From Ezra Klein -

There are two very different tax-policy conversations playing out in the Republican Party right now. In Washington, House Republicans are arguing with each other over how small of a temporary tax cut to give the middle class. Out on the primary trail, the Republican presidential candidates are arguing over how huge of a permanent tax cut to give the wealthy.

…

All of which leaves the Republican Party in an odd place: skeptical of a temporary tax cut for the middle class that carries a price tag in the low hundreds of billions of dollars and is fully paid for but apparently enthused over permanent tax cuts for the rich that cost trillions of dollars and aren’t paid for at all.

But it’s not odd at all, once you realize that the GOP is not now, and never has been (at least not since the 1970s) concerned about the deficit. All the fiscal posturing of the last couple of years has been about using the deficit as a club to smash the welfare state, with the secondary goal of frustrating any efforts on the part of the Obama administration to help the struggling economy.

The entire debate has been fake. If you don’t understand that, or can’t bring yourself to admit it, you’re missing the whole story.

The non-partisan Tax Policy Center has just run the numbers on Pizza Cain’s 9-9-9 fair tax plan.

How much would it lower your taxes? Let’s see. Professor Bob Frank of Cornell (and Georgia Tech alumnus) has done the math for us in a recent article in The New York Times.

“According to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Mr. Cain’s proposal would increase the annual tax bill of a typical family of four earning $50,000 a year by more than $4,000, but would reduce the taxes owed by a similar family earning between $500,000 and $1 million by almost $60,000. The center also estimated that families in the top one-tenth of 1 percent of households would enjoy an average annual tax reduction of nearly $1.4 million under the Cain plan. Similar distributional effects are common under all flat-tax plans, not just Mr. Cain’s. ”

Tax fairness is about equality of sacrifice, not percentages. 10% of my income, much of which is not spent on necessities, but saved is not equal to the sacrifice a family of four with $35,000 for necessities makes when they pay 10% of their income.

Mike Reynolds
Rome, Ga

Fair idea from Michael Morrill:

In April, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to cut Medicare and Medicaid. And this month, even Democrats on the so-called Super Committee have offered deep cuts to these vital programs.

Essentially, Republicans in Congress are telling senior citizens and the poor that tax cuts for billionaires and millionaires are more important than providing a health care safety net for our most vulnerable.

But did you know that members of Congress get great taxpayer-funded health care? In fact, they have one of the best health care plans in the world.

It strikes us as the height of hypocrisy to be accepting government-provided, taxpayer-subsidized health insurance while denying seniors, the disabled, and the poor the basic coverage that Medicare and Medicaid provide.

That’s why we’re circulating this petition demanding that members of Congress who voted to cut Medicare and Medicaid stop accepting taxpayer-subsidized health insurance for themselves. If they believe our most vulnerable citizens should buy insurance on the corporate, for-profit market, shouldn’t they do the same?

The petition is addressed to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and says:

If you voted to cut Medicare and Medicaid, you must stop accepting taxpayer-funded health care for yourself and your family.

Will you sign the petition? Click here to add your name, and then pass it along to your friends:

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=267956&id=33102-17130366-Xsq9crx&t=2

Thanks!

–Michael Morrill

The causes of the financial meltdown are hard to understand but let’s call it what it was thievery. Complexity and CDOs don’t matter, it was just plain old garden variety theft made possible by the Republicans (I have mine; too bad about you.) repealing the rules of the banking game that were put in place during the Depression.

The rules made the speculative bankers take the losses of their gambles and protected the depositors and commercial banks that served the real economy. Did anyone notice we went almost two generations without a bank run and with steady growth shared fairly after those laws were passed?

Jobs will continue to disappear and wages decline until bankers go to jail and the old rules are reinstated. Banks to big to fail are too big to exist, especially since the taxpayers-you- pick up the bill.

As Rod Serling would have said on The Twilight Zone, take the case of one Joseph F. Skowron, a Yale-educated surgeon with everything going for him.

Dr. “Chip” Skowron decided to forego his lucrative career as an orthopedic surgeon for the unimaginable riches of Wall Street. His medical knowledge gave him an edge in trading health care stocks, netting him millions of dollars. (Keep in mind financial transactions add NOTHING to America’s stock of productive assets.)

Dr. Chip lived with his wife and four young children in a $7 million mansion in the wealthy Connecticut suburb of New Canaan. In New Canaan, that is really kind of a modest place so I am pretty sure Mrs. Doctor was looking to move up.

On Friday, a federal judge in Manhattan sentenced Dr. Skowron to five years in prison for insider trading, capping a remarkable reversal of fortune for the fair-haired 42-year-old. Insider trading is where I call a buddy who tips me off, because he works at Acme Anvils, that Acme is going to announce the Roadrunner just placed a $10 million order for anvils. Dr. Chip quickly loads up on Acme Anvil to profit from the inevitable rise in price but his gain comes from an unfair advantage, inside information.

Judge Denise Cote said “Your criminal activities caused investors to lose money, undermined the integrity of the U.S. securities laws and caused many people to lose jobs.” Oh, Dr. Chip also lied to the SEC about all this. Our Ivy League graduates and many doctors are really, really smart, but don’t necessarily care a wit about the average citizen.

So, Chip is off to the slammer for five years. If it were up to Dante, he would be in the 7th circle of Hell reserved for thieves, constantly pursued and bitten by snakes and lizards. Just as they stole other peoples’ substance in life, here the very identity of thieves is gradually eaten by reptiles.

Since my father had 40 years of painful saving stolen from him by the likes of Dr. Chip, 25 million people are un or under-employed, and $8 trillion in wealth has evaporated while Wall Street passed out over $200 billion in bonuses last year, Dante’s punishment seems fair to me.

Mike Reynolds

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal of the 11th Circuit Court on the constitutionality of the ACA, the health care reform law. It is reported that the case is likely to be heard in March and a ruling would come in late June when the Court typically announces all the high profile decisions. That is also toward the conclusion of the presidential campaign.

The “New York Times” had an editorial today, a portion of which is quoted below. The link at the end of this post is for those who want to get “into the weeds” on this issue. Tim Jost is a professor at Washington and Lee’s Law School in Lexington, Virginia. He has written prolifically on health reform law, testified before Congress, and provided policy recommendations for government and industry.

Thanks to the New York Times’ Editorial Board:

“The Supreme Court’s decision to review the constitutionality of health care reformmeans it will be issuing a ruling in the middle of the 2012 presidential campaign. This can be a highly politicized court, and, for the public good and its own credibility, it must resist that impulse.

If the court follows its own precedents, as it should, this case should not be a close call: The reform law and a provision requiring most people to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty are clearly constitutional.

The court agreed to hear appeals from a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which struck down the individual mandate to buy health insurance but left other parts of the law standing. Opponents of the law contend that Congress went beyond its authority in the reform measure. But Congress, under the commerce clause, plainly has the power to regulate the national health care market.

Almost everyone needs health care at some point, and if uninsured people are unable to pay steep medical bills they will get charity care that shifts the costs to others, whose insurance premiums go up to cover the cost of the free riders. There is no denying the health care market is interconnected and that individuals’ decisions to purchase insurance — or not — affects the whole system.

Republican-appointed judges on two appellate courts have found the insurance mandate constitutional. They have cogently pointed out that past Supreme Court decisions have upheld federal laws that were much more intrusive on personal liberty and involved activities less clearly relevant to interstate commerce. These include rulings on laws that prohibit a farmer growing wheat for his own family’s use and a woman growing marijuana for her own medicinal use. There is also no doubt that Congress has the authority to set minimum-wage rates and other laws that affect an individual’s economic decisions. As Judge Laurence Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit wrote last week in upholding the health reform law, “the right to be free from federal regulation is not absolute, and yields to the imperative that Congress be free to forge national solutions to national problems, no matter how local — or seemingly passive — their individual origins.”

Tim Jost’s Health Care Blog post link :

http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2011/11/14/high-court-to-review-acas-minimum-coverage-requirement-medicaid-expansion/

Mike Reynolds

Elizabeth Warren – she will help Democrats Keep the Senate

The video link above is a short message from Elizabeth Warren. She won’t win every battle but she has set the strengthening of the middle class as an agenda and she will keep Democrats in control of the Senate.

Help her if you are able.

Mike Reynolds

The average doctor spend $88,000 annually just dealing with insurance company bureaucracy .

BTW, what value does the health insurance industry add to health care?

Ever wonder what the cost of all those billboards on Shorter and Turner McCall is?

Mike Reynolds

1. Percentage decrease in the median U.S. household income during the “Great Recession”, 3.2%

2. Decrease during the subsequent “recovery” ,  6.7%

3. Portion of income growth since the end of the recession that has gone to corporate profits : 90%

4. Number of major threats the Transportation Security Administration has detected in the decade since its creation : 0

5. Number of Afghan army battalions currently able to fight without coalition support : 0

6. Percentage by which the average privately contracted project costs the government more than the equivalent government-run project : 83%

6. Chance that an American between 18 and 24 has read a book in the past year that wasn’t required for school or work : 1 in 2

7. Amount the Emergency Homeowners’ Loan Program returned to the Treasury after its allocation deadline passed : $568,000,000

8. Minimum number of pigs stolen in Minnesota this September : 744

The Trout Unlimited Chili Cookoff delivered its trademark outstanding chili but the number of cook teams was down substantially. The economy has left more people in soup lines than on the road to show off their chili cookin prowess.

The Floyd County Republicans and the Floyd County Democrats were there pushing chili and doing a little politickin.

Being a friendly guy, I went over to try out the Republican’s secret recipe. They named their chili “Nobama” and may have purposely made it some of the worst I tasted all day.

I could take the bad chili, but it was the talking point misinformation that gave me a short-lived case of heart burn. The young kaiki-clad, Polo shirted proprietors had their lines well-memorized and declared that only Republicans worked (impilcation: the rest of us are deadbeats, teachers are evil incompetents, and public employees are overpaid) that stuck in my throat.

Someone said that you can’t keep a man down in a ditch unless you keep someone down there with him.

I wanted to ask where all the jobs the job-creators were supposed to have created as a result of record tax cuts were but didn’t want to embarrass them since they would have had to admit that they created those jobs overseas.

Georgia is next to last in the entire US in job creation. The jobs we have lost were high-wage jobs and the jobs we gained were low wage-jobs.

When they taunted there was a “surcharge” on their “nobama” chili, I could only think that there should be since the top 5% of Georgians pay only about 7% of their income in state taxes while the rest of us pay 13%.

God has chosen them for a lower tax rate! The rest of us deserve our wandering in the wilderness. For the theologically inclined, that’s good old garden variety Calvinism ; it is bred in our bones, just not true as the unlucky in life and losers in the ovarian lottery know well.

At any rate, my choices for outstanding chili were Crown Royal, HotRod, and Hubley. The band was great except when they did a couple of Springsteen pieces, good effort, but you can’t beat the Boss.

Oh, most everyone had cold water since the Democrats were sharing theirs. I bet the Republicans would have sold it.

Michael L. Reynolds, Rome, GA.

Click on link for video:

Silence from the Stage

Michael L. Reynolds

Rome, Ga