This Will Not Be Fun

It seems unclear when we'll start to feel the crunch, but we're very much in line to expect increases in the cost of just about everything we buy. Duh.

And part of that problem is that some companies whose stuff isn't imported - or are selling stuff that's impacted just a little - will see the tariffs as an opportunity to jack up their prices right along with everybody else.

And I'll go out on the limb here and say there are politicians just itchin' to use the potentially backbreaking effects of the tariffs as leverage to kill taxes altogether (some have talked about this for a long time, and we're getting it from Trump now too). We may start to hear about attempts to re-animate some variation on the stupid idea that a flat tax is the fairest way to do things.

Also - there have been proposals floated that we should ditch income tax and go with a universal sales tax, or a value-added tax. This is all regressive as fuck and pushes what's left of the middle class down - and keeps everybody down - while benefiting only people who're making more than 3 or 4 hundred K.

I hate this shit. When we had a graduating, progressive tax schedule, it helped drive the societal machinery that made for a strong and stable middle class, which build up the best overall system ever.

Fake lord knows it wasn't perfect - far from it - but by the middle 60s it seemed like everybody was going to have a shot at the dream. And we'd begun to understand that when everybody has a shot, and everybody understands that everybody deserves it, then we're making the whole thing better for ourselves.

I sound like a sad old man waxing nostalgic, so back to the point:

This latest bullshit feels like more coercion. If they make us miserable enough, we'll bend to their will and sign on for whatever might ease the pressure.

So here's a look at what WaPo thinks is headed our way.

Here’s where prices could rise the most and least under Trump’s tariffs

Shoppers will see uneven price increases on goods.

The global tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump this week will cause prices to rise on a broad array of food, household items and electronics, economists warn.

But the increases won’t be applied equally — some items are likely to see much higher price hikes than others. Trump imposed 10 percent tariffs on imports from nearly every country and imposed higher rates on goods coming from about 60 specific countries.

Consumer goods will be more exposed to higher tariffs than food and drinks

That means products that the United States commonly gets from Vietnam, such as clothing and shoes, would be subject to a new 46 percent tax, whereas goods from Colombia, like flowers, would see a lower new 10 percent levy. Imports from Mexico, such as avocados, will have no new tax. In any case, shopping is about to get more expensive for Americans.

“There’s no way this is going to be absorbed by firms alone,” said Michael Pearce, deputy chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. “This will be felt by consumers.”

The vast majority of consumer goods — almost 80 percent — brought into United States will be subject to tariffs of at least 20 percent, according to a Washington Post analysis of international trade data from the Census Bureau.

Canada and Mexico weren’t included in the latest round of tariffs, though a 25 percent tax was placed earlier this year on some of the goods they export to the United States.

“I think Mexico is breathing a sigh of relief,” said Michael Camuñez, president and CEO of Monarch Global Strategies, which advises businesses in international trade.

Mexico and Canada are the United States’ largest trading partners for food, and imports can avoid tariffs entirely if they are compliant with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) agreement. Still, experts expect food prices to rise somewhat with the new tariffs.

“The bottom line is, it does mean more inflation,” said Tom Bailey, a senior consumer foods analyst at Rabobank.

The prices of food products from other parts of the world, such as tea from Vietnam, could increase much more sharply with the high tax rates.

“Some retailers might just hang up a sign to consumers in shops and say, ‘price plus tariff,’” said Judy Ganes, president of J Ganes Consulting, which works with food and agricultural industries.

Bailey cautioned that prices will not rise exactly in line with the percentage of tariffs — a 46 percent tariff does not mean the final product will cost 46 percent more. Actual increases on finished goods are expected to be much less because some of the cost of the product comes from distribution and operations in the United States.

Countries in Asia are facing some of the highest rates, including goods from China, with tariffs of at least 54 percent, and goods from Vietnam, with a new 46 percent tax. That’s sure to mean higher prices for electronics such as phones, computers and video game consoles, which are often imported from the continent. The tariff imposed on goods from China could add roughly $250 or more to the cost of a $1,000 iPhone, though it’s not clear yet how much of the tariff costs would show up in consumer sticker prices.

The United States Fashion Industry Association said in a statement it was “disappointed” that the Trump administration imposed tariffs on the industry’s trading partners.

Most of the clothing sold in the U.S. is imported from abroad, and even clothing made domestically often relies on fabrics and yarn that are brought in from other countries, said Sheng Lu, a professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware.

Apart from paying the new tariffs, clothing companies could also face a pullback from consumers, as people grow increasingly wary about their personal finances.

“If consumers do not feel safe about their financial outlook, they may stop buying clothing,” Lu said.

Ready For A Showdown?

Random-ish thoughts:

• We have to tax the rich now, so we don't have to eat them later
• Double the Social Security cap, and the system is good for generations. Remove it, and the surplus takes care of practically everything seniors will ever need
• Tell Elon to keep his grubby mitts off my stuff
• Republicans aren't trying to eliminate waste fraud and abuse - they're trying to install it. If you're impressed with the way the Russian military is working, you're gonna love privatized schools and Social Security

IF WE TAX THE RICH NOW

WE WON'T HAVE TO EAT THEM LATER

Reminder

Taxing rich people now

means we won't have

to eat them later

What's Coming

In anticipation of the probable push for another round of tax cuts for billionaires and corporations that keep posting record profits:

Today's Vic

About that tariff thingie.

IMHO, Republicans want tariffs for possibly two reasons.

1. To kill off the normal income tax schedules
2. To petty fog their schemes to smash dissent by stripping resources from potential opposition, and keep people so busy just trying to stay afloat that they don't dare make waves

When dealing with "conservatives" on any issue, the one thing you can always count on is that they're angling for control. Minority rule (aka: The Daddy State) doesn't work if people feel free to confront and challenge the privilege and sense of entitlement of snobbish effete plutocrats.

That's why they want to kill women's rights, and cut back voting rights, and squash labor rights, and eliminate Queerfolk rights, and and and.

Tax 'Em Or Eat 'Em

Last year, Walmart posted a profit of almost $150B.

They could've raised the salaries of every one of their US employees by $20K, and still netted over $112B.

$112,000,000,000.00

PROFIT

And BTW - Walmart employees are still among the largest groups that have to tap Medicaid and Food Stamps to make ends meet.

And Walmart (out of the goodness of their hearts I'm sure) maintains a permanent discount schedule for SNAP recipients.

You pay taxes to help the poor, and a shitload of that money goes into the pockets of the Walmart gang.

What was that shit you were talkin' about Welfare Queens?

I Will Stop You

I think Trump has been worried that he might not get the old money Republicans to go along with his hare-brained schemes, so he's emphasizing his intentions to serve the plutocracy by telling us straight out that he's all for shit-canning every progressive policy that's been put in place since FDR.

• Privatize Social Security
• Voucherize Medicare
• Kill Obamacare outright
• Eliminate EPA and OSHA (and the departments of Energy and Education, et al)

In a democracy, even very poor people have power thru the various agencies and regulatory bodies that their votes got politicians to create, and push those politicians to maintain.

In a plutocracy, people who don't have the money don't have the power.

Today's Debunkment

Actually, a blast from the past.

It starts out with a good explanation of the Marginal Tax Rate Increase, and the Wealth Tax.

AOC proposed an increase to 70% for anything over $10M in a year:

• So you pay the usual 37% on everything up to $10,000,000.00 (that's 37% assuming your clever tax accountant can't jigger up a way to exempt it)

Warren's proposal of a Wealth Tax:

• 0% tax on anything up to $50,000,000.00
• 2% on everything over that

Sorry not sorry, but I'm not going to believe you'd be plunged into destitution if we forced you to live on 63% of $10M, plus 30% of another $10M.

You can't live on $750,000 a month? You're gonna have to scrimp? Maybe give up HBO?

Give it a fuckin rest.

Robert Reich:

On Social Security & Medicare

To preface this, I think it's pretty safe to assume a few things.

1. I don't know what to do about all this - I'm not an economist, and I'm not a tax accountant, and I'm not trying to pretend I know how to fix it
2. Somebody does know how to fix it - in a fair, even-handed way
3. Anything we do to fix it will involve the tax code 

And everything we try to do will be picked apart and shat upon by all manner of armchair experts and keyboard commandos. This is likely going to get even messier than it's been for the last 90 years.

WASHINGTON — President Biden scored an early political point this month in his fight with congressional Republicans over taxes, spending and raising the federal debt limit: He forced Republican leaders to profess, repeatedly, that they will not seek cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

In the process, Mr. Biden has effectively steered a debate about fiscal responsibility away from two cherished safety-net programs for seniors, just as those plans are poised for a decade of rapid spending growth.

New forecasts from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, set to be released on Wednesday, are expected to show Medicare and Social Security spending growth rapidly outpacing the growth in federal tax revenues over the next 10 years. That is the product of a wave of baby boomers reaching retirement age and beginning to tap the programs, which provide guaranteed income and health insurance from the time benefits are claimed until death.

Those retirees are an electoral force. In refusing to touch so-called entitlement programs, Mr. Biden was appealing to seniors, along with generations of future retirees, when he used his State of the Union address and subsequent speeches this month to amplify attacks on Republican plans to reduce future spending on Social Security and Medicare or potentially sunset the programs entirely.

“They’re more than government programs,” Mr. Biden told a Florida audience last week. “They’re a promise — a promise we made: Work hard and contribute, and when the time has come for you to retire, you’ll be there — we’ll be there for you to help you out. It’s been a sacred trust, the rock-solid guarantee generations of Americans have counted on, and it works.”

In his 2020 campaign, Mr. Biden proposed shoring up Social Security’s finances and increasing benefits for some retirees by raising taxes on high earners. Social Security is primarily funded through payroll taxes on workers’ incomes of up to $160,200. Mr. Biden has suggested eliminating the cap for incomes above $400,000 a year, subjecting them to payroll taxes.

Influential Republicans have proposed a variety of changes to make both programs more fiscally sustainable, including spending cuts and gradually raising the retirement age from 67 to keep up with longer life expectancy.

Republican leaders in Congress have stressed in recent days that, despite the calls from some conservatives to link safety net spending and the debt limit, they will not seek those changes as part of an agreement to raise the nation’s borrowing cap.

House Republicans have threatened not to increase the current $31.4 trillion limit, which the United States technically hit on Jan. 19, unless Mr. Biden agrees to unspecified demands to reduce government spending and debt. If the cap is not raised and the government is unable to pay all its bills at once, some retirees might not get their Social Security checks as scheduled. But leaders say their demands to raise the cap will ultimately leave Social Security and Medicare intact.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, told reporters on Tuesday that “there is no agenda on the part of Senate Republicans to revisit Medicare or Social Security, period,” adding, “I’ve noticed that the speaker of the House has said the same thing.”

note: This does not mean McConnell is "on our side". It could just as easily mean, "We won't do anything to fix the problem, knowing the thing will eventually implode (because our tax-cut strategy is working according to plan), and then we can make our move to kill it altogether."

If both sides hold their positions, the fiscal debate will narrow to Mr. Biden’s proposals to raise taxes on corporations and high earners — which Republicans have roundly rejected — and Republican proposals to cut the growth of a much smaller slice of federal programs.

Mr. Biden plans to address the deficit in remarks on Wednesday in which he will criticize Republican proposals that he says would add $3 trillion to the debt. That includes repealing tax increases Mr. Biden signed into law in 2022, which would increase federal revenues, as well as making permanent several Republican tax cuts that are set to expire at the end of 2025.

That debate will exclude the primary spending-side drivers of future federal debt and deficits. Both Social Security’s and Medicare’s trust funds are currently spending more than they take in from payroll taxes and other revenue sources, a growing gap that is included in how the government accounts for the total size of its budget deficit.

In its last wave of forecasts, in May, the budget office predicted Social Security spending would grow by two-thirds over the coming decade. That’s more than double the expected growth rate for spending on the military and on domestic programs like education and environmental protection. High inflation could further accelerate that growth; Social Security enacted an 8.7 percent cost-of-living increase this year, its largest in decades.

By 2033, the May forecasts suggest, the federal government will be spending nearly as much on Social Security alone as it does on all discretionary spending — military and otherwise — combined.

Medicare is a smaller program but poised to grow even faster, at three times the rate of military and other discretionary spending over the next decade, according to the May forecasts. The new projections are likely to show its growth will be restrained somewhat by a law Mr. Biden signed last summer that is expected to reduce the program’s spending on prescription drugs for seniors.

Lawmakers could stabilize the programs by raising taxes, reducing spending or simply continuing to borrow money to keep paying full benefits. A group of liberal lawmakers led by Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, has a proposal to expand Social Security benefits and extend its solvency for 75 years through a variety of new taxes on investment and business income, along with earnings for Americans making $250,000 or more.

The conservative Republican Study Committee in the House has a plan that would raise the retirement age for both programs and reduce Social Security benefits for some higher-earning retirees.

Fiscal hawks in Washington, including think tank officials and some Senate Republicans, have said lawmakers must move now to find bipartisan agreement on plans to better balance the programs’ spending with tax revenues in the years to come. More than a decade ago, President Barack Obama, a Democrat, issued similar warnings.

“To put us on solid ground, we should also find a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security for future generations,” Mr. Obama said in his 2011 State of the Union address. “We must do it without putting at risk current retirees, the most vulnerable or people with disabilities; without slashing benefits for future generations; and without subjecting Americans’ guaranteed retirement income to the whims of the stock market.”

Some were dismayed that Mr. Biden — and Republican lawmakers — did not follow a similar path at his own State of the Union this month. “The sober warnings from the experts is quite a contrast to the gleeful cheers from bipartisan policymakers at the State of the Union for doing nothing,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates federal debt reduction.

In his State of the Union address, Mr. Biden, who was Mr. Obama’s vice president, ripped Republicans for plans to cut safety net programs. Republicans in the audience booed him vigorously. After some back-and-forth with his critics, Mr. Biden declared victory.

“So folks, as we all apparently agree, Social Security, Medicare is off the books now, right? All right. We’ve got unanimity,” he said.

BTW, let's not pretend the problems haven't already started.

Asking For Help At 80 - America's New Face Of Hunger

PBS NewsHour

And also too:

The Forgotten History of the Radical ‘Elders of the Tribe’

The Gray Panthers staged rowdy protests against ageism and found common cause with young activists on everything from health care to racial justice. What can they teach us today?

By the mid-1970s, she was a national celebrity. She had speaking engagements all over the country; she traveled 100,000 miles annually, giving at least 200 talks a year. She was all over the TV: “The Phil Donahue Show,” the “Today” show and “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, multiple times. Media monikers for her included “ball of fire,” “dynamo” and the now-problematic “feisty.” In 1978, the World Almanac named her one of the 25 most influential women in the United States. Shortly before she died in 1995, ABC News profiled her as its “Person of the Week.”

She was Maggie Kuhn, the woman who, 50 years ago, founded the Gray Panthers, a movement to encourage activism — sometimes radical activism — among the country’s older people. Today, both Kuhn and her movement have been all but forgotten. But their mission is worth remembering, commemorating and perhaps even resurrecting, especially in the present moment.

Then, as now, was a time of intense activism. Inspired by demonstrations on behalf of racial and gender equality, and against the Vietnam War, Kuhn insisted it was time that the issues facing older people be included in any social reform agenda. Her passion was to shatter every stereotype she could about older people and, as a lifelong feminist, especially older women.

- more -

One Dumb Idea

... after the next.

Republicans keep trying to move the Plutocracy Project along no matter what you or anybody else says.

Leigh McGowan

Because my entire income is Social Security, I don't pay income tax unless I work a regular job and earn an additional $15-20K per year. It would suck something awful if suddenly everything I buy goes up 30%.

I'd have no choice but to work just to try to stay even.

So let's take a look.

Currently, at $50,000 per year, about $14,500 goes to taxation - about $1200 per month.

• If your groceries run about $600.00 per month, you'll pay $780.00
• Instead of $250 per month for Gas & Lights, you'll pay $325.00
• Gasoline: Your 3-dollar gallon of gas goes down to $2.72 (no more DOT road tax), but then goes back up to $3.55 because of the new sales tax. At 1,000 miles per month, at 25 miles per gallon, at $3.55 per gallon, you're paying an extra $33 every month in taxes - and of course, we can absolutely count on the price of gas never going up, right?
• Buy a house at $300,000.00, and pay $390,000.00 - and then pay tax on top of the finance charges for the privilege of borrowing the money - plus you get to pay another $200,000 because you'll probably have to include that sales tax in your 30-year mortgage - which boosts those monthly payments by about $500
• Same with buying a car

And one of the kickers - if they wipe away the property taxes everybody pays on real estate, then the schools have practically no funding at all.

Add it all up, and you're paying more - at least $5,000 more per year. And that's just for the essentials of food, housing, and transportation.

So, staying with "just the essentials":

at $50,000, you'll pay about 39% of your income in taxes

at $100,000, you'll pay about 20% of your income in taxes

at $ 250,000, you'll pay about 8% of your income in taxes

This is nothing but a variation on "Flat Tax" - it's what dog-ass Republicans call "fair" - and I think we can count on the GOP to go back to the old bullshit of a flat tax, so they can pretend they're being reasonable.

But they're not. They're playing with the numbers, trying to set it up so they win either way.

With this "Value Added" shit, they win on percentages. With the "Flat Tax", they win on absolute dollars.

A progressive tax plan is what works. Everything the Republicans are proposing only works to put more yacht money in their pockets, while putting more debt, more hardship, and more misery on everybody else.

Eat The Rich

I'm totally uninterested in sob stories about how badly the obscenely wealthy are being treated.

Not when Jeff Bezos could end poverty and homelessness in this country all by himself, and still have more wealth than over 99% of us.

Elizabeth Warren, in WaPo: (pay wall)

Now that the Senate has passed a budget resolution, we’re one step closer to realizing President Biden’s transformational agenda: a once-in-a-generation investment in child care and Medicare, combating climate change and other efforts that would actually make our government work for families. The other half of the package — how to pay for these investments — is equally important.

The already huge gap between the 0.1 percent and everyone else is just getting wider. Billionaire wealth surged by $1.8 trillion from the early days of the pandemic through last month. The 400 richest Americans had more total wealth, as of 2019, than all 10 million Black American households, plus a quarter of Latino households, combined. Yet the ultrarich pay only 3.2 percent of that wealth in taxes, while 99 percent of families pay 7.2 percent. And scores of giant U.S. corporations pay zero.

I’ve proposed measures that would raise more than $5 trillion in revenue — far more than we need to enact the Biden plan. Though not every Democrat agrees with every one of my ideas, Biden campaigned aggressively on a suite of progressive tax policies, and voters embraced these changes at the ballot box. No matter how loudly Washington lobbyists bleat otherwise, progressive tax policies are wildly popular. Americans understand that our tax system has been rigged to reward the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else. So let’s fix it.

First, it’s time to start taxing wealth, not just income. When Jeff Bezos takes a joyride to space, he isn’t paying for it with his declared income of $80,000. Bezos, who owns The Post, and lots of other billionaires have gamed the system so they have plenty of spending money and close to zero tax obligations. The best option to stop that is a two-cent wealth tax that applies only to the wealthiest 100,000 U.S. households — with a few cents more for the billionaires. Such a wealth tax would raise roughly $3 trillion in revenue over the next decade, without raising taxes on 99.95 percent of Americans. It’s supported by 68 percent of the country, including a majority of Republicans. And there are lots of ways to advance this principle — including a one-time wealth tax that would raise over $1 trillion.

Second, let’s turn to highly profitable giant corporations. In the three years following the 2017 Republican tax cuts, 39 megacorporations, including Amazon and FedEx, reported more than $122 billion in profits to their shareholders while using loopholes, deductions and exemptions to pay zero in federal income taxes.

These companies boosted their stock prices and increased CEO pay by telling their shareholders they raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, while simultaneously telling the Internal Revenue Service that they don’t owe any taxes. The president supports taxing the profits that large companies report to their shareholders. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and I have a plan that mirrors this. We would require any company that earns more than $100 million in profits to pay a 7 percent tax on every dollar earned above that amount. Only about 1,300 public companies would pay the tax, raising nearly $700 billion over 10 years.

Finally, rules don’t mean anything if nobody enforces them, so let’s enforce the law. Currently, the top 1 percent of Americans fail to report more than a fifth of their income. The difference between taxes owed and taxes actually paid exceeds an estimated $1 trillion annually.

The superrich get away with not paying their taxes because decades of politically motivated budget cuts have hollowed out the IRS. Since 2010, the agency’s enforcement budget has declined by more than 20 percent, and it has lost one-third of its enforcers. It’s no surprise that audit rates for taxpayers making more than $10 million have plummeted. This should enrage every American who plays by the rules. That’s why over 70 percent of Americans support giving the IRS more resources to make sure the wealthy and corporations aren’t evading taxes.

Biden has proposed giving the IRS about $8 billion in additional annual funding. I’ve suggested a step further: $31.5 billion in permanent annual funding to track down wealthy and corporate tax cheats. The IRS also needs better reporting from banks and other financial institutions so it can sniff out the hidden cash of the ultrarich. These changes could raise as much as $1.75 trillion from tax cheats.

I’ve put these three proposals — a wealth tax, a tax on real corporate profits and closing the tax gap — on the table. There are other ideas worthy of consideration, but the standard should be writing rules that target wealthy freeloaders and corporate grifters and then enforcing those rules. American workers and families don’t want handouts. They want everybody to play by the same rules. The Democrats’ infrastructure plan is about investments and tax fairness — changes that would help build a strong future for not only a handful of people at the top but for everyone. This is what we were sent here to do. It’s time for us to do it.

Pay Up Or Get Out

One of the big fantasies we've been suckered with is the one about "the noble job creators" - the companies we have to bow down to for practically everything.

eg: WalMart employees get fucked over (right along with the rest of us) because the Waltons have figured out how to stay within legal parameters (which their lobbyists helped establish) while paying their people so little that an alarmingly big chunk of their hourly staff qualify for Medicaid.

So taxpayers get to pick up the tab for WalMart's healthcare insurance - as well as their water and sewer in a lot of cases, and of course their fire and police protection, as well as a fair amount of their federal taxes.

"State and local governments spend nearly twice as much

on corporate welfare as they do on fire protection"

WaPo: (pay wall)

President Biden and Democrats in Congress have kicked off a national debate about raising corporate taxes. Yet an arguably more important conversation is happening outside Washington, D.C.: how to slash the nearly $95 billion in tax incentives that states and cities give to businesses every year. And unlike the discussion about the corporate tax rate, the movement to cut corporate welfare has attracted notable support on both sides of the political aisle.

Legislators in 15 states have introduced bills that would block their governments from doling out tax incentives and subsidies through so-called economic development programs. Every state has used these programs, trying to convince corporations from Hollywood producers to sports teams to brand-name manufacturers to set up shop or stay within their borders.

State and local governments spend nearly twice as much on corporate welfare as they do on fire protection. It’s done through a combination of both direct payments and company-specific tax breaks: In Michigan, where I live, most incentives are cash payments. The same is true for the biggest giveaway programs in most states, such as Florida, where companies can get $3,000 “refunds” for each job they create. At least 35 states have handed out more than a billion dollars each, though many fail to report the true total.

Subsidies for Hollywood productions are among the most popular, with Michigan alone spending half a billion dollars between 2008 and 2015. National Football League teams worth billions of dollars each routinely get hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to build stadiums. Each state tends to reward its biggest corporate citizens: In Michigan, Ford, GM and Stellantis get the most; in Massachusetts, General Electric; in Louisiana, oil companies; and in Washington state, Boeing received the biggest tax break in history, worth $8.7 billion.

And, of course, states pull out all the stops to lure big-name businesses. Wisconsin courted the chipmaker Foxconn with $2.9 billion in state tax credits in 2017, while New York and Virginia dangled a combined $3.75 billion in incentives to win Amazon’s second headquarters.

Such deals have deservedly spurred a massive public outcry. The Foxconn debacle played a major role in the 2018 gubernatorial race in Wisconsin, and the subsidy was subsequently cut by more than two-thirds. Widespread opposition even led Amazon to cancel its New York plans. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)

State lawmakers, representing various political bases, increasingly oppose these blatant handouts. No one has done more to draw attention to the issue than Dan Johnson, a progressive lobbyist in Illinois. In Michigan, the Senate Democratic leader and a key House Republican are leading the legislative charge. In Alabama and Utah, Republicans are in the vanguard. In Rhode Island, the Senate sponsor of the anti-subsidy bill is a Democrat, while the House sponsor is a Republican.

Despite their disagreements on other issues, these lawmakers share the view that states should compete on business climate and quality-of-life issues, not corporate welfare. They also have the facts on their side, as studies show that such subsidies can harm, not help, economic growth and almost always fail to drive the promised job creation.

Yet no state is willing to end its incentive program unless others do the same, fearing that unilateral disarmament would damage their economy. That’s unlikely: One study found that up to 98 percent of companies would make the same investment and expansion decisions without any tax breaks. Even so, state leaders aren’t willing to take the risk. Fortunately, the legislation under consideration in those 15 states is designed to overcome this hurdle.

Whether it’s Hawaii, Florida, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania or elsewhere, no bill currently under consideration would take effect on its own. If enacted, it would go live only after at least one other state passed the same measure. The goal is for many more states to enact the legislation simultaneously. It would then be illegal for all those states to reduce taxes or provide subsidies to entice specific companies to stay or relocate within their borders. Existing corporate welfare handouts would wind down until they disappear entirely. In short, the legislation creates an interstate compact to ban corporate welfare.

This concept is new, arising only in 2019. Yet the mounting interest from lawmakers across the country shows that momentum is building. Although no state has enacted anything yet, Utah is closest, with the interstate compact bill passing the House of Representatives in 2020. With each state legislative cycle, more lawmakers in more states introduce this policy. No wonder: Ending taxpayer giveaways to corporations has broad and bipartisan appeal.

This issue deserves at least as much attention as corporate tax rates. It’s a matter of respecting taxpayers and companies who pay their fair share. That’s a conversation America needs to have, and states are not only doing so, they’re moving toward the right decision.

It wasn't a buncha poor people who lobbied state and federal legislatures to put 100,000 pages of shelters, loopholes, and exemptions in the tax codes

Understand Something

It wasn't a buncha workin' slobs who got together to lobby congress in order to insert 60,000 pages of shelters, loopholes, write-downs and exceptions into the IRS Tax Code.

Rich people hold an out-sized share of power over government, and they use their wealth very effectively to feed us a steady stream of propaganda, convincing us that they're no different from the rest of us, that they're just being smart, and that everything they do comes from a place in their hearts that's the very essence of purity, love, and charity.

It's bullshit and we know it, but we walk around acting like it's god's own truth - we eat it up like it's one of Grandma's fresh-baked mulberry pies with homemade ice cream.

If any of it were true, then guys like Branson and Bezos and Musk wouldn't be in a race to space - they'd be trying to end the cycle of poverty ignorance and crime.

"Never be deceived that the rich will let you

vote away their wealth."

-- Lucy Parsons

Seems Like A Good Idea

No one is above the law.

But putting themselves above the law is exactly what the plutocrats have always worked towards - and achieved to a greater or lesser extent down through the ages.

It's just possible we're on the brink of cutting some of that shit back considerably.

The Hill:

Yellen proposing global minimum tax on multinationals

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is working with other countries on an agreement to update corporate tax rules to establish a global minimum tax as the Biden administration considers raising taxes on businesses in order to finance spending priorities.

Notice how the poodles at The Hill have managed to soften the language a bit as they pimp the usual "tax-n-spend" shit. 

The Washington Post reported Monday that the effort could be one of Yellen's biggest accomplishments if an agreement is reached and could be critical to any push from Biden to raise taxes to offset the cost of future spending proposals.

There it is again - those rascals.

Yellen is participating in ongoing negotiations at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) about how to update global tax rules to reflect the digital economy. One pillar of the group's work is focused on a nonbinding global minimum tax.

The work comes as the Biden administration is looking at including tax increases in its next major legislative package, which could be an infrastructure bill. During Biden's presidential campaign, he proposed increasing the U.S. corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent.

And again - are we seeing a pattern here?

Republican lawmakers have raised concerns that such an increase could impact U.S. competitiveness and cause American companies to move overseas, since countries have generally been cutting their corporate tax rates in recent years. President Trump's 2017 tax law lowered the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.

Yellen has responded to concerns about increasing corporate taxes by expressing her desire for the OECD to reach an agreement. She said during her confirmation hearing in January that she wants to work with the OECD to prevent a "race to the bottom" on corporate taxation.

In response to a written question following the hearing, Yellen said that "the Biden-Harris Administration will pursue a comprehensive multinational agreement to update global tax rules in ways that establish effective minimum taxation rules, prevent global profit-shifting, and ensure that corporations pay their fair share."

"We will pursue in a manner that will maintain competitiveness and diminish the incentives that American companies now have to offshore activities," she added.

The Post reported that it could be challenging for any OECD agreement on a global minimum tax to be implemented because of its nonbinding nature. The newspaper also reported that any agreement would likely need to be approved by Congress, which could be difficult depending on the specifics of the deal.

On The NYT Story

Hoo boy.

Tidbits from a long and rather arduous piece in the NYT:

Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

-snip-

In fact, those public filings offer a distorted picture of his financial state, since they simply report revenue, not profit. In 2018, for example, Mr. Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9 million. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of his bottom line: $47.4 million in losses.

-snip-

Mr. Trump’s net income from his fame — his 50 percent share of “The Apprentice,” together with the riches showered upon him by the scores of suitors paying to use his name — totaled $427.4 million through 2018. A further $176.5 million in profit came to him through his investment in two highly successful office buildings.

So how did he escape nearly all taxes on that fortune? Even the effective tax rate paid by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans could have caused him to pay more than $100 million.

The answer rests in a third category of Mr. Trump’s endeavors: businesses that he owns and runs himself. The collective and persistent losses he reported from them largely absolved him from paying federal income taxes on the $600 million from “The Apprentice,” branding deals and investments.

That equation is a key element of the alchemy of Mr. Trump’s finances: using the proceeds of his celebrity to purchase and prop up risky businesses, then wielding their losses to avoid taxes.

Throughout his career, Mr. Trump’s business losses have often accumulated in sums larger than could be used to reduce taxes on other income in a single year. But the tax code offers a workaround: With some restrictions, business owners can carry forward leftover losses to reduce taxes in future years.

That provision has been the background music to Mr. Trump’s life. As The Times’s previous reporting on his 1995 return showed, the nearly $1 billion in losses from his early-1990s collapse generated a tax deduction that he could use for up to 18 years going forward.

-snip-

Testifying before Congress in February 2019, the president’s estranged personal lawyer, Mr. Cohen, recalled Mr. Trump’s showing him a huge check from the U.S. Treasury some years earlier and musing “that he could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like him that much money back.”

There will be a lot more stories that come from this, but for me, the obvious overarching lesson is that we have a tax code that's being used as one giant loophole that lets rich people off the hook completely.

And - from the last part of the Stephanie Miller clip:

"Dissent is my way of speaking to the intellect of a day in the future." -- RBG

Whooda Thunk It

WaPo:

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), a lead architect of the GOP tax bill, suggested Tuesday the tax cuts may not fully pay for themselves, contradicting a promise Republicans made repeatedly while pushing the law in late 2017.

Pressed about what portion of the tax cuts were fully paid for, Brady said it was “hard to know."

“We will know in year 8, 9 or 10 what revenues it brought in to the government over time. So it’s way too early to tell,” said Brady at the Peterson Foundation’s annual Fiscal Summit in Washington D.C.

The federal government’s deficit typically shrinks during strong economic times, but the deficit is up nearly 40 percent so far this fiscal year, according to the latest Congressional Budget Office report released Friday.

Wait - ya mean opening the drain and turning off one of the spigots isn't a good way to fill a bath tub? Huh.

But let's be careful not to dismiss this - to laugh it off as another example of how stoopid some of these GOP clowns are, and how stoopid the rubes must be to go on voting for them. 

At this point, after a couple of generations of Trickle Down and Supply Side, and knowing it's all just 10 gallons of shit in a 3 gallon bucket, no one should think the Repubs are dumb enough ever to have believed it'd work the way they say it's supposed to work. These are pretty smart guys who know what they're doing.

It should be obvious to us by now that there are reasons they keep coming back to it, and the main reason almost has to be that Republicans have come to hate the very idea of democratic self-government, and everything they do is part of a plan to dismantle it in order to replace it with plutocracy.

We Are Not Surprised

There's more than one way to fill a bathtub. 

It'll get filled if all you do is leave it out the rain for a good while.

What you don't do is open the drain and turn off the taps - are you that fuckin' stoopid?

The Hill:

The federal deficit in the first seven months of fiscal 2019 jumped 38 percent compared to the same period last year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Tuesday.

The deficit ballooned to $531 billion from the beginning of October to the end of April, well above the previous year's $385 billion mark.
But the comparison with 2018 was somewhat inflated, CBO said, due to differences in payments and outlays; without them, the deficit would have been $486 billion.

Expenditures rose by $178 billion during the first seven months of the fiscal year, driven by both increased mandatory spending and a bipartisan agreement to increase discretionary spending. Higher interest rates also contributed.

“Outlays for net interest on the public debt increased by $27 billion (or 13 percent) because interest rates on short-term debt are substantially higher now than they were during the same period in 2018 and because the amount of federal debt is larger than it was a year ago," the CBO said in its report.

Meanwhile, revenues were up only $34 billion, due in part to the 2017 GOP tax law.

“Most of that shortfall stems from lower-than-anticipated withholding of individual income and payroll taxes in December 2018 and January 2019,” CBO said.

A recent CBO analysis found that if current spending and tax policies remain in place, the nation’s debt burden will reach 105 percent of gross domestic product by 2029, just 1 percentage point below the post-World War II record set in 1946.

Today's GOP

Hey, Repubs - we're really tired of working our ass off trying to get things squared away just to watch you guys come in and fuck it all up.

Pack your shit and get the fuck outa my government.

Sarah McGregor, Bloomberg:

The U.S. recorded a $100.5 billion budget deficit in October, an increase of about 60 percent from a year earlier, as spending grew twice as fast as revenue.

The deficit widened from $63.2 billion in the same month last year, the department said in an emailed statement on Tuesday. October marks the start of the U.S. fiscal year.

Receipts totaled $252.7 billion last month, up 7 percent from a year earlier, while outlays climbed 18 percent to $353.2 billion, according to the department.

A ballooning U.S. budget shortfall -- fueled by tax cuts, spending hikes and an aging population -- is driving the Treasury Department to raise its long-term debt issuance. Waning support for U.S. government debt from the Fed, combined with President Donald Trump’s deficit-boosting tax cuts, are weighing on the debt load that he inherited from Barack Obama.

In Trump’s first full fiscal year that ended in September, the budget gap grew to $779 billion, the highest level since 2012.

Sleight Of Hand

Vox, Matthew Yglesias:

Donald Trump took time out of his busy schedule of disaster tourism and tweeting about the media to deliver a speech in Missouri on Wednesday about a seemingly far-less entertaining topic — comprehensive tax reform.

An overhaul of the tax code would, Trump promised, “bring back Main Street by reducing the crumbling burden on our companies and on our workers.”

Meanwhile, Paul Ryan’s been touring the nation waiving around a vaguely postcard-shaped piece of paper that he believes Americans will be able to use to file their taxes once the simplification nirvana of tax reform is enacted.

Congress is facing a crowded September full of “must pass” bills to keep the government open, replenish FEMA’s Harvey-depleted coffers, and avoid a debt ceiling crisis. But when those deadlines are in the rearview mirror, tax reform is the next Republican policy priority. And while achieving the sort of comprehensive reworking of the tax system that Trump is talking about is extremely difficult, the stars are far better aligned for Republicans to pass something than they were on the disastrous effort to replace the Affordable Care Act.
My take-away, as always:

Rich people will throw us a few tasty ribs, knowing we won't notice (or we'll deliberately ignore) the simple fact that they're eating the whole fucking pig.

The obvious musical accompaniment:

Everything old is new again - especially the part about how a few uber-dicks will always fuck it up for the rest of us if we're not very watchful.

Hey Hey - Goo-ood Bye

WaPo, Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, Robert Costa and Damian Paletta

“No matter what happens, Steve is a honey badger,” said this person, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. “Steve’s in a good place. He doesn’t care. He’s going to support the president and push the agenda, whether he’s on the inside or the outside.”

Bannon doesn't care.

First off, he knows he's insulated. He doesn't have to worry about the effects of shitty draconian policies on regular people cuz he's not regular people.

Guys at Bannon's level pretty much think they own the government anyway (or at least they think they should - 'course we haven't exactly been giving them whole big bunches of reasons to think otherwise). And there's always the probability that he just enjoys having the power, and the time, to dabble.

Wanting to prevent ridiculously rich and craven people from "governing" at their leisurely  whim was kinda the whole point of 'The United States of America' in first place, wasn't it?

So lemme see - what might keep these assholes kinda reined in so they'd hafta spend more time minding their own goddamned business and less time fucking with the rest of us?

Anybody wanna talk Tax Reform?  Be ready - cuz that's coming soon, but for now: