Gun Truth for Patriots Only

Gun Truth for Patriots Only

By cutting off federal funding for research [1] and stymieing data collection [2] and sharing [3], the National Rifle Association has tried to do to the study of gun violence what climate deniers have done to the science of global warming. No wonder: When it comes to hard numbers, some of the gun lobby's favorite arguments are full of holes.

Myth #1: They're coming for your guns.
Fact-check: No one knows the exact number of guns in America, but it's clear there's no practical way to round them all up (never mind that no one in Washington is proposing this). Yet if you fantasize about rifle-toting citizens facing down the government, you'll rest easy knowing that America's roughly 80 million gun owners already have the feds and cops outgunned by a factor of around 79 to 1.
gun ownership

Sources: Congressional Research Service [4] (PDF), Small Arms Survey [5]

Myth #2: Guns don't kill people—people kill people.
Fact-check: People with more guns tend to kill more people—with guns. The states with the highest gun ownership rates have a gun murder rate 114% higher [6] than those with the lowest gun ownership rates. Also, gun death rates tend to be higher in states with higher rates of gun ownership. Gun death rates are generally lower in states [7] with restrictions such as assault-weapons bans or safe-storage requirements.
ownership vs gun death

Sources: Pediatrics [8], Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [9]

Myth #3: An armed society is a polite society.
Fact-check: Drivers who carry guns are 44% more likely [10] than unarmed drivers to make obscene gestures at other motorists, and 77% more likely to follow them aggressively.
• Among Texans convicted of serious crimes, those with concealed-handgun licenses were sentenced for threatening someone with a firearm 4.8 times more [11] than those without.
• In states with Stand Your Ground [12] and other laws making it easier to shoot in self-defense, those policies have been linked to a 7 to 10% increase [13] in homicides.  


Myth #4: More good guys with guns can stop rampaging bad guys.
Fact-check: Mass shootings stopped by armed civilians in the past 30 years: 0 [21]
• Chances that a shooting at an ER involves guns taken from guards: 1 in 5 [22]

Myth #5: Keeping a gun at home makes you safer.
Fact-check: Owning a gun has been linked to higher risks of homicide [23], suicide [24], and accidental death [25] by gun.
• For every time a gun is used in self-defense in the home, there are 7 assaults or murders [26], 11 suicide attempts, and 4 accidents involving guns in or around a home.
• 43% of homes [27] with guns and kids have at least one unlocked firearm.
• In one experiment, one third of 8-to-12-year-old boys [28] who found a handgun pulled the trigger.

Myth #6: Carrying a gun for self-defense makes you safer.
Fact-check: In 2011, nearly 10 times more people were shot and killed in arguments [29] than by civilians trying to stop a crime [30].
• In one survey, nearly 1% [31] of Americans reported using guns to defend themselves or their property. However, a closer look at their claims found that more than 50% [31] involved using guns in an aggressive manner, such as escalating an argument.
• A Philadelphia study found that the odds of an assault victim being shot were 4.5 times greater [32] if he carried a gun. His odds of being killed were 4.2 times greater.

Myth #7: Guns make women safer.
Fact-check: In 2010, nearly 6 times more [33] women were shot by husbands, boyfriends, and ex-partners than murdered by male strangers.
• A woman's chances of being killed by her abuser increase more than 7 times [34] if he has access to a gun.
• One study found that women in states with higher gun ownership rates were 4.9 times [35] more likely to be murdered by a gun than women in states with lower gun ownership rates.

Myth #8: "Vicious, violent video games" deserve more blame than guns.
Fact-check: So said [36] NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre after Newtown. So what's up with Japan [37]?
      United States     Japan
Per capita spending
on video games     $44     $55
Civilian firearms
per 100 people     88     0.6
Gun homicides
in 2008     11,030     11

Sources: PricewaterhouseCoopers [38], Small Arms Survey [39] (PDF), UN Office on Drugs and Crime [40]

Myth #9: More and more Americans are becoming gun owners.
Fact-check: More guns [41] are being sold, but they're owned by a shrinking portion [42] of the population.
• About 50% [43] of Americans said they had a gun in their homes in 1973. Today, about [44] 45% [45] say they do. Overall, 35% of Americans [45] personally own a gun.
• Around 80% of gun owners are men. On average they own 7.9 guns each [46].

Myth #10: We don't need more gun laws—we just need to enforce the ones we have.
Fact-check: Weak laws and loopholes backed by the gun lobby make it easier to get guns illegally.
• Around 40% [47] of all legal gun sales involve private sellers and don't require background checks. 40% of prison inmates [48] who used guns in their crimes got them this way.
• An investigation found 62% of online gun sellers [49] were willing to sell to buyers who said they couldn't pass a background check.
• 20% of licensed California gun dealers [50] agreed to sell handguns to researchers posing as illegal "straw" buyers.
• The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has not had a permanent director for 6 years [51], due to an NRA-backed requirement [52] that the Senate approve nominees.


Links:
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/26guns.html?pagewanted=all
[2] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/atf-obama-gun-reform-control-alcohol-tobacco-firearms
[3] http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/80518462.html
[4] http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32842.pdf
[5] http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/publications/by-type/yearbook/small-arms-survey-2006.html
[6] http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/elsevier/state-level-homicide-victimization-rates-in-the-us-in-relation-to-TNMKd0qUVn
[7] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/the-geography-of-gun-deaths/69354/
[8] http://www.pediatricsdigest.mobi/content/116/3/e370.full
[9] http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparemaptable.jsp?ind=113&cat=2
[10] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16434012
[11] http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/american-public-health-association/when-concealed-handgun-licensees-break-bad-criminal-convictions-of-patzzJ6ljx?articleList=%2Fsearch%3Fquery%3Dfirearms%26dateFacetFrom%3DNOW%252FDAY-5YEARS%26internal_rental_state%3Drentable%26journal_journal_name%5B%5D%3DAmerican%2BJournal%2Bof%2BPublic%2BHealth
[12] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/nra-alec-stand-your-ground?page=1
[13] http://econweb.tamu.edu/mhoekstra/castle_doctrine.pdf
[14] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/nra-board-newtown-bushmaster
[15] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/nra-board-members-selleck-nugent
[16] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/nra-mass-shootings-myth
[17] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/01/nra-membership-numbers
[18] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/nra-life-duty-police-assault-rifle-gun-control
[19] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/nra-alec-stand-your-ground
[20] http://www.motherjones.com/special-reports/2012/12/guns-in-america-mass-shootings
[21] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/armed-civilians-do-not-stop-mass-shootings
[22] http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644%2812%2901408-4/abstract
[23] http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/9/1/48.full
[24] http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full
[25] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457502000490
[26] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/9715182/
[27] http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.90.4.588
[28] http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/107/6/1247.abstract?sid=96fc3066-8fc5-4c58-b518-1940841c762b
[29] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-11
[30] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-15
[31] http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/6/4/263.full
[32] http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2008.143099
[33] http://www.vpc.org/studies/wmmw2012.pdf
[34] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447915/
[35] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3456383/
[36] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/12/national-rifle-association-has-video-game-too
[37] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/a-land-without-guns-how-japan-has-virtually-eliminated-shooting-deaths/260189/
[38] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2012/0316/Top-video-game-markets-in-the-world/United-States
[39] http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smallarmssurvey.org%2Ffileadmin%2Fdocs%2FA-Yearbook%2F2007%2Fen%2FSmall-Arms-Survey-2007-Chapter-02-annexe-4-EN.pdf&ei=Zp8JUZrxD8rhigK_iIBw&usg=AFQjCNFYCb3CI6fyWJpCx1qTfVYVdKB_wA&sig2=eeeku-E1n8tpFC6XbBDq6g
[40] http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html
[41] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/mass-shootings-investigation
[42] http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/07/21/the-declining-culture-of-guns-and-violence-in-the-united-states/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+themonkeycagefeed+%28The+Monkey+Cage%29
[43] http://publicdata.norc.org/webview/velocity?var1=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfVariable%2F4697_V5076&op1=%3C%3E&cases2=5&stubs=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfVariable%2F4697_V1&var2=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfVariable%2F4697_V5076&op3=%3C%3E&analysismode=table&v=2&var3=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfVariable%2F4697_V5076&ao2=and&weights=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfVariable%2F4697_V5084&cases3=7&V1slice=1972&ao1=and&previousmode=table&study=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfStudy%2F4697&headers=http%3A%2F%2Fpublicdata.norc.org%3A80%2Fobj%2FfVariable%2F4697_V648&op2=%3C%3E&mode=table&ao3=and&V4slice=0&tabcontenttype=row&count=2&cases1=4
[44] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postabcpoll_20130113.html
[45] http://www.gallup.com/poll/150353/self-reported-gun-ownership-highest-1993.aspx
[46] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2610545/
[47] http://www.nij.gov/pubs-sum/165476.htm
[48] http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=940
[49] http://www.fixgunchecks.org/deleteonlineoutlaws
[50] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2937134/
[51] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/12/atf-ill-equipped-enforce-new-gun-laws
[52] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/us/legislative-handcuffs-limit-atfs-ability-to-fight-gun-crime.html?pagewanted=all
[53] http://thenounproject.com/
[54] http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&searchterm=gun+man+woman&search_group=&orient=&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=konstantynov&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&commercial_ok=&color=&show_color_wheel=1#id=33221842&src=c4c1199215fa517793878a728c5ca0be-1-0

Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims

Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims

Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.
Romney

Mitt Romney was not a businessman; He was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses.

Nevertheless, Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaign’s narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs. The fact that Bain’s returns reputedly averaged more than 50 percent annually during this period is purportedly proof of the case—real-world validation that Romney not only was a striking business success but also has been uniquely trained and seasoned for the task of restarting the nation’s sputtering engines of capitalism.

Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.

That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism—where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.

So the vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise. I know this from 17 years of experience doing leveraged buyouts at one of the pioneering private-equity houses, Blackstone, and then my own firm. I know the pitfalls of private equity. The whole business was about maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible. Occasionally, we did invest in genuine growth companies, but without cheap debt and deep tax subsidies, most deals would not make economic sense.

VICTORY FROM THE JAWS OF DEFEAT

The startling fact is that four of the 10 Bain Capital home runs ended up in bankruptcy, and for an obvious reason: Bain got its money out at the top of the Greenspan boom in the late 1990s and then these companies hit the wall during the 2000-02 downturn, weighed down by the massive load of debt Bain had bequeathed them. In fact, nearly $600 million, or one third of the profits earned by the home-run companies, had been extracted from the hide of these four eventual debt zombies.

The most emblematic among them was a roll-up deal focused on down-in-the-mouth department stores and apparel chains that were falling by the wayside in small-town America due to the arrival of Wal-Mart and the big-box retailers. Bain invested $10 million in 1988 and nine years later took out 18X its money—that is, a $175 million profit.

Fittingly, Stage Stores Inc. was the last deal underwritten by the Drexel-Milken junk-bond machine before its demise. And the $300 million raised for this incipient LBO was exactly the kind of slush fund that Milken’s stable of takeover artists had used to acquire corporate castoffs and other bedraggled pots and pans that got rechristened as “growth” companies.

During the next eight years, Bain slogged it out, accumulating about 300 small Main Street storefronts under such forgettable banners as Royal Palais, Bealls, and Fashion Bar. Yet the company wasn’t making much headway. By 1996, it had paid back none of the Milken debt and was only earning $14 million—exactly what it had generated back in 1992 on half the number of stores.

In the spring of 1997, when Chairman Greenspan decided that “irrational exuberance” was not such a worrisome thing, Bain Capital decided to indulge, too. It caused Stage Stores Inc.—which was already publicly traded—to raise $300 million of new junk bonds and used the proceeds to buy a faltering 250-store chain of family clothing stores called C.R. Anthony.

These 12,000-square-foot cracker-box stores sold mid-market shoes, shirts, and dresses right in Wal-Mart’s wheelhouse. In hot pursuit of “synergies,” Bain promptly rebranded these Anthony stores to the purportedly more compelling Stage and Bealls banners. While the name change did nothing to ward off the grim reaper from Bentonville, it suddenly gave Stage Stores Inc. the “growth” story that Greenspan’s bull market craved. Within five months of this ostensibly “transformative” deal and long before the results of the ritual “synergies” and “rebranding” could be determined, the company’s stock price had doubled. Bain Capital and its partner, Goldman Sachs, quickly unloaded their shares at the aforementioned 18X gain.

As a matter of plain fact, the “transformative” C.R. Anthony deal was a bull-market scam. Almost immediately, results headed south. After growing 4 percent during the year of Bain’s quick 1997 exit, same-store sales turned to a negative 3 percent in 1998 and negative 7 percent in 1999, and were still falling when Stage Stores Inc. filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter. The company hemorrhaged $150 million of negative cash flow during 1998-99—that is, during the two years after Bain and Goldman got out of Dodge City.

Bain Capital subsequently claimed the company was “a growing, successful and consistently profitable company during the nine years we owned it” but then immediately ran into “operating problems.” That was a doozy by any other name but typical of the standard private-equity narrative that confuses speculators’ timing with real value creation on the free market. The fact is, the bad inventory and vastly overstated assets that took the company down did not suddenly materialize out of the blue during the 24 months after Bain’s exit: they were actually the result of financial-engineering games from the very beginning.

Worse still, the Stage Stores deal embodied all of the hidden leverage that had become par for the course in the era of bubble finance. When the crunch came, the company had no assets to fall back on because Bain had hocked virtually everything; it sold all the company’s credit-card receivables to a third party, and among its 650 stores it owned exactly three! By my calculation, the capitalized debt embedded in its store leases was nearly $750 million and when added to its disclosed balance-sheet debt, the company’s true debt of was $1.3 billion or a devastating 25X its peak-year free cash flow.

The bankruptcy forced the closure of about 250—or 40 percent—of the company’s stores and the loss of about 5,000 jobs. Yet the moral of the Stage Stores saga is not simply that in this instance Bain Capital was a jobs destroyer, not a jobs creator. The larger point is that it is actually a tale of Wall Street speculators toying with Main Street properties in defiance of sound finance—an anti-Schumpeterian project that used state-subsidized debt to milk cash from stores that would not have otherwise survived on the free market.

Bain’s acclaimed success with another retailer—Staples—is also not what it is touted to be. Tom Stemberg was a visionary entrepreneur who got $5 million of seed money from Bain in 1986 when it was still in the venture-capital business; the Milken-style LBO schemes came later. As it happened, Bain exited the Staples deal after only a few years with a $15 million profit, a rounding error in the scheme of things.

Stemberg made Staples a free-market success, a relentless generator of efficiency in the retail distribution of office supplies. Yet this honest capitalist efficiency, which benefited millions of customers, was achieved by a rampage of job destruction among tens of thousands of Main Street stationery and office-supplies stores and other traditional distributors. These now-defunct operations could not compete with Staples due to their high labor costs per dollar of sales—including upstream labor expense in the traditional, inefficient wholesale and distribution layers that stood behind Main Street retailers.

Ironically, the businesses and jobs that Staples eliminated were the office-supply counterparts of the cracker-box stores selling shoes, shirts, and dresses that Bain kept on artificial life-support at Stage Stores Inc. At length, Wal-Mart eliminated these jobs and replaced them with back-of–the-store automation and front-end part-timers, as did Staples, which now has 40,000 part-time employees out of its approximate 90,000 total head count. The pointless exercise of counting jobs won and lost owing to these epochal shifts on the free market is obviously irrelevant to the job of being president, but the fact that Bain made $15 million from the winner and $175 million from the loser is evidence that it did not make a fortune all on its own. It had considerable help from the Easy Button at the Fed.

Romney and his crony pals have simply found a way to to use tax subsidies, leveraged buy outs and assorted financial tricks to pay themselves use fees and sell off the bones of the company they stripped apart in the name of plutocratic plundering, not capitalism. Capitalism is this great system for competing to sell the best products and services to actually create jobs and improve the quality of people's lives. Romney would probably laugh in your face if you told him that in private.

Romney and Paul Ryan are just your garden variety conservative Republican stealth candidates, hiding their real selves and real agenda behind fake patriotism and fake values, Charity president says Paul Ryan 'ramrodded' way into fake dish washing photo-op

Myth Busters: The Super Wealthy and Big Business Are America's Biggest Welfare Queens

Myth Busters: The Super Wealthy and Big Business Are America's Biggest Welfare Queens

Wealthy individuals and corporations want us to believe they've made it on their own, without the help of government or the American people. Billionaire financier Sanford Weill blustered, "We didn't rely on somebody else to build what we built." He was echoing the words of his famous predecessor, the formidable financier J. P. Morgan, who spouted, "I owe the public nothing."

That's the bull of Wall Street. There are at least five good reasons why the wealthiest Americans need government as much as the rest of us, and probably more.

1. Security

In his "People's History," Howard Zinn described colonial opposition to inequality in 1765: "A shoemaker named Ebenezer Macintosh led a mob in destroying the house of a rich Boston merchant named Andrew Oliver. Two weeks later, the crowd turned to the home of Thomas Hutchinson, symbol of the rich elite who ruled the colonies in the name of England. They smashed up his house with axes, drank the wine in his wine cellar, and looted the house of its furniture and other objects. A report by colony officials to England said that this was part of a larger scheme in which the houses of fifteen rich people were to be destroyed, as part of 'a war of plunder, of general levelling and taking away the distinction of rich and poor.'"

That doesn't happen much anymore. Of course, the super-rich aren't taking any chances, with panic shelters and James Bond cars and personal surveillance drones. But the U.S. government will be helping them by spending $55 billion on Homeland Security next year, in addition to $673 billion for the military. The police, emergency services, and National Guard are trained to focus on crimes against wealth.

In the cities, business interests keep the police focused on the homeless and unemployed. And on drug users. A "Broken Windows" mentality, which promotes quick fixes of minor damage to discourage large-scale destruction, is being applied to human beings. Wealthy Americans can rest better at night knowing that the police are "stopping and frisking" in the streets of the poor neighborhoods.

2. Laws and Deregulations

The wealthiest Americans are the main beneficiaries of tax laws, property rights, zoning rules, patent and copyright provisions, trade pacts, antitrust legislation, and contract regulations. Tax loopholes allow them to store over $1 trillion in assets overseas.

Their companies benefit, despite any publicly voiced objections to regulatory agencies, from SBA and SEC guidelines that generally favor business, and from FDA and USDA quality control measures that minimize consumer complaints and product recalls.

The growing numbers of financial industry executives have profited from 30 years of deregulation, most notably the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Lobbying by the financial industry has prolonged the absurdity of a zero sales tax on financial transactions.

Big advantages accrue for multinational corporations from trade agreements like NAFTA, with international disputes resolved by the business-friendly World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. Federal judicial law protects our biggest companies from foreign infringement. The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership would put governments around the world at the mercy of corporate decision-makers.

The euphemistically named JOBS Act further empowers business, exempting startups from regulatory accounting requirements.

There are even anti-antitrust measures, such as the licensing rules that allow the American Medical Association to restrict the number of doctors in the U.S., thereby keeping doctor salaries artificially high. Can't have a free market if it hurts business.

3. Research and Infrastructure

A publicly supported communications infrastructure allows the richest 10% of Americans to manipulate their 80% share of the stock market. CEOs rely on roads and seaports and airports to ship their products, the FAA and TSA and Coast Guard and Department of Transportation to safeguard them, a nationwide energy grid to power their factories, and communications towers and satellites to conduct online business. Private jets use 16 percent of air traffic control resources while paying only 3% of the bill.

Perhaps most important to business, even as it focuses on short-term profits, is the long-term basic research that is largely conducted with government money. Especially for the tech industry. Taxpayer-funded research at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the Internet) and the National Science Foundation (the Digital Library Initiative) has laid a half-century foundation for technological product development. Well into the 1980s, as companies like Apple and Google and Microsoft and Oracle and Cisco profited from the fastest-growing product revolution in American history, the U.S. Government was still providing half the research funds. Even today 60% of university research is government-supported.

Public schools have helped to train the chemists, physicists, chip designers, programmers, engineers, production line workers, market analysts, and testers who create modern technological devices. They, in turn, can't succeed without public layers of medical support and security. All of them contribute to the final product.

As the super-rich ride in their military-designed armored cars to a financial center globally connected by public fiber optics networks to make a trade guided by publicly funded data mining and artificial intelligence software, they might stop and re-think the old Horatio Alger myth.

4. Subsidies

The traditional image of 'welfare' pales in comparison to corporate welfare and millionaire welfare. Whereas over 90% of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families goes to the elderly, the disabled, or working households, most of the annual $1.3 trillion in "tax expenditures" (tax subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, and loopholes) goes to the top quintile of taxpayers. One estimate is $250 billion a year just to the richest 1%.

Senator Tom Coburn's website reports that mortgage interest and rental expense deductions alone return almost $100 billion a year to millionaires.

The most profitable corporations get the biggest subsidies. The Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in financial assistance to financial institutions and corporations. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, 280 profitable Fortune 500 companies, which together paid only half of the maximum 35 percent corporate tax rate, received $223 billion in tax subsidies.

Even the conservative Cato Institute admitted that the U.S. federal government spent $92 billion on corporate welfare during fiscal year 2006. Recipients included Boeing, Xerox, IBM, Motorola, Dow Chemical, and General Electric.

In agriculture, most of the funding for commodity programs goes to large agribusiness corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland. For the oil industry, estimates of subsidy payments range from $10 to $50 billion per year.

5. Disaster Costs

Exxon spokesperson Ken Cohen once said: "Any claim we don't pay taxes is absurd...ExxonMobil is a leading U.S. taxpayer." Added Chevron CEO John Watson: "The oil and gas industry pays its fair share in taxes" But SEC documents show that Exxon paid 2% in U.S. federal taxes from 2008 to 2010, Chevron 4.8%.

As if to double up on the insult, the petroleum industry readily takes public money for oil spills. Cleanups cost much more than the fines imposed on the companies. Government costs can run into the billions, or even tens of billions, of dollars.

Another disaster-prone industry is finance, from which came the encouraging words of Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein: "Everybody should be, frankly, happy...the financial system led us into the crisis and it will lead us out."

Estimates for bailout funds from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve range between $3 trillion and $5 trillion. That's enough to pay off both the deficit and next year's entitlement costs. All because of the irresponsibility of the super-salaried CEOs of our most profitable corporations.

Common Sense

Patriotic Millionaires recently addressed the President and Congress: "Given the dire state of our economy, it is absurd that one-quarter of all millionaires pay a lower tax rate than millions of working, middle-class American families...Please do the right thing for our country. Raise our taxes."

It's good to know somebody gets it right. Taxes, for the most part, are not unfair. They represent payment for society's many benefits, which get bigger and better as people get richer.

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org),

Conservatives are in perpetual paranoia mode about someone getting a few dollars for food - that conservatives with supernatural extrasensory perception are sure they do not deserve. Yet billions, even trillions of unearned income go into the pockets of the elite. Conservatives and the elite ( not all wealthy people are elites to be fair) feel that we should all be down on our knees praising these thieves.

Mitt Romney plans on resurrecting the worse policies of the Bush administration. For those with a short memory, Bush was our first MBA (Masters of Business Administration) president - Whorehouse Morals and Business Ethics

Economists: Romney’s Plan Would Spark a New Recession