Tag Archives: Tax cut

March 18, 2013 · 9:11 AM

Daily Kos: Ten signs Paul Ryan is dropping acid

Of course Jon Perr of Daily Kos was not seriously implying that Rep. Paul Ryan is “dropping acid” but was simply using the dramatic title to attract readers to his very serious post:

Daily Kos

Back in the 1990s, the CEO of my former company had a simple way of questioning the wisdom of some of our more dubious business strategies. “Are we,” he would ask, “smoking the drapes?” By that standard, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan must be dropping acid. Because as a quick glance at his job-killing, Medicare-rationing, health care-gutting, tax cut windfall for the wealthy-giving and hopelessly unbalanced budget shows, Ryan was apparently hallucinating when he wrote it.

Here are 10 signs that suggest Paul Ryan is now following Timothy Leary as well as Ayn Rand.

  1. Two Million Jobs Lost in 2014 Alone
  2. $5.7 Trillion Tax Cut, Mostly for the Wealthy
  3. Zero Tax Breaks Ended
  4. Tax Hikes for the Middle Class
  5. Medicare Rationing Boosts Annual Premiums for Seniors by $2,200 in 2030
  6. 38 Million More Uninsured
  7. Slashing Medicare and Medicaid Benefits, But Keeping the Tax Revenue
  8. Non-Defense Discretionary Spending at Lowest Level in Decades
  9. Two Trillion Dollar Flip-Flop on Defense Spending
  10. Cutting Historically Small Federal Workforce by 10 Percent
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March 12, 2013 · 8:45 PM

Paul Ryan’s “New” Plan: Squeeze the Poor, Boost the Rich

Rep. Paul Ryan trotted out yet another budget that looks like more of the same.   At this point I’m reminded of  the old George W. Bush “admonition“…

Mother Jones

Oh Lord. I almost forgot that today is Paul Ryan Day, even though I wrote about it just yesterday. So what’s in the 2014 version of the Ryan budget? Let’s see:

  • Repeal of Obamacare (though we keep Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare, as well as its new taxes).
  • Medicare would be converted into a voucher system.
  • Big cuts to Medicaid.
  • Big cuts to other domestic programs.
  • Repeal of the sequester cuts in the Pentagon budget.
  • A “simplified” income tax system with only two brackets, 10 percent and 25 percent.
  • A reduction in the corporate tax from 35 percent to 25 percent.

I’ll dive into the details later. Maybe. But basically this is the same old same old. Big tax cuts on the rich, big tax cuts for corporations, and big spending increases for the military. For the poor, the middle class, and the elderly, we have big spending cuts and—though Ryan doesn’t admit it—the almost mathematical certainty of big tax increases.

At this point, I honestly have only one wish for all this: that the press finally wises up and refuses to call this a “deficit reduction” plan. It’s not. It’s a plan to dramatically cut domestic spending, full stop, mostly on the poor, the middle class, and the elderly. Every other component of the plan increases the deficit.

~Kevin Drum

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December 22, 2012 · 2:51 AM

Obama Drops the Hammer on Republicans and Pulls Back His Last Fiscal Cliff Proposal

This is better…

PoliticusUSA

After House Republicans imploded over their own Plan B, President Obama took away much of his previous proposal by calling for Republicans to get their act together and cut taxes on the 98% right now.

Obama said he met them on taxes and he met them more than halfway on spending, The president said he is still committed to working towards the goal of making a deal, but in 10 days we are facing a deadline. The president then reiterated his call for Congress to immediately extend the Bush tax cuts for the 98%. He said he spoke to both Boehner and Reid, and he is asking them to extend the tax cuts for the 98% and extend unemployment benefits. Obama said, “Governing is a shared responsibility between both parties…everybody’s got to give a little bit in a sensible way. We move forward together, or we don’t move forward at all.”

The president turned up the heat by asking members of Congress to think about their obligations to the people that they serve over Christmas. President Obama said, “We’re going to have find some common ground.” He said the challenge is that the American people are much more sensible, responsible, and willing to compromise than the people they elected.

Underneath all the nice language about compromise, President Obama pulled back any sort of cuts that he had offered in his previous proposal by urging Republicans and Democrats to pass a tax cut extension for the 98%. In other words, that $400,000 income cutoff for the tax cut extension is gone, and we are back to $250,000. In fact, the President appeared to take all spending cuts off the table.

Obama’s call for congressional leadership to put spending cuts on the shelf and cut taxes for the 98% is exactly what he has wanted all along. Republicans blew their once chance at a deal, and now it looks like they can kiss any immediate entitlement cuts goodbye. It would surprise no one if Republicans reject what the president put on the table today, but the president is making House Republicans pay a price for their incompetence by cutting his offer.

It looks like Republicans will either have to go off the cliff, or give President Obama everything he wants right now.

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October 16, 2012 · 7:14 PM

Pres. Clinton explains Romney’s $5 trillion tax cut for the rich (video)

No surprise there.  In my opinion, Mitt Romney has proven himself to be the most lying, shape shifting presidential nominee in our country’s history.

America Blog

President Clinton explains that Mitt Romney’s $5 trillion tax cut for the rich will lower taxes by $250,000 for the wealthy, while increasing taxes $2,000 for the middle class.

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September 18, 2012 · 12:10 AM

Why the Poor Pay No Federal Income Tax: A Wee Tutorial

I’ll try to put the Mitt Romney tape fiasco into perspective:

Mitt Romney had to call an impromptu news conference late this evening to explain his remarks in the following video:

Here is a portion of the press conference video in which he makes no apologies for his remarks:

Mother Jones – Kevin Drum

Is it true, as Mitt Romney says, that 47% of Americans don’t pay federal income tax? Yes! That’s mostly because they’re either poor, elderly, or take advantage of tax credits for low-income workers. Details here.  But why do these people pay no income tax? Ezra Klein breaks it down into Twitter-sized chunks:

  • Rs have spent years cutting income taxes and increasing things like the Child Tax Credit. This means fewer people pay income taxes.
  • So whenever you hear a stat like “47% don’t pay income taxes,” remember: Reagan and Bush helped build that.
  • These tax cuts for the poor were partly in order to make further tax cuts for the rich political palatable.
  • But now that fewer people pay income taxes as a result of GOP policies, they’re being called lazy and dependent.
  • And thus the GOP’s tax cuts are being used to make a case that the rich are overtaxed and that the less-rich are becoming dependent.
  • Which thus leads to a policy agenda of tax cuts for the rich and cuts to social services for the non-rich.

Yep, that’s about it. Also worth noting: the poor often pay higher state tax rates than the rich. Add in payroll taxes and excise taxes, instead of cherry picking only a single tax, and it turns out that the poor and the working class end up paying a fair chunk of their income in taxes. Not as big a chunk as the rich, it’s true, but then, it strikes most of us as perfectly fair that the poor should pay lower tax rates than the rich. I wonder if this strikes Romney as fair too?

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July 9, 2012 · 12:07 AM

Romney Donor Says ‘Lower Income’ People ‘Don’t Understand What’s Going On’

The “rich” seem to be thoroughly uninformed about “the rest of us” and that includes Mitt Romney…

Think Progress

Today, Mitt Romney is holding a series of fundraisers in the Hamptons, culminating with a huge event at the home of billionaire David Koch. The LA Times in on the scene and reporter Maeve Reston caught up with a donor on her way into one of the events.

The woman, who wouldn’t reveal her name, said the following:

I don’t think the common person is getting it…my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies —everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.

The recommended contribution for the event she was attending was $25,000.

Earlier in the campaign Romney recieved criticism for saying, “I’m not concerned with the very poor.” He later said he misspoke.

Romney’s tax plan would give the richest 0.1% of Americans an average tax cut of $264,000.

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February 29, 2012 · 5:26 AM

Four Fiscal Phonies

The amazing hypocrisy of the remaining GOP candidates is astonishing.

They all tout their tax plans as being better than Obama’s and each praises their tax plans as being fiscally responsible and will save money in the long run…NOT!

The New York Times – Paul Krugman

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget – not my favorite people, but they can do their arithmetic – has put together evaluations of the four remaining GOP candidates’ tax and spending plans. Annoyingly, however, they compare these plans to a so-called “realistic baseline” that assumes, among other things, that all the Bush tax cuts are made permanent. So for all the talk of the urgency of deficit control, the need to cut basic social insurance programs, the CRFB is in effect willing to accept as a fait accompli the biggest, most gratuitous budget-busting action of the past couple of decades.

How to fix this? One way would be a current-law comparison, which would involve allowing all the Bush tax cuts to expire. But it also seems to me useful to compare the Republican plans with the Obama administration’s plan, which would at least allow the high-end tax cuts to expire. How does debt under this plan compare with the four Republicans?

Well, here’s debt as a percentage of GDP in 2021 (using the OMB numbers(pdf) for Obama and CRFB for the others):

Yep: as Republicans yell about Obama’s deficits and cry that we’re turning into Greece, Greece I tell you, all of them, all of them, propose making the deficit bigger.

And for what? For reverse Robin-Hoodism, taking from the poor and the middle class to lavish huge tax cuts on the rich.

And I believe that all of them know this, too. It’s pure hypocrisy – and it’s all in the service of class warfare waged on behalf of the top 0.1 or 0.01 percent of the income distribution.

Edit: Emphasis are mine

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February 20, 2012 · 10:39 AM

Republicans: “Dumb But Not Stupid”

I beg to differ Senator McCain, Republicans are dumb and stupid!

Mario Piperni

In the face of Republicans reluctantly ending their opposition and allowing the payroll tax cuts measure to pass through Congress, Senator John McCain described his political party in this way:

“We’re dumb, but we’re not stupid. We did not want to repeat the debacle of last December. It’s not that complicated.”

While there’s not much difference in parsing dumb and stupid (they pretty much have the same meaning), I think most of us can agree on what it is McCain was admitting. Basically, he’s saying that Republicans never do anything because it’s the right thing to do. Never. It’s always about politics for them.

Did anyone believe for a second that Republicans backed down from their obstructionist ways this one time because they honestly cared about the tens of millions of middle class workers who would benefit from a two percentage point increase in their paychecks? Or because they care a damn about the millions of jobless who will see their benefits extended in a time of economic crisis? I hope not for you would have to either be a complete moron or a blind partisan fool to believe that Republicans are anything other than self-serving, heartless bastards who finally understood that opposing a tax cut at this time was detrimental to their chances of winning in November.

Essentially, if an individual is not part of the one percent of society who fill their election coffers, Republicans don’t care much for them or about them. While trying to steal their vote in any way they can, the vast majority of Americans are little more than political pawns in the eyes of the modern GOP. Pawns who for whatever reason cannot see the manner in which they are being manipulated in the worst of ways. Republican policy which favors health insurers’ profits over the millions who cannot afford any health insurance. Policy which favors big oil’s record profits over the safeguarding of the environment and a fragile warming planet. And policy which favors the taking down of a president over the basic needs and welfare of Americans.

The Republican party is dumb but not stupid? Yeah, most rational thinking people get it.

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February 15, 2012 · 7:59 AM

Why The GOP’s Payroll Tax Cut Cave Is An Even Bigger Deal Than You Think

TPMDC

The GOP’s accession to reality on the payroll tax cut is being cast as a key victory for Democrats and President Obama. Republicans caved, the payroll tax will almost certainly be renewed, and the economy won’t take a tough hit just as the recovery’s beginning to accelerate.

But it also reveals a flaw — a potentially huge flaw — in the conservative movement’s generational strategy to roll back the federal safety net.

These might sound like two wildly disparate issues, but they’re actually variations on a years-long theme. And the outcome of the payroll tax debacle bodes poorly for the GOP on the rest of their long-run goals.

Here’s why.

For years and years, conservative elites have rested their hopes of shrinking the federal government, including its most popular programs, on the theory that if they just “starve the beast” — keep taxes low until the budget comes under enough strain that those programs have to be slashed — then Democrats will ultimately fold, rather than touch off a fiscal crisis.

Republicans have scrimmaged with this strategy over the past year. The debt limit fight was premised on the Republicans’ threat that they’d put the country’s creditworthiness at risk to force Democrats to agree to spending cuts. And Democrats basically caved.

Fast forward to the end of 2011, Republicans used the looming expiration of the payroll tax cut to demand further cuts to government services.

“There’s no debate about whether these extensions ought to be paid for,” House Speaker John Boehner said in November.  But of course Republicans ruled out financing the payroll cut with a small tax on millionaires, and demanded they be paid for with spending cuts elsewhere in the budget.

When Democrats resisted, that strategy blew up in his face, the payroll tax cut nearly lapsed, and Republicans took a beating with the public.

So with the payroll tax cut set to lapse once again, the entire GOP leadership has backed off the demand that the policy be offset. Democrats weren’t going to let the GOP set the ground rules for that fight. And instead of entertaining the idea of even a small, temporary tax increase on wealthy people, Republican leaders have agreed to finance the payroll tax cut with yet more debt — over the strong objections of their own members.

Tax cuts, and benefit programs are different beasts, and that’s why Republicans have agreed to isolate the payroll holiday from other expiring provisions. But the key is that when Republicans recognized that the public was wise to them — that their tactics were putting a popular policy in jeopardy — they backed off.

The same dynamics govern the longer fight over programs like Medicare and Social Security. At some point in the months and years ahead, when policymakers are forced to weigh cuts and big reforms to those programs against higher taxes on the wealthy, Republicans will stand to own the consequences, if they push revenues off the table.

What Democrats have to do is remember how they won the fight over the payroll tax cut, and stick to the same playbook.

(Ed. Note: Emphasis are mine)

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December 27, 2011 · 10:28 AM

Republican Gift To President Obama? A Positive Approval Rating

The harder the GOP tries to make President Obama a one-term President, the harder they seem to fail.  Of course it’s still too early to make a solid judgment about the Right’s agenda concerning President Obama, but the early indications are looking good for the POTUS…

Addicting Info


Possibly because of the Tea Party led payroll tax cut debacle, or perhaps because of weak performances in the Republican field, President Obama’s approval numbers are in the black for the first time since July. According to a Gallup poll just released, 47% approve of the job the President is doing and 45% disapprove.

Despite Republican and progressive talking points that Obama is losing his base, his approval is highest among 18-29 year olds, at 52%. He maintains the support of 80% of Democrats, 73% of liberals, 88% of African-Americans, and 60% of Hispanics.

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