Tag: tax

Taking Back Wasted Tax Breaks

Seth Anderson0 comment

Illinois Department of Revenue
Illinois Department of Revenue

Speaking of corporate welfare, who will be the first state to start demanding corporate welfare recipients pass drug tests? Or at least do what the taxpayer funded subsidy was supposed to accomplish?

For example: Many states compete for new jobs by offering taxpayer-funded subsidies to companies to entice them to open in their state. In many ways, these states are just like consumers: those willing to pay the most (in this case, offer the most generous subsidy) ultimately get the product they demand (the jobs a company promises to provide in exchange).

So if these companies ultimately fail to produce the jobs they promised, shouldn’t the taxpayers get their money back? Seems right, but according to a new report from Good Jobs First, this is hardly ever the case. Their analysis of  “clawback” efforts for 238 different state-based business subsidies reveals just how tough it is to demand fairness and accountability when it comes to public handouts to private companies.

At first glance, many of these subsidies do appear to have return policies in place: fully 90 percent of these programs actually require companies to deliver regular reports to state agencies estimating how many jobs they have successfully created thanks to public subsidies; furthermore, 75 percent of the programs they studied contain some type of penalty measure in the event that job creation fails to meet the agreed upon standards.

But here’s the bad news: 31 percent of the programs that require proof of job creation do not require any independent third-party reviewer to ensure that the data these companies submit is actually accurate. And those penalty provisions? Forty-seven percent of them are only enforced voluntarily, meaning that they are basically never enforced at all — in fact, only 21 of the 178 programs with penalty provisions actually publish any documentation of enforcement efforts.

 

(click here to continue reading No Subsidies For You: Taking Back Wasted Tax Breaks – The Demos Blog – PolicyShop.)

Flag Waving
Flag Waving

What about your state? What is its ranking on this list of Clawbacks and Other Enforcement Safeguards in State Economic Development Subsidy Programs? Illinois scored 52/100 on the Monitoring, Enforcement & Penalty Score, covering 5 projects totaling nearly $150,000,000 of state budget.

Illinois’ worst score was for IDOT Economic Development Program ‐ a funding stream for road infrastructure built primarily to benefit specific companies, primarily big‐box retailers, for these reasons:

  • Agency awarding subsidy does not verify performance outcomes reported by recipient
  • No penalty
  • No recalibration of award
  • No online publication of statistics regarding award
  • No online publication of names of companies penalized and dollar amounts
And yet our state is in dire financial straits, and our leaders cannot seem to figure out why…

Taxes at the Top

Seth Anderson0 comment

Shouldn't That Be a Right Turn?
Shouldn’t That Be a Right Turn?

Mitt Romney isn’t the only clown who pays too little in taxes.

Paul Krugman writes, in part:

Defenders of low taxes on the rich mainly make two arguments: that low taxes on capital gains are a time-honored principle, and that they are needed to promote economic growth and job creation. Both claims are false.

When you hear about the low, low taxes of people like Mr. Romney, what you need to know is that it wasn’t always thus — and the days when the superrich paid much higher taxes weren’t that long ago. Back in 1986, Ronald Reagan — yes, Ronald Reagan — signed a tax reform equalizing top rates on earned income and capital gains at 28 percent. The rate rose further, to more than 29 percent, during Bill Clinton’s first term.

Low capital gains taxes date only from 1997, when Mr. Clinton struck a deal with Republicans in Congress in which he cut taxes on the rich in return for creation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And today’s ultralow rates — the lowest since the days of Herbert Hoover — date only from 2003, when former President George W. Bush rammed both a tax cut on capital gains and a tax cut on dividends through Congress, something he achieved by exploiting the illusion of triumph in Iraq.

Correspondingly, the low-tax status of the very rich is also a recent development. During Mr. Clinton’s first term, the top 400 taxpayers paid close to 30 percent of their income in federal taxes, and even after his tax deal they paid substantially more than they have since the 2003 cut.

So is it essential that the rich receive such a big tax break? There is a theoretical case for according special treatment to capital gains, but there are also theoretical and practical arguments against such special treatment. In particular, the huge gap between taxes on earned income and taxes on unearned income creates a perverse incentive to arrange one’s affairs so as to make income appear in the “right” category.

And the economic record certainly doesn’t support the notion that superlow taxes on the superrich are the key to prosperity. During that first Clinton term, when the very rich paid much higher taxes than they do now, the economy added 11.5 million jobs, dwarfing anything achieved even during the good years of the Bush administration.

(click here to continue reading Taxes at the Top – NYTimes.com.)

Just seems like greed to me, and short-sightedness on the part of the 1%. If the US continues its slow, inexorable decline into a banana republic, that can’t bode well for the rich. Hard to stay wealthy when the risk of kidnapping and robbing is real, and omnipresent. America did the best when the middle class had enough money to spend on things…

Upcoming Corporate Welfare Pleas

Seth Anderson0 comment

Dunking on the Sears Tower
Dunking on the Sears Tower

Just like the major league sporting franchise boondoggle, the corporate tax break boondoggle is like a never ending bowl of soup for politicians to ladle out favors from…1

Ramsin Canon of Gapers Block notes:

This week Governor Quinn signed into law special tax incentives for the insanely profitable Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the poorly run Sears. The Associated Press offers a sort-of warning: that scores of companies have tax “packages” that are to expire over the next few years. If you are a shareholder in any of those companies, would you expect anything less than threats to relocate from your CEO? And if you’re a government affairs person representing a business in Springfield, what would your attitude be towards a legislator who voted for this tax package but won’t put forward one for you?

I never bought for a minute that CME and Sears were actually going to leave. Nor do I suspect that Mayor Emanuel, who helped engineer the cuts for CME, or most of the legislators who voted for the cuts, actually bought the threats either. But the threat to leave is a formality that gives cover to politicians who want to hand their political supporters a nice plum but want to obscure the quid pro quo. Seeing now that the tactic works, we should fully expect a tidal wave of employers demanding incentives to stay in the state.

You know, if we cut our tax rates to 0%, we’ll get all the businesses. All the businesses!

(click here to continue reading Give Em An Inch, They Tax Break All Over You – Gapers Block Mechanics | Chicago.)

 

Enraged

Oh joy!

As state senators sent the tax package to the governor’s desk last week, economic development experts said other companies are likely to threaten to move as well unless Illinois offers them more financial goodies. More than 100 companies, including Deere & Co. and Abbott Laboratories, have incentive packages expiring in the next three years — and may want better deals to keep jobs in Illinois.

Businesses thinking of moving to the state could demand even bigger incentives or play Illinois against other states in a bidding war, experts said.

“Once it becomes known that you’re giving incentives, other companies are going to ask for them. Why wouldn’t they?” said Judith Stallmann, a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia who has studied economic development.

 

(click here to continue reading In the game of tax breaks, states play at their risk | The Salt Lake Tribune.)

Footnotes:
  1. yeah, a horrible metaphor, sorry, pressed for time [↩]

Hoffman Estates Battle Over a Tax Break For Sears

Seth Anderson0 comment

A Matter of Degree
A Matter of Degree

Of course, corporate welfare for the 1% trumps education, schools, kids every single time. I’d hoped the outcome was different since Hoffman Estates is not a poor district, and thus has a little clout, but I was wrong.

When Ms.  1 Crates met with Hoffman Estates officials in March, she learned the money might not be coming after all because the tax break might not expire.

“I cried,” Ms. Crates said. “The school district has cut for the last two years. We’ve had no wage increases, and we were planning on that revenue to bring down our class sizes. We have one algebra class with 47 students. It was devastating.”

Ms. Crates and her school district had suddenly found themselves at the epicenter of Illinois’s latest political and financial crisis, described by one lawmaker as round-robin blackmail among Midwestern states. Unless Illinois agreed to extend the tax break, Sears threatened to leave. The state of Ohio, for one, dangled $400 million in tax incentives as a lure.

But when lawmakers agree to corporate demands for property tax relief, they induce strain on the financial stability of schools, local governments, libraries and parks that rely on those taxes as their most stable form of revenue. The State of Illinois, with $3 billion in unpaid bills, has already disrupted local governments’ revenue streams, often delivering payments to schools at least four months behind schedule.

So when Ms. Crates and her colleagues learned in March that Sears might win an extension of its tax break, they followed the lead of many corporations with well-connected lobbyists. They began a fierce campaign.

At first, the district wasn’t even involved in discussions about the bill. The village of Hoffman Estates oversees the distribution of the Sears property tax revenue. Village officials did not mention that they had helped write and introduce legislation to extend the tax break until months after they did so, according to Ms. Crates. “I was dumbfounded that a public agency like ourselves, right next door, didn’t bother to tell us and tried in the middle of the night to pass legislation without telling us,” Ms. Crates said.

(click here to continue reading Town and School District Battle Over a Tax Break – NYTimes.com.)

and I’m with Representative Currie: some state needs to have the gumption to stand firm, and see if moving a giant corporation’s HQ is as simple as renting a moving truck.

The House Democratic leader, Barbara Flynn Currie, questioned whether the state should keep bending to satisfy threats from businesses entertaining other offers.
“Do we respond or do we just say goodbye? Or do we even call their bluff?” she asked. “I mean, sometimes I think we should start calling the occasional bluff and say: ‘Wait a minute. Is this for real?’ Because the costs of moving are certainly significant.”

Footnotes:
  1. Chief Financial Officer Cheryl Crates [↩]

Illinois being held hostage over tax breaks

Seth Anderson2 Comments

South Loop Construction
South Loop Construction

For maybe the first time, I agree 1 with something Dennis Byrne writes, namely that Sears shouldn’t get a dime from a broke-ass Illinois.

If Ohio wants to shower Sears Holding Corp. with $400 million to lure the retailer away from Hoffman Estates, I say, “Fine, do it.” And let Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) explain to his taxpayers why his state’s bribe is four times greater than the $100 million that Illinois reportedly had offered.

But if I were a stockholder in Sears, I’d ask its board, have you lost your mind? Your stock, say some analysts, is underperforming; you’re losing business to competitors, and last quarter’s financials were disappointing. When you’ve got plenty of challenges just running the business, why are you even thinking about wasting precious time, money and energy moving? Think about the cost of everything — from printing new stationery and business cards to relocating or severing 6,000 employees, hiring new ones, transporting equipment and records, creating new business relationships and on and on.

Seems to me that your problem isn’t so much where you are doing your job as how well you are doing it.

Of course, you’re not the only one trying to extort money from taxpayers to stay. CME Group Inc., the giant derivatives marketplace whose Chicago roots, like Sears, go back more than a century, also wants taxpayer “assistance,” even though it’s already making a nice hunk of change. And Caterpillar Inc., the Peoria-based manufacturing giant, is shopping a new plant and its 1,000 jobs around the country to lure some serious coin from a willing state.

…

The line of companies whose demands for taxpayer largesse seems endless. Motorola Mobility Holdings copping $113.7 million in tax credits over the next decade, $1.25 million in training funds and a $3 million grant to retain 2,500 jobs. Chrysler in Belvidere. Mitsubishi Motors to come and stay in Bloomington-Normal for a mere $276.1 million. Sears, you’ll recall, originally squeezed a taxpayer-subsidized incentive package to move from the former Sears Tower in Chicago to Hoffman Estates. That deal is about to expire and Sears now wants more. If we give it to Sears, why, we can ask ourselves, won’t it happen again? And again. And again.

(click here to continue reading Dennis Byrne commentary: Illinois being held hostage over tax breaks – chicagotribune.com.)

Corporate welfare is never the answer, from my perspective. Politicians need cash to get elected however, so corporations seemingly can always buy tax favors, exemptions, loopholes that are not available to commoners.

Footnotes:
  1. mostly – Byrne adds some clap-trap about IL raising corporate tax rates by a percentage point. The state is broke, remember? [↩]

Sears offered $400 million to Flee Illinois

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Demon Eyed Truck
Demon Eyed Truck

I say, good riddance. If a company like KMart/Sears cannot survive without corporate welfare, then maybe they deserve to be banished. Their executives can home school their kids, etc., and maybe even visit Chicago over the holidays…

Ohio has offered $400 million in incentives to retailer Sears Holdings Corp. to relocate its headquarters from Illinois to Ohio, a source familiar with the discussions told Reuters. The news comes just days after the Illinois state house voted down a proposal that would have given $100 million in tax relief to CME Group and Sears, which have threatened to move to other states. Sears declined to comment. Earlier this week, a Sears spokesman said the retailer had received proposals from about a third of the 50 U.S. states, and executives of the parent of Sears department stores and the Kmart chain have visited Columbus, Ohio, and Austin, Texas, to explore possible sites.

(click here to continue reading Sears offered $400 million to move to Ohio | Consumer | Crain’s Chicago Business.)


Fed Setting Their Hair on Fire

Seth Anderson0 comment

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Surprisingly, Paul Krugman liked President Obama’s speech:

First things first: I was favorably surprised by the new Obama jobs plan, which is significantly bolder and better than I expected. It’s not nearly as bold as the plan I’d want in an ideal world. But if it actually became law, it would probably make a significant dent in unemployment.

Of course, it isn’t likely to become law, thanks to G.O.P. opposition. Nor is anything else likely to happen that will do much to help the 14 million Americans out of work. And that is both a tragedy and an outrage.

Before I get to the Obama plan, let me talk about the other important economic speech of the week, which was given by Charles Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve of Chicago. Mr. Evans said, forthrightly, what some of us have been hoping to hear from Fed officials for years now.

As Mr. Evans pointed out, the Fed, both as a matter of law and as a matter of social responsibility, should try to keep both inflation and unemployment low — and while inflation seems likely to stay near or below the Fed’s target of around 2 percent, unemployment remains extremely high.

So how should the Fed be reacting? Mr. Evans: “Imagine that inflation was running at 5 percent against our inflation objective of 2 percent. Is there a doubt that any central banker worth their salt would be reacting strongly to fight this high inflation rate? No, there isn’t any doubt. They would be acting as if their hair was on fire. We should be similarly energized about improving conditions in the labor market.”

(click here to continue reading Setting Their Hair on Fire – NYTimes.com.)

And if you had the intestinal fortitude to watch the latest GOP debate12 – you heard the GOP repeatedly criticize the Fed, without having any factual reasons to do so…

Now, however, leading Republicans are against tax cuts — at least if they benefit working Americans rather than rich people and corporations. And they’re against monetary policy, too. In Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney declared that he would seek a replacement for Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, essentially because Mr. Bernanke has tried to do something (though not enough) about unemployment. And that makes Mr. Romney a moderate by G.O.P. standards, since Rick Perry, his main rival for the presidential nomination, has suggested that Mr. Bernanke should be treated “pretty ugly.”

So, at this point, leading Republicans are basically against anything that might help the unemployed.

Footnotes:
  1. I watched about half, and then ate a pound of laxatives [↩]
  2. not really [↩]

A Jobs Program In America

Seth Anderson0 comment

Restorative Harmony
Restorative Harmony

If only our politicians were as brave and bold as Franklin Roosevelt…I wouldn’t hold my breath

Bob Herbert writes:

Politicians have given little more than lip service to this terrible turn of events. If there was but one message that I would try to get through to the nation’s leadership, it is that we cannot begin to get the United States back on track until we begin to put our people back to work.

And there is so much work to be done. Start with the crying need to rebuild the nation’s aging, deteriorating infrastructure – its bridges and highways, airports and air traffic control systems, its sewer and wastewater treatment facilities, the electrical grid, inland waterways, public transportation systems, levees and floodwalls and ports and dams, and on and on. Lawrence Summers, until recently President Obama’s top economic adviser, has pointed out that 75 percent of America’s public schools have structural deficiencies. Twelve percent of the nation’s bridges have been rated structurally deficient and another 15 percent are functionally obsolete.

Three to four trillion dollars worth of improvements will be needed over the next decade just to bring the infrastructure into a reasonable state of repair. Meanwhile, we’ve got legions of unemployed construction workers, manufacturing workers, engineers and others who are ready and eager to step into the breach, to take on jobs ranging from infrastructure maintenance and repair to infrastructure design and new construction. It shouldn’t require a genius to put together those two gigantic pieces of America’s economic puzzle – infrastructure and unemployment.

Yes, it would be expensive. But the money spent  would be an investment designed to bring about a stronger, more stable economic environment. Putting people to work bolsters the economy and the newly-employed workers begin paying taxes again. Improving the infrastructure would make American industry much more competitive overall, and would spawn new industries. Creation of a national infrastructure bank that would use government funds to leverage additional investments from the private sector to finance projects of national importance would lead to extraordinary longterm benefits.

But even rebuilding the infrastructure is not enough. The employment crisis facing the U.S. is enormous and is taking a particularly harsh toll on the less well-educated members of the society. We need to take our cue from Franklin Roosevelt who understood during the Depression that nothing short of a federal jobs program was essential. The two-pronged goal was to alleviate the suffering of the unemployed and, as the workers began spending their wages, improve the economy.

Roosevelt put millions of Americans to work, including artists, writers, photographers and musicians. It was an unprecedented undertaking, and it worked.

(click here to continue reading HOME – PolicyShop.)

Broken History

Broken History

and meanwhile, the GOP’s prescription for creating jobs is laughable. Laughable if this wasn’t my country we are talking about. But we are discussing the US, so the joke isn’t very funny.

The Republicans think these things will be useful: destroying unions, more free trade agreements, lowering business taxes even lower, repealing EPA and other regulations, and cutting the minimum wage. If you think any of these policy ideas are going to jump-start our anemic economy, I have a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Sarah Jaffe reports at Alternet:

Washington, nearly a year after the 2010 election that was supposedly all about jobs, finally seems to have woken up to the fact that the economy is still in the dumps and Americans are sort of angry about it. Make that very angry. And with Republicans in charge of at least part of Congress as well as many state governments, they know they’re about to take some of the blame for the continuing lack of any policy ideas on job creation–recent polls show only 24 percent of the country approves of how they’re doing their jobs. Not to mention the GOP primary field is loaded with contenders claiming they have the magic solution to the jobs problem.

So what is this masterful GOP jobs agenda? You won’t be shocked to hear that it’s more of the same—more deregulation, more tax cuts, more whining about deficits. “House Republicans are planning votes for almost every week this fall in an effort to repeal environmental and labor requirements on business that they say have hampered job growth,” says the Washington Post. But since you’re about to be hearing these same ideas, with minor variations, over and over again, we thought we’d count down the five worst ideas, and arm you with some reasons why they’re so very bad.

News Corp Skates on Paying US Taxes

Seth Anderson0 comment

Ready for a scotch
Ready for a scotch

What a surprise, News Corp is a tax scofflaw as well as a regular criminal enterprise…

Over the past four years Murdoch’s U.S.-based News Corp. has made money on income taxes. Having earned $10.4 billion in profits, News Corp. would have been expected to pay $3.6 billion at the 35 percent corporate tax rate. Instead, it actually collected $4.8 billion in income tax refunds, all or nearly all from the U.S. government.

The relevant figure is the cash paid tax rate. This is the net amount of corporate income taxes actually paid after refunds. For those four years, it was minus 46 percent, disclosure statements show.

Even on an accounting basis, which measures taxes incurred but often not actually paid for years, News Corp. had a tax rate of under 20 percent, little more than half the 35 percent statutory rate, company disclosures examined by Reuters show. News Corp. had no comment.

 

(click here to continue reading RPT-COLUMN-It pays to be Murdoch. Just ask US gov’t: DCJohnston | Reuters.)

Of course, despite these facts, the ditto-heads on Fox News never stop repeating the mantra about U.S. taxes being too high.

…Update 6:46 PM

Hmm, author retracts article. Strange, but perhaps no conspiracy. Perhaps.

No excuses. But I will explain how I made such a bonehead error.

The other facts I reported remain:

* Among the 100 largest companies in the United States, News Corp has the third largest number of subsidiaries in tax havens, a Government Accountability Office study found in 2009.

* On an accounting basis, which measures taxes incurred but often not actually paid for years, News Corp had a tax rate of under 20 percent, little more than half the 35 percent statutory rate, its disclosures show.

* Murdoch has bought companies with tax losses and fought to be able to use them, which reduces his company’s costs.

* News Corp lawyers and accountants are experts at making use of tax deferrals, though the company’s net tax assets have shrunken from $5.7 billion in 2007 to $3.3 billion last year as the benefits were either used or expired.

 

Taxes and Billionaires

Seth Anderson0 comment

Curvaceous
Curvaceous

The Republicans are not really concerned with people like you and me1 – the GOP instead is worried that the filthy rich continue to pay 15% income tax…

Nicholas D. Kristof reports:

take a look at one of the tax loopholes that Congressional Republicans are refusing to close — even if the cost is that America’s credit rating blows up. This loophole has nothing to do with creating jobs and everything to do with protecting some of America’s wealthiest financiers.

If there were an award for Most Unconscionable Tax Loophole, this one would win grand prize.

Wait, wake up! I know that “tax policy” makes one’s eyes glaze over, but that’s how financiers have gotten away with paying a lower tax rate than their chauffeurs or personal trainers. Tycoons have bet for years that the public is too stupid or distracted to note that in many cases they’re paying just a 15 percent tax rate.

What’s at stake is the “carried interest” loophole, and President Obama is pushing to close it. The White House estimates that this would raise $20 billion over a decade. But Congressional Republicans walked out of budget talks rather than discuss raising revenues from measures such as this one.

…This carried interest loophole benefits managers of financial partnerships such as hedge funds, private equity funds, venture capital funds and real estate funds — who are among the highest-paid people in the world. John Paulson, a hedge fund manager in New York City, made $4.9 billion last year, top of the chart for hedge fund managers, according to AR Magazine, which follows hedge funds. That’s equivalent to the average per capita income of 184,000 Americans, according to my back-of-envelope calculations based on Census Bureau figures.

Mr. Paulson declined to comment on this tax break, but here’s how it works. These fund managers are compensated mostly with a performance bonus of 20 percent or more of the profits they make. Under this carried interest loophole, that 20 percent is eligible to be taxed at the long-term capital gains rate (if the fund’s underlying assets are held long enough) of just 15 percent rather than the regular personal income rate of 35 percent.

This tax loophole is also intellectually vacuous. The performance fee is a return on the manager’s labor, not his or her capital, so there’s no reason to give it preferential capital gains treatment.

“The carried interest loophole represents everyone’s worst fear about the tax system — that the rich and powerful get away with murder,” says Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has written about the issue.  “Closing the loophole won’t fix the budget by itself, but it gets us one step closer to justice.”

(click here to continue reading Taxes and Billionaires – NYTimes.com.)

Get that? The GOP is insisting the rich pay less in tax, percentage-wise, than average citizens, yet simultaneously the Rethuglicans want to destroy the social safety net because there isn’t enough revenue. Slime balls…

Footnotes:
  1. assuming you are not a billionaire. If you are, can you contact me about a business idea I have? [↩]

The final nail in the supply side coffin

Seth Anderson0 comment

Hit From Below
If only…

The theory of supply-side economics tells us that if you cut taxes on rich people and corporations, the newly liberated moguls and businessmen will take their windfall and invest it, creating jobs and accelerating the rate of economic growth. The benefits of a light hand on the upper class, therefore, will “trickle down” to the working man and woman.

Ever since Ronald Reagan first attempted to make supply-side economics a reality and proceeded to inaugurate an era of persistent government deficits and growing income inequality, it has become harder and harder to make the trickle-down argument with a straight face. But we’ve never seen anything quite like the disaster that’s playing out right now.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that corporate profits are looking quite strong for the second quarter of 2011. Even the Journal can’t sugarcoat the basic facts:

While the U.S. economy staggers through one of its slowest recoveries since the Great Depression, American companies are poised to report strong earnings for the second quarter — exposing a dichotomy between corporate performance and the overall health of the economy.

…

Wages are moribund, unemployment is stuck at 9 percent, and the corporate bottom line is doing just fine. You could be excused for thinking that if ever there was time to put the stake through supply-side economics, it would be now. Wall Street and big corporations are doing just fine, but absolutely nothing is trickling down. And yet Republicans are still pushing the same old song and dance, passionately holding the entire creditworthiness of the United States hostage in return for even lower taxes on corporations, adamantly refusing to countenance even the slightest revenue increase to help cushion the hard times for the Americans who are getting a raw deal out of the current recovery.

Democrats come in for their share of the blame, too. The worst economic recovery for American workers in history has happened on Obama’s watch, and he appears remarkably oblivious to it. He may live to regret this oversight.

(click here to continue reading The final nail in the supply side coffin – How the World Works – Salon.com.)

Doesn’t matter what actually happens, Republicans stick to their erroneous positions until they either get their way, or the world ends.

Last FU from Amazon.com

Seth Anderson0 comment

Amazon - The Original Store
Amazon – The Original Store

Amazon.com sent me a last fuck you for bothering to be an affiliate for Amazon in Illinois:

Dear Former Amazon Associate,

We have just sent you a payment for the amount of USD 5.40 for the remaining advertising fees less adjustments and fees on your recently closed account. This payment also includes any credit balance carried forward from previous payment periods.

If your billing address is in the U.S. and you selected payment by check, we will deduct a $15 processing fee from the check we send. (This charge does not apply to Associates with non-U.S. billing addresses, as direct deposit is not available to them.)

$5.40 – $15 = Fuck You for helping us sell our goods.

Gee thanks. Luckily, I recently jumped through all the hoops to give Amazon.com access to direct deposit, or else I’d really be pissed off. I truly hope that action is taken on a federal level to force Amazon.com to pay sales taxes, retroactively, so Jeff Bezos can choke a bit.

Republicans Shelve Medicare Overhaul Plan

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Watching the Cars

Republicans don’t seem to have the strength of their convictions, already flip-flopping on their planned destruction of Medicare. Maybe they’ll regroup later this summer.

House Republicans signaled Thursday that they were backing away from the centerpiece of their budget plan — a proposal to overhaul Medicare — in a decision that underscored both the difficulties and political perils of addressing the nation’s long-term fiscal problems. While top Republicans insisted that they remained committed to the Medicare initiative, which had become the target of intense attacks by Democrats and liberal groups in recent weeks, the lawmaker who would have to turn the proposal into legislation said he had no plans to do so any time soon.

The lawmaker, Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said that while he still supports the party’s Medicare approach, opposition from Democrats made it pointless to proceed.

“I’m not interested in talking about whether the House is going to pass a bill that the Senate shows no interest in,” Mr. Camp said in an appearance at the National Press Club. “I’m not interested in laying down more markers. I am interested in solutions.”

Coupled with remarks by other House Republican leaders, his statement suggested that the party’s Medicare proposal had been shelved, even though the party’s lawmakers had taken a risky vote to pass the budget in the House just last month, and in the past two weeks had attempted to sell it to constituents in often-stormy town hall meetings.

 

(click here to continue reading Republicans Shelve Medicare Overhaul Plan – NYTimes.com.)

No Stairs Do Not Enter

Still, Senator Harry Reid should bring the bill to the Senate floor as he planned so that Senate Republicans can embarrass themselves too. Why should House GOP have all the fun? Especially since the rank and file Republicans were still supporting the plan:

Some members — especially freshmen from districts with steep re-election hills to scale — were upset to hear that the plan could be scotched after they had voted for the budget proposal and then invested so much hard work trying to sell it back home over the spring recess.

“I would be very disappointed if we didn’t follow through,” said Representative Joe Walsh, whose district lies in the Chicago suburbs. “We have spent, gosh, a month or two now trying to educate the American people to a pretty good reception. I appreciate the chairman’s notion, but I would continue to respectfully challenge him to get this thing through committee.”

Representative Bobby Schilling of Illinois said backing down now would be giving in “to lies and deceit told by the other side.”

“We’ve just got to address this problem,” he said. “Is it going to be perfect? No, but it needs to be addressed.”

Republicans Loves Em Some Oil Subsidies

Seth Anderson0 comment

Energy is the Lifeblood of Civilization

Not surprising: oil corporations love Republicans as much as Republicans love oil corporations.

Despite statements in the past week from Speaker John Boehner and tax-and-program slasher Paul Ryan that oil company subsidies should be included in items getting the ax, House Republicans today voted in unison for a procedural motion that kicked the legs out from under a proposal which would have chopped one of those key subsidies. Every single Republican voted for the motion, along with seven Democrats who jumped ship. Democrats wanted to defeat the motion so that they could bring up a bill penned by Rep. Tim Bishop (NY-01) to repeal the Section 199 domestic manufacturing tax credit for the five largest oil companies. The provision, part of a 2004 law meant to promote domestic production, allows corporations to reduce their taxable income by 9 percent under prescribed circumstances.

Although Democrats knew from the outset that there was no chance they would win on the procedural motion, they had hoped to get Republicans on the record at a time when American consumers are unhappy over rising gas prices and rising oil-company profits. By that measure, they succeeded.

(click here to continue reading Daily Kos: Number of Republicans who voted to allow vote to cut oil subsidy: Zero.)

But hey, tax breaks for oil corporations just means there is less revenue in the US Treasury, and thus less teachers and police, and so forth. Win, win, right? Unless of course you like living in an educated country, or like law and order, yadda yadda. Ya damn Socialist, you.

In fact, no company on this list of most profitable should get any tax relief, at all, imo.

Dems seek to change conversation on gas prices

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Four Forty Nine

Oh, sure, this will be effective…

Although there is no single, easy answer for addressing increased gas prices in the short term, there are things we can do to guarantee that Americans aren’t victims of escalating gas prices in the long term.

* One thing we can do is eliminate unnecessary tax breaks for the oil and gas industry and instead invest that money into clean energy, so that we can cut our dependence on foreign oil.

* America’s outmoded tax laws offer the oil and gas industry more than $4 billion in annual taxpayer subsidies, even though that industry is expected to report extra-large profits this quarter. Even as those companies are reaping near record profits, Americans are shelling out for near record gas prices. That doesn’t make sense and it has to end.

* CEO’s of leading oil companies have made it clear that such high oil prices alone offer enough of a profit motive to push them to invest in domestic oil exploration and production — even without special tax breaks.

* Speaker Boehner has said he’s open to eliminating wasteful subsidies for the oil and gas industry. For too long, our political system has avoided doing so. Now, hopefully, our leaders can come together in a bipartisan way to make it happen.

(click here to continue reading Dems seek to change conversation on gas prices – The Plum Line – The Washington Post.)

Any proposal that will help the US and involves Boehner will not happen. That dude, and the GOP in general, basically is hoping for end-of-times.