”

Tightening the screws a bit, Obama campaign Press Secretary Ben LaBolt quickly followed suit, tweeting out a link to a video of Mitt Romney speaking French for an introduction of the volunteers at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Obviously, the Romneybot has been programmed for self-parody. bleep! blork! blah blah…

image: godlessliberals.com

Meanwhile in the Grand Ol’ Teaparty

WHAT DOES A PIPELINE have to do with extending a payroll tax cut for the working and middle class? (Answer: Not a friggin’ thing.) — Rawstory

“If that bill comes over to us, we will make changes to it, and I will guarantee you that the Keystone pipeline will be in there when it goes back to the United States Senate.” — John Boehner, last night

THE EMPLOYMENT NUMBERS ON THAT PIPELINE are being greatly exaggerated: it’ll create 20,000 jobs? No. More like 3,500 temporary jobs, offset by job losses because of the increase in gas prices that it would cause. — Politico

ONLY A TEAPARTY PATRIOT (read: idiotic moron) would take a gun into LaGuardia Airport. — CBS News

CHRISTMAS IN AMERICA! Congress cuts winter heating aid for the poor while boosting the defense budget. — Think Progress

AND WHO BETTER TO SIGN A “MARRIAGE PLEDGE” than Newt “the Ging” Gingrich? — NRO

Did you know one major factor in Rick Perry’s ‘Texas Miracle’ was government jobs?

Jared Bernstein has a little fun with Perry’s declaration that as president he’d make Washington “as inconsequential in your lives as I can.”

Over the last few years, government jobs have been awfully consequential in Texas: 47% of all government jobs added in the US between 2007 and 2010 were added in Texas.

The chart shows that Texas employment wasn’t down much at all in these years, as the state lost only 53,000 jobs. But looming behind that number are large losses in the private sector (down 178,000) and large gains (up 125,000) in government jobs.

Source: BLS

Now, this was a period when the nation lost close to eight million jobs, so this churning in Texas is a very small drop in that bucket. But it sure doesn’t match the Governor’s anti-government rhetoric.

In fact, as the table below shows, the nation as a whole added 264,000 government jobs, 2007-10, meaning public-sector jobs added in Texas account for almost half of the nation’s public-sector jobs over these years.

Read the rest…

Here is irony: the miracle of public sector jobs making an anti-government guy who wants to be president look good. Also too: why didn’t wealthy and corporate Texans with all the tax breaks create more private sector jobs in the past 10 years? Could larger government actually be the solution for our nation’s troubles?

Artist – David Fitzsimmons via BobCesca

The true leader of the teaparty Republican Congress approved Boehner’s debt-ceiling plan yesterday

Boehner had to get the approval of the GOP’s real (but unelected) leader before he moved forward with his debt-ceiling plan. And who better to guide Boehner on cutting safety net programs and services to the poor and middle-class while extending tax cuts, tax loopholes, and tax subsidies for the rich and powerful than Rush Limbaugh?

Boehner briefed Limbaugh on debt plan:

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) outlined the GOP’s debt-ceiling plan to conservative commentator [entertainer] Rush Limbaugh on Monday before showing it to his conference.

The conservative radio host said Boehner outlined his two-step plan that includes $1.2 trillion in spending cuts and a $1 trillion hike in the debt ceiling. In the second step, a commission would be appointed to come back with additional deficit-reduction proposals, which the Congress could then vote on.

I can’t imagine what would happen if Pelosi or Reid had to run a plan for some legislation by a liberal media person / entertainer — the Right would kick and scream all over cable news. But I have to say that I’m glad I can’t image Democratic leaders doing that anyway, because IT’S ABSURD!

I guess the teaparty and Republican congress take Rush’s tagline literally: “talent on loan from God.” For anyone who doesn’t know it — Rush made that up, okay? His “talent” (which we could argue about for a week) comes straight from an ego the size of his waistline and consists of “scar[ing] white men as they get in their trucks at lunchtime.”

The incredible shrinking income of the American worker

Except for the Clinton years, we’ve been on a straight downward trajectory since 1980.

Incredible Shrinking Workers’ Income — David Frum:

Workers’ share of U.S, national income is collapsing.

Two questions for the Republican presidential candidates:

1) Is this a problem?

2) If yes, what can be done about it?

The Republican candidates will never be asked these questions. If they were, their answer to #2 would likely involve either extending tax cuts for the wealthy and more deregulation (because look how well it’s worked so far!) or passing federal laws against gay marriage and abortion.

The wealthy are gobbling up more of the national income, and the Republican Party wants to protect them from having to pay higher taxes on any of it.

“Cut, Cap, Balance — and cause 700,000 Americans to lose their jobs — Act”

Oh, Republicans… you so crazy!

The “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act” would require cuts totaling $111 billion immediately, in the fiscal year that starts 75 days from now, despite a 9.2 percent unemployment rate. These cuts would equal 0.7 percent of the projected Gross Domestic Product in fiscal year 2012 and would thus cause the loss of roughly 700,000 jobs in the current weak economy, relative to what the number of jobs otherwise would be.

Brian Beutler explains that it’s the wingnuts at Club for Growth pushing this current insanity:

“Cut, Cap, and Balance will fix our fiscal mess. The McConnell-Reid plan does not,” said Club for Growth President Chris Chocola in a statement accompanying an alert that these votes will be counted on the group’s scorecard. “McConnell-Reid simply punts our budget problem further down the road and is everything that’s wrong with Washington. Congress has proven that they are unable to balance the budget without reform. Cut, Cap and Balance is the only plan that permanently handcuffs politicians from spending more money than they take in.”

If you’re a Republican, voting for Plan B means you’re that much likelier to face a primary. By holding the test votes on Cut, Cap, and Balance, and the Balanced Budget Amendment, they can at least meet the Club for Growth, and similar groups half way.

They’ll hold the symbolic vote tomorrow. Republican politics over country — you can always count on that.

Poll: 71% unhappy with Republian Party’s handling of debt crisis (but 21% approve!)

via Charles Johnson:

According to a new CBS News poll, the American public doesn’t like the way any of our politicians are handling the debt crisis — but they’re especially, overwhelmingly unhappy with the Republican Party: Poll: 71% shun GOP handling of debt crisis.

And especially weird is that 21% say they APPROVE of the Republican Party’s handling of the debt crisis.

Who are these people who approve? Let’s try to guess:

18% — Teapartyers (18% self-identify as the Tea Party nationally)
2% — the wealthy
1% — space aliens, nursing home residents, spouses or mothers of GOP congress members, men who want to propose marriage to Casey Anthony, Hamsher fans, all of Glenn Beck’s personalities, Marcus Bachmann’s degayed clients, the residents of Grapevine TX, McCain’s houses, al Qaeda, the household staffs of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh (under duress), Palin’s kids, Ron Paul supporters, Sergeant Raymond Shaw, and PUMAs.

Who have I missed?

GOP divided: Team Boehner vs Team Cantor

Let the conservative in-fighting begin! Spending cuts plus ending tax cuts for the wealthy, or just spending cuts with no new revenue (and sparing the rich any more hardship than they’re already had to suffer, what with all the criticism lately):

On one side are the long-time Republican House members who see the president’s current deal, which gives them 80 percent of what they want, as a win that they should take and go home happy. On the other side are newer House members, including freshmen representatives of the Tea Party, for whom the closure of tax loopholes and other revenue generating measures are anathema, who believe that to compromise would be worse than letting the deal (and by extension, the world economy) go down in flames.

It’s unfortunate that the Teaparty Freshmen think all they have to do is not negotiate and not compromise on anything, and BOOM: mission accomplished — not doing “business as usual.” But for everyone outside the teaparty, this non-activity is understood to mean not doing “shit.”

Good luck on getting re-elected based on NOT doing America’s business while wandering the halls of Congress, chewing the fat around the water cooler, and drawing a full paycheck and benefits from the American taxpayer. The freshmen congressmen should know we’re all aware that they’re doggin it.

Related:

Attn teabaggers: here’s what happens if the debt ceiling is not raised

Eric Cantor: “I want what I want when I want it” (quote from his high school year book)

Eric Cantor isn’t really a “boogeyman” as much as a generally shitty person who plays games with people’s lives because he can. Little Lord Cantoroy…

“House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has shown he shouldn’t be at the table and Republicans agree he shouldn’t be at the table,” Mr. Reid said. “He has walked out on the meetings with the vice president of the United States,” he said, adding, “It was childish.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, denounced Mr. Cantor from the floor of the Senate on Wednesday, accusing him — among other things — of supporting a plan for Medicare that is “not balanced, it’s not fair, it’s not moral.”

Mr. Schumer’s communications team also trumpeted quotes from Mr. Cantor’s high school yearbook: “I want what I want when I want it.” And the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is charged with electing more Democrats to the House, dug up an old nickname for Mr. Cantor during his time as a state senator in Virginia.

“True to his roots, he got the nickname ‘Overdog’ for his unflinching support of big corporations and the wealthy at the expense of the middle class,” the Democratic group said in an e-mail to reporters on Wednesday.

Overdog! The guy’s been one of those elitist douchebags with the popped collars since childhood, and working-class teaparty voters actually think he represents them.

[Cantor high school image: elmorse]

The income gap, illustrated.

Related:

image: via

Let’s all drink to the inspiring job the Republican party is doing so far with our debt ceiling

…and with our country’s future. Here’s to you, Republicans!

Related:

newshour:

Smacking Into the Debt Ceiling: the Day-by-Day Consequences

“Remember when the United States was so politically paralyzed that it risked its credit rating and international credibility by refusing to hike the debt ceiling?”

Interactive graphics by Justin Myers based on data from the Bipartisan Policy Center. Paul Solman shares more of his thoughts- and more infographics that break it all down- here

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“The president and I do not agree on his view that the government needs more revenues through taxes on job creators.” —- John Boehner, July 11, 2011

The growing income gap, stalled economic growth, and financial deregulation

“The idea that people make the same or less today than they made 40 years ago is a stunning historical fact.” — Author Jeff Madrick

NPR: As income gap balloons, is it holding back growth?

“This inequality is destabilizing and undermines the ability of the economy to grow sustainably and efficiently,” [Fed governor Sarah Bloom Raskin] said. Income inequality, she continued, is “anathema to the social progress that is part and parcel of such growth.”

The income gap in the United States has ballooned: It’s wider than any time since 1928, in the days before the stock market crash triggered the Great Depression.

[…] “In the 1970s, there was an assault on government oversight and regulation,” Madrick tells Raz. “And eventually, the financial community stopped playing by the rules. There was an economic theory that kept justifying what they were doing. And the American public was not fully aware of what was going on.”

The traditional argument for deregulation states that those policies make America richer, and that a rising tide lifts all boats.

But Madrick says that for the typical American worker, the wage tide has gone out since 1969.

“The typical male worker makes less today, discounted for inflation, than the typical median worker made in 1969,” says Madrick. “The idea that people make the same or less today than they made 40 years ago is a stunning historical fact.”

[…] “[Bank failures] peak up in crisis years. They peak in the 1920s,” [David Moss, a professor of economics at Harvard Business School] tells Raz. “But then most striking, after 1933, when we saw the introduction of federal banking and financial regulation, these banking crises disappear almost completely. And then it continues very, very low until the 1980s, then they pick back up again.”

Moss found it striking that banking failures go down after financial regulation and start rising after the introduction of deregulation.

Then, one of Moss’ colleagues showed him a chart of income inequality over the same period. Moss took that curve and plotted it on the same page as his bank failure curve.

“And lo and behold, it was a striking, striking connection,” Moss says.

As bank failures went up in the 1920s, so did income inequality. As inequality came down in the 1930s, bank failures stayed down. They stayed down together until the advent of deregulation in the 1980s.

For Moss, this coincidence raises more questions than it provides answers. He isn’t sure what exactly the correlation between income inequality and financial failure means.

Read the rest…

So there’s an historical correlation that financial regulation might be one of the best things that could happen for creating economic growth and closing the income gap? Maybe that’s because government regulation and oversight actually keeps financial institutions more honest and accountable than fictional concepts, such as some “invisible hand” guiding everything or Reagan’s “trickle down” fallacy. Maybe it also helps ensure that individuals in financial institutions won’t gamble away everyone else’s money on things like sub-prime mortgage loans while they walk away with their own fortunes intact.

And I’m not even bringing up the 10.5 years of tax breaks for the ~~job creators~~ wealthy here, or that the wealthy compounded their fortunes during a time of economic loss for everyone else. They work harder than us, right?

It’s almost TOO SIMPLE. That must be why the Tea Party base sides with millionaires like the Koch brothers to protest “big” government and regulation and expiring Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. Because they’re morans.

: The gap in income between the wealthiest Americans and all others has grown strikingly in recent decades, the CBO data show. In 1979, when the data begin, the average after-tax incomes of the top 1 percent of households were 7.9 times higher than those of the middle fifth of households. By 2007, top incomes were 23.9 times higher than those of the middle fifth — a more than tripling of the income gap.

@liberalchik

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“Oh, I’m sorry — did I say rich? I meant “job creators“… when did the business community become so sensitive that we have to treat them like some kind of rare, exotic animal? Don’t startle them or they’ll fly away! We need to soothe them so they can nest here and lay their magic eggs full of jobs, WHICH NEVER HATCH, by the way.” — Bill Maher

We can all agree that they’ve banked enough tax cuts in the past decade to create many, many jobs. Hilarious how the GOP is trying to convince us that the wealthy are now ‘job creators’ and we shouldn’t raise taxes on the job creators.

We shouldn’t have to bribe the rich with tax cuts to create jobs. If businesses and corporations had lots of customers (you know, people with good, steady jobs and a little extra cash), there would be plenty of jobs and a thriving economy. Isn’t it weird how things slow down when the wealthy bank all their extra cash, ship American jobs overseas, and either stagnate everyone wages or bust unions so they can pay minimum wage with no benefits? You’d think there was some kind of cause and effect going on here.

The GOP would like us all to believe the wealthy might create jobs. Maybe. Someday.