Doing The Laundry

From Rolling Stone Magazine, by Tim Dickinson:

Are Romney's tax dodges legal? It's impossible to say for sure, given how little he has disclosed. But tax experts note that there are plenty of red flags, including an investigation by New York prosecutors into tax abuses at Bain Capital that began on Romney's watch. "He aggressively exploits every loophole he can find," says Victor Fleischer, a professor of tax law at the University of Colorado. "He's pushing the limits of tax law beyond what many think is reasonable." Indeed, a look at Romney's finances reveals just how skilled he is at hiding his wealth – and paying a fraction of his fair share in taxes.

 The more I learn about this guy, the smaller he looks.

Colbert

(hat tip = Crooks & Liars)

Parade Of Stupid

Stoopid shit we say about teachers:

"Teachers are just glorified babysitters."

So let's pay 'em according to current babysitting rates.
($10/hour x 6 hours) = $60/day
($60/day x 5 days/week) = $300/week
($300/week x 36 weeks) = $10,800/year
($10,800/year x 30 kids) - (30% discount group rate) = $226,800

"My kids never act out at home, I wonder what the teachers are doing wrong in the classroom."

This is most strange.  Maybe if the teachers came to observe you in your home for a few days, they could figure it out.  When's a good time for 30 teachers to drop by your house to get some solid tips on how you go about controlling one or two children?  Or maybe it'd be better if one teacher brought 30 kids to your place and just sat back to watch you work your magic.

And the big one - "We pay those teachers with our hard-earned tax dollars."

Speaking for myself, I pay about $4,200 per year in local taxes (property, sales, car, etc).  I'm not dumb enough to think that all of that money goes to the high school where two of my kids are going this year, so I did a little fairly easy digging, and found out that the school budget total for 2012-13 is about $151 Million, out of a total budget for the whole county of $313 Million.  The arithmetic is pretty simple at the top here.  Schools account for about 48% of what I pay in local taxes - that's $2016.
Now let's pretend the whole $1008 (per kid) goes to "my" high school - what are the basics that I get for my contribution?

• 1260 hours of instruction (for the year) in English, History, a foreign language, Geometry, Algebra, Earth Science, Chorus, Phys Ed, Applied Computer Science, Graphic Design and Marketing, Intro To Psych, etc
• In-school tutoring
• Mentoring, coaching, counseling, etc

(Plus, the joint is clean and safe and well-maintained; the kids get Annual Eye and Hearing tests, and a full time on-sight School Nurse; it has a new turf field, and the building was recently upgraded/updated with a bunch of other new goodies - plus they provide door-to-door transportation every day)

But let's just take the main point here, and further pretend that the whole cost of the school is devoted solely to the teaching of one of my kids for the year.  1260 instruction hours + 20 (or so) tutoring hours = 1280 hours.  Divide that into the 1008 bucks I pay, and suddenly it starts to look like I'm gettin' a pretty good fucking deal at less than 79 cents/hour.

At some point, we have to start to understand that we deserve a much better debate than this endless carping about bad government, unions, taxes; and how everything'll be  peachy if we just apply some common sense and remember how great it all was back when Grandma was girl.

What you really need to remember is that Nostalgia was once classified as mental illness.

Here We Go Again(?)

“The Republicans say they don’t want to raise taxes on the middle class, and I don’t want to raise taxes on the middle class, so we should all agree to extend the tax cut for the middle class. Let’s agree to do what we agree on,” he said in the East Room of the White House, flanked by people who would benefit from the extension. “Let’s not hold the vast majority of the Americans and the entire economy hostage while we debate the merits of another tax cut for the wealthy.”

Read more at Politico.


C'mon, "conservatives" - you sat there all night; you had a nice dinner; you downed some decent wine; you had a whole squad of cocktails; you listened to the band, and you even got up and danced a little - but now the check's here and somehow it's Obama's fault that you have to settle up?

Repubs love pissin' and moanin' about somebody getting a free ride; so how come they refuse to pay for their own shit?  Buncha fuckin' pussies.

How Stupid Are We?

The Buffett Rule is stuck in the US Senate because Repubs won't let it get unstuck.  This is a measure that CNN's polling tells us is supported by 72% of us.  But because we have a near-totally dysfunctional US Senate, nothing gets done without a 60 vote majority.

But the real kicker is that most of the Press Poodles look at a vote tally of 51 AYEs vs 45 NAYs, and report to us that "the measure failed".

USA Today:

The 51-45 defeat of the "Buffett rule," named after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, fell mostly along party lines.

Huffington Post:

Democrats' attempt to pass a Buffett Rule tax on the super wealthy failed Monday in the Senate, as Republicans blocked the measure in a sharply partisan debate.

Reuters (headline):

Buffett rule fails Senate vote in tax fight

New York Daily News:

The Senate rejected the "Buffett Rule," which would've raised the tax rates for millionaires, after Republicans accused President Barack Obama of pitting Americans against each other.

I hope it's just lazy, but it seems to be bordering on dishonest.

NYT has a breakdown that's feels a lot more straightforward to me.

Shoulda Knowed It

DumFux News is fond of saying the US Corporate Tax Rate is the 2nd highest in the world (35%), getting the rubes to pretend that the debate can just stop there.

Well, the non-rubes among us know that the Tax Rate has no meaning if nobody ever pays at that rate.

So guess what - the 'effective rate' is actually down around 12%.  And, the amount of Corp Taxes collected as a percentage of GDP is the lowest it's been since 1972.

So, once again, the "Libruls" were right, and the "Conservatives" have been lying to us.

From the Rupert Street Journal - full piece is behind the pay wall.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Quick Tho't

Don't be too hasty to condemn "the do-nothing Congress".  Remember that if they manage to do nothing for the next couple of years, the Bush Tax Cuts will expire which means the deficit starts to go away, which in turn means the debt starts to go away.

Sounds Encouraging

A judge in Colorado apparently has some real balls for a change.  How long before we get the Repub Chorus singing the standard Judicial Activism tune?

"There is not enough money in the system to permit school districts across the state to properly implement standards-based education and to meet the requirements of state law and regulation," she wrote in her ruling. "This is true for districts of every description. . . . There is not one school district that is sufficiently funded. This is an obvious hallmark of an irrational system."

You don't get good solutions just by throwing money at a problem (duh), but you don't get any solutions at all unless you start working the problem.  It always takes more time, effort and money than anybody wants to spend, and we've gotten really good at whining about it. Grow up, shut up and pony up.  We got shit to do.

Read the story in The Denver Post.

The Tax Swindle

Middle Class Americans have to be distracted while the Ownership Class continues to pick their pockets.

A good way to keep them from noticing how badly you're fucking them is to scapegoat some other group (in this case the poor and the working poor), which makes them think you're actually on their side, which enlists their help in your efforts to fuck them over even more.

It's classic.  People of a particular authoritarian bent, who are in positions of privilege and power are always advocating the most severe remedies "for the good of the country"; and those remedies somehow always end up being imposed on (and to the detriment of) the very people who should benefit from those remedies the most.  And lately, all this self-sacrifice for the common good is being sold to us under the guise of Ayn Rand-type philosophy.  Guess what?  Rand HATED the notion of self sacrifice; and she especially HATED the rationale of sacrifice in service to the collective.  Rejection of all things communal, and a complete disdain for sacrificing the Self are at the very heart of Rand's construction of Objectivism.

I'm off the point a little, so let's bring it back to the bullshit currently being peddled by DumFux News and their network of echo chamber media lizards.

via The Atlantic:

There is no question that the wealthy pay a higher overall tax rate than any other group. That is an American tradition. But there is also no question that their tax rates have fallen more than any other group’s over the last three decades. The only reason they are paying more taxes than in the past is that their pretax incomes have risen so rapidly — which hardly seems a great rationale for a further tax cut.

Fun Fact

This represents exactly one dollar more than what ExxonMobil paid in taxes last year.

Taxation

"We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem."
"Taxes are too high in the US."
"No wonder companies are trying to shelter their income; corporate taxes are sky high."

All of that is bullshit.  To wit (Citizens For Tax Justice):

A Terrible Secret

In the very short time she served as Alaska's governor, Sarah Palin's single greatest achievement was...wait for it...raising taxes!  There's a fair probability that it wasn't actually her idea - more often than not, it's the staffers who come up with these things - but she pushed hard for a program of taxing oil company profits in order to give Alaskans a share of their state's great mineral wealth.  And she did it by going out of her way to get the Dems to support her efforts.

via Joshua Green:

...she managed to solve, at least for a time, the problem that lay at the heart of Alaska's politics for a generation: how to break the oil companies' grip on the state and capture a fair share of their profits for Alaskans. Palin's major achievement was winning an oil tax that did just that and was called Alaska's Clear and Equitable Share (ACES).

Shocking, ain't it?

And here's where politics is so fucking weird that I just have to love it in all its perverse glory:  no politician is going to talk about it out in the open.  Obama can't point at it as a good example of appropriate regulation because then he has to give props to Palin for getting it done.  And Palin sure as hell can't talk about it because it directly contradicts the party-line dogma about government interference.

But the main thing is the same ol' crap that talking about taxation is considered political poison.  There's a program in place that fills the coffers of a (very red) state government, while not hindering the profitability of Big Oil, but it seems nobody anywhere else is allowed to make any serious effort at getting hugely profitable corporations off the dole, much less getting them just to pay the taxes they already owe.  This is just too weird.

Tax Season

We've been conditioned to feel bad about paying our taxes, so this is the time of year when everybody is supposed to piss and moan about what a horrendous burden we're all carrying.

Maybe it's just my contrarian nature, but I kinda like it.  I think it's a good thing to add it all up once a year to see where you stand.  And when I take a close look at it, I think I'm gettin' a pretty good deal here.

I live in a great part of a great country; I can go where I wanna go, and I can do what I wanna do, and I really don't have to worry a lot about the basics.  There's a lot I'd like to see improved.  There's plenty to be done to get some balance back into the power structure, etc - that's all a given.  If you want democracy, you have to practice at it.  My point is that when I'm in the "28% Bracket", and I actually pay less than 16% of my total income for both Federal and State taxes, I find it hard to complain about the "burden".  We had a boatload of deductions last year, but still, 16% total?  That's cheap.

Random thought: with all the wacky shit that goes on in Congress, how long before some knucklehead stands up and proposes that what I pay in taxes this year should be allowed as a deduction on my taxes next year?  Just wonderin'.

Time To Get Real

We need to get back to a saner and more common-sensical approach to governing.  The radical policies of Reaganism and Clinton/Rubin Triangulation, the Gingrich Republicans and the Junior Bush Administration have brought us down.

We should start by remembering and admitting that you have to pay for the things you want.