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.

Fuck Civility

From Juanita Jean:

Your Tax Dollars in the Greedy Mitts of Super-Rich Fckwads

Zandar nails it:

Just remember that when Republicans tell you that we can't afford roads, bridges, schools, clean water, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and health care, just remember they had no problem giving Apple $47 billion a year to buy their own stock.

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?

Repug Tax Bill Guts Public Schools

Among the many public-good victims of the repug Shove Middle Class Money Down the Throats of the Obscenely Wealthy is the long-standing target of repug fuckery: Public Education.

Budget cuts for public schools but giant tax cuts for private schools, including religious schools.  This is pretty much precisely the opposite of the Constitutional "general welfare" clause and the Establishment Clause. Not to mention a compete reversal of the free public education system that created America's economic powerhouse and global leadership.

And the cherry on top of this shit souffle is that these soon-to-be-even richer charter schools are increasing segregation to the level of slavery days.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

“IN MANY CASES, SCHOOL DISTRICT LINES ARE THE MORE POTENT CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS THAT WE STILL NEED TO TAKE DOWN”

That excellent sentence is from this fine Andre Perry piece on the connection between charter schools and continued de facto school segregation. The reality is that charter schools, private schools, and people who move to the suburbs for “better schools” that are almost always whiter schools are reinforcing what Brown v. Board of Education tried to take down. The nation’s schools never desegregated. After the government forced Little Rock to desegregate in 1957, leading to the legendary battle at Central High School, the city simply closed all its public schools the next year. Not surprisingly, the rise of often Christian private schools coincided almost precisely with the courts getting involved in desegregation. Also not surprisingly, this occurred at the same time that white people began fleeing to the suburbs. Despite such efforts as busing, schools have remained largely segregated to the present. Any fight for racial justice must also be a fight for integrated schools. Charter schools are just making this worse. This is a legacy of slavery and white supremacy, topics the white people nation hasn’t even begun to tackle seriously.

You will not be surprised that Jonathan Chait, Rheeist charter school shill and husband of a leading charter school advocate, doesn’t care about any of this and instead thinks that charter schools will solve these problems. He is wrong, as the research not developed by fellow charter school shills, consistently demonstrates.

If you want better schools, you do so by fighting poverty. If you want to fight poverty, you have to fight racism. There is no other solution. Anti-union privatizers seeking to make a buck off education certainly are no solution. And in any case, actual real life desegregation needs to be a goal that we must strive for. It’s not as if it is impossible.

Charlie Pierce brings it home:

Very often, people who express doubts about the value of public charter schools are criticized for being unsympathetic to minority and poor students that these schools allegedly are designed to help. (That the charter movement is awash in fraud and deceit, to say nothing of educational and disciplinary policies that wouldn’t be out of place in Tom Brown’s School Days, is another issue entirely.) The Associated Press went out and discovered that, for one reason or another, if you’re nostalgic for the days of racially segregated education, charter schools can deliver the goods there, too.

SNIP

Public education, embattled though it is, and as disrespected by this administration* as it ever has been by any administration, remains one of the most fundamental American ideas that Americans ever had. Looked at honestly, and over the span of centuries, it may be among the most lasting contributions this country has made to civilization. It deserves better than what it’s getting. It deserves honesty.

Charter schools are now legal in Kentucky, although supposedly only "public" ones.  I give the corporatists and the freakazoids until the end of the General Assembly in April to grab for themselves the last pennies still funding public schools.

The Enemy is the Money Power

Everything that's wrong with the nation and the world comes down to plutocracy: rule by the rich.

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.

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.

Typical Repug Tax Bill on Steroids

If it didn't fuck the middle class and poor to pour more billions in billionaire's pockets, repugs wouldn't vote for it.

Kevin Drum:

I’ve sort of given up on the latest batch of estimates about the effect of the tax bill. They all say the same thing: It gives big cuts to the rich; big cuts to corporations; big cuts to hedge fund zillionaires; and a few crumbs for the middle class that disappear over time. And none of this has the slightest effect. Republicans just don’t care. It doesn’t matter that the economy is strong and doesn’t need a tax cut. It doesn’t matter that CBO hasn’t had time to produce an official estimate of the bill. It doesn’t matter that American corporations are already among the lowest-taxed in the world. It doesn’t matter that the bill will have virtually no effect on growth. It doesn’t matter that the rich have done so well over the past few decades that they hardly need another windfall.

Republicans are just going to do it, and that’s all there is to it. So why not turn off your brain and go read about Prince Harry instead? He’s also rich, but at least he doesn’t spend his time whining about how meager his allowance is.

Poor Suffering Corporations

And this doesn't even count the billions in direct subsidies.  Down with Tyranny:

 

 

And no, corporations do not create jobs.  Minimum-wage workers who have to spend every dime they make create jobs.

Bevin's Pension Plan Will Bankrupt the State

Don't believe me; listen to the states who tried the same plan.

In the 1990s, both West Virginia and Michigan closed public pension plans. West Virginia was first, closing its teacher pension plan in 1991. All new teachers were placed in a 401(k)-style defined contribution plan. In 1997, Michigan closed its traditional pension plan for state government employees. What happened next is a warning to other states or cities considering a similar course.

After closing the pension plan, two things happened in both states: the cost of the plan increased dramatically and retirement security for employees plummeted. As plan costs skyrocketed in West Virginia, the state began studying its options.

In 2003, West Virginia found that providing a pension to teachers cost taxpayers half the amount of a comparable 401(k)-style plan. After 15 years, West Virginia reopened the pension plan for new teachers and gave teachers in the 401(k) plan an option to switch into the pension plan. Over 78 percent of teachers switched to the pension plan.

Michigan, too, has seen plan costs increase and funding levels decrease. But worst of all, Michigan is forcing its state employees to retire into poverty rather than providing a modest, reliable defined benefit.

And yeah, of course Bevin's lying about the real cost.

Kentucky’s General Assembly will need to find an estimated $5.4 billion to fund the pension systems for state workers and school teachers in the next two-year state budget, officials told the Public Pension Oversight Board on Monday.

That amount would be a hefty funding increase and a painful squeeze for a state General Fund that — at about $20 billion over two years — also is expected to pay for education, prisons, social services and other state programs.

It's the fast-track to Kansas and Haiti. Pretend that fatal budget cuts, pension destruction and tax windfalls for the rich will fix Kentucky's finances. Then discover that oops, the Commonwealth can't operate with no money, so sorry, sux to be you, gotta go run for president now.

It's a church! It's a business! It's a Lying Bunch of Grifters

The Big Gay Wooden Box is revealing the true soul of religion: use it to justify whatever you want to do.

Linda Blackford at the Herald:

Three days after state tourism officials suspended an $18 million tax incentive, officials at a Noah’s Ark theme park have sold their main parcel back to their for-profit entity for $10.

The issue started in late June after Ark Encounter LLC sold the parcel to its non-profit affiliate, Crosswater Canyon for $10. The deed continues to describe the property as worth $18 million even though the Grant County PVA has assessed the land for $48 million.

Ark Encounter officials have declined to say why they sold the property in the first place, but the move in June coincided with their refusal to pay a safety assessment tax levied by the city of Williamstown. City officials worried that the sale might be the first step in the ark park claiming non-profit status, which would exempt it from property taxes.

Thanks to the Freedom From Religion Foundation for demanding Kentucky withdraw the tax incentives.  If only we had a non-freakazoid governor who would use the money for the benefit of all, rather than his co-religionists.

Bevin Says RepugNoCare Doesn't Kill Enough People Fast Enough

A bill deliberately designed to kill tens of thousands of working people in order to give a trillion-dollar tax cut to the already obscenely wealthy - like himself and his buddies - is not cruel and stupid enough for Governor Piece of Shit.

From the AP:

Kentucky's Republican governor said he reluctantly supports the Senate's plan to replace the Affordable Care Act and blamed its shaky prospects for passage on "mushy moderates" who "don't have enough spine" to pass the bill.

Kentucky was one of 31 states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. It did so under a previous Democratic governor who supported the law. The expansion added another 400,000 people to Kentucky's Medicaid program, causing the state to have among the largest coverage gains in the country.

Bevin told WVHU radio host Tom Roten on Tuesday the Senate proposal was "not really a good bill" but said it would start the process of giving states more control. He said he understands some conservative opposition, but said Republican lawmakers who support the Medicaid expansion should be ashamed.

Yeah, that would be the same Medicaid expansion that has brought billions of dollars into Kentucky, rescued struggling rural hospitals and oh yeah SAVED THOUSANDS OF KENTUCKY LIVES.

But keep voting repug, Kentucky trumpians.  You will die in a ditch, but you really showed that Ni**ger in the White House.

RepugNoCare in Pictures

Kevin Drum has the graphs in all their fuck-workers glory. Here's one with the guy who is sacrificing 22 million Americans to give a trillion-dollar windfall to the already obscenely rich.

 

Need words?  Kevin's got 'em.  He concludes:

Reading the CBO report in its entirety, it’s hard to see that BCRA offers any improvements over Obamacare aside from cutting taxes for the rich. Net premiums go up for most people—quite massively in the case of older consumers; deductibles go up; out-of-pocket expenses go up; the working poor are virtually shut out of the insurance market; the quality of coverage gets worse; and 22 million people lose insurance.

The only plausible path for any improvement is the increased flexibility states would have to run their own health care progams. Historically, this has accomplished little except to allow conservative states to cut back on health services to the poor, so you’d need to be mighty starry-eyed to think that it will produce amazing innovations this time around. But that’s about it: believing in the power of states to innovate because they have less money is the only path for defenders of BCRA.

It's making liberals puke and scream and cry, and it cancels the primary achievement of That Ni**er in the White House, so in the eyes of trump voters, it's perfect.

They'd rather watch their children die in agony from lack of health insurance than let Those People win. 

Is Kentucky Smarter Than Kansas?

Not if Billionaire Bevin and his all-repug legislature get their economy-destroying tax cuts for the rich this year.

Because their plan is exactly the same fuck-everybody-who's-not-rich plan that turned Kansas into Haiti so completely that this week even Kansas'  vicious repug motherfuckers voted overwhelmingly to start taxing corporations and the rich again.

Martin Longman at Political Animal:

The news out of Kansas is highly amusing, as you can see in this report from the The Wichita Eagle:

Lawmakers rolled back Gov. Sam Brownback’s signature tax policy over his objections Tuesday night, forcing into law tax increases to fix a budget shortfall and provide more money for schools.

The legislation ends the “march to zero” income tax cuts that Brownback heralded for much of his time as governor…

…The Senate and House voted 27-13 and 88-31, respectively, to override Brownback’s veto…

…The override represents a blow to the legacy of one of the most unpopular governors in America, amid speculation that he may not serve out his remaining time in office but instead take a federal position.

Kansas is such a Republican state that even Brownback’s epic mismanagement hasn’t turned the state purple or blue, but he’s done his best. He’s made Republicans sound like Democrats. For example, look at this:

Rep. Larry Hibbard, R-Toronto, said some residents would feel taxed too much and others would feel that certain services weren’t funded enough. But the compromise was good, he said.

Hibbard said the state had become a national laughing stock for its recent fiscal troubles, including a tax system that allowed situations where “the employee was paying the taxes and the employer wasn’t.”

“This tax bill starts us on the road to recovery,” he said.

Or this:

“It’s hard to celebrate because Kansas is in such shambles. The magnitude of the problems that we have to correct is so great,” Rep. Melissa Rooker, R-Fairway, said.

Here you have one Republican highlighting the absurd injustice of a tax code in which employers pay nothing, echoing Democrats who complain about corporations like General Electric that contribute nothing to the treasury. And you have another Republican who wants to celebrate what the governor correctly called “a $1.2 billion tax hike, making it the largest in state history,” but is not quite able to pull it off because the state’s coffers are still so drained.

Apparently repug legislators resent Brownback for turning the state into "a laughingstock."  Will Kentucky's repug legislators wake up in time to stop Governor Not From Here from doing the same or worse to the Bluegrass State?

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.

Bevin's Wet Dream for Kentucky

... is actually worse than what repugs have done to Kansas.  Even Brownback hasn't neutron-bombed the state's flagship university.  Yet.

Charlie Pierce:

Sliding north, we find ourselves in the failed state of Kansas, now in the fifth year of the Brownbackian Dark Ages, as such things are reckoned. Somehow, the fact that Kansas' status as a supply-side lab rat has dropped the state down a political garbage chute the likes of which hasn't been seen since they shredded the Articles of Confederation is beginning to seep under the guardhouses of the gated communities. The head of a healthcare company is fleeing to the Missouri border and he's not shy about telling the world why. 

From Pathfinder Health Innovations CEO Jeff Blackwood: 

It wasn't just that Brownback was conservative; it was that he is seen as a tool of the Koch brothers and ALEC, a conservative think tank and lobbying organization. Brownback used his influence and funding to eliminate "moderate" republicans from the Kansas legislature and install his hand-picked conservative cronies. He couldn't do the same with the Kansas Supreme Court, which has ruled a number of the conservative legislature's laws as unconstitutional, so Brownback's administration decided to threaten to cut off funding to the court system and is actively pursuing legislation to impeach the Supreme Court.

Kansas has become a test center of "trickle down" economics, espoused by economist Arthur Laffer during the Reagan years. Nowhere has there been as thorough an implementation of Laffer's policy recommendations… and nowhere has there been as dramatic a failure of government. Under Brownback's direction, Kansas implemented an unprecedented tax cut in 2012, eliminating taxes for LLCs and professional firms (for full disclosure, PHI is a C Corporation) and making the largest cuts in the highest tax brackets. He shifted taxes to create a heavier burden on property and sales taxes, which typically represent a larger burden on lower income brackets. Brownback declared that this tax cut would be a "shot of adrenaline" for the Kansas economy, but the reality is that the tax cuts have had the opposite effect. Kansas lags neighboring states in job growth. For 11 of the last 12 months, Kansas has dramatically missed revenue targets, falling deeper in debt and facing another round of degraded bond ratings.

The worst part is that the burdens for the shortfalls rest on the shoulders of those who can least afford it – children and the developmentally disabled.

No kidding, tell us what you really feel.

The funding problems got so bad that Osawatomie State Hospital's mental health ward had to significantly cut staffing. Over 40% of their staff positions were dormant, leaving the remaining staff overworked and unprepared. This understaffing resulted in an improperly released patient murdering a 61-year-old man, and a hospital worker was raped, having to rely on other patients to save her. In January 2016, the Osawatomie State Hospital lost its certification to provide mental health services, cutting off federal funding that counted for roughly half of the hospital's revenue. It is unclear what will happen to the patients and staff at Osawatomie State Hospital, leaving the fates of the patients in limbo.

The state's public education system, once considered one of the best in the nation, hasn't been spared, either. You'll hear claims from Kansas officials that funding to education is at an all time high, but it's just an accounting trick – they chose to shuffle money for special education and retirement funds through the schools so it could appear as an increase on the books. Salary freezes, underfunding to the point of being ruled unconstitutional, laws allowing teachers to be imprisoned for introducing potentially "offensive" content, cuts and delays in $100 million in payments to the state-run retirement fund, and legislation specifically targeted to cripple the Kansas teacher's union are all part of an ongoing effort to undermine the public education system in Kansas. Instead, the Brownback administration plans to offer vouchers to encourage families to send their children to private and religious schools.

To double down on these policies, Brownback is now ignoring the $250 million shortfall predicted for 2016, instead opting for headlines about closing Kansas to refugees and blaming the "liberal media" for the state's economic woes.

In the end, I believe the goals of the Brownback administration are going exactly to plan – starve the state of resources to the point where it just makes sense to turn over critical government functions to for-profit entities. I can't, in good conscience, continue to give our tax money to a government that actively works against the needs of its citizens; a state that is systematically targeting the citizens in most need, denying them critical care and reducing their cost of life as if they're simply a tax burden that should be ignored. It's because of these moves that I have decided to deny Kansas revenue from Pathfinder's taxes by moving our company to Missouri.

This guy says it flat out–Brownback has engineered the failure of government in Kansas to prove to himself and to the world that government inevitably fails. It's not often that you see it made that plain, and now it's time to point out that enough voters in Kansas showed up and re-elected this cluck in what only can be seen now as a suicide pact.

 You know Governor Lying Coward is thinking up ways he can one-up Brownback and create the Galt's Gulch libertarian paradise of the Bluegrass.

Great Idea of the Week

Extend it to CEOs and Board Directors of corporations and I'd say this would definitely put an end to the redistribution of income from the working poor to the filthy rich.

Now all we need is an excuse to deny the franchise to repugs, conservatards, freakazoids and other non-Democratic voters.

 

Allegra Kirkland at TPM: 

If states can drug test low-income residents seeking welfare assistance, why can’t they do the same for members of the one percent asking for hefty federal tax deductions?

So goes the thinking of Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), who spoke to the Guardian on Wednesday about her new Top 1% Accountability Act. The bill would force taxpayers reporting itemized deductions of over $150,000 to either submit a clear drug test to the IRS or accept the much lower standard deduction when filing their tax returns.

“We’re not going to get rid of the federal deficit by cutting poor people off SNAP,” Moore told the Guardian, referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps. “But if we are going to drug-test people to reduce the deficit, let’s start on the other end of the income spectrum.”

The Milwaukee congresswoman's bill comes as a rebuke to Republican lawmakers and her state’s governor, Scott Walker. A state law that went into effect in December forces applicants for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to answer questions about their drug use, and Walker is suing the federal government for the right to drug test Wisconsin residents applying for SNAP benefits.

Other officials like Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) and West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin (D) have pushed for similar measures in their states.

Moore told the Guardian she was “sick and tired, and sick and tired of being sick and tired, of the criminalization of poverty.”