Alright you curmudgeonly shrew, let’s do that thing I do.
The wrong economic debate
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tuesday, April 5, 10:56 AM
There’s a janitor who lives in a studio apartment just outside of Stevens Point , Wis.
Sweet. If there’s a down-home girl with fading looks or an up-town debutante looking for excitement on the other side of the tracks, this is pretty much a Springsteen song.
Or Billy Joel.
Or something equally awesome.
He cleans the math and science buildings at a state university,
So you’re saying he’s a state employee. In Wisconsin Milwaukee
Also, blue collar Springsteen-style heroes don’t clean schools. They either clean in downtrodden manufacturing plants or gritty bars where bikers puke in the pee-trough. This shit is worse than Secret Garden
a job he’s been doing for about 18 months, after a year of unemployment. He’s 43 and last year made $24,622.
Fuck that’s pathetic. That guy would make more on unemployment, which, for the record, he would’ve qualified for throughout about 12 of those terrible months he spent cleaning the University.
He doesn’t have kids, so he doesn’t qualify for a child-care tax credit.
Whew. Thank God this world-beater didn’t procreate.
He doesn’t own a home
But I’m guessing the dude owns a kegerator. (Why can’t I contribute to the hypothetical janitor’s backstory?)
or a hybrid car — those credits don’t apply to him, either.
In my head, the guy drives the same beat-up Trans Am he did in high school. Except now the passenger side door is made of cardboard.
He hasn’t been enrolled in school since the 10th grade, so he definitely doesn’t qualify for any education credits or deductions.
FINE. He drives the same beat-up Trans Am he did when he should have been in high school. Does that help alleviate the dissonance of the cross-narration?
Oh, the passenger door is still made of cardboard.
He just learned that Gov. Scott Walker’s new budget has slashed his benefits
That sneaky wench! I knew she chose Wisconsin
and that next year he’ll be bringing in about 16 percent less per month.
Sounds like this guy is really regretting having actively avoided developing a marketable skill set his entire life.
Also, I’m not sure that math squares, but I’ll let it slide.
And when he sits down to do his taxes next week, he’ll find that he paid the federal government around $1,400 in 2010
Seriously? This dude might as well pay in pocket lint. That’s 5.7%.
About a thousand miles to the east, in Fairfield , Conn.
Aw sweet! This story is a trans-class love affair!
General Electric, one of the world’s largest multinational corporations, posted a $14.2 billion profit for 2010.
Woot! I just imagined that I fist-bumped a symbolic representation of GE. And that symbolic representation just happened to be a squirrel named Reggie. The fist-bumping logistics with a timid rodent were indeed tricky, but I pulled the complex meneuver off like a champ. (Natch.)
When its accountants were finished working their magic, the company didn’t owe a single dollar in federal taxes.
That squirrel deserves another fist-bump.
“People can think what they think,” said Jeff Immelt, GE’s chief executive, in response to a growing anger to this story, first reported last week by the New York Times.
Yeah! Fuck ‘em. It’s not like you have any political responsibilities or anything gay like that…http://www.biztimes.com/daily/2009/2/6/obama-appoints-immelt-to-economic-recovery-advisory-board…Oh. ….Shit.
What else is there to think, one wonders, but that with the muscle and money of lobbyists and lawyers, with the access and influence built over generations, GE has done not just the audacious but the outrageous. And it is not alone.
So you’re saying that GE has good accountants and tax lawyers? Get right out of town!
Exxon Mobil, for example, made $19 billion in profits in 2009 but paid no federal income taxes. In fact, it received a $156 million rebate from the IRS. Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, even though it made $4.4 billion in profits and was handed a nearly $1 trillion bailout by taxpayers. The list, inconceivably, goes on.
Literally all of those examples were primarily the result of tax-loss carry-forwards, which is another way of saying “shut the fuck up about things you don’t understand, you horse-faced trollop.”
That may have been a bit harsh.
And yet the conversation in Washington
Nothing riles a liberal up like raising taxes.
Still, I fundamentally agree, but not in a way that KvH would like. The tax code is long, convoluted, and arbitrary. The only thing more predictable in Washington
Within five years, the tax code is so convoluted that the IRS can’t figure it out, tax revenues are down, and fraud has ravaged the effectiveness of the poorly-conceived and even-more-poorly-implemented tax incentives. (That’s best-case. Worst-case scenarios generally involve the desertification of Iowa
It hasn’t turned toward ending the ridiculous tax breaks on corporate dividends and capital gains
It takes either gigantic stones or crippling ignorance to seriously advance a full-throated defense of the double-taxation of savings in the midst of an economic crisis caused by a deficiency in savings.
that allow hedge fund managers and the very wealthy to pay the government a lower percentage than their middle-class employees.
Wow. That was quite the jump. Blink and you’ll miss it. Apparently because some wealthy corporations have low income tax rates, wealthy individuals are somehow culpable. I was under the impressions that liberals despised the idea that corporations had the same rights as individuals when it came to political donations. (After all, that was literally the only issue of the Citizens United decision.)
But that’s just the beginning of this outright lie. The wealthy decidedly do not pay less in taxes—either by nominal value or by percentage—than the middle class.
And finally, the cherry on top: corporate taxes aren’t paid by corporations anyways. Producers raise prices to accommodate tax increases on sellers (depending, of course, on the price elasticity of demand and the price elasticity of supply for the market in question.) In effect, KvH is advocating that you should be stark-raving mad that you don’t get to pay a higher price for a washing machine.
Instead, Congress is debating whether $33 billion in cuts to the social safety net is enough to make the Tea Party happy.
It’s not.
While Republicans in the House have stopped talking nearly altogether about jobs
Well, Republicans have rightly calculated that it’s not worth the political capital to convince the American people that the unemployment figures are staggeringly misleading and, in many ways, intentionally deceptive. Instead, they’ll let the President get his good news out of the way before discouraged workers start flooding back into the labor market in the next few months.
Plus, the best job-stimulating activity they could engage in is cutting taxes. They just fought tooth and nail to keep the Bush tax cuts in place in December. After that, they can remove the obscene regulations around businesses and try to shut down the printing press to ease inflationary pressures. Finally, they can boost investor confidence by solidifying the budgetary situation and getting the country’s fiscal house in order.
Come to think of it, Republicans haven’t talked about anything other than jobs.
(and have embraced a budget that could cost the economy 700,000 of them, according to Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi),
As in Moody’s, the credit rating agency that keeps threatening to downgrade treasury securities because of the crippling debt that the Republican proposal seeks to fix? That Moodys?
the head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, someone charged with finding a way to sustained job growth, is none other than Jeff Immelt himself, tax evader in chief.
I’m pretty sure that this counts as an honest-to-God instance of libel. Tax evasion is a crime, after all, and there is scant evidence that Jeff Immelt did anything illegal. Tax avoidance is just good business practice.
Also, it’s intellectually dishonest. Immelt is finding plenty of jobs for accountants and tax lawyers alone, but high profitability is generally a good indicator that GE will start hiring for new positions. (I feel like I’m teaching the “slow” class when I have to explain things like that.)
This is a systemic problem that neither belongs to nor can be solved by a single man. But for Immelt to keep his post with the administration now would be bad politics, bad policy and bad messaging. Yet as I write this, it doesn’t look as if he will be asked to step down.
Still, I am hopeful.
First you make libelous accusations against this man. Then you imply that his allegedly illegal activity (although you’re the only one alleging that it’s illegal) is hurting job creation, meaning that he’s also, in your estimation, bad at his job. Finally, if that weren’t enough, you call for him to lose his job.
Well thanks, you skanky platypus, but you’re not helping. Okay, my ad hominem insults are getting a little weird.
I am hopeful because an incredible spirit and energy has been unleashed.
Damn. Now this is more of a 60s folk song. Bring back Springsteen!!!
It was first shown during the Wisconsin labor battle, and it is being sustained and nurtured, and broadened to communities across the country. People are showing that they will not abide a system that finances corporate greed on the backs of the poor and middle class.
Yeah! We only finance Union greed on the backs of the poor and middle class!
On Monday, the nation commemorated the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.,
Uh…
Well that was a pivot.
who was killed in Memphis
Seriously, is this article about Unions or not? It’s getting a little late to make up your mind.
Thousands gathered across America
Well that’s vague.
They participated in teach-ins, protests, demonstrations and vigils,
Is it just me, or does protesting sound insufferably lame?
all with a simple and deeply American message: It is time for the richest, most privileged among us to pay their fair share.
Whoa whoa whoa. Slow down, hoss. First, we’re back to that really strange jump that you made about three paragraphs ago that because GE didn’t pay taxes, it must mean that all rich people are paying obscenely low taxes. Beyond being intellectually lazy and logically fallacious, it’ also demonstrably untrue.
But here’s the more important point: in an article when you invoke Martin Luther King Jr., it’s just uncouth to also promote the forceful application of power by the majority in an effort to target the minority. That you’re talking about economic classes is completely irrelevant; it’s antithetical to the equality that defined the civil rights movement.
They spoke of the widening gulf in American politics, between the powerful and the powerless, between those who most need the government’s assistance and those most likely, instead, to receive it.
Sometimes, this is like playing a card game against a toddler; you’ve got to just let it go. Otherwise, you’re stuck deleting paragraphs upon paragraphs of semi-intelligible rants that simultaneously pretend to be shocked by the ineptitude of an opponent while decrying the systematic injustice of the entire language of the issue at hand.
(Not that I did that here; that happened the last time I played Go Fish against my nephew. That cheating bastard’s mom wouldn’t let me read him the letter. Apparently I say “fuck” too much for a four-year-old.)
They are not alone. For all the disappointment that progressives feel about this Congress, there are members who have been leaders and allies on Capitol Hill.
Consider Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
I’ve considered him. He’s an avowed socialist and just batshit crazy. I mean seriously? A socialist? What the hell is that about?
Always the people’s champion, Sanders has called for closing corporate tax loopholes, which, if done, would raise more than $400 billion over a 10-year period.
Yeah…no it wouldn’t. It would just encourage even more American companies to realize their revenues and move their jobs overseas.
He’s also introduced legislation imposing a 5.4 percent surtax on millionaires that would yield up to $50 billion more a year —
Yeah…no it wouldn’t. It would just encourage even more American millionaires to move to more tax-favorable locations.
more than enough to protect Pell Grants and Head Start and other programs facing the chopping block.
He is joined by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.),
Yet another mark of shame for the People’s Republic of Illinois Ill. ” hasn’t been the abbreviation for Illinois
who has introduced legislation to create a separate tax bracket for millionaires and billionaires — an option that garners the support of 81 percent of the American people, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.
I literally see no distinction between modern-day liberals and WWI-era Bolsheviks. Well, the Bolsheviks used the word “proletariat” more, but then that might just be a disconnect in translation.
The common sense, humane response at this moment is to fight to reset the terms of a suffocatingly narrow and wrongheaded debate.
Humane? Humane is not redefining the terms of a debate. Humane is manning up, grabbing your old man’s bolt-action rifle, going out back, and firing off a round into the face of a dog that got rabies while fighting off a wolf to save your life. That’s fucking humane.
...Now I’m really sad.
This is the heritage of the progressive movement and, indeed, our obligation.
If this is a manifesto, it’s downright terrible.
The best principles of our country have been trampled by corporate immorality
Fuck that noise. It’s not immoral to not pay taxes if you don’t owe taxes. We responsible adults call that “fulfilling fiduciary obligations.”
and right-wing extremism.
Tax breaks were progressive ideas. GE gets tax breaks for all of the useless “green energy” nonsense it does. You think that’s a conservative idea? If I had it my way, there wouldn’t be an income tax at all. Or if there were, it certainly wouldn’t apply to corporations, because taxing corporations is just fucking stupid. It only leads to price increases, reduced consumption, and deadweight loss of economic efficiency.
But they can be restored. Martin Luther King Jr. knew as much when he fought for the sanitation workers of Tennessee
Seriously, if you get to invoke MLK in a unions rights issue, I get to invoke Jesus for tax issues.
Even MLK would agree Jesus wins in the roshambo of rhetorical overreach.
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