illegal alien kills another american
- From: gringo <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:09:36 -0500
Vito wrote:
"gringo" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wroteThat was a mistype as you well know. However, if cancers caused by carbon-based fuels and heart attacks caused by the stress of living in a society dominated by billionaire greed are added in, yes, I'm sure the total will be in the millions.
You're a trip. Some of my kin settled in the Shenandoah valley in 1720 where, with 100s of other pioneers, they faced indian, french and brit attacks, not to mention starvation and weather, for the next century. Another walked from San Diego to Iowa alone after the Mexican war. Most of the original Jamestown settlers died in the first year. Millions of Americans have faced real danger and still do. But your kind are stressed "living in a society dominated by billionaire greed"? That's worthy of a Doonsbury strip.
Ever been stuck on a stalled escalator?
You're a jackass racist. Name of Vito? Italian descent? Got news for you bucko. Your family emigrated from somewhere other than here. Not even native Americans originated as a people from here. Back in the day, the weak little human species were migratory, following the herds, fleeing from unsociable weather and things like volcanoes.
That billionaire greed you uphold, son, is the source of America's current economic woes.
http://www.thomhartmann.com/2009/07/21/the-great-tax-con-job/
Somebody living on a million dollars a year but earning five million after taxes, can sock away four million in a Swiss bank. If his taxes go up enough to drop his after-tax income to only three million a year, heâ??s still living on a million a year, and only socks away two million in the Swiss bank. His â??disposableâ?? income goes down when his taxes go up, and vice-versa. (Technically, the word is â??discretionaryâ?? income for after-tax, after-living-expenses income, but disposable income has become so widely used as a phrase to describe discretionary income I'll use it here.)
The Rich Person Tax Effect is the one that virtually all Americans understand - and, oddly, most working class people think applies to them, too (this is the truly amazing part of the con job referred to earlier).
But it doesnt.
Working Person's Tax Effect - version one
Most working people spend pretty much all of what they earn - their disposable/discretionary income is close to zero. Savings rates in the US among working people typically are small - one to five percent - and during the last few years of the W. Bush administration actually went negative. So the take-home pay that people have after taxes - regardless of what the taxes may be - is pretty much what they live on.
As economist David Ricardo pointed out in 1817 in the "On Wagesâ" chapter of his book "On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation" take home pay is also generally what a person will work for. Employers know this: that there is a market for labor, driven in part by supply and demand. So if a worker is earning, for example, a gross salary of $75,000, his 2008 federal income take-home pay will be about $60,000.
Both he and his employer know that he'll do the job he's doing for around $60,000 a year in take-home pay.
So what happens if his taxes go up, cutting his take-home pay to $55,000 a year (even though his gross is still $75,000)? Over time (typically one to three years) his wages will rise enough to compensate for the lost income.
Alan Greenspan used to be hysterical about this effect - he called it wage inflation - and The Wall Street Journal and other publications would often reference it, although the average working person has no idea that if his taxes go up, his wages will eventually go up. Similarly, when working-class taxes go down, their gross wages will, over time, go down so their inflation-adjusted take-home pay remains the same. We've seen both happen over the past eighty years, over and over again.
When I was in Denmark last year doing my radio show from the Danish Radio offices for a week and interviewing many of that nationâl leading politicians, economists, energy experts, and newspaper publishers, one of my guests made a comment that dropped the scales from my own eyes.
We'd been discussing taxes on the air, what the Danes get for their average 52% tax rate (free college education, free health care, 4 weeks of vacation, being the world's happiest country according to research reported on CBS's 60 Minutes TV show, etc.). I asked him why people didn't revolt at such high tax rates, and he smiled and just pointed out to me that the average Dane is very well paid with a minimum wage that equals about $18 US (depending on the exchange rate from day to day).
Off the air, he made the comment to me that was so enlightening. "You Americans are such suckers," he said, as I recall. "You think that the rules for taxes that apply to rich people also apply to working people. But they donâ??t. When working peoples taxes go up, their pay goes up. When their taxes go down, their pay goes down. It may take a year or two or three to all even out, but it always works this way - look at any country in Europe. And it's the opposite of how it works for rich people!"
Working Person's Tax Effect - Version Two
The other point about taxes - which Obama leveraged with his no tax increases on people earning under $250,000 a year pledge - has to do with the fact that our tax structure in the US is progressive.
Here's how it breaks out for a single person from the 2008 federal tax tables:
10% on income between $0 and $8,025
15% on the income between $8,025 and $32,550;
25% on the income between $32,550 and $78,850;
28% on the income between $78,850 and $164,550;
33% on the income between $164,550 and $357,700;
35% on the income over $357,700.
Note that our $75,000/year worker has two full tax brackets above him, which, if they go up, will not affect him at all. (This is also true, of course, for the median-wage and average-wage American workers who earn in the low to mid-$40,000/year range.)
The top tax rate that a person pays is referred to as their marginal tax rate (in our worker's case 28%). So what happens if the top marginal tax rate on people making over $357,700 goes up from its current 35% to, for example, the Eisenhower-era 91%?
For over 120 million American workers who donâ??t earn over $357,700/year, it wonâ??t mean a thing. But for the tiny handful of millionaires and billionaires who have promoted The Great Tax Con, it will bite hard. And that's why they spend millions to make average working people freak out about increases in the top tax rates.
Income taxes as the "Great Stabilizer"
Beyond fairness and holding back the Landed Gentry the Founders worried about (America had no billionaires in todayâ??s money until after the Civil War, with John D. Rockefeller being our first), there's an important reason to increase to top marginal tax rate, and to do so now.
Novelist Larry Beinhart was the first to bring this to my attention. He looked over the history of tax cuts and economic bubbles, and found a clear relationship between the two. High top marginal tax rates (generally well above 60%) on rich people actually stabilize the economy, prevent economic bubbles from forming, prevent economic crashes, and lead to steady and sustained economic growth (and steady and sustained wage growth for working people).
On the other hand, when top marginal rates drop below 50 percent, the opposite happens. As Beinhart noted in a November 17, 2008 post on the Huffington Post, the massive Republican tax cuts of the 1920s (*from 73% to 25%*) led directly to the Roaring 20s stock market bubble, temporary boom, and then the crash and Republican Great Depression of 1929.
Rates on the very rich went back up into the 70-90% range from the 1930s to the 1980s. As a result, the economy grew steadily; for the first time in the history of our nation we went 50 years without a crash or major bank failure; and working people's wages increased enough to produce the strongest middle class this nation has ever seen.
Then came Reaganomics.
Reagan cut top marginal rates on millionaires and billionaires from 74% down to 38% and there was an immediate surge in the markets - followed by the worst crash since the Great Depression and the failure of virtually the entire nation's savings and loan banking system.
Bush I cut taxes, and the nation fell into a severe recession while debt soared and wages for working people fell.
Things stabilized somewhat when Clinton slightly raised taxes on the very rich, but W. Bush dropped them again - including taking taxes on unearned income (interest and dividends - the income that people like W. born with a trust fund earn as they sit around the pool waiting for the dividend check to arrive in the mail) down to a top rate of 15%. The result of this surge in easy money for the wealthy, combined with deregulation in the financial markets, was the froth Greenspan worried about and led us straight into the Second Republican Great Depression, ongoing today.
The math is really pretty simple. When the uber-rich are heavily taxed, economies prosper and wages for working people steadily rise. When taxes are cut for the rich, working people suffer and economies turn into casinos.
Roll Back The Reagan Tax Cuts
While there's much discussion about letting the Bush tax cuts expire, if we really want our country to recover its financial footing we must do something altogether different. We need to roll back the Reagan tax cuts that took the top marginal rate from above 70% down into the 30% range.
First, though, we have to help Americans realize that "no new taxes" is a mantra that is meaningful to the very rich, but largely irrelevant to average working people.
Only when the current generation re-learns the economic and tax lessons well known by the generation (now dying off) that came of age in the 30s through the 60s, will this become politically possible. Americans need to learn what Europeans know about taxes - they only matter to the rich.
Thus today the uber-rich are spending hundreds of millions to make sure words like burdens are always associated with the word tax and to convince average working people that they should throw out of office any politicians who are willing to raise taxes on the rich.
We have a lot of education to do. As long as the Right Wing Machine of the uber-rich continues to "lose" (e.g. invest) millions of dollars a year in their ongoing disinformation campaign, it's going to require all of us reciting the mantra, *Roll back the Reagan tax cuts!*
"The man who dies rich dies disgraced" - Andrew Carnegie
Carnegie was responsible for building 2500 libraries and most still exist today. He understood the responsibility that we have to those that have helped us succeed in life.
"Carnegie believed in giving to the â??industrious and ambitious; not those who need everything done for them, but those who, being most anxious and able to help themselves, deserve and will be benefited by help from others."
Andrew Carnegie, "The Best Fields for Philanthropy" The North American Review, Volume 149, Issue 397, December, 1889
7.
Bill Maher articulates this in a funny and easy to understand article:
How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it did't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.
Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a war profiteer was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves like laundry. War is not supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and connected civilian contractors.
Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason : who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition you're going to have trouble with the tenants. But now prisons are big business. A company called the Corrections Corporation of America is on the New York Stock Exchange, which is convenient since that's where all the real crime is happening anyway. The CCA and similar corporations actually lobby Congress for stiffer sentencing laws so they can lock more people up and make more money. That's why America has the world's largest prison population, because actually rehabilitating people would have a negative impact on the bottom line.
Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. I thought, Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.
But maybe they aren't. Because unlike in Cronkite's day, today's news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That's why it wasn't surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter's time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.
And finally, there's health care. It wasn't that long ago that when a kid broke his leg playing stickball, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun put a thermometer in his mouth, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle and you were done. The bill was $1.50, plus you got to keep the thermometer.
But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some Wall Street wizard decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're run by some bean counters in a corporate plaza in Charlotte. In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. Americaâ??s largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it's not a right, it's a racket. The more people who get sick and need medicine, the higher their profit margins. Which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O.
Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like "recision," where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you've been paying into your plan for years.
When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask whatâ??s in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
If conservatives get to call universal health care socialized medicine I get to call private health care soulless vampires making money off human pain. The problem with President Obama's health care plan isn't socialism, it's capitalism.
And if medicine is for profit, and war, and the news, and the penal system, my question is: what's wrong with firemen? Why don't they charge? They must be commies. Oh my God! That explains the red trucks!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-not-everything-i_b_244050.html
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