Today, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is proposing a bill that would institute the Buffett Rule - the extraordinarily simple concept that millionaires, specifically those with more than $1 million a year in income, should pay at least the same tax rate as the middle class (at least a flat 30%) - into the federal tax code. The top 400 tax filers in this country, each making at least $110 million in a year - the uber rich of the uber rich - paid an average federal tax rate of 18% in 2008. A third of these taxpayers paid less than 15% (Mitt "Corporations are people, my friend" Romney is included in this select group of tax dodgers) and fully 85% paid less than 30%. The effective tax rate on a middle class business owner earning $70,000 a year? 28%.

So why this disparity? As we have discussed on TPV before, the closer you get to the higher end of the income brackets, the less of one's income tends to come from work, and more of it tends to come from investment, known as "capital gains." Our tax code has a terrible discrepancy that treats income made from work differently from money made from wealth, and it gives preferential treatment to the latter. Here's a graphic representation of what that looks like (the orange line is the effective tax rate of the richest 400 people in America):

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

President Obama in the State of the Union laid out a tax proposal that will pretty much do the following:

1. ensure those making over $1 million pay a minimum effective rate of at least 30%
2. eliminating tax subsidies for housing, health care, retirement, and child care for those making over $1 million
3. ensure that taxes won't go up on those with incomes under $250,000
4. extending the payroll tax cut
5. eliminate tax incentives to those who ship jobs offshore by ensuring that all American companies pay a minimum tax on their overseas profits
6. eliminate the tax deduction companies receive for the cost of shutting down factories and moving production overseas
7. create a new tax credit to cover moving expenses for companies that close production overseas and bring jobs back to the United States
8. lower tax rates for companies that manufacture and create jobs in the United States

Now, if you ask me, all these proposals are common sense tax policies that should have broad support by the American people. However, when you have millionaires in Congress representing the PEOPLE and coddle with those top 1%, President Obama's tax proposal in our Congress seems like a dead on arrival proposal that would not have any chance of passing especially in the Republican majority House. Even in a Democratic controlled Senate, I have no doubt that the Republican will have enough votes to block the tax proposal. Beside, it is not only in the best interest of the Republican to kill this proposal, it is in the best interest of many multimillionaire Democratic lawmakers in Congress.

You have to ask yourselves why would a person in a position of power who pretty much gets their millions by doing favors in passing laws that makes it possible to enrich themselves be willing to have more taken from them in taxes? The thing is this people are not scrapping to survive. They are filthy rich and honestly don't give a damn about their constituents.

So I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks. That's because I have been on vacation to India, visiting my family for the first time in 10 years. It's been a wonderful time - I hope to give you all some updates soon. I will be arriving back into the US tomorrow.

A word as to why I haven't said anything ahead of time about this short "hiatus": I didn't want possible trolls to take advantage of an announced absence - simple as that.

It's good to be home (soon).

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

In this article, I compiled a number of key benefits of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or ObamaCare which included many benefits that are currently in effect and helping many Americans today. What I did not included was things that will be in effect in 2012 and beyond. While I am working to compile the benefits that will take effect in the future, there is one element (the Individual Mandate which will take effect in 2014) that I feel has gotten a bad rap as it has been used to undermine ACA and scare many Americans because it requires penalty if a qualified individual does not buy insurance in the exchange.

I will explain what the Individual Mandate is, its benefits to controlling the cost of health care and its central principle, how the individual mandate works, the penalties for being without health insurance, the process to determine who would qualify for Medicaid or Government Subsidies and what it means if the individual mandate is repealed by the Supreme Courts but the rest of the Affordable Care Act survives.

The classic response we hear from Obama-haters after he gives any speech is, "Yeah, he gives a great speech but..." And, surely, last night was a great speech. It was more than a great speech, it was an inspirational speech. Never before has a national politician spoken so openly and plainly about the unfairness in our economic system. This speech went beyond populism; it asked us to engage our brains and look at things from a common sense standpoint.

Which, of course, why Obama-haters (a) didn't hear the same speech as the rest of us and (b) didn't understand the concepts President Obama was talking about.

In order for a concept to become firmly lodged in the national dialog, it needs to be repeated over and over again. The discussion about fairness in our economic system began in earnest with the Occupy movement. You couldn't listen to the State of the Union address last night without hearing resounding echoes of the Occupy message: that the system is rigged for the super-wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower classes. For that, we owe them a big debt of gratitude.



Now President Obama has taken up the charge and is repeating this message at every opportunity. In interviews. On the campaign trail. And last night during his State of the Union address.

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

I must say -- I am so proud to listen to the vision President Obama has for my country as he laid it all out in detail during the State of the Union address last night. I will also add that I expected no less as usual from President Obama.

The President came out highlighting his populist message that we must all work together to achieve great things and build this country in its time of trial and tribulations. If there was one paragraph that sums the gist of the President's message while covering many new ideas, it would be this:

I'm reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those 50 stars and those 13 stripes. No one built this country on their own. This Nation is great because we built it together. This Nation is great because we worked as a team. This Nation is great because we get each other's backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we're joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

Video of the speech from last night and read the full transcript of President Obama's 2012 State of the Union Address.

Suzzane Mettler's book The Submerged State is a attempt to explain how anti-health care demonstrators could yell "Get government hands of my medicare" and other equally delusional slogans. Here's an amazing graph from Mettler (via Ezra Klein) listing a number of Federal programs and the percentage of people polled who received aid from those programs yet told the poll taker that they had not received any government aid.

Like the right wing TV actor who told Glenn Beck that he had been so poor that he'd been on welfare and food stamps and he didn't get any government help, many Americans receive government social benefits yet don't or won't understand that they are from the government. Mettler points out that the largest social benefits, like the Mortgage Interest Deduction, student loans, and medicare are delivered in ways that make it easy to think of them as private. Many of her students were under the impression that their student loans were private loans - because of the way the funding is delivered. The obscure way these benefit programs works often hides the fact that they are grossly unfair - for example the mortgage deduction gives the biggest subsidy to wealthy people and student loans, until the Obama reform, were a direct subsidy of banks.

The NYTimes has a not miss article about why Apple does not make things in the USA anymore.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

 and this passage that is obviously something way beyond economists like Dean Baker.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

In the economic models used by conventional economists, left and right, there is no measurable difference between a factory making electronic devices and an office building managing corporate HR paperwork as long as gross accounting measures are the same. But in the real-world, there is a huge difference not only between the economic effects of the two businesses but in the economic position of the workers and the surrounding economy. It's the difference between making and managing. Which is why Robert Reich, Dean Baker and other "left economists" are so confused and so unable to offer illuminating critiques or useful proposals. Keynesian stimulus is not going to bring those Apple jobs back or fix the erosion of the middle class that is tied to the erosion of the manufacturing base.  The failure of "the left" to understand that the rise of the Romney/Koch economy of corporate looting and crony capitalism is not the result of some bad corporate executives and lack of sufficient regulation, but is generated by deeper forces is part of the reason that "the left" has become a barrier to progress.

 Dean Baker is widely seen as "to the left" of Barack Obama and Obama's famously (among some people) evil "neoliberal" economic team. But Baker, like Robert Reich and to some extent Paul Krugman, are deeply committed to a orthodox economics ideology that is essentially conservative. Here's Baker:

[The Wall Street Journal] has an article the point of which is to warn readers that engineering is increasingly being outsourced to Asia. This may be bad news to people who hope to work in engineering, but for the rest of us, it means cheaper products, just as buying clothes and shoes manufactured abroad meant cheaper products.

 So, here we are in 2012, and the "left/liberal" economists are still pushing the theory of the service economy.  Andy Groves, one of the founders of Intel, pointed out   the social costs

You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work—and much of the profits—remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?

So we live in an era where a billionaire industrialist understands the crushing effect of deindustrialization on the social structure, yet our "left/liberal" intellectuals tell us to stop worrying and apply for a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart. To me, this is an indication of a more general collapse of the "left" and its isolation both from the last thirty years of economic research and from real-life. Baker and similar are deeply critical of the Obama administration, but their critique is not illuminating nor does it produce progress because the "left" is operating on an intellectual framework that is not capable of addressing the important issues of the day.

1) The First Obama/Biden 2012 TV Ad - Brilliant

2) Is 15% taxation for a multimillionaire enough?

Romney in hot seat paying only 15% while his father George paid 37% in Taxes when he run for President in the 60s. Oops, I guess someone is using tax heaven investment to game the system. Go figure!

Crossposted from ThisIsOurTime Blog

I have been reading a lot about Glenn Greenwald and David Sirota's phony love affair with Ron Paul. I must admit it is fascinating how the minds of these self proclaimed liberal wanna be caricatures take the bandwidth of the online community. Like them annoying little hairy things that gets in-between your teeth when you eat a mango, their phony liberal libertarian hyperbole have gotten in-between my teeth so here is how I floss out the many dishonesty and hyperbolic rhetoric I keep hearing God knows for how long.

Glenn Greenwald or David Sirota by any stretch of imagination are not people I follow because they are just not Liberals. I always find them a controversial read in blogs I frequent and often I find their ideology intellectually dishonest. Their aim: By any means necessary to paint President Obama in a negative light! Why? Because the choices made by the President is never radical enough to satisfy their ego and considering their consistent hyperbole attacks it seems as if their ego has been infected by a racists ideology like these people. In fact researching Glenn Greewald's writing at salon, his attacks on the President sure makes one to conclude that the venom he foams out of his mouth is not objective but personal and filled with hatred that he is welling to over look everything this President has done to get even for being called a Libertarian and racist. Well, as they say, you reap what you sow and everything Greenwald has been getting from the liberal circle is indeed deserving while he as usual religiously dismiss them with his idiotic non-stop rantings. The over the top rhetoric he spews to tarnish President Obama exaggerating the truth beyond recognition while you won't see him write remotely anything that is critical of the GOP says volume and you only have to scan through his recent articles to realize that.

Can you see this woman in the photo to the left? If you answered "no" you may be a member of the false-left. There was exactly one member of Congress with the courage to vote against the war in Afghanistan and it was not Ron Paul. Here's how Congresswoman Lee explained her vote against the authorization of military force (AUMF).

It was a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the Sept. 11 events -- anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation's long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit. In granting these overly broad powers, the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration. I could not support such a grant of war-making authority to the president; I believe it would put more innocent lives at risk.[SFGATE]

This stand earned Congresswoman Lee a wave of attacks and death threats against herself and her family - she had to get police protection against the jingoists. Read her explanation of her vote not to rush to give nearly-unlimited power to George W. Bush. It looks pretty damn smart right now. At the same time, the famous Ron Paul not only voted for the AUMF but also wanted to give President Bush authority to charter Blackwater mercenaries as unregulated world wide assassination teams. That would have been, no doubt, a treat for all concerned.

 Although Congresswoman Lee was a strong supporter of President Obama's election, she has not moderated her criticism of the wars since he took office far from it - she has continued to call for rapid withdrawal, to propose legislation forcing the US out of Afghanistan, to propose significant cuts in the DOD budget, to urge greater US humanitarian aid as a replacement for military efforts, and even opposed the Obama administrations intervention in Libya. Congresswoman Lee has been chair of the Black Congressional Caucus and co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus - she's high profile and an eloquent, powerful speaker. Barbara Lee is the critic from the left that so many in the false left claim to be. So of course, our self-appointed guardians of left-orthodoxy and principle have completely ignored her.  Instead they keep whining that Racist Kook Ron Paul is being attacked for standing up for principle.