Republican Freeloaders

This week Boehner has been raising campaign money from wealthy backers on the links at super-posh Muirfield Village Country Club in the hope of keeping the GOP in control of the House. One of the perks is a golf ball the classy drunken Speaker, according to Politico, gave out to his cronies-- a golf ball with Nancy Pelosi's face on it. Meanwhile Wall Street's boy in Wisconsin, Paul Ryan, is urgently asking rightists to send him money so he can advertise... in Iowa. Ryan doesn't exactly need grassroots contributions since he's taken $2,416,997 in legalistic bribes from the Financial Sector, far more than any other politician in the history of Wisconsin. Ryan and Boehner have been desperately running around to every open mike either can find to insist that the S&P downgrade they forced the country into-- and which was cheered by their teabagger followers (and which resulted in the current stock market crash)-- wasn't their fault; it was Obama's fault! If Obama can be faulted in any way, it was for having too much patience with their nihilism, treason and willful, obvious agenda to destroy the American economy in the name of the 2012 campaign.

Ever since the credit rating agency S&P downgraded U.S. credit to AA+ on Friday night, Republicans have desperately trying to pin the blame on President Obama, even though, as National Journal put it, “it’s hard to read the S&P analysis as anything other than a blast at Republicans.” S&P called out the GOP for using the debt ceiling as a political football and for its flat refusal to consider new revenue as part of any plan to reduce long-term deficits.



Earlier this week Rep. Allen West (R-FL) claimed that the S&P downgrade “has nothing to do with increasing revenues,” while some Republicans have said that passing a Balanced Budget Amendment would have prevented the downgrade, both of which S&P disagreed with. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) yesterday jumped into the same pool, saying that the downgrade could have been avoided if only Democrats had embraced the House Republican budget and its plan to eliminate Medicare:



House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) blamed President Obama and the Democrats Tuesday for the recent downgrading of the U.S. credit rating, saying that if Democrats had joined with Republicans in passing the GOP budget, which the House passed in April, “it’s unlikely anyone would be talking about the United States being downgraded today.”

Both Boehner's and Ryan's states' citizens pay about the same in federal taxes as comes back to them from the federal government in terms of services and infrastructure. Yet both lead the Republican squawkbox against federal taxes that basically subsidize the freeloader Republican states, especially Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona, West Virginia, the Dakotas, Louisiana, Alaska, and South Carolina. The state's the give far more than they get in return include Minnesota, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware... all blue states. PoliticalProf, who lives in Illinois, wants his money back:

Most people don’t understand that the federal government doesn’t really take taxes to put in a gilded room in DC to buy teak desks for Senators. Rather, much of the federal government’s operations are a pass through program, meaning taxes taken today are sent out to program beneficiaries today. Both Social Security and Medicare work this way, for example-- and that’s over 40% of the US budget.



As it happens, it is usually the case that the citizens living in a state do not receive the same amount in total benefits and other federal spending as they contribute. The citizens of some states—the ones in various shades of green in this map-- pay more in taxes than they receive. The ones in red receive more federal tax money than its citizens pay.



While the pattern is not perfect, a few things stand out here. First, many “conservative” states are in fact net tax recipients-- e.g., they get more than they pay. Many such states have lots of poverty, farms, military bases and retired persons, and such persons and programs get lots of federal tax support.



Another thing that stands out here is that, in general, the “rich”-- or net tax contributing-- states are those with the United States’ major cities: NY, California, Illinois, Texas, Georgia, etc. (The latter two are exceptions to the “conservative = welfare states point I made above.)

UPDATE



Turns out Boehner wasn't the one handing out the Nancy Pelosi golf balls. Politico reported the story wrong; it was some other right wing idiot.

Job Creation-- Or Another Opportunity To Give Our Tax Dollars To Wall Street Fascists Again?

Yesterday Politico published a scorching OpEd by neo-liberal economist Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs isn't a one-dimensional drooling right-wing ideologue and, although his overall theme is anti-Keynsian claptrap, there is plenty in what he says that can't be denied.

Almost the entire country seems to agree that the debt deal is miserable. Yet the shouting does little to clear up what is really wrong with the deal and with the U.S. economy. Democrats blame Republicans, and Republicans blame Democrats. But both parties are partners in America’s decline.

We need a new direction in the country, and that requires taking on the powerful interests represented by both political parties.

President Barack Obama has failed to lead the country out of crisis. This is not just because of right-wing opposition, but also because Obama has promoted the wrong ideas. He came to office following the end of a Wall-Street-fueled consumption binge that had started during the Clinton administration and collapsed in 2008.

...Obama surrounded himself with the Wall Street types who had deregulated the financial sector and thereby created the bubble economy under President Bill Clinton – Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Gene Sperling and many others.

What kind of economic policy can one expect when nearly every senior administration official on the economic team is tied to Wall Street? The answer is predictable: One that is unfair, shortsighted and loaded with gimmicks. Yet in our exhausted, post-binge economy, the gimmicks don’t even create a blip in jobs and growth, much less a sustained recovery.

...The Republican opposition is, of course, far nastier and its economics are even worse. The GOP holds that there is one and only one answer to every problem: lower taxes on the rich.

In the Republican ideology, the super-rich are the job-creators and therefore deserve all the money we can shove their way, even as tens of millions of Americans struggle to make ends meet. There is also the idea that the poor are unworthy-- for example, an illegal minority migrant household.

The Republicans forever prey on a divide-and-conquer mentality, which is indeed leaving our country divided and conquered by hate and fear.

Sachs may be feted as a great thinker of the 21st Century but Matt Taibbi is a far keener analyst of real life politics and how it interacts with real life economics. There's probably a lot they agree on but Taibbi's work is more informative, more practical and better suited to a non-academic real world. His latest column in Rolling Stone takes on the dreaded corporate tax holiday concept still being pushed-- vigorously-- by neo-liberal freaks on Wall Street and K Street and in the offices of Republicans and Blue Dogs. In fact corporate whores Kevin Brady (R-TX) and Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT) are co-sponsoring a bill, the Freedom to Invest Act, which would “temporarily” lower the effective corporate tax rate to 5.25 percent for all profits being repatriated to America from overseas profits.

Essentially, this is a one-time tax holiday rewarding companies for systematically offshoring their profits since 2004-- the last time they did this “one-time” deal.

The Brady bill is still alive and in speaking to three different Hill staffers (on the House side) over the last few days, I’m hearing that it was “unaffected” by the debt deal and that it continues to gain momentum, thanks in large part to a lobbying effort that two different staffers described as intense and ongoing.

For people interested in this story, I definitely recommend reading this Bloomberg article focusing on Cisco, one of the biggest lobbyers in favor of the tax holiday. This is a company whose CEO, John Chambers, wrote an editorial last October in the Wall Street Journal predicting that the tax holiday would generate a trillion dollars in repatriated earnings, money that Chambers insisted would outdo even Barack Obama’s stimulus as a job-creation engine:

"The amount of corporate cash that would come flooding into the country could be larger than the entire federal stimulus package, and it could be used for creating jobs, investing in research, building plants, purchasing equipment, and other uses."

And yet: Chambers’s company, Cisco, would not commit to creating so much as a single job if the tax holiday is passed. As it is, the company has already committed to a wave of layoffs. When asked a question about Cisco's plans w/regard to a potential tax holiday, the company’s spokesman, John Earhardt, declined to answer. From the Bloomberg piece:

"It’s unclear whether any jobs would come from Cisco, which announced plans in May to shed an unspecified number of workers. Earnhardt, the spokesman, declined to comment on hiring plans for the company, whose customers include Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) and AT&T Inc. (T)

Matt with Olbermann this week:

Tax Breaks For Treason-- Big Ones

Farish II wasn't shot for treason, nor was Prescott Bush... and the spawn of both have gone on, together, fighting for fascism

During World War II corporate America wasn't sure if it wanted to take sides. Most of the ruling families were fascists and had long backed Hitler and Mussolini. And they loathed Roosevelt and loathed democracy. Many of them-- let's take Big Oil-- continued selling oil to the Nazis after the U.S. entered the war. None of the big names in American industry-- Mellons, DuPonts, Rockefellers, Morgans, Bushs, et all-- were ever punished for aiding and abetting while American soldiers were dying on the battlefields.

Sunday Digby reminded us that the American ruling class-- and not just the Republicans-- are up to no good again.

Republicans are not only looking to cut the corporate tax rate, but they have been pushing to open a permanent tax loophole by switching to what’s known as a “territorial” corporate tax system, which would mean that corporations could permanently park money offshore and never pay taxes on it. The Republicans have also endorsed a misguided push to give corporations a tax windfall worth tens of billions of dollars through a tax repatriation holiday.

It reminded me that I buried an important bit of information in a long and convoluted post ostensibly about Ratko Mladic on Saturday. It wasn't really about Mdadic. And the quote, from Glen Yeadon's Nazi Hydra in America was set in the context of corporate collaboration with fascism and the Republican Party's flirtation with the Nazis. Remember, no one was punished. Here's the key quote you need to keep in mind while debate rages about how much more to give these corporations in tax loopholes and giveaways:

On March 26, 1942, Senator Truman accused Standard Oil of treason. Standard had delivered the new tetraethyl lead gas additive to both Germany and Japan. Standard was the major supplier of oil to both the Nazis and Japan. In his appearance before the Senate committee, [William Stamps] Farish II, the president of Standard, was asked if Standard had delivered the oil to Japan that made the attack on Pearl Harbor possible. He answered that Standard Oil was an international company.

His grandson and great-grandson, also heirs to the rabidly fascist DuPont dynasty, went on continue working with the rabidly fascist Bush family. William Stamps Farish III (pictured above) is widely considered the worst and least effective U.S. Ambassador to Britain in history. The family continues to finance the Republican Party and other extreme right-wing groups to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire!

If you've been following our posts riffing off Glen Yeadon's The Nazi Hydra in America, you may have gotten the idea that I think every millionaire in the country should have been lined up against a wall and shot. That would be the wrong idea. I certainly feel economic predators and corporate Nazi collaborators should have been brought to justice and I have been outspoken about far too many millionaires-- with their unique perspective and interests-- in Congress and the media. But there are plenty of worthy, patriotic millionaires... as evidenced in the short clip above, marking today's 10 anniversary of the Bush tax cuts.

Their message-- "rich people are not the cause of a robust economy; they're the result of a robust economy"-- was very different from Tim Pawlenty's ballyhooed big economic speech that came out at the same time. Pawlenty thinks his path to the Republican vice-presidential nomination is by calling for draconian changes if not an end to Social Security and Medicare. In short, Pawlenty, like all the Republicans, is demanding

• A massive new tax cut for the wealthy

• A massive tax cut (more than 50% reduction in the rate) for corporations-- including Big Oil (He's also called the idea of ending subsidies "ludicrous")

• The elimination of the estate tax and taxes on capital gains and dividend income

• A balanced budget amendment and spending cap at 18% of GDP-- translation: severe cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and everything else except the Military-Industrial Complex

In his not-ready for prime time speech, Pawlenty said "There are some obvious targets to cut. We can start by applying what I call 'the Google test.' If you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn't need to offer the same good or service. Eddie Vale of Protect Your Care scratched his head in wonder.

I can Google ‘seniors’ and ‘health care’ does that mean Pawlenty would completely end Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security? I can Google ‘veterans’ and ‘hospital’ does that mean Pawlenty would dismantle the VA system? I can Google ‘pharmacy’ does that mean no senior citizen or child would ever get assistance with their medicines from Pawlenty? These may seem like idiotically stupid questions, but, are necessary since Pawlenty is going to give a speech to demonstrate his qualifications to be leader of the free world by basing his policy agenda off what he can find on the internet.

“It’s also pretty sad and pathetic how quickly the regular blue collar guy veneer has fallen off as he rushes to cry crocodile tears over class warfare while taking away health care from seniors and kids to pay for tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires and big oil.

Author and labor attorney Jonathan Tasini marked the anniversary of the Bush tax cuts for millionaires by asking what we've learned from their utter failure to create jobs or improve the economy. Not much.

We seem to learn very little. Or, perhaps, it's better to say that our elected representatives seem to learn very little-- partly, albeit, because of the corruption of the electoral process that seems to force even those who have half a brain to automatically spew out the words "tax cuts" along with "economic recovery," "government regulations" and "small business" as if there was even a connection between any of those phrases to building a health economy.

Example: in 2009, the president proposed, and the Congress passed, a stimulus bill that was supposed to drag the economy out of the crisis sparked by the financial crimes on Wall Street. The problem: the stimulus was too small-- $787 billion-- and a third of the bill was...tax cuts!!! The most inefficient way to create jobs. And, IMHO, it's the reasons the stimulus did not have the impact it could have had.

So, now, the president and Democrats are caught in a real pickle: they face a disastrous jobs picture but they seem reluctant to push for new government stimulus because they feel on the defensive defending the 2009 "failed" stimulus. Well, that's what you get for believing in tax cuts as some economic miracle-producer ("failed" is in quotes because actually if you ask governors and mayors about the stimulus you would find a lot of them grateful for the hundreds of thousands of jobs that were saved thanks to the stimulus).

And we don't learn.

People run around wanting to cut taxes for "small businesses" and eliminate the estate tax--even though this is just a cover that, "would allow the rich to continue to enjoy most of the tax cuts they received under President Bush while doing nothing to create or protect jobs."

The "compromise" tax deal in 2010 tilted to the wealthy.

Then, there is the truly dumb idea of giving corporations yet another tax break by letting them bring back profits stashed overseas virtually for free.

And wrapped around all this craziness is the entire phony debate about a debt and deficit "crisis"--phony because the only crisis that exists is the lack of jobs in the country, a crisis brought on by a massive robbery of our nation's wealth, in large part, due to the obsession over giving ever-larger tax cuts to people who do not deserve to get them (and a decision by many of those same people to pay themselves obscene CEO salaries).

It goes on and on and on. A robbery that has gone on for thirty years shows no sign of abating.

Thirty years? Why leave out the 1920s and '30s, the years the last 30 were based on? They were the Big Business heyday hacks like Pawlenty and Romney want to get us back to.