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“GOP Tax Jihad Continues”: The Enemy Within Shoots Down The Buffett Rule

To nobody’s surprise, the Senate has blocked the Buffett Rule that would have required those earning more than $1 million a year to pay a minimum tax of 30 percent.

The 51-46 vote—short of the 60 votes in support needed to bring the measure to the floor—went along party lines with only GOP Senator Susan Collins crossing the aisle to vote with the Democrats while Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas sided with the Republicans.

While passage of the measure is estimated to bring in only $47 billion in additional revenue, the proposed law, which has been actively pushed by the Obama Administration, is viewed by supporters as fairness issue while opponents claim that the rich already pay a disproportionate share of the nation’s tax revenue.

Failure of the bill to advance is also likely to give the President a popular issue for his re-election campaign, given the strong support for the law among the general public. According to a CNN/ORC poll out today, 72 percent of the nation’s registered voters support the measure.

Expressing disappointment with the vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said,

The wealthiest one percent takes home the highest share of the nation’s income since the early ’20s, the roaring ’20s. Times are tough for many middle class American families. Millionaires and billionaires aren’t sharing the pain or the sacrifice, not one bit. Last year there were 7,000 millionaires who didn’t pay a single penny in federal income taxes.

But Republicans aren’t buying it, arguing that the proposal is nothing more than a ‘political gimmick’—or so says GOP Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell:

The problem is, we’ve got a president who seems more interested in pitting people against each other than he is in actually doing what it takes to face these challenges head on. By wasting so much time on this political gimmick that even Democrats admit won’t solve our larger problems, it’s shown the president is more interested in misleading people than he is in leading.

Last week, ThinkProgress posted a video of President Ronald Reagan giving a speech indicating that he too objected to the notion of a secretary paying a higher rate of tax than her employer, the circumstance that gave rise to Warren Buffett’s proposal that resulted in his name going on this piece of legislation.

 

By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, The Policy Page, Forbes, April 16, 2012

April 17, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Mitt’s Other World”: Mothers Should Be Required To Work Outside Home Or Lose Benefits

Poor women who stay at home to raise their children should be given federal assistance for child care so that they can enter the job market and “have the dignity of work,” Mitt Romney said in January, undercutting the sense of extreme umbrage he showed when Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen quipped last week that Ann Romney had not “worked a day in her life.”

The remark, made to a Manchester, N.H., audience, was unearthed by MSNBC’s “Up w/Chris Hayes,” and aired during the 8 a.m. hour of his show Sunday.

Ann Romney and her husband’s campaign fired back hard at Rosen following her remark. “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work,” Romney said on Twitter.

Mitt Romney, however, judging by his January remark, views stay-at-home moms who are supported by federal assistance much differently than those backed by hundreds of millions in private equity income. Poor women, he said, shouldn’t be given a choice, but instead should be required to work outside the home to receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits. “[E]ven if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work,” Romney said of moms on TANF.

Recalling his effort as governor to increase the amount of time women on welfare in Massachusetts were required to work, Romney noted that some had considered his proposal “heartless,” but he argued that the women would be better off having “the dignity of work” — a suggestion Ann Romney would likely take issue with.

“I wanted to increase the work requirement,” said Romney. “I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.'”

Regardless of its level of dignity, for Ann Romney, her work raising her children would not have fulfilled her work requirement had she been on TANF benefits. As HuffPost reported Thursday:

As far as Uncle Sam is concerned, if you’re poor, deciding to stay at home and rear your children is not an option. Thanks to welfare reform, recipients of federal benefits must prove to a caseworker that they have performed, over the course of a week, a certain number of hours of “work activity.” That number changes from state to state, and each state has discretion as to how narrowly work is defined, but federal law lists 12 broad categories that are covered. 

Raising children is not among them.

According to a 2006 Congressional Research Service report, the dozen activities that fulfill the work requirement are:

(1) unsubsidized employment
(2) subsidized private sector employment
(3) subsidized public sector employment
(4) work experience
(5) on-the-job training
(6) job search and job readiness assistance
(7) community services programs
(8) vocational educational training
(9) job skills training directly related to employment
(10) education directly related to employment (for those without a high school degree or equivalent)
(11) satisfactory attendance at a secondary school
(12) provision of child care to a participant of a community service program

The only child-care related activity on the list is the last one, which would allow someone to care for someone else’s child if that person were off volunteering. But it does not apply to married couples in some states. Connecticut, for instance, specifically prevents counting as “work” an instance in which one parent watches a child while the other parent volunteers.

The federal government does at least implicitly acknowledge the value of child care, though not for married couples. According to a 2012 Urban Institute study, a single mother is required to work 30 hours a week, but the requirement drops to 20 hours if she has a child under 6. A married woman, such as Romney, would not be entitled to such a reduction in the requirement. If a married couple receives federally funded child care, the work requirement increases by 20 hours, from 35 hours to 55 hours between the two of them, another implicit acknowledgment of the value of stay-at-home work.

Romney’s January view echoes a remark he made in 1994 during his failed Senate campaign. “This is a different world than it was in the 1960s when I was growing up, when you used to have Mom at home and Dad at work,” Romney said, as shown in a video posted by BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski. “Now Mom and Dad both have to work whether they want to or not, and usually one of them has two jobs.”

 

BY: Ryan Grim, The Huffington Post, April 15, 2012

April 15, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Content Free Propaganda”: “We The People” And Other Things That Aren’t True

According to a recent study by the University of California, 93% of income growth since the economic collapse of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest 1% of American households. Just 20 years ago, the amount of national income growth earned by the top 1% was less than half that.

So, if you are a right wing movement and not even you can justify concentrated economic and political power like that, what do you do? Well, you produce a video that celebrates “freedom” and shakes its fists at “tyranny” and you hope that the gullible will think the plutocratic takeover of our country is as American as apple pie.

The video is called “We the People” and it looks like it’s gone viral on the Right, collecting more than six million hits. I saw it because a friend of my wife’s thought it was just great and was sure we would too. Guess she didn’t get the memo!

The video is organized like an open letter to President Obama and its tone is a perfect replication of the gauzy, abstract vernacular of Fox News.

As the narrator informs President Obama, We The People “have stated resolutely we reject your vision for our country.” We The People “have assembled across America resisting your efforts to subvert our constitution and undermine our liberty.”

The video is filled with the sort of Americana that appeals to Sarah Palin’s right wing “real Americans.” As the Battle Hymn of the Republic plays in the background, scenes of Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, a saluting Marine, an Apache attack helicopter, the Preamble to the Constitution, American flags, American flags, American flags and more American flags fill the screen. Even a Bald Eagle makes a guest appearance.

The video claims to speak for We the People but its voice is boilerplate Tea Party Republican: “Our greatest treasure is freedom;” “We believe in the power of the individual;” “Freedom is the capacity of self-determination.”

There are also the Thomas Jefferson-like “long train of abuses” hurled at the President: “you have expanded government, violated our Constitution, confounded laws, seized private industry, destroyed jobs, perverted our economy, curtailed free speech, corrupted our currency, weakened our national security, and endangered our sovereignty.”

And this is why, the video’s producers say, “we” are assembling all across this land, so that “we” can deliver “our” message that: “We will not accept tyranny under any guise;” that the redistribution of “the fruits of our labor is Statism and will not be tolerated;” that “We The People will defend our liberty;” and that “we will protect our beloved country and America’s exceptionalism will prevail.”

At first I thought “We the People” was the kind of parody Saturday Night Live might do as a spoof of right wing propaganda. Even its title was laughhable – “We the People” – as if the 70% of We the People don’t exist who think Democrats are right and Republicans are wrong when it comes to such key questions as whether to tax the rich more, to eliminate subsidies for oil companies or to preserve America’s endangered safety net.

But, at the end of the day, it is also disheartening to see how easy it is for the hard work of raising the level of understanding and debate in this country to all go to waste as vacuous, dishonest, manipulative and utterly content-free propaganda like this is produced to bamboozle even very smart people like those who sent us this insulting piece of reactionary performance art.

Then again, given recent experience, why should we be surprised that so many seem impervious to facts and reason or who now see politics as nothing more than brute force and war — a take-no-prisoners, law of the jungle scramble for survival of the fittest?

But I did like the Bald Eagles.

 

By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, March 31, 2012

March 31, 2012 Posted by | Democracy, Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Still Shelling Out More Than Men”: The High Cost Of Being A Woman

It turns out being a woman is an expensive undertaking. Despite laws on the books meant to prevent companies and firms from charging women more for the same products and services, we’re still shelling out more than men for a variety of things. And we do it on less pay.

A new report out this week from the National Women’s Law Center found that insurance companies have been charging women $1 billion more than men for the same coverage. In fact, in the states that haven’t banned the practice of jacking up prices for women – known as gender rating – women were charged more for 92 percent of the best-selling health plans. The difference can’t be explained by a higher cost of maternity care: even when that care is left out, almost a third of plans charged women at least 30 percent or more, and that care is usually not part of a standard benefits package. Why might insurers decide women are more expensive? Because they tend to use more services – like going to the doctor more often for regular check ups. Damn them being preventative.

Paying higher dollar amounts for similar care isn’t the only way health issues screw women. Nona Willis Aronowitz and Dylan C. Lathrop of GOOD added up the numbers on how much women spend on lady-specific care. The average woman will spend 30 years trying to prevent pregnancy, eventually having two children. With insurance, at the low end, their estimates show that she will end up spending $10,070 on her particular health needs. Those include costs for having a baby, such as gestational diabetes screening ($80), a lactation class ($80), and breast-feeding supplies ($670). It also includes preventative care, such as HPV tests every three years ($260), annual HIV counseling and screening ($1,500), annual pelvic exams ($2,080), and co-pays for hormonal birth control ($5,400).

But health care isn’t the only arena that gets women. As Jezebel reported yesterday, women also end up paying more just for everyday products and needs. Women pay more just to get their shirts dry cleaned (even though a “blouse” and a man’s dress shirt is basically the same thing) and haircuts (our hair’s made of the same stuff, right?). A study from the University of Central Florida found that women’s deodorant costs 30 cents more than men’s – and the only difference is scent. Bigger purchases also cost women more: on average women pay $200 more for a car than a man, and they were about 30 percent more likely to end up with subprime home loans before the crash.

All of this, of course, is paid for with lower income. The gender wage gap stood at 82 cents on the dollar for the same work men do. That gap ends up costing women $431,000 in pay over a 40-year career. In turn, they have a harder time building up assets and saving for retirement, even though they tend to live longer lives.

It seems being a man still gives you a big financial upper hand. With some people talking about women being the richer of the two sexes, we might want to stop and take a look at how much thinner our money has to spread.

 

Bryce Covert, The Nation, March 21, 2012

March 25, 2012 Posted by | Income Gap, Women | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Rich Are Different From You And Me”: Mitt Romney’s Good Friends Own Football Teams, Too

Newsflash: Some of Mitt Romney’s good friends own football teams. 
 
That’s in addition to his great friends who own NASCAR teams.
 
The rich are different from you and me. Apparently they have lots of friends who own sports teams — something most people probably never thought about until Romney’s presidential campaign.
 
The interview with Paul Finebaum, a syndicated sports radio host based in Birmingham, Ala., was going so well for Romney until the last couple of minutes. He had described as “pretty tasty” if “a bit fattening” his dinner the night before of catfish, fried dill pickles and hush puppies. He had convincingly discussed his longstanding loyalty to the basketball team at Brigham Young University, which he attended as an undergrad, as opposed to Harvard, where he earned his business and law degrees.
 
And then came the Peyton Manning question. “I know you want him somewhere away from New England. Where do you think he ought to go?” Finebaum asked about the star quarterback.
 
“I don’t want him in our neck of the woods, let’s put it that way. I don’t want him to go to Miami or the Jets,” Romney said, laughing, referring to two teams that play the New England Patriots in the American Football Conference Eastern Division. “I got a lot of good friends — the owners of the Miami Dolphins and New York Jets — both owners are friends of mine, but let’s keep away from New England so that Tom Brady has a better shot of picking up a championship for us.”
 
Romney didn’t mention that Jets owner Woody Johnson is one of his national finance co-chairmen. A very good friend indeed.
 
The $10,000 bet, the two Cadillacs, the $374,000 in speaking fees that Romney described as “not very much,” the NASCAR team owners and now the football team owners — it is getting hard to keep track of all the times Romney doesn’t notice he is casually saying things that are completely outside the experience of regular people. 
 
I predicted this problem wouldn’t stop. But it’s still amazing that it continues.

 

By: Jill Lawrence, The National Journal, March 12, 2012

March 14, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012, GOP Presidential Candidates | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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