Even under the best of economic circumstances, tax season is a tense time for American households. The number of hours we collectively spend working on our returns is probably a lot more than government agencies claim.
The burden in financial terms is even greater: A recent independent survey found that the average American’s total federal, state and local tax bill roughly equals his or her entire earnings from January 1 up until right before tax day.
Now imagine that tax bill doubling over time.
In recent years, the federal government has spent more money than it takes in at an increasing rate. Total federal debt almost doubled during President George W. Bush’s administration and, as much as we needed some stimulus spending to boost the economy, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office now estimates total debt levels could almost double again over the next eight years based on the budget recently outlined by President Obama.
Regardless of what politicians tell you, any additional accumulations of debt are, absent dramatic reductions in the size and role of government, basically deferred tax increases. Remember the old saw? “You can pay me now or you can pay me later, with interest.”
[…]
Unless we begin to get our fiscal house in order, there’s simply no other way to handle our ever-mounting debt burdens except by doubling taxes over time. Otherwise, our growing commitments for Medicare and Social Security benefits will gradually squeeze out spending on other vital programs such as education, research and development, and infrastructure…
Effectively addressing these issues will require tough choices and comprehensive reforms, including budget controls, changes to our entitlement programs, reductions in health care costs, other spending cuts, and yes, tax increases. But as the old saw goes, paying now, or paying soon, won’t be as painful as paying later.
So as you file your tax returns this year, bear in mind that no matter how much you’re paying now, you’ll pay much more in the future because of Washington’s failure to get its finances in order. If you don’t like the idea, then get informed and get involved. And by listening rather than punishing, help encourage our elected officials to speak the truth about our financial condition, even if it means reforming entitlements, cutting spending, and yes, raising taxes.
Now call me crazy, but it seems to me that about eight years ago a president left the nation a surplus and a new president came in on a platform of “no new blowjobs” and “it’s your money.” And Walker’s anti-deficit benefactor, Pete Peterson, went strangely silent while that president and his party spent the country into oblivion on useless wars and tax cuts for the rich. They have no credibility.
The owners of America nearly destroyed the golden egg (again) and they are gathering their forces to ensure that they will pay no price for their thievery. If they can manage to destroy the American safety net while they’re at it, all the better.
All these wealthy front groups are coming together to fight any kind of reform that will benefit the average person. There is nothing more threatening to the ruling class than the possibility of average citizens becoming politically empowered and actually voting their own self interests.
Courtesy La Vida Locavore, and there are some other really groovy recipes over there in addition to this one:
Darjeeling Ice Cream
(any ice cream recipe can be adapted, simply by infusing the liquid with your favorite tea) makes about 1 quart
1 cup whole milk 2 cups half and half (can use heavy cream for a richer ice cream) ¾ cup sugar 5-6 Darjeeling tea bags 5 egg yolks
Warm the milk, half and half, and sugar in a saucepan. Remove from heat, place tea bags in the pan, cover and steep at room temperature for an hour. Remove tea bags.
Rewarm tea-infused milk. Wisk egg yolks together in a separate bowl. Slowly pour the milk mixture into the bowl with egg yolks, whisking constantly.
Return the milk and egg mixture to the saucepan, and cook over medium heat, stirring and scrapping the bottom of the pan constantly until the mixture thickens to a custard and coats the spatula.
Cool the mixture completely, and freeze in your ice cream maker.
If You’ve Done Nothing Wrong, You Have Nothing To Worry About
by dday
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security released a report on right-wing extremism, being fueled by the recession and the disturbing increase in activity from white supremacy groups after the election of the nation’s first black President. Basically, fear and economic uncertainty breed a certain strain of anger that could morph into violence. And in particular, the targets here are anti-government hate groups, who may recruit and radicalize American citizens, including veterans.
Of course, this has set off conservative media, who claim that the President is directly targeting conservatives with this report. Never mind that the report initiated with the Bush Administration, and was a companion to a similar report on left-wing groups potentially using cyber-attacks (Here’s a separate report referring to left-wing groups back in 2001). Somehow conservative media groups take a look at murderous extremists like Timothy McVeigh and see themselves. Here’s Dave Neiwert, an authority on the subject:
Because, you know, the report — which in fact is perfectly accurate in every jot and tittle — couldn’t be more clear. It carefully delineates that the subject of its report is “rightwing extremists,” “domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups,” “terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks,” “white supremacists,” and similar very real threats described in similar language.
Nothing about conservatives. The word never appears in the report.
Because, you know, we always thought there was a difference between right-wing extremists and mainstream conservatives too. My new book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, does explain that the distance between them has in fact shrunk considerably, thanks to the help of people like Malkin […] The report itself, in fact, is all about accurately identifying very real looming threats. And, while it’s obvious Malkin hasn’t been paying attention, there in fact is considerable data coming over the transom to indicate that there’s a real problem looming with the far right.
Don’t forget: Before he’d even been sworn into office, we had skinheads [photo above] being arrested for plotting Obama’s assassination.
Those who are slightly smarter than to describe themselves in the same breath as neo-Nazis are trying to shift the issue and claim that the report attacks veterans. Some good examples of this whining are Joe Scarborough, who said the Obama Administration is “more focused on targeting veterans than on protecting our border,” and Newt Gingrich, who claimed that the White House “used terrorism to describe worrying about Americans but the word has been banned for describing foreigners.” To their credit, some conservatives have maintained their sanity in discussing a report targeting violent extremist groups with a stated goal and long history of committing acts of terrorism.
Now, I think there is a potential danger of government over-reaching in the name of national security when it comes to monitoring citizen groups. I’ve ALWAYS thought so. That’s why the utter hypocrisy coming from the right on this issue is too insane to ignore.
The political faction screeching about the dangers of the DHS is the same one that spent the last eight years vastly expanding the domestic Surveillance State and federal police powers in every area. DHS — and the still-creepy phrase “homeland security” — became George Bush’s calling card. The Republicans won the 2002 election by demonizing those who opposed its creation. All of the enabling legislation underlying this Surveillance State — from the Patriot Act to the Military Commissions Act, from the various FISA “reforms” to massive increases in domestic “counter-Terrorism” programs — are the spawns of the very right-wing movement that today is petrified that this is all being directed at them.
When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you. If you create a massive and wildly empowered domestic surveillance apparatus, it’s going to monitor and investigate domestic political activity. That’s its nature […]
Indeed, thanks to the very people who are today petulantly complaining about politically-motivated federal police actions (now that they imagine it’s directed at them rather than at people they dislike), the Federal Government today has the power to eavesdrop on telephone calls and read the emails of American citizens without warrants; monitor bank records without court approval; obtain all sorts of invasive personal records, medical and financial, without Subpoenas; and obtain and store a whole host of other personal information about American citizens who have not been accused, let alone convicted, of having done anything wrong.
It was obvious that the same cheerleaders for excessive government surveillance, warrantless wiretapping, and police-state crackdowns would turn on a dime the moment that the federal apparatus transferred to Democrats. And it was obvious they would not fall back on their previous justifications – “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about,” – once their party lost power. So they really have no right to complain at all. If they had any intellectual honesty at all, maybe they’d work with civil liberties groups to dismantle the national security state and put an end to the threat of concentrated power in the hands of the few. But they won’t, because they’re perpetual victims and rage addicts who just want to feel oppressed by their enemies.
Susan Roesgen of CNN reports from the Chicago Tea Party:
Kira Phillips: Susan Roesgen getting a taste of that Chicago style tea. Does that come with a pizza too?
Roesgen: Well you know Kira, this is a party for Obama bashers. I have to say that this is not entirely representative of everybody in America. This was organized by three different conservative groups and if you lok at some of the signs Kira … Let me intorduce you to this guy. Could you come over here please?
(Pointing to picture of Obama dressed as Hitler) You know, what is this supposed to mean? What do you mean by that?
Dittohead freak: Well, I mean he’s a fascist, the real pirates …
Roesgen: Wait, why do you say he’s a fascist? He’s the president of the United States.
Dittohead freak: I think he’s a fascist.
Roesgen, Do you realize how offensive that is?
DF: I think he’s a fascist
Roesgen: Why?
DF: Beacuse he is. He’s a fascist.
Roesgen: Why can you say that?
DF: beacuse the real pirates are in the white house and the senate and in the congress. We need one term limits for all these elected politicians.
Roesgen: Why be so hard on the president of the United States with such an offensive message?
Ok, you’re here with your two year old and “you’re already in debt” (referring to sign he’s holding) Why do you say that?
Ditto head freak 2: Because I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln’s primary thing was that he believed that people had the right to liberty.
Roesgen: Sir, what does this have to do with taxes? What does this have to do with your taxes?
DF2: Let me finish speaking!
Roesgen: Do you realize that you are eligible for a 400 dollar …
DF2: Let me finish my point. (Crowd getting surly, yelling at Rojan to shut up) Lincoln believed that people had ther right to share in the fruits of their own labor and that government should not take it. And we have clearly gotten to that point.
Roesgen: Alright. Did you know that the state of Lincoln gets 50 billion dollars out of this stimulus? That’s 50 billion dollars for this state sir.
DF2: (looking at someone off camera) Can you stop this sir? (people milling closely around, Rojan looking harried. )
Roesgen: Ok Well, Kira, we’ll move on over here. I think you get the general tenor of this. Uh, it’s anti government, anti-CNN since this is highly promoted by the right wing conservative network Fox. And since I can’t really hear much more and I think this is not really family viewing, toss it back to you, Kira.
Update: C&L captures a Fox news anchors talkin’ fascism at a rally, (video at the link):
Fox Business Network anchor Cody Willard didn’t appear to be very “fair and balanced” as he let out his opinion of Democrats’ economic policy during a tea party protest in Boston. “When are we going to wake up and start fighting the fascism that seems to be permeating the country?” asked an excited Willard. “The fascism — the definition of it is big business and government getting in bed together. That is what these people are fighting. We have about 700 people here. They are starting to rally,” he said.
I know we all hate the government today because it’s tax day and all, but it’s more important than ever to keep out eyes on the ball. Dday has written a nice primer for all your tea bag party needs. And here’s another little something that should inform your teabagging friends that the tax on teabags is actually not the problem:
Even as the U.S. economy went into a tailspin, the median salary for CEOs of 200 large corporations increased by 4.5 percent to $1.08 million. On top of that, these corporations keep plying executives with generous freebies, despite the public outcry over private jets and other executive perks. The 2009 AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch site, which launches today, points out that the perksfor executives rose on average by 12.5 percent in 2008 to $336,248—or nine times the median salary of a full-time worker. Even more appalling is the practice of rewarding executives who drive their companies into the ground. For example, the site reports that in 2007—the year the financial crisis began to unfold—the top 10 recipients of the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) collectively paid their CEOs a combined $242 million in total annual compensation. That averages nearly $25 million per CEO to run companies that might have gone bankrupt if not for billions of dollars in taxpayer assistance. The PayWatch site also features an e-mail action. Click here to send a letter to Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), chairmen of the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, respectively. Let them know we’re counting on them to draft legislation that truly strengthens our financial regulations and begins curing the disease that has infected our economic system. […] Here are other prime examples in the case studies of corporate failure:
While retirees worry over the fate of Deere & Co.’s pension surplus, which is shrinking because of stock market losses, the value of Deere CEO Robert Lane’s retirement income increased $5.5 million in fiscal 2008 to $22.5 million. Lane and other senior executives participate in not one but three different pension plans.
SunTrust Bank, which received $4.9 billion from the federal bailout fund, wants shareholders to approve a mega-grant of $7.7 million in stock options for James Wells, its chairman and chief executive officer, even as investors have lost billions.
While workers who are laid off in these tough economic times are lucky if they receive anything more than their last paycheck, Richard Bond, who retired as CEO of Tyson Foods in January, stands to collect more than $14 million in “golden parachute” severance payments.
Want to know what your CEO made last year? The Executive Paywatch site offers three user-friendly ways to find out. And if you want to have a little fun at the CEO’s expense, play the “Boot The CEO” game and kick the money out of the greedy CEO’s hands.
In 2008, despite the worst economic meltdown in over 75 years, U.S. chief executives continued to take home over 300 times more pay than their workers. That’s a gap ten times wider than the gap between top execs and workers that existed just a generation ago. Corporate boards of directors seem determined to keep this massive gap intact. Most corporations are refusing to make even symbolic gestures toward more common-sense executive compensation. Remember last fall’s firestorm over executive jets? In 2008, over half America’s big corporations — 104 of the 200 the Wall Street Journal tracked — continued to foot the bill for the personal air travel of their top executives, only three fewer than the year before. CEOs have to report the personal air travel subsidies they get, along with whatever other perks they receive, as taxable income. Over a third of America’s biggest corporations last year actually gave their executives extra money to pay the taxes on all this perk income. The dollars devoted to this tax reimbursing — or “grossing up,” as power suits refer to the process — averaged $16,400 last year. That sum might not sound like much, given the millions CEOs take home overall, but, in 2008, average American workers had to labor five months to make $16,400. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t include perks like free air travel and tax gross-ups in its $7.6 million figure for 2008 CEO “direct compensation.” The New York Times $8.4 million total does. Neither paper’s pay totals for 2008 include the gains CEOs registered last year cashing out the stock options they collected in previous years. These cashouts generated some staggering personal paydays. Occidental Petroleum’s Ray Irani, for instance, took home $49.9 million in “total direct compensation,” according to the Wall Street Journal figures. But he gained another $215.9 million in 2008 from options and other long-term “incentives” that Occidental had stuffed in his personal portfolio before last year. Corporate boards have essentially created what amounts to a perpetual motion pay machine that year in and year out gins up millions in executive compensation, no matter what may be happening economically in the real world. In “good” times, with revenues and profits up, boards hand executives stock awards and cash bonuses as rewards for their fine “performance.” In hard times, boards keep the stock awards coming — as an incentive to stick around and perform better in the future.
And thus continues the delusion that the wealthy are the most productive members of society which requires that they be allowed to dictate the terms by which the burden of their failure and mismanagement is borne by others. The corporate aristocrats are working hard to keep the rubes focused on the big, bad gummint because if they ever realize just how thoroughly they’ve been scammed by these Masters of the Universe, who knows what might happen?
The moral heart of David Neiwert’s absorbing new book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, is Chapter 8, “Eliminationism in America: A Brief History.” It is a heartbreaking narrative of virulently hateful rhetoric and bigotry sparking hundreds of years of unspeakably atrocious crimes against Native Americans, against Africans and African Americans, against Chinese Americans, against Japanese Americans, against Jews, Irish, Italians, against anyone who didn’t look like, speak like, act like, or think like those in the dominant white culture. The goal was to extirpate the different by any means necessary, including rape, torture, and murder.
And Dave doesn’t shy from the awful truth: from the standpoint of the bigoted, it’s worked. For example:
…while the South actively oppressed its nonwhite population, Americans in most of the rest of the country chose not to even tolerate their presence and actively engaged in an ongoing campaign of eliminationist violence to drive them out, forcing them to cluster in large urban areas for their own self-protection and survival.
Thus, our many, many lily-white Northern suburbs.
Given the ghastly record of success Americans have had when they’ve indulged their tendencies to expunge the Other, both here and abroad, this modern call to exterminate the brutes, from John Podhoretz, should come as no surprise:
What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?
To counter such hate requires the positing of moral axioms that transcend the narrow space carved out by racial, ethnic, and national identities. In short, an effective response to America’s tropism for exterminative violence requires liberalism. Modern conservative ideologies won’t cut it: They have become saturated with the prejudices of the far-right’s rhetoric, frameworks, and obsessions. The modern day conservative movement privileges – no, fetishizes – eliminationism, whether it takes the form of drowning the baby of government]; Coulter’s proposal to invade the Middle East, kill their leaders, and convert the populace to Christianity; liberal hunting permits, or Glenn Beck’s latest rightwing belches.
Countering modern American fascists and para-fascists is easier said than done. In the last chapter of his book, Neiwert calls for urban liberals to understand better where their rural fellow-citizens are coming from:
For all of its logic and love of science, a consistent flaw weighs down mooern liberalism: an overweening belief in its own moral superiority. (Not, of course, that conservatives ate any better in this regard; factoring in the religious Right and the “moral values” vote, they are objectively worse.) This tendency becomes especially noticeable in urban liberal societies, which for all their enlightenment are maddeningly and disturbingly intolerant of the “ignorance” of their rural counterparts. This is not an omnipresent attitude but it is pervasive enough that rural dwellers’ perceptions of it are certainly not without basis. There’s a similar stigma attached to religious believers as well, especially among the more secular liberals, and that, in turn, has given birth to a predictable counterreaction that is only partially informed by misunderstanding.
Here, Dave and I slightly disagree. Or rather, as an urban liberal who, unlike Neiwert, grew up in essentially an urban liberal milieu, the situation looks to me to be far more complex.
“Religious believers” make up the vast majority of urban liberals, for example. We go to every denomination of church, put our children through the training for a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, volunteer in religiously-run charity groups, celebrate the major holidays, keep kosher, wear ash crosses on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday, and so on. There are very, very few genuinely “secular liberals” anywhere in the United States, including liberal urban areas. There are even less atheists. (There are however, many, many Americans who, despite their strongly held religious beliefs, nevertheless affirm a robust separation of church and state.)
American urban liberals have no problem with “people of faith” for the very simple reason that the vast majority are also people of faith who openly honor the traditions of their various religious backgrounds. What disturbs urban liberals really is not religious belief, but fanaticism. Likewise, what positively infuriates and drives us to our own expressions of intolerance are not expressions of faith. Rather, what strikes us as galling are all the smug, self-righteous proselytizers and moralizers, not to mention the blatant political opportunism indulged in by a narcissistic, vocal minority who try to dictate to the rest of us what is Religiously or Culturally Correct. This is especially so when it comes to science: put bluntly, the promoters of “intelligent design” creationism on rural school boards are dangerously ignorant. (Not that most non-scientific liberals have any reason to feel superior: Urban liberals are typically just as ignorant of basic science as their rural cousins. But at least we have the cultural decency not to support organizations which proactively advocate ignorance as official public policy.)
Even, so, even with the common urban liberal intolerance for religious and political extremism of the Rushdoony/Randy Weaver ilk, I was reminded, when I read Dave’s book, of the relationship Michael Pollan developed with Joel Salatin in The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Pollan is the epitome of an elite liberal urban foodie – his final section on hunting wild pig is an excruciating embarrassing ordeal to read even, or maybe especially, for a liberal- yet he forms what seems to be genuine admiration, even friendship, for Salatin, a “beyond organic” dairy farmer who happens to be a born-again graduate of the reprehensible Bob Jones University. Even with all their differences, however, Salatin’s deep knowledge of sustainable, responsible farming, as well as the fact that he practices what he preaches, provide him with a rich set of values that Pollan – and many of us who care about food quality – can share. Indeed, through Pollan’s eyes, we more than tolerate Salatin: we deeply respect him to the point that we are shocked when Pollan reports the vulgar intolerance of a fellow urban foodie who – in perfect illustration of Neiwert’s point – is contemptuous of the fish signs that adorn Salatin’s front door.
But note where a sharing of values between the “secular” cosmopolitan and fundamentalist rural cultures occurs – not inside a specific religious tradition, but within the secular moral space created by the structure of American governance, a structure which produces a tolerant environment by denying the establishment of any religion. In other words, it is only within a liberal cultural space that such a genuine tolerance and respect of radically disparate worldviews, such as Pollan for Salatin, can find a home.
This brings me back to the question that has puzzled me from the day I began trying to find active ways to confront the right in an effective manner: How can liberals prevent proto-fascists, para-fascists, and fascists from seizing power in America (and I would add, although Dave probably wouldn’t, “again” )? Surely, as Neiwert urges, we always need to better understand our world – not only our own values but the values of those who disagree with us. But that is nowhere near enough.
Fascism feeds on oversimplifications, bigotry, and violent provocation. It parries logic with toxic nationalisms, tribalism, and a fist. No amount of calm persuasion will open the mind of a Christian Reconstructionist, a white supremacist, or their more cleaned-up-for-primetime enablers like Coulter, Limbaugh, Bachmann, and Palin.
To counter the modern American right will take a rhetoric that surely places reality, reason, and logic front and center. But that rhetoric needs also to contain a healthy dollop of ridicule and contempt (thank you, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert). It must know when to confront the buffoons (such as Dave’s willingness to rebut Jonah Goldberg), and when to usefully ignore them (e.g., well-known scientists’ refusal to debate creationists).
Happy Tax Day! Today we recognize that taxes are the price we pay for a free society, and that America is worth paying for. So you’re armed with the facts in case you get randy and go out for some teabagging, here’s a little primer:
First of all, people are more satisfied with the level of income tax that they pay than at any time since 1956 – with 48% believing the amount they pay is “just about right,” and 61% regarding the amount of tax they pay as fair. Since a good amount of people pay no income tax, this means that the majority of people who pay anything think they’re paying too much, which stands to reason, but the shift from previous years is significant, and anyway people don’t necessarily differentiate between the different kinds of taxes they pay. Gallup surmises, and I agree, that the reason for this satisfaction is the Making Work Pay tax credit in the stimulus, the largest tax cut on the middle class in history, and the idea that people finally might get something in exchange for those taxes.
Now, the real problem conservatives have with taxation is that the code is too progressive and too many lucky duckies don’t pay anything. And they manipulate statistics to show how terribly burdened the overclass is (the top 10% pay 72% of the taxes is a common statistic used). But the more important statistics are the percentage of total income earned by the top 10%, and therefore the effective tax rate.
When I look at the CBO’s dataset on long-term tax trends, I see plenty of things that are important besides the share of federal tax liabilities. Most important is the top decile’s share of the national income. In 2001 the top decile earned 37.5% of the national pretax income. In 2006 the same decile earned 41.6% of the income. In 2001, households in the top decile earned an average pretax income of $294,700. In 2006 it was $366,400.
Why should we be surprised that this group pays more in taxes? It earns more money.
Another trend is the effective tax rate. Between 2001 and 2006, the top effective income tax rate fell from 18.7% to 16%. The top rate for all federal taxes fell from 28.5% to 27.5%. So while the top decile is paying a larger share of federal taxes, it is being taxed at a lower rate.
When you add state and local taxes, most of which are flat or regressive, the share of total income and the share of total taxes match up pretty evenly. Conservatives conveniently leave this out.
And of course, a lot of these numbers don’t take into account the multitude of tax breaks, loopholes and work-arounds that have made the actual tax receipts collected less fair over time.
Thirty years ago, the tax code was broadly progressive, reflecting shared contributions to public investments and our common good. Loopholes were fewer and covered such items as home mortgages that everyone could understand and appreciate.
Now the tax code is a scam. Billionaire hedge fund managers pay taxes at lower rates than their receptionists. Corporations get tax breaks for moving jobs overseas. Oil companies with the largest profits in corporate history receive annual tax breaks worth $14 billion, roughly twice the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency.
While rich people reap tax breaks, working people struggle just to keep even. Adjusted for inflation, weekly wages were lower in 2007 than they were in 1979 […]
Income inequality is rising — measured by the ratio of after-tax income of the top one percent (1.1 million people) to after-tax income of the whole middle 60 percent (68.3 million people). Top-end taxes are declining — measured as the average effective tax rate of the top one percent. The trend lines for top-end tax cuts and income inequality since 1980 form the X in the chart on this page and in the report.
Our report explains the X. Inequality rose 144 percent; top-end taxes dropped 15 percent.
One way we could make the tax code more fair, and make the broad majority of people even more satisfied with their taxes by giving them more and better services, is by adding more marginal brackets.
It’s well known that tax rates on top incomes used to be far higher than they are today. The top marginal rate hovered around 90 percent in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. Reagan ultimately reduced it to 28 percent, and it is now 35 percent. Obama would raise it to 39.6 percent, where it was under Bill Clinton.
What’s much less known is that those old confiscatory rates were not as sweeping as they sound. They applied to only the richest of the rich, because yesterday’s tax code, unlike today’s, had separate marginal tax rates for the truly wealthy and the merely affluent. For a married couple in 1960, for example, the 38 percent tax bracket started at $20,000, which is about $145,000 in today’s terms. The top bracket of 91 percent began at $400,000, which is the equivalent of nearly $3 million now. Some of the old brackets are truly stunning: in 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt raised the top rate to 79 percent, from 63 percent, and raised the income level that qualified for that rate to $5 million (about $75 million today) from $1 million. As the economist Bruce Bartlett has noted, that 79 percent rate apparently applied to only one person in the entire country, John D. Rockefeller.
Today, by contrast, the very well off and the superwealthy are lumped together. The top bracket last year started at $357,700. Any income above that — whether it was the 400,000th dollar earned by a surgeon or the 40 millionth earned by a Wall Street titan — was taxed the same, at 35 percent. This change is especially striking, because there is so much more income at the top of the distribution now than there was in the past. Today a tax rate for the very top earners would apply to a far larger portion of the nation’s income than it would have years ago.
It’s even worse at the state level – in California, you pay the same income tax rate on every dollar from $47,500 to $999,999. The genius of the marginal tax rate system, lost on conservatives, is that it rewards work over wealth, and only taxes those dollars earned above that particular marginal rate at the higher number. More than any cap on executive compensation or bonuses, this would actually promote the highest standard of living for the most Americans, and discourage the rampant inequality that helped this crisis along.
When you teabag, it’s good to have the facts. Consider yourselves armed.
Don’t bother with the article, it’s essentially just an extended advertisement for frozen biscuits. Wowie Zowie. But check out the photos (there are more on the page 2).
Notice anything about the people working hard to make those biscuits? Notice anything different about the person enjoying those biscuits? And the person who profits from them?
Robert Parry observes an important Beltway phenomenon:
Watching Glenn Beck of Fox News rant about “progressive fascism” – and muse about armed insurrection – or listening to mainstream pundits prattle on about Barack Obama as the “most polarizing President ever,” it is hard to escape the conclusion that today’s U.S. news media represents a danger to the Republic.
By and large, the Washington press corps continues to function within a paradigm set in the 1980s, mostly bending to the American Right, especially to its perceived power to destroy mainstream journalistic careers and to grease the way toward lucrative jobs for those who play ball.
The parameters set by this intimidated (or bought-off) news media, in turn, influence how far Washington politicians feel they can go on issues, like health-care reform or environmental initiatives, or how risky they believe it might be to pull back from George W. Bush’s “war on terror” policies.
[…]
…the American Left never took media seriously, putting what money it had mostly into “organizing” or into direct humanitarian giving. Underscoring the Left’s fecklessness about media, progressives have concentrated their relatively few media outlets in San Francisco, 3,000 miles away – and three hours behind – the news centers of Washington and New York.
By contrast, the Right grasped the importance of “information warfare” in a modern media age and targeted its heaviest firepower on the frontlines of that war – mostly the political battlefields of Washington – thus magnifying the influence of right-wing ideas on policymakers.
One consequence of this media imbalance is that Republicans feel they can pretty much say whatever they want – no matter how provocative or even crazy – while Democrats must be far more circumspect, knowing that any comment might be twisted into an effective attack point against them.
So, while criticism of Republicans presidents – from Ronald Reagan to the two Bushes – had to be tempered for fear of counterattacks, almost anything could be said against a Democratic president, Bill Clinton or now Barack Obama, who is repeatedly labeled a “socialist” and, according to Beck, a “fascist” for pressuring hapless GM chief executive Rick Wagoner to resign.
Just in case anyone thinks that’s hyperbolic, here’s a little trip down memory lane from just five years ago:
What MoveOn.org wanted was for people to submit 30-second ads that were critical of President Bush, but what the liberal-leaning organization got was a controversy over one entry that compared Bush to Adolf Hitler.
The ad in question used a tape recording of the Nazi leader speaking while it showed images of Hitler and German military prowess during World War II. At the end of the ad, a photo of Bush raising his hand to take the oath of office is seen.
“A nation warped by lies. Lies fuel fear. Fear fuels aggression. Invasion. Occupation. What were war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003,” the ad said.
Republican groups and Jewish organizations expressed outrage over the ad, which has been removed from the MoveOn.org Web site. The Republican National Committee (search) called on all nine Democratic candidates to condemn the ads.
RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie (search) called the ad, “the worst and most vile form of political hate speech.”
[…]
MoveOn.org spokesman Trevor Fitzgibbon said, “we had no idea the Hitler thing even existed.”
Here’s Beck this past weekend:
When a liberal activist group accidentally put a 30 second citizen generated ad featuring a comparison between Bush and Hitler on its web site, the political establishment goes nuts.
Glenn Beck, a highly paid television pundit spends an entire hour comparing Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini to Obama and the political establishment acts like it’s perfectly normal.
“So I’m sorry, California, but I don’t want to go down your road. You can’t force me to go down your road. Does the individual have any right anymore? Does the state have any right any more? And I know, because I’ve heard it from all of the conservative – you know, historians and scholars and everything else, but you can’t convince me that the founding fathers wouldn’t allow you to secede. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. And if a state says “I don’t want to go there because that’s suicide,” they have a right to back out. They have a right – people have a right to not commit economic suicide. “Oh, no, that was all solved in the—“ Really? The founder never intended – so wait a minute. I sign into this union and I can never, ever get out no matter what the government does? I can never get out? Well that only leaves you with one other option. That doesn’t seem like a good option. Texas says “go to hell, Washington,” which, by the way, has been said before. I believe it was Davy Crockett, that as he was standing there in the well of the Senate and they were all yelling and screaming at him, he said – he looked them right square in the eye and said, “Hey, you know what? You can all go to hell. I’m going to Texas. About time somebody says that again.
You’re telling me that states can’t say “Washington, we’re not going to commit suicide with you.” This is what I was trying to explain yesterday when the guest that we had unfortunately, David Buckner, he’s a friend of mine. On the TV show he – probably, if you’ve read the Drudge Report you’ve seen him – he passed out in the middle of the show. And I thought he was joking because he was like “I’m going to pass out.” We were talking about how we have destroyed – we are just taking cancer from the private sector, from the banks, from the brokerage houses, from the cities, and we’re just piling them – all of them – right into the Treasury. We’ve taken cancer from one patient, and we’ve put cancer into another patient. Well, gang, somebody’s still going to die from cancer. Yeah. This time it’s going to be you and our country.”
He’s quite the historian, you know. What do you want to bet that he thinks Lincoln would agree with him?
