If We Cut Corporate Taxes Does Is That Good For the State and Jobs? NO! How States Lose $600 Million On A Worthless Corporate Tax Break

If We Cut Corporate Taxes Does Is That Good For the State and Jobs? NO! How States Lose $600 Million On A Worthless Corporate Tax Break

There’s no shortage of corporate tax giveaways at both the federal and state levels. Lawmakers of all stripes love to use the tax code to subsidize companies, either directly or indirectly.

But in some instances, federal tax breaks for corporations undermine state budgets. As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities detailed today, one particular tax break will cost states $600 million next year:

    The federal government created this tax break, known as the “domestic production deduction,” in 2004. Since most states base their own tax codes on the federal tax code, the tax break was carried over into many states without specific legislative scrutiny or a vote. Now it is costing not only the federal government but also 25 states a large amount of money. By 2014, it will cost these states over $600 million per year.

    The deduction — enacted as Section 199 of the federal Internal Revenue Code — allows companies to claim a tax deduction based on profits from “qualified production activities,” a sweeping category that goes well beyond manufacturing to include such diverse activities as food production, filmmaking, and utilities — a substantial share of states’ corporate income tax base.

These deductions are largely worthless, and many states have tossed them overboard. But 25 states still leave it intact:

As CBPP noted, “Firms can claim the domestic production deduction for profits from all qualifying domestic activities — meaning activities that occur anywhere within the United States. As a result, a multi-state firm can claim the deduction in a conforming state for production activities in any state, not just the state where the firm is filing.” They also benefit large firms at the expense of small.

State efforts to encourage corporate growth and job creation through the tax code usually encourage a race to the bottom, as corporations play states off each other in order to secure the most preferential treatment, and then feel no hesitation about up and leaving later. Of course, paying corporations to create jobs is only one of the bone-headed ways states try to generate economic activity.

Another conservative myth bites the dust, again. 

President Obama handled a tough situation fairly well; Romney offers no credible alternative

President Obama handled a tough situation fairly well; Romney offers no credible alternative

The question before presidential voters is simple: Who will better serve this country for the next four years, Mitt Romney or Barack Obama? When couched in straightforward terms, the answer is clear: President Obama should be re-elected.

Obama has done a reasonably good job handling an almost unprecedented economic mess – a situation that has proved far worse than anyone knew as it developed. Still, there is room for debate about the direction the country is headed.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party has offered no credible alternative. Its platform consists of little more than nostalgia for the 1950s, and its presidential candidate largely remains a mystery.

Romney has publicly demonstrated no core convictions beyond his obvious belief that he should be president. He apparently thinks that simply not being Obama is qualification enough.

It is not.

When Barack Obama took office, the country was mired in two wars, one pointless and neither properly funded. The economy was tanking and jobs were disappearing by the thousands. The automotive industry was on the verge of collapse – threatening to take with it the entire upper Midwest. And, while no one knew it at the time, the Middle East was about to explode into chaos and confusion.

On balance, Obama’s handling of all that has been good. U.S. forces have left Iraq and the end is in sight in Afghanistan. Muammar Gadhafi was ousted with no American troops involved. Democracy has a tenuous but real toehold in some Arab countries. And while the U.S. economy is recovering too slowly, it is recovering. As Vice President Joe Biden put it, Osama bin Laden is dead and GM is alive.

Amid all that, Obama kept a campaign promise and signed into law a sweeping health-care reform package.

All told, that is not a bad record. But in considering the way forward, Americans are always interested in alternative visions.

Mitt Romney, however, has not effectively offered one. Instead, this race has been presented as a referendum on the economy and the president’s personal style. Romney has failed to explain himself or his agenda, and the voters still do not really know who he is or how he would govern.

By all accounts, Romney’s Mormon faith is central to who he is. To listen to him campaign, however, one would never know that. His business acumen is touted as his core competence, but he will not release his tax records for more than a couple of years. He promises to cut taxes, increase defense spending, lower the deficit and make the seemingly impossible math work out by reforming the tax code. But he cannot, or will not, explain what those tax changes might be.

Romney rails against Obamacare, although it was modeled on the program he enacted as governor of Massachusetts. He governed that state as a moderate, but won the presidential nomination describing himself as “severely conservative.”

He has gone from supporting reproductive rights when running for the Senate in 1994 to saying in 2007 that he would gladly ban abortion in all cases. He now says he would allow exceptions for rape, incest and the health of the mother.

Romney has shown some consistency on other women’s health issues. He has repeatedly said he would strip Planned Parenthood of all funding and allow employers to exclude contraception from health-insurance coverage. He wants to talk about the economy but fails to understand that reproductive autonomy is an economic issue for women.

Barack Obama is an imperfect president, of course, and to what extent he can achieve his goals for the nation remains to be seen. But he has and can articulate a vision for a better, fairer, more successful America. His opponent offers nothing of the sort.

Vote to re-elect Barack Obama.

Romney has no real jobs plan. It is all smoke and mirrors. The only way he can make his very stretchy budget and tax plan work is to raise taxes on families making under $150k per year.

Mitt Romney Supporters Show Love For China, Hatred For American Workers

GOP congressman admits Paul Ryan, GOP will “end” Medicare

Immoral Mitt Romney is hoping for another 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis,..." I will work to take advantage of the opportunity.” w/video

Inside Romney Bain's Chinese Sensata Factories, Where Workers Put in 12-Hour Days for $.99-$1.35 an Hour

If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan had values They Would Stop Their Medicare Lies

If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan had values They Would Stop Their Medicare Lies

When formulating public policy, evidence should be accorded more weight than ideology, and facts should matter more than shibboleths. The Romney-Ryan plan for Medicare reform depends on assertions that are ideologically consistent. But the Republicans plan is not supported by the evidence and does not survive serious scrutiny.

Perhaps that's why the Romney campaign has been deliberately misrepresenting President Obama's Medicare record.

Mitt Romney characterizes the $716 billion of Medicare savings over the next 10 years, contained in the Affordable Care Act, as President Obama's "raid" on the Medicare program to pay for his health care program. This fear-mongering is simply untrue. These savings result from reforms to slow the growth of Medicare spending per enrollee - there are no cuts in Medicare benefits.

The reforms include both voluntary and mandatory changes in how providers deliver health care to promote better care coordination at lower cost, reward the quality and outcomes of services rather than their volume and reduce fraud and abuse.

For example, the law fosters the creation of accountable-care organizations, i.e., groups of providers willing to accept a flat fee for the integrated care provided to their Medicare patients. Accountable-care organizations represent a major step away from the unsustainable fee-for-service model that rewards the number of procedures rather than the quality of care.

Health experts believe that these organizations will significantly improve care and lower costs not just in Medicare but throughout the health care system. This belief is based on evidence, not ideology.

Medicare beneficiaries will also benefit from reforms that penalize hospitals for preventable re-admissions reflecting complications from previous procedures and that require hospitals to post their rates of medical errors, with penalties for those with the highest rates.

Both Governor Romney and Representative Paul D. Ryan have promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act and with it the reforms behind the $716 billion in Medicare savings (although Mr. Ryan duplicitously counts the savings from these reforms in his deficit-reduction plan). Medicare beneficiaries would be the losers. They would lose the benefits of better care at lower cost. They would lose the plan's expanded Medicare coverage for prevention benefits and prescription drugs, and they would be forced to pay higher premiums and co-pays as a result of faster growth in Medicare costs.

Same on Romney and Ryan for being yet more examples of the moral corruption and anti-Americanism of the Republican party.

Mitt Romney Thinks Israel's Universal Health Care System Is Great, But Would Condemn 45,000 Americans To Death With Obamacare Repeal

Mitt Romney Thinks Israel's Universal Health Care System Is Great, But Would Condemn 45,000 Americans To Death With Obamacare Repeal

Throughout his presidential campaign, Mitt Romney has been running away from the individual insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act — even though a mandate is a cornerstone of the former Massachusetts governor’s health care reform law. “If I’m President of the United States, we’re gonna get rid of Obamacare and return, under our constitution, the 10th Amendment, the responsibility and care of health care to the people in the states,” Romney said during a GOP presidential debate.

But during his trip to Israel, Romney inadvertently praised the individual requirement and universal health care. “[F]or an American abroad, you can’t get much closer to the ideals and convictions of my own country than you do in Israel,” he said. And according to The New York Times, Romney spoke favorably about the fact that health care makes up a much smaller amount of Israel’s gross domestic product compared to the United States:

    “Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the G.D.P. in Israel? Eight percent,” he said. “You spend eight percent of G.D.P. on health care. You’re a pretty healthy nation. We spend 18 percent of our G.D.P. on health care, 10 percentage points more. That gap, that 10 percent cost, compare that with the size of our military — our military which is 4 percent, 4 percent. Our gap with Israel is 10 points of G.D.P. We have to find ways — not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to fund and manage our health care costs.”

Israel spends less on health care because of a universal health system that requires everyone to have insurance. Every Israeli citizen has the obligation to purchase health care services through one of the country’s four HMOs since government officials approved the National Health Insurance Law in 1995. People pay for 40 percent of their HMO’s costs through income-related contributions collected through the tax system, and the state pays the remaining 60 percent. And by many standards, Israelis are getting better health care than U.S. citizens. The infant mortality rate is much lower, and its mortality rate due to heart disease is half the U.S. rate.

Orly Manor, dean of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Braun School of Public Health, said U.S. officials could “learn a lot from the Israeli system. The quality is high, and the outcomes are good.” And it seems that, following his trip to Jerusalem, Romney would agree.

With all of Romney's money one would think he could afford a brain transplant or hire someone smart to think for him. If he succeeds in repealing the ACA (health care reform) he will condemn 45,000 Americans to death. After he hires the smart person he also needs to hire someone who is not morally corrupt to have a conscience for him.

How the U.S. Government Helped Mitt Romney Build His Fortune

 Bain produced stellar returns for its investors--yet the bulk of these came from just a small number of its investments. Ten deals produced more than 70% of the dollar gains.

    Some of those companies, too, later ran into trouble. Of the 10 businesses on which Bain investors scored their biggest gains, four later landed in bankruptcy court.

Put another way, Mitt Romney's investing was almost risk-free. He won when his portfolio companies won and often when they lost. Thanks in large part to the dangerous incentives unleashed by the U.S. tax code.

Which is why other countries like Denmark, the UK and Germany either don't offer--or are trying to limit--the "public subsidy" that William D. Cohan deemed "the mother's milk of a leveraged buyout". As Felix Salmon noted, the United States could lower the rate at which debt interest can deducted or cap the amount of debt to which it applies. (The Obama administration is considering those kinds of changes in its recently proposed "Framework for Business Tax Reform.") In its January 30, 2012 editorial, the Financial Times lamented:

    "The system could be made fairer and more efficient by taxing debt and equity at the same rate...Most of [Romney's] money was made at Bain Capital, which, like all private equity groups, benefits from a federal debt subsidy. It should be eliminated."

U.S. tax payer subsidized every penny that Romney "built".

Romney Caught in Two More Lies - When He Left Bain and His Ownership of Medical Waste Company

Romney Caught in Two More Lies - When He Left Bain and His Ownership of Medical Waste Company

Earlier this year, Mitt Romney nearly landed in a politically perilous controversy when the Huffington Post reported that in 1999 the GOP presidential candidate had been part of an investment group that invested $75 million in Stericycle, a medical-waste disposal firm that has been attacked by anti-abortion groups for disposing aborted fetuses collected from family planning clinics. Coming during the heat of the GOP primaries, as Romney tried to sell South Carolina Republicans on his pro-life bona fides, the revelation had the potential to damage the candidate's reputation among values voters already suspicious of his shifting position on abortion.

But Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney founded, tamped down the controversy. The company said Romney left the firm in February 1999 to run the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and likely had nothing to with the deal. The matter never became a campaign issue. But documents filed by Bain and Stericycle with the Securities and Exchange Commission—and obtained by Mother Jones—list Romney as an active participant in the investment. And this deal helped Stericycle, a company with a poor safety record, grow, while yielding tens of millions of dollars in profits for Romney and his partners. The documents—one of which was signed by Romney—also contradict the official account of Romney's exit from Bain.

The Stericycle deal—the abortion connection aside—is relevant because of questions regarding the timing of Romney's departure from the private equity firm he founded. Responding to a recent Washington Post story reporting that Bain-acquired companies outsourced jobs, the Romney campaign insisted that Romney exited Bain in February 1999, a month or more before Bain took over two of the companies named in the Post's article. The SEC documents undercut that defense, indicating that Romney still played a role in Bain investments until at least the end of 1999.

All politicians hedge on the truth a bit. We all expect that. Mitt Romney - Mr Values Mr. Stand-up Guy - Mr Morals seems to think this election cycle is a contest to see how many and often he can tell big lies. If Romney is the moral standard of Republican conservatism that say a lot about how far down in the stinking gutter conservatism has sunk. Many American seem to have learned nothing from the Bush-Cheney years - that when conservatives say they stand for values - they mean deeply repugnant values.

Crazy Conservative Carly Fiorina — a Mitt Romney surrogate Falsely Claims That Obamacare Would Harm Breast Cancer Patients. Carly studied truth telling at the Soviet Politburo when she was growing up.


Is there some wealth redistribution going on in the USA. Yes there is. Corporate America is taking all the profits from worker productivity. Can we call it class war yet? Corporate profits are at an all time high; wages are at an all time low

Free markets run the world? 'Monopoly': Calling the Global Financial Sector What It Is

Free markets run the world? 'Monopoly': Calling the Global Financial Sector What It Is

New York Times columnists Protess and Scott report that Barclays Bank is paying some US$450 million to regulators in the US and UK to “resolve accusations” surrounding its manipulation of a key interest rate, the London Inter-Bank Offer Rate (Libor), during the first years of the ongoing global financial crisis.  According to the article, the Libor rate is used as a benchmark rate to price some US$350 trillion in financial products worldwide each year, from credit cards to derivatives and student loans.

The Financial Times reports that the investigation now spans 12 regulators—from the US to Europe and Japan—and 20 banks, including the multinational giants JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, UBS and Deutsche Bank. The general idea is that the big banks—so far only Barclays has admitted wrongdoing—misreported the rates at which they borrowed from other banks, influencing the LIBOR rate so as to profit the banks. Barclays has also admitted to allowing consultations between various bank departments, and between itself and other banks, before reporting its rates to Libor, an illicit practice.

In most accounts, blame for such unsavory practices are spread around from bank managers and employees seeking higher profits and lower losses, to regulators who were asleep at the wheel, to the secretive and opaque process by which the Libor rate is set.  Yet, behind the regulators and the greedy bankers, lies the ‘m’ word that no one dares utter in the business presses—monopoly. The global financial system is increasingly run by a few big firms operating in a highly uncompetitive market place and wielding enormous power, often behind a veil of secrecy, (intentional) regulatory blindness, and technical complexity.

As any introductory economic textbook shows, imperfectly competitive marketplaces (e.g. monopoly, monopsony, oligopoly and oligopsony) are defined by the ability of a few firms, or only one firm, to manipulate prices and other exchange terms.  As markets concentrate, and free competition is replaced by collusion and superprofits, firms gain the market power to influence market rules and prices in their own interest.  Indeed, any college freshman in an traditional economics department could foresee that growing concentration in global credit markets would result in price distortions, to the detriment of consumers and other less powerful actors.  And, some might also be able to cite a few examples of the manner in which market power confers political power, another dangerous dimension of monopolistic market structures frequently noted in the Marxist tradition, among others (think, say, of Goldman Sach’s ability to staff the US Treasury and Federal Reserve).

Reintroducing the concept of monopoly into public discourse is critical for seeing patterns of injustice in the global economy, continuities that are otherwise obscured by national, geographic, partisan and sectoral distinctions. And not just in the financial context.  The word “monopoly” helps to understand why it is that Greek citizens suffer austerity even as financial institutions get rescue packages, just as it helps us to understand how it is that Starbucks could rake in record profits from its coffee sales even as world prices fell to record lows during 1998-2002.  The word “monopoly” helps us to see why our pigs and cattle are raised in confinement with antibiotics and without any trace of humanity, just as it helps us to see why small farmers in India are killing themselves by the tens of thousands.  The word “monopoly” untangles the Mexican tortilla crisis, just as it unravels the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadeq in Iran.  The word “monopoly” helps us to understand why it is that Presidents Bush and Obama have such a similar economic agenda, despite their playing for two different political teams.  And, just today, the word “monopoly” helped me to understand how it is that it is illegal for me to collect rainwater in my backyard here in Denver.

Justice demands that we call things what they are—indeed, we must name the system to change it.  In this context, the “m” word allows clarity of thought and analysis in the face of often overwhelming economic complexity. The “m” word allows us to strip the economy of its competitive veil, allows us to de-robe the trusts and combines of the 21st century. The “m” word prevents us from lapsing into the view that all of these injustices—from antibiotic resistance to farmer suicide to coup d’etat—must be treated separately by different movements and different peoples.  The “m” word allows us to see the architecture of the global economy for what it is—a playground for the new robber barons, a collection of corporate fiefdoms, an integrated system of monopolies, with all of the typical injustices that such arrangements usher forth.

Sasha Breger Bush is a Lecturer at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.  Her new book, Derivatives and Development: A Political Economy of Global Finance, Farming and Poverty, is due out this month from Palgrave Macmillan.

It is laughable to hear conservative Republican twits say the U.S. is becoming Marxist. there is a kind of socialism at work, some would call it corporate socialism. Big banks and corporations have all the power and workers have less and less. Which is mostly what Republican finger pointing is about. They demonize the critics of our bloated plutocracy so they can prevent change to a worker centered and humane competitive capitalism. Mitt Romney is their champion because he promises to shift the balance even more towards billionaires being our modern lords and masters, a conservative Republican dream come true.

Will Fox Report On Fortune Bombshell That Fast And Furious Didn't Involve Gunwalking? Call or e-mail your congressional rep and ask them to censure Darrell Issa (R-Ca) for using his political power to drum up a phony scandal that has cost the tax payers millions.

Suck it conservatives: BREAKING: Supreme Court Upholds Individual Mandate As A Tax

Is The U.S.A. Becoming a Marxist Country. In a Way, and Conservative Republicans Are Helping

Is The U.S.A. Becoming a Marxist Country. In a Way, and Conservative Republicans Are Helping Weird

Statistics are boring, but it’s important to wrap your head around this latest one from the Federal Reserve as the definitive epitaph for the American dream. Wall Street’s financial shenanigans, the banking games that made some fat cats outrageously wealthy as they turned home mortgages into toxic securities, wiped out 20 years of growth in American families’ net worth.
“Americans saw wealth plummet 40% from 2007 to 2010, Federal Reserve says,” is how The Washington Post headlined the startling news that all of the economic gain of the past two decades had been destroyed by the banking meltdown. And with housing values—the bulk of middle-class savings—indefinitely moribund, the situation will not get better anytime soon.

“The recession caused the greatest upheaval among the middle class,” the Post noted. “... Their median net worth ... suffered the biggest drops. By contrast, the wealthiest families’ median net worth rose slightly.”

That outcome, disastrous to the American ideal of a nation of mostly middle-class stakeholders competing on a relatively equal economic playing field, was preordained. When tens of millions lost their jobs and homes as a result of financial swindles that the Federal Reserve failed to prevent, this ostensibly public agency, with strong bipartisan support in the White House and Congress, adroitly directed the flow of public funds to save the bankers while abandoning their victims.

On Tuesday Sen. Bernie Sanders, acting under authority of the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, released the conclusions of a Government Accountability Office report showing that “[d]uring the financial crisis, at least 18 former and current directors from Federal Reserve Banks worked in banks and corporations that collectively received over $4 trillion in low-interest loans from the Federal Reserve."

One of those Fed directors, Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who has been on the New York Fed board since 2007, testified before Congress on Wednesday that he was sorry his company lost billions in risky trading even after all of the warnings concerning too-big-to-fail banks.

Dimon—whose company last year paid him $24 million, compared to the $45,800 median U.S. family income—testified that the bank could manage its own affairs. But that is hardly reassuring given that the Fed provided JPMorgan Chase $391 billion in total assistance as well as paying the bank to administer the government’s emergency lending program. It was the Fed that back in March of 2008 made $29 billion available to Dimon’s bank so it could acquire beleaguered Bear Stearns; the Fed also agreed to purchase Bear Stearns’ most toxic assets before the merger.

Conservative Republican Hank Paulson was Treasury Secretary when this banks started to fail. Moderate conservative Republican Ben Bernanke was and still is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank.A majority of conservatives in both houses of Congress voted for the bank rescue known as TARP. It might well have been necessary to rescue the banks - Hoover did so in the 1920s - which FDR continued. Ronald Reagan seized the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, had the government reorganize them. Though what they could have done in 2007-2008 was seize the banks, isolate toxic assets and broken them up into smaller competitive banks that were no longer too big to fail. Instead conservative Republicans in the government used socialism for the wealthy. They made the public pay for the bank losses. They also made the public pay for the losses they suffered because of the banks, themselves ( Obama has set up a mortgage assistance program for average Americans, but it is not big enough). Now that the Great Recession has settled in for at least another three to five years, conservative Republicans are saying that the failures of conservative policy must continue to be paid for by the middle-class and low income workers by cuts in college loans, cuts in or gutting Medicare altogether. We have Marxism in America for the wealthy - who never have to pay for their loses or their risks. Those losses will be paid for the the proletariat - the workers. No wonder Republicans are always calling liberals socialists. It is to distract from their own very real crony corporate socialism for conservatives and their base, the wealthy and powerful elite.


Ex-loan officer claims Wells Fargo targeted black communities for shoddy loans


Contrary To Anti-American Conservative Broadcaster Limbaugh's Claims, Public-Sector Workers Do 
 Contribute To Economic Growth

How to buy an election. Because conservative Republicans cannot win an election based on their ideas, Billionaire Adelson Pledges Unlimited Campaign Contributions To Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney Beleives in Voodoo. In Other Words He'll Be Bush 3.0

It was a Bush and Conservative Republican fairy tale that tax cuts would pay for themselves and create jobs. That while trickle down supply-side economics did not work under Reagan and has never worked any where for long, this time, with a little magic and wishful thinking voodoo economic would work. Mitt is not one to give up on the belief in voodoo economic magic. Many Americans Will Buy Romney's Economic Fairy Tales Just Like They Bought Bush's

Mitt Romney delivered a speech today about the budget deficit. It’s hard to wrap your arms around Romney’s argument, because it’s an amalgamation of free-floating conservative rage and anxiety, completely untethered to any facts, as agreed upon by the relevant experts.

In the real world, the following things are true: The budget deficit was projected to top $1 trillion even before President Obama took office, and that was when forecasters were still radically underestimating the depth of the 2008 crash. Obama did propose temporary deficit-increasing measures, an economic approach endorsed in its general contours, if not its particulars, by Romney’s economists. These measures contributed a relatively small proportion to the deficit, and their effect is short-lived. Obama instead focused on longer-term measures to reduce the deficit, including comprehensive health-care reform projected to reduce deficits by a trillion dollars in its second decade. Obama put forward a budget plan that would stabilize the debt as a percentage of the economy. Obama has hoped to achieve deeper long-term deficit reduction by striking bipartisan deals with Congress, and he has tried to achieve this goal by openly endorsing a bipartisan deficit plan in the Senate and privately agreeing to a more conservative plan with John Boehner, both of which were killed by Republican opposition to any higher revenue.

The story told by Romney is one in which all of these things are either untrue or could not possibly be true.

Romney elides some inconvenient facts — for instance, by asserting “Then there was Obamacare. Even now nobody knows what it will actually cost,” which is literally true in the sense that precise cost estimates are always impossible, but sounds to his audience like a claim that the program will swell the deficit in vast, unknowable ways. But most of Romney’s speech doesn't even refer to the facts stated above. It's simply orthogonal to facts. It’s a story, one in which Obama increased the deficit because he loves big government and Europe and hates the private sector.

Not only does Romney elide vast swaths of established facts about the deficit, it’s fairly clear that he does not operate within the mainstream understanding of the term “deficit” at all. As Jonathan Bernstein has repeatedly explained, modern Republican behavior and even language in relation to the deficit is completely nonsensical if you understand “the deficit” to mean the gap between revenue and outlays. Republican use of the term only makes sense if you define “the deficit” to mean “spending Republicans don’t like.” That’s why Republicans consider it impossible to believe that one could simultaneously extend health insurance to the uninsured while reducing the deficit.

Look at Romney’s terms to describe deficits, and it’s pretty clear he has adapted himself to his party’s conceptualization of it. His speech includes the following phrases:

    a financial crisis of debt and spending

    Washington has been spending too much money

    out-of-control spending sprees, or to piling up massive amounts of debt

    This is why I do not, for one moment, share my opponent’s belief that our spending problems can be solved with more taxes.

In Romney’s telling, the terms debt and spending are essentially interchangeable. When presented with Obama’s position — that the solution to the debt ought to include both higher taxes and lower spending — he rejects it out of hand. Naturally, Romney has admitted before that his budget plan “can’t be scored.” It’s an expression of conservative moral beliefs about the role of government. While loosely couched in budgetary terms, Romney is expressing an analysis that resides outside of, and completely at odds with, mainstream macroeconomic forecasting and scoring assumptions.

Cannot be "scored" means that no unbiased expert will say that his plan will reduce the deficit. No unbiased expert will say that the Romney plan will not gut Medicare. Tax cuts did not create jobs from 2001 to 2008 - employment remained flat. Extending tax cuts did not create jobs from 2008 until today ( the stimulus created jobs). never mind the facts, Romney will have more tax cuts for millionaires because conservatives believe the elite should not pay their fair share for the cost of America's infrastructure. America's wealthiest citizens and corporations are the biggest group of welfare recipients. They are supported by a middle-class that is shrinking every year.

Mitt Romney has a long history of attacking firefighters and their unions, going back to his days in Massachusetts

President Obama was right, Wages haven’t kept pace with recovery, study finds.
The stock market is improving. Corporate profits are up dramatically. But workers’ wages don’t seem to be rising, a study finds.

Chart Shows President Obama Has Controlled Spending, Lowered Taxes and Deficit

Chart Shows President Obama Has Controlled Spending, Lowered Taxes and Deficit

Federal spending is lower now than it was when President Obama took office. I’ll pause to let you absorb the news.

In January 2009, before President Obama had even taken the oath of office, annual spending was set to total 24.9 percent of gross domestic product. Total spending this year, fiscal year 2012, is expected to top out at 23.4 percent of GDP.

Here’s another interesting fact. Taxes today are lower than they were on inauguration day 2009. Back in January 2009, the CBO projected that total federal tax revenue that year would amount to 16.5 percent of GDP. This year? 15.8 percent.

One last nugget. The deficit this year is going to be lower than what it was on the day President Obama took office. Back then, the CBO said the 2009 deficit would be 8.3 percent of GDP. This year’s deficit is expected to come in at 7.6 percent.

The fact is that Obama inherited a disaster of a federal budget. Eight years prior, when President George W. Bush took the oath of office, there was a $281 billion surplus. By the time Obama was sworn in, he was facing a $1.2 trillion deficit. Inconvenient though it may be for conservatives (especially those who are running for president), the truth is that spending, taxes and the deficit are all lower today than when President Obama took office.

Conservative Republicans, those people who claim to have values, have spun a whole new reality when it comes to the nation's finances. They can't stick with the facts because the facts show that conservatives always sabotage America's future.

Why is Big Oil trying to defeat President Obama?

Mitt Romney Debt Speech Ignores Key Facts Romney plan would increase deficit by $5 trillion over ten years. Includes even more tax cuts for billionaires.

All Institutions Are Prone to Corruption and Conservative Republicans Like It That Way

The Cost of Anti-American Conservative Republican Ideology Is More Than America Can Afford

The Cost of Anti-American Conservative Republican Ideology Is More Than America Can Afford

For more than a year, House Republicans have energetically worked to demolish vital social programs that have made this country both stronger and fairer over the last half-century. At the same time, they have insisted on preserving bloated military spending and unjustifiably low tax rates for the rich. That effort reached a nadir on Thursday when the House voted to prevent $55 billion in automatic cuts imposed on the Pentagon as part of last year’s debt-ceiling deal, choosing instead to make all those cuts, and much more, from domestic programs.

If this bill were enacted, estimates suggest that nearly two million Americans would lose food stamps and 44 million others would find them reduced. The bill would eliminate a program that allows disabled older people to live at home and out of institutions. It cuts money that helps low-income families buy health insurance. At the same time, the House bill actually adds more than $8 billion to the Pentagon budget.

In all, the bill would cut $310 billion from domestic programs; a third of that comes out of programs that serve low- and moderate-income people. Other provisions would slash by half the budget of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was set up after the financial meltdown to protect consumers from predatory lending and other abuses, and reduce the pay of federal workers.

Fortunately, it will never be taken up in the Senate, where the majority leader, Harry Reid, has said it would “shred the social safety net in order to protect tax breaks for the rich and inflate defense spending.”

House Republicans are already claiming that this bill, along with the equally inhumane overall 2013 budget written by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, shows their seriousness in reducing the deficit and why they should keep control of the House in November. In fact, it does the opposite on both accounts — and serves as a reminder of their destructive priorities.

As a resolution to the debt-ceiling crisis, Republicans had already agreed to $109 billion a year in automatic spending cuts — half from defense, half from the domestic side — if lawmakers failed to agree to lower the deficit in more reasonable ways such as mixing targeted cuts with tax increases on the rich. Even Democrats who supported big defense cuts wanted them chosen carefully, not with the sequester’s cleaver. But Republicans refused to take that path when the supercommittee deliberated and now are trying to make all of the cuts on the domestic side.

In just one particularly destructive example, the bill would eliminate the social services block grant, a $1.7 billion fund that is given to the states to help people struggling the hardest. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the fund provides services to 23 million people, including Meals on Wheels and other programs that help older Americans. It also helps pay for child care assistance, foster care and juvenile justice at a time when states are cutting back these programs.

House Democrats offered an alternative bill that would replace the $109 billion sequester by raising taxes on the wealthy, ending oil company tax loopholes and cutting farm subsidies, but it was rejected. Republicans are determined to protect millionaires and defense contractors, no matter the costs to the country.

Conservatives said they were insulted when President Obama implied the conservative agenda was based on social-Darwinism, otherwise known as having a dog-eat-dog culture. Maybe that is because what the president said is so true. Conservatives would literally prefer that seniors and children suffer, even die, than rise taxes on the wealthy.

What Capitalists Don't Know: Without Democracy, Capitalism Dies

What You Need To Know About Anti-American Nut Ed Klein, Author Of New Book Smearing Obama

Fox filled the airwaves with a lot of economic misinformation leading up the the Great Recession. How can patriotic Americans trust Fox News and their foreign owners Rupert Murdoch and Prince Alwaleed to help America have an informed debate. Fox Forgets Its Role Downplaying Magnitude Of Recession

Big Conservative Pundit David Brooks argues there is nothing to be done to bring back lower middle-class jobs

Big Conservative Pundit David Brooks argues there is nothing to be done to bring back lower middle-class jobs

It didn’t take long to crank up the backlash against European voters. This is inevitable whenever a socialist wins a major election, but particularly now, when new French president François Hollande rode to victory shouting, "Austerity can no longer be inevitable!"A protester holds a banner that reads 'Austerity enough is enough' during a demonstration in Paris. (MEHDI FEDOUACH/AFP/Getty Images)

This sounds like the beginning of what will be a very heated debate over who has to pay for the excesses of the financial crisis. It was previously assumed that everybody but the actual financial services sector would have to pay, but voters in Europe now are refusing to go along, sparking a wave of eye-rolling editorials in the financial press. Even David Brooks got into the act today, penning a lugubrious editorial about the errant political instincts of the populist masses here and abroad.

Markets all over the world freaked out over the prospect of having ignorant European voters meddling in the recovery process the geniuses of the high finance world had already painstakingly laid out for them. The model for economic progress in the financial bubble era, after all, is supposed to go something like this:

    Let banks inflate massive asset bubbles with the aid of cheap or even free government cash, and tons of leverage;
    
    Before it all explodes, carve out gigantic sums for bonuses and compensation for the companies that inflated those bubbles;
    
    After it explodes, get the various governments to bail those companies out;
    
    Pay for it all by slashing services to what’s left of the middle class.

This is the model we used in America. We had a monster asset bubble based on phony mortgages, which Wall Street was allowed to inflate to spectacular dimensions with minimal reserve capital, huge amounts of leverage, and tons of fraud for good measure. When that bubble exploded, we first rescued the banks who inflated the thing in the first place, and then our plan for paying for it mostly revolved around folks like Paul Ryan and Chris Christie, who made great political hay by trying to take an ax to "entitlements" like health care and retirement benefits.

They're replaying the same script in Europe, sort of. The causes of crises in places like Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy vary somewhat and are less simple to define, but a common denominator in all of them is weak growth mixed with giant budget deficits.

In most all of these cases, you had enormous sums of money entering these countries in the middle and late 2000s as global financiers in the midst of the bubble boom looked for higher-yield investments around the world – Spanish real estate, Greek debt, etc.

The local economies sucked up the bubble money, and in Greece's case they used it to ramp up state benefits, which they could no longer afford once the bubble burst. A lot of these countries turned to Wall Street to finance their way out of budgetary messes using swap deals and other hocus-pocus moves, kicking the can down the road as it were, and those decisions are now blowing up in their faces.

Now that it’s the next morning, and everyone has a severe hangover from the bubble, the dominant narrative is that these countries brought their troubles on themselves by being reckless spenders with unsustainable welfare states. The solution, naturally, is going to be "austerity," slashing state budgets, reining in those wasteful citizens with their unreasonable demands for returns on taxes.

Take today's Brooks column in the Times, for instance, which seems aimed at his colleague Paul Krugman (who has been arguing that cutting public spending and job stimulus in European countries will be disastrous). Brooks claims that the financial crisis was caused by "structural" problems, the first of which is that we’ve simply grown out of a need to pay low-skilled workers real wages:

    Hyperefficient globalized companies need fewer workers. As a result, unemployment rises, superstar salaries surge while lower-skilled wages stagnate, the middle gets hollowed out and inequality grows.

According to Brooks, this organic trend toward lower salaries for everyone but the "superstars"  managing those hyperefficient companies has forced politicians into the bad decision of borrowing and taxing to extend more welfare/charity to the less fortunate:

    Politicians tried to compensate by reducing the tax bill, increasing deficit spending, ensuring easy credit for homebuyers and by helping workers shift out of the hypercompetitive, globalized part of the economy and into the less productive and more sheltered parts of the economy – mostly into health care, government and education.

    But you can only mask structural problems for so long …. The current model, in which we try to compensate for structural economic weakness with tax cuts and an unsustainable welfare state, simply cannot last.

Naturally, since that welfare state is "unsustainable"” we need to be real about things and stop the deficit spending and the stimulus, etc.

This world view ignores the fact that those "superstar" leaders of "hyperefficient" companies have been sucking up a thousand times as much welfare as those low-skilled workers Brooks is talking about. Here’s how the "superstars" of the banking world sometimes earn their bonuses: they borrow trillions from the U.S. Federal Reserve at zero or near zero interest, then they turn right around and lend chunks of that free money to a place like Greece (ex-FDIC Sheila Bair, in a hilarious editorial on the subject, pegged the ten-year yield at 21%), then they pocket the proceeds and call it capitalism.

Brooks’ analysis of the financial crisis leaves out things like the $16 trillion in emergency loans the banks secretly got from the Fed in the years since the crisis. It ignores quantitative easing, bailouts, and the trillions of dollars of bets Wall Street made on the unreal economy during the bubble years that we all ended up paying for, either through taxes or reduced home values or lowered interest on our savings.

The point is, when people talk about “austerity,” they only ever talk about the pain the general population should voluntarily accept, in the form of reduced services and curtailed “stimulus.” No one ever says the financial services sector should have to cut back on its access to easy money, and there hasn’t been much in the way of serious plans to restore some sanity and prudence to the lending and investing business.

Instead, governments have stood by and allowed banks to lend thirty and forty dollars for every one on the books, they’ve watched lenders almost completely do away with underwriting standards, they’ve continually pumped the big firms full of cheap cash from the Fed and the ECB (printing new trillions when the real money runs out), and they’ve allowed Wall Street to build giant sandcastles of illusory wealth using synthetic derivatives, all with minimal reserve requirements.

The result of all of this easy money is an endless succession of speculative bubbles that simply shift from one market to another as financial companies run around the globe in search of high yields. It was Spanish real estate yesterday, and Euro sovereign debt before that, and American home mortgages at other times, and then it was wheat and corn and other food commodities last year (which led to the social unrest in the middle East), and it was oil in 2008, oil in 2011, and oil again this year, and so on. 

In addition to the direct consequence of huge stunning losses when these bubbles collapse, the insane volatility of all of these markets creates panic in the business community, and puts a brake on real lending to grow real businesses. When you don’t know if oil is going to cost $40 a barrel or $140 three months from now, it’s pretty hard to invest in a new airline, or a chain of supermarkets (as commodities, many food prices will also rise and fall with oil), or anything at all, really. It’s not surprising that no one wants to lend in this environment.

 The Founders would certainly see the irony that the conservative agenda has wrought. We now have an economy that rsembles the royal economies of 17th century Europe where royalty never loses money. No, in our economy when the very wealthy elite lose money the peasant workers pay for it. This is what an economy looks like on conservationism, the lazy, crooked and rich rake in the cash while the middle and working classes lose ground.

CNN's Smiley-faced fascist Dana Loesch Doesn't Disclose Her Link To Conservative Activist Investigated Over Possible Sen. McCaskill Threat

How Romney Budget will Cut Social Security and Medicare by 26% & Then Raise Taxes On the Middle Class by $3 Trillion

How Romney Budget will Cut Social Security and Medicare by 26% & Then Raise Taxes On the Middle Class by $3 Trillion

I just read the Glenn Hubbard editorial in the WSJ claiming thatthe President's budget is really a secret plan to raise everyone's taxes by11%.
Glenn and I have been friends for pushing 20 years but onthis one, Glenn seems to have jumped the shark.
Basically Hubbard says he has looked at the Obama budgetand, according to his calculation, after subtracting off the revenue projected from returning to the Clinton rates for high income people plus adding aBuffett rule, Obama's budget will raise everyone's taxes by 11% to stabilize things as a share of GDP.
Two things stuck out to me here:
1) Hubbard's numbers seem in pretty serious danger of violating the league's substance abuse policy.
His claim that the President's budget requires large tax increases on the middle class to stabilize the debt is just factually  wrong.  Just go look at the Congressional Budget Office's numbers.  They examined the President's budget and directly refute the central claim of the op-ed: http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/03-16-APB1.pdf
Figure 2 on page 6 shows their forecast of debt as a share of GDP with the President's budget--and it's stabilized and falling without any taxes on the middle class.  Figure 1shows similar stability on the deficit.
I can understand the argument of some people when they say that Republicans will never allow the Obama budget to pass so it would be better to debate the right approach to reaching a grand bargain rather than arguing about the administration budget. That's probably true but unlikely in the election season.  I can also understand the people who think that we shouldn't raise revenue only from high income people but to spread it around.  But Hubbard isn't saying either of those.  He's saying something that looks to me (and the CBO) like it just fundamentally isn't true.
2) Using Hubbard's logic, an alternative title for would be HOW MITT ROMNEY'S BUDGET WILL CUT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE BY 26% AND THEN RAISE TAXES ON THE MIDDLE CLASS BY $3 TRILLION
Sadly, I'm being only slightly flip about it.  Hubbard imputes future policy based on the implications of the budget plan.  So what happens if you do that for Romney's budget promises?  Well, he has proposed a multi-trillion dollartax cut, a balanced budget amendment to the constitution and a cap on government spending at 20%.
The cap forces a cut of social security and medicare (and everything else) of 26% (you can see the numbers for yourself at http://www.cbpp.org/files/1-23-12bud.pdf).
But his tax cut reduces revenue by an additional $3 trillion or so.  Using Mr. Hubbard's argument then,the Romney budget will raise taxes on everyone earning less than $200,000 per year to cover it (and since the deductions Romney says he will limit don't come  remotely close to paying for the cost of the tax cuts, it's a bit like having your cousin take all the money from your wallet but offer to let you rummage through the couch for coins as repayment).

If Romney's silly and dangerous notions about taxes and revenue ring a bell, if you having one of those deja vu moments its because these are warmed over George Bush policies that every conservative in Congress supported. Conservatism does not work. Never has and never will. In the short term it makes a few people very wealthy. In the long term it turns the USA into some dystopian nightmare. These policies will destroy an already weakened middle-class..

FACT CHECK: Americans For Prosperity Announces $6.1 Million Ad Buy To Push Totally False Green Jobs Claims

Fox Won't Let Go Of Ridiculous Myth That Obama "Apologized" For America. When will Fox News apologize to America for its daily truckload of lies. True patriots have honor, Fox news has none.

Criminal Rick Scott(R) and Florida Conservatives Are Wasting Tax Dollars and Trampling Liberty

Criminal Rick Scott(R) and Florida Conservatives Are Wasting Tax Dollars and Trampling Liberty

Required drug tests for people seeking welfare benefits ended up costing taxpayers more than it saved and failed to curb the number of prospective applicants, data used against the state in an ongoing legal battle shows.

The findings — that only 108 of the 4,086 people who took a drug test failed — are additional ammunition for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, which sued the state and won a temporary ban on the drug-testing program in October, said ACLU spokesman Derek Newton.

Attorneys for the state immediately appealed the ban, and will face off against the ACLU again at the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta and the U.S. District Court in Orlando in coming months.

The costs and benefits of the law — and the outcome of the court case — could reverberate nationwide. This week, Georgia passed its own drug welfare law.

Since Gov. Rick Scott signed the bill into law last year, 25 states have considered similar legislation, Newton said.

Data about the law’s cost may impact the court of public opinion, but Jenn Meale, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, said it won’t play a role in the legal proceedings.

That’s because ACLU’s case rests on whether the law violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens against "unreasonable searches" by the government.

"Any costs associated with the program are irrelevant to the analysis of whether the statute is constitutional," Meale said.

Of the 4,086 applicants who scheduled drug tests while the law was enforced, 108 people, or 2.6 percent, failed, most often testing positive for marijuana. About 40 people scheduled tests but canceled them, according to the Department of Children and Families, which oversees Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, known as the TANF program.

The numbers, confirming previous estimates, show that taxpayers spent $118,140 to reimburse people for drug test costs, at an average of $35 per screening.

The state’s net loss? $45,780.

"That’s not counting attorneys and court fees and the thousands of hours of staff time it took to implement this policy," Newton said.

The law also didn’t impact the number of people who applied for benefits.

Conservatives are for small government? One of the biggest scams ever perpetuated on the American people. Thanks to conservatives every American has less freedom today than they had 15 years ago. And everyday they think of new legislation to intrude government into people's personal lives.

Conservatives should know about redistributing income, their policies make sure the nation's financial capital is redistributed from workers to lazy corporate executives - CEOs at top companies earned 380 times the average worker's income in 2011

What is CISPA and why it is the newest threat to internet access and privacy

Every major economic downturn in the USA has been due to conservative supply side economics. Yet they keep thinking the public has such a short term memory they can try them again every few years. Time to stop the conservative fantasy Ferris wheel and move on.

Conservative Republican John Raese Cannot Tell The Difference Between Regulated Smoking Areas and The Holocaust

Conservative Republican John Raese Cannot Tell The Difference Between Regulated Smoking Areas and The Holocaust

 

John Raese, a very wealthy Republican who may or may not live in West Virginia, was one of the most colorful Senate candidates of 2010 when he ran against now-Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). This year, he wants a rematch against Manchin (Raese has already lost three Senate races and one for governor), and Raese appears to have lost none of the qualities that led the Manchin campaign to call him “crazy” two years ago.

Speaking at the Putnam County Lincoln Day dinner recently, Raese compared his county’s smoking regulations to when “Hitler used to put [a] Star of David” on Jews:

    RAESE: I don’t want government telling me what I can do and what I can’t do because I’m an American. But in Monongalia County you can’t smoke a cigarette, you can’t smoke a cigar, you can’t do anything. And I oppose that. … I have to put a huge sticker on my buildings to say this is a smoke free environment. This is brought to you by the government of Monongalia County. OK?

    Remember Hitler used to put Star of David on everybody’s lapel, remember that? Same thing.



In his last bid, Raese said the minimum wage was unconstitutional, said he wanted to take capitalism back to the days before child labor laws, blamed volcanoes for global warming, made fun of Chinese last names, and proudly proclaimed, “I made my money the old-fashioned way — I inherited it.” Perhaps most famously, one of Raese’s biggest ideas from 2010 was demanding “1,000 laser systems put in the sky” for missile defense. “And need it right now,” he added to demonstrate his seriousness. 

Pictured are USA hating Conservatives Raese, Palin, Nugent

Actually the laws in Putnam are like they are in most places. You cannot smoke in public buildings like schools and courthouses because of the second hand smoke.

In America, financial inequality has soared over the past few decades thanks to conservative policies that punish work and reward wealth.

Mitt Romney's Bain Represents Crony Capitalism's Worst. Conservatives caused the recession of the 1980s. They caused the recession of 2008. But hey forget all that and vote for them in 2012. Maybe they'll get it right this time.

Ann Coulter Typifies Modern Conservatism in Her Hatred of America and the Truth

Ann Coulter Typifies Modern Conservatism in Her Hatred of America and the Truth

It's been more than two years since the Affordable Care Act became law, and Ann Coulter is still misinforming Fox News viewers about how it passed through Congress.

As the Supreme Court has considered the suits brought against the law, Fox News has been throwing falsehood after falsehood at the legislation. Some of them even made their way into a justice's questioning during oral arguments.

On Fox & Friends Saturday, Coulter repeated yet another falsehood about the law:

    COULTER: Overwhelmingly since Obamacare passed, before it passed, a majority of Americans have opposed Obamacare. And that's why the Democrats had to sneak it through on a party-line vote, and remember that sleazy little maneuver, "deem as passed"? They didn't even -- the two houses didn't even vote on the same bill.

Fox News has made this false claim before. It was widely reported on March 20, 2010, several days before the House passed the Senate's version of the bill, that the Democrats "dropped a controversial plan that would have 'deemed' Senate-approved health care legislation passed as part of a resolution setting rules of debate but would not have required House members to vote directly on the legislation." Even Fox News itself reported that the Democrats "decided against" using that legislative tactic.

Coulter holds many of the same beliefs as communist Josef Stalin and Iranian fundamentalist - the government has a right to lie spy on you, the government has a right to deny you due process, the government has the right to use lies to send you family off to die in a unnecessary war ( as long as a conservative is doing the lying), the government has the right to take your home, but the government cannot set up an insurance exchange with corporate insurance companies so that 30 million more Americans can have health insurance. Th irony, or at least one irony, is that Coulter makes millions never doing a day of honest work in the USA, the country she hates.

The Horrors of an Ayn Rand World: Why We Must Fight for America's Soul - An Objectivist America would be a dark age of unhindered free enterprise, far more primitive and Darwinian than anything seen before.