Tax Day Meme

Down with Tyranny:

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Remembering also that all us working stiffs are paying way more in federal taxes this year because of the Trump Tax Cut for Rich Fuckwads.

Eliiminate the Rich. Do It Now.

By taxing them at 99.9999 percent or chasing them into the sea with pitchforks and torches, I don't care.  Just do it.

Steve M.:

I think the rich assume they're bulletproof now. They think they'll maintain their ability to hoard all the nice stuff even if the rest of America (or the world) burns. And I wish I believed they were wrong about that. I support progressive politicians, but I suspect it may be impossible now to make significant improvements to ordinary Americans' lives through conventional politcal means. I fear the rich won't allow us to do that unless we threaten to destroy their world.

Why We Must Tax Billionaires Out of Existence

Via Down with Tyranny:

Mulch the Rich

Dok Zoom at Wonkette:

Also, it is evil to try to convince children to believe the super-rich should be objects of pity. They should instead be eaten. Or rather, mulched, for environmental and health reasons.

David M. Perry

✔ @Lollardfish

 · Jan 14, 2019

Eat the rich.

outrageoboros @1stnameNounvrbr

Someone pointed out that due to biomagnification of toxins being concentrated in predators going up the food chain, we might be better off mulching the rich, vice eating them and absorbing all those toxins ourselves.

17

1:18 PM - Jan 14, 2019

And there was rejoicing ("Yay").

Repug Policy

Down with Tyranny:

The Wrong Way to Legalize Pot

After trillions of wasted dollars and millions of wasted lives, the repugs are finally giving up on the War on (Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs.  But not before they make sure all the profits from legalization will keep going to already filthy rich white repug men.

Zandar:

Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved the legalization of marijuana earlier this month in order to gain tax revenue to pay for schools and roads.  But Republicans in the state's lame duck session are making sure that tax money goes to cops instead, with nothing for students, and that the profits go to corporate growers with both deep ties and deep pockets to give to lawmakers.

A bill proposed by outgoing Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof, R-West Olive, would significantly change the voter-approved recreational marijuana program in Michigan, including by drastically lowering the tax revenue the state is set to receive.

Proposal 1 passed with 56 percent of the vote Nov. 6. It will take effect next week.

Meekhof, R-West Olive, introduced the bill Thursday.

In addition to lowering the tax rate from 10 percent to three percent, the bill cuts out Michigan's schools and roads from receiving tax revenue from legal marijuana. The state's six percent sales tax would still apply, said Amber McCann, Meekhof's spokeswoman.

"It's disrespectful to the political process and it's disrespectful to the voters of Michigan," said Josh Hovey, spokesman for the coalition behind the ballot proposal, of Meekhof's bill.

"The people of Michigan have spoken. They knew what they were voting on."

Tax revenue from marijuana sales could reach $287.9 million by the time the market matures in Michigan under the tax structure in Proposal 1, according to a Senate Fiscal Agency analysis. It's unclear how much revenue Meekhof's proposal would draw.

Under Proposal 1, Michigan has one of the lowest tax rates on adult-use marijuana in the country. Under Meekhof's proposed bill, Michigan would have the lowest tax rate in the country. The bill redirects the revenue to municipalities (25 percent), counties (30 percent) and county sheriffs (5 percent) that have marijuana facilities, and 30 percent for state police, police training and first responder disability benefits.

Meekhof's bill, Senate Bill 1243, proposes other major changes to the voter-approved Proposal 1; including eliminating the ability for individuals to grow marijuana at home and cutting out a micro-grower's license.

Proposal 1 allows for individuals to grow up to 12 plants at home, and up to 150 plants at home with a micro-grower's license.

Republicans have such a huge majority in Michigan thanks to gerrymandering that there's a chance that this passes, but it'll take Democrats too because the measure would need a 75% margin to pass. But sending all the tax money to counties with state-approved growing operations (all rural, natch) means Detroit gets zero, and it means that the growing can become yet another industry in the pocket of corporate owners and donors.

That was the plan all along, and it's dank as hell.

Of Course We Can Afford A Civilized Nation

And this doesn't even count how much more we could do if the non-working rich actually paid their fair share.

 Down with Tyranny:

 

 

27 Days.  VOTE.  Vote for the Democratic candidates who agree with that list and pledge to implement it.

 

VOTE!

GOP Tax Cuts Are Worse Than We Thought

Yep, the repugs just snatched the wallets of every working person in the country and handed them directly to corporate shareholders.  Do not invest in new factories, do not create jobs, do not pass go.  Just steal the savings of everyone who's not obscenely rich.

Political Animal

Corporations aren’t just spending their tax cuts on stock buybacks. They’re investing at almost record levels on mergers and acquisitions, which increases what they’re making on buybacks. Isn’t that special?

Let’s take all this one step further though. Mergers and acquisitions are the building blocks of monopolies, something the Washington Monthly has been warning about for years as perhaps the single biggest contributor to stagnant wages and income inequality.

We can all complain that Democrats didn’t do enough to tackle the monopolization of our economy when they had majorities in Congress and a president in the White House. But now we see what the Republican position is. They aren’t just ignoring the issue, they’re feeding it with their corporate tax cuts and expect the rest of us to be happy with an extra buck fifty a week.

Noah at Down with Tyranny has it in meme form:

Take a look at that $6 Billion for workers. Chances are that is you, the reader of this post. If you are one of the approximately 300 Million Americans (I'm rounding it off just in the interest of simplicity), your average share of that $6 Billion would be $20.00. How's that $20.00 changing your life? Oh, you say your share is well above the average? OK. Great for you! You say your share is what $100? $1,000? $1,500? Wow! I bet that's life changing for you! That money can buy you a lot of healthcare, no?

The Rights We've Been Waiting 80 Years For

These are the human rights FDR wanted to enshrine in our Constitution eight decades ago.  The repugs beat him back then, and have been beating the American people into the ground ever since.

These rights are not radical.  They are basic human rights available and affordable to hundreds of millions of people in civilized nations around the globe.

But we're not civilized.  We're corporate drones and peasants in a capitalistic, kleptocratic plutocracy. Because the obscenely rich have stolen every dime to ensure we never have the strength to demand our rights.

Noah at Down with Tyranny:

A Working-Class Job Worth Fighting For

I grew up with kids who graduated from college and earned mid-six-figures and proudly spoke of their fathers who were gas station attendants. I remember when the first self-serve gas stations appeared and everybody laughed and pointed. Who would ever go there if you had a choice?  But then gas prices spiked and the self-serves were a nickel cheaper and the repugs started destroying jobs and the rest is history.

Or maybe the future.

 

Erik Loomis at LGM:

There are times when I would like to just pop out of my car and pump my own gas. But then I realize that these are jobs. And jobs are important. The dismissal of these jobs goes very far to show how strongly we have internalized right-wing arguments about employment and innovation. Earlier today I discussed the idea, proposed by Democratic leaders a mere 40 years ago, that we should be able to sue the government if we can’t find a job and how this is completely lost to our ideas of what our relationship to the government could be in the present. In a similar vein, the idea of actual working-class employment repulses many of us if it bothers our idea of what work should be.

Oregon and New Jersey are the only two states to mandate gas station attendants. Are these great jobs? No. But what do you think actual working-class employment looks like? In a deindustrialized and automated economy, how many options do people like this have? It’s not a great job, but it tends to pay $1 or $2 higher than minimum wage so it places a slight upward pressure on wages for unskilled workers. Most, but certainly not all, gas station attendants are working class men. Many of them likely do not have a high school diploma. Some are missing teeth and things of this nature that make their employment in other fields kind of hard. This is also a job that allows people to interact with others, be outside, and work hard for a wage. For a lot of people, that is their desired result from a job. 

SNIP

This is why I strongly believe in full employment policy as the core of how to escape the jobless future. We can have a wide definition of what full employment is and we will need to. These are not easy policies to work out. But it’s a more solid political position, in my view. Even if a UBI (Universal Basic Income) is passed, Americans will still demand jobs. Even if you don’t want to work or think work sucks or want to be emancipated from work, you aren’t most people and neither am I.

Again, there’s nothing magical about gas pumping jobs. They aren’t great. But they are real. When we make fun of them, we need to examine our own prejudices toward working people and to examine how deeply we have internalized really awful narratives about work, technological innovation, and society. There may be reasons to not have gas pumping, but those who hate this aren’t really presenting very good ones. What would you have low-skill workers do? And if your primary driver in creating economic policy is “I don’t want to talk to people” or “This is dumb” or “I could do this faster,” you need to think a whole lot harder about your place in society and the world. A full employment economy may in fact require small sacrifices around the margins to make this work, such as you waiting 3 minutes for your gas to be pumped. This is not necessarily a bad thing given the societal benefits of full employment.

That the people in our economy who do the dirtiest, hardest and most necessary work - janitors, represent!- is a fundamental indictment of not just capitalism, but of our failure to establish economic justice.

What Taxing the Rich Brought Us

For more than 40 years, working Americans have paid through the ass for tax cuts for the rich. No more.  Tax the motherfuckers out of existence with 90 percent tax on investment income - the kind they get by sitting on their ass - and estates - which they get by being born - and use it to repay working Americans with infrastructure and renewable energy and publicly owned high-speed wifi and free college and universal health care and basic incomes.
 

Noah at Down with Tyranny:

Remember That Repugs Destroyed the Economy

The only way to stop this catastrophe is to vote in a Democratic Congress is 2018.  That means you should be out right now knocking on doors and getting Democratic voters off their asses.

TPM:

As Republicans in the House and Senate hash out their tax bill differences in a conference committee behind closed doors, with the goal of producing a final bill before the holiday break, conservative economists tell TPM that the policies likely to become law will wreak havoc on the country for many years to come. Though Republicans insisted repeatedly over the past few weeks that the $1.4 trillion in tax cuts, most of them geared toward wealthy individuals and corporations, would pay for themselves by stimulating economic growth, they presented no evidence to support their claims.

Instead, the economists and former government officials predicted, the bill will drive up the federal deficit, shrink and destabilize the health care market, exacerbate already historic income inequality, and pressure Congress to make deep cuts to the social safety net and government programs.

When you're cleaning a millionaire's toilets with your tongue for 50 cents an hour, remember that repugs voted this motherfucker in while every Democrat voted against it.

The Tories Are Winning

We should never have let the motherfucking traitors back into the country.

Digby:

It is a personality type committed to maintaining the "natural" order.

 

America was very good to New World royalty. They invested in a political party. They're preparing to close on a country.

Working Americans No Longer Citizens, Just Peasants

D.R. Tucker at Political Animal:

The Republican tax deform (that’s not a spelling error) bill passed by the Senate on a 51-49 vote early this morning is nothing short of a hate crime against the economically disadvantaged, a declaration of holy war against the poor. In supporting this bill, the GOP has made it clear that for all practical purposes, the party wishes to, in effect, strip anyone not in the one percent of the benefits of citizenship.

Remember: Every single Democratic Senator voted against this un-democratic, un-American monstrosity. And every single repug Senator except Bob Corker voted for it - including Kentucky's Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul.

The deadline for filing to run in Kentuckjy's 100 state house elections and 19 state senate elections is January 29.  The people who win those seats will re-district the whole state and decide whether the repug servants of the rich or the Democratic people's representatives will prevail for the next generation.

All Great Wealth is Stolen

There's an old saying that behind every great fortune is a crime.  That ain't the half of it.

PZ Myers:

Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are, together, richer than the half of the population of the United States. Bezos was the fortunate recipient of an abrupt surge in the value of Amazon stock that has given him a net worth of over 100 billion dollars. Which makes this comment particularly appropriate:

One of the best soundbites I’ve heard about modern economics is (paraphrased)) “It’s not possible to earn a billion dollars. It is possible to steal a billion dollars.”

There is nobody smart enough, hardworking enough, trained enough and dedicated enough to earn a billion dollars without leveraging corrupt systems and exploiting people.

The poverty threshold in America is $11,490 for one person. If someone has a billion dollars, that is 87,032 times the poverty line.

It’s possible for someone to be twice as smart as another worker. It’s possible for them to be four or five times as hardworking. It’s possible for one person to have ten times the training of another person. So if you have one person that is half as smart, a fifth as hardworking, and a tenth as trained, they should reasonably earn one percent of the other. That’s the very outside figure. But anyone who takes in more than a million dollars per year did not earn that, they stole it. They found a vulnerable system to exploit or they found a group of people to cheat. Maybe they did it legally. Maybe they paid someone to make it legal to do that. It happens. But “earn”? Actually -deserving- that much money because of their merits and efforts? No.

I don’t mind some inequities in wealth — I buy into capitalism just enough to think that a motivating reward system for human behavior is a good thing — but we’re well beyond what is fair or reasonable. I can live with some people making a million dollars a year, but only if we’re also making sure that no one has to live in rank poverty. But someone “earning” billions while huge numbers can barely keep food on the table, can’t afford rent, can’t go to a doctor when they need to, and their children have no opportunities for a good education…that is an obscenity.

Incentives

As someone once said, repugs claim that giving more money to the rich makes them work harder, but giving money to the poor makes them work less.  Right.

Only Obstacle to Ending Inequality Is Repugs

We don't have nice things in this country because repugs and the rich are stealing it all for themselves.

Can't decide on a single issue to drive you in The Resistance?  Try income inequality: it's simple and easy to sell.  All it takes to make it happen is working to elect progressives.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

Of course growing inequality is not inevitable. Robert Kuttner:

But can we ever get that back? Of course we can—the obstacles are political, not economic.

We could have much higher minimum wages. We could stop the union-bashing. We could restore a brand of globalization that promotes rather than undermines national social standards. We could invest massively in a green transition, modeled on the World War II mobilization that reduced unemployment from 14 percent to 2 percent in two years and produced tens of millions of good jobs.

As technology replaces human work, we could also give everyone a share of that new production, the way the Alaska Permanent Fund gives all Alaskans a share of that state’s oil revenues. Any advances created with the help of government—from subsidy of biomedical research to free-riding on the internet—could be subject to a share-the-wealth levy. Author Peter Barnes is the inspiration for this idea.

Is this broad vision crazy? It is far less crazy than the folly of supply-side economics that is back in fashion, which will only make America more needlessly unequal.

As Kuttner points out, this is a question of political power, not some sort of inevitable force in the economy. In the New Gilded Age, corporations have torn down most of the limitations to their wealth that were erected between the 1930s and 1970s to create a more equitable society. They are now seeking to eliminate the last of those barriers (and largely will in the next 4 years) and repeal much of the Progressive Era as well. These are grim times indeed. But they are not inevitable. The obstacles we have to overcome to turn this tide are certainly no greater than those of workers a century ago. But we have to commit to this fight to do it. A more robust Democratic Party leading an actual fight would help but we are a long ways from that. And the loss of class consciousness, even among the white working class toward other members of the white working class (racism has usually trumped class consciousness across races of course) certainly makes this harder. But it is not impossible. It will however probably be one of the critical struggles of our remaining lives.

The Rich Stole Your Job, Too

Globalization done right could have made us more rather than less economically secure.  But the rich obscenities had to grab every last penny they could, everyone else, the nation and the world be damned.

Erik Loomis:

And let me reiterate, there is no such thing as market forces. These are not immutable laws like gravity. These are all a series of decisions made by humans. They have the option to make other decisions. They do not do so. But we should not naturalize this. We could have had a system of globalization that sought to share economic benefits equally. But because the process was controlled by the rich for the benefit of the rich (and let’s remember that the core reason for globalization in the last 50 years is CEOs and shareholders seeking to bust unions and escape environmental protection by moving overseas), that never happened. Today, the capitalists have naturalized the process to deflect how they control all of it. This is basically believed not only on the right and by elites in both parties but also by those liberal writers who believe that Paul Theroux is history’s greatest monster for pointing out the real costs of this to Americans. We have a long ways to go. Dean Baker is doing a lot of the work to help give us the tools to push back against this orthodoxy.

Privatization Kills: Step by Step

This is how they do it, children.  They take away your Democratic rights to a publicly accountable government and turn America into Somalia one step at a time.

Erik Loomis:

Everyone should check out the report released today by In the Public Interest on how privatization increases inequality. Here are the five key findings:

Creation of new user fees: The creation of new user fees to fund public services disproportionately impacts the poor. As government budgets have declined, some jurisdictions have tried outsourcing services to private companies and allowing those companies to charge fees to the end-user to subsidize or completely fund the service. Many of the services that use this contracting and payment structure are those that poor individuals and families must use or are subject to through their interactions with the government.

Increase in existing user fees: Residents of jurisdictions that have privatized critical public services such as water or transit have experienced steep increases in their rates—such increases particularly harm low-income residents and those on fixed-incomes.

Privatization of the social safety net: Programs that provide and deliver critical support to the poor are often the subject of privatization experiments, many times with tragic results. Because these programs assist those who have little to no political power, these programs are low hanging fruit for privatization.

Decreased wages and benefits: Privatization increases income inequality through the decline of contracted workers’ wages and benefits. When governments directly provide a service, they often provide living wages and decent benefits to workers. When private companies take control, they often slash wages and benefits in an attempt to cut labor costs, replacing stable, middle class jobs with poverty-level jobs.

Increased socioeconomic and racial segregation: The introduction of private interests into public goods and services can radically impact access for certain groups. In some cases, as the public park example in Section 5 shows, privatization can create parallel systems in which one system propped up by private interests typically serves higher-income people, while another lesser quality system serves lower-income people. In other cases, the creation of a private system, such as charter schools in a school district, siphons funding away from the public system meant to serve everyone. In some situations, poor individuals and families can lose access to the public good completely.

The report as a whole is highly disturbing and alarming. Whether we are talking about charter schools or hiring private agencies to manage funds for foster children or bringing in private contractors for any number of social services, privatization of our public services is a universally awful idea that centers profit in the hands of the few who make that profit on reducing wages and benefits, avoiding unions, hiring recent college graduates to replace long-term workers, and other strategies that have contributed to the broader crises of inequality and a lack of quality jobs in the economy. Yet the mania for privatization continues. Grover Norquist wins.

Gov. Moneybags Steals From Working People to Give to the Obscenely Rich

Free stuff for rich people.  $20 million in tax dollars from people earning $7.25 per hour to benefit only people who can afford a private plane.  

From the press release:

Gov. Matt Bevin announced today that select general aviation airports across the state will receive $20 million over the next two years to fund overdue airport pavement renovations.

Don't be fooled: "general aviation" airports do not serve the public. Only private planes - and people rich enough to buy one - can use them.

Meanwhile, Governor Only Rich People Are Really Human is still planning to rip health care away from 400,000 working poor Kentuckians.

None of whom have a private plane.