GOD'S HONEST TRUTH ABOUT FEDERAL TAX CUTS

God's Honest Truth About Tax Cuts

By ROBERT KAHN

     I know it's un-American, and may soon be illegal, but let's be honest for moment about "tax cuts," and how they brought us an economic catastrophe so great we are on the brink of national default.

     The United States passed from being the world's greatest creditor to the world's greatest debtor under President Ronald Reagan.

     Reagan's tax cuts, like the even more disastrous, and even more dishonest, tax cuts of President George W. Bush, overwhelmingly benefited the 2 percent of citizens who own 90 percent of our nation's wealth.

     Thanks to those tax cuts, the national debt increased by 20.6 percent, as a percent of Gross Domestic Product, under Reagan's two terms. It increased by another 13 percent under President George H.W. Bush.

     The national debt grew by 71.9 percent under President George W. Bush: an increase of 27.8 percent of GDP.

     That's a 61.4 percent increase in national debt/GDP under our latest three Republican presidents - all of whom swore that cutting taxes would somehow reduce the debt.

     Bush II's debt increases, of $6.4 trillion, were the largest such increase in history, in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP.

     All statistics in this column come from the Congressional Budget Office.

     During Bush II's two terms, Congress increased the debt limit of the United States seven times.

     Without any brouhaha.

     Actually, the increase in the national debt as a result of Bush II's tax cuts, mathematically, was infinite, as Bush inherited a $236 billion budget surplus from President Clinton, and left President Obama with a one-year deficit of $1.4 trillion, which turned out to be $1.8 trillion after correcting for lies and errors.

     The budget deficits of the succeeding years: $1.3 trillion in fiscal year 2010, and another trillion this fiscal year, had nothing to do with President Obama's policies. They were the results of years of tax cuts for the rich, of two unnecessary wars, and of the escalating cost of medical care.

     As a percentage of Gross Domestic Product under our last two Democratic presidents was the only time our national debt has decreased in the past generation.

     The budget surplus that President Clinton bequeathed to Bush II was not a fluke: it was Clinton's third budget surplus in 4 years. As a percentage of GDP under President Clinton national debt decreased by 9.7 percent,.

     Before Clinton, the last time the national debt had decreased as a percentage of GDP was under the administration of Jimmy Carter, when it decreased by 3.3 percent.

     This is not a question of partisan bragging rights. It's a question of national economic catastrophe, and of simple honesty.

     Ever since Reagan, increasingly under Bush II, and ever more stridently today, Republican officeholders have claimed "tax hikes" will ruin our economy, and make us the economic basket case that we may become on Aug. 3.

     Which brings us to the original question: What, after all, is a tax hike?

     If our nation is economically healthy, reducing debt, running a surplus, and an irresponsible, vote-hunting president throws us into the red by cutting taxes so deeply, above all for the rich, that we become the world's greatest debtor, because of those tax cuts, is it fair, is it rational, to say that a "tax increase," which will not increase taxes even to the point they stood at before we became beggars to China, is really a tax increase at all?

     The top marginal tax rate under President Eisenhower was 91 percent. The top marginal corporate tax rate under Eisenhower was 52 percent. Both rates top out at 35 percent today. Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, our latest Republican Savior, wants to cut the rates to 25 percent.

     Our country was not a basket case under Eisenhower. We were the richest, most powerful country and technologically advanced country in the world.

     We were all of that until our last three Republican presidents threw trillions of dollars of our national wealth at the richest people in the world: people who don't need more money, who won't spend it or hire people with it, who never have and never will pay their fair share of upkeep for the country that made it possible for them to become rich.

     And now these Republican zealots, these water boys for the rich, are exacerbating our economic crisis by refusing to remedy a situation their own party created. The tax-cutters are throwing our economy into the trashcan to punish the nation for what Congress did.

     Remember: the debt ceiling has to be raised today to pay the bills that Congress itself rang up.

     The Republican Party is attempting, and may succeed, in crippling the U.S. economy in quest of short-term partisan advantage.

     But this, I am afraid, is only part of the Republican plan, which is devoted to inculcating in our country what Borges called”Pedagogy of Hatred" - hatred of people who disagree with them. Borges used the phrase as the title of an essay he wrote about the Nazi party in 1937.

_____________________________________-

U.S. Cuts Deal With Swiss Bank

By ELIZABETH BANICKI 08/03/2009

(CN) - Switzerland and the United States have agreed in principle to settle the details of a messy case that seeks to force Swiss banking giant UBS to release the names of 52,000 wealthy Americans suspected of tax evasion. A trial scheduled to start today (Monday) will be canceled, and a final deal is expected by Aug. 7.

______________________________________

Ex Top Exec Says AARP Evades Taxes

06/26/2008

     WASHINGTON (CN) - AARP fired its director of international affairs from her $140,000 job "because she refused to assist in the commission of unlawful acts": AARP's abuse of its tax-exempt status to evade federal taxes, Line Vreven claims in Federal Court. She claims the tax dodge is related to AARP's wholly owned subsidiary, AGN.

God's Honest Truth About Tax Cuts

By ROBERT KAHN

     I know it's un-American, and may soon be illegal, but let's be honest for moment about "tax cuts," and how they brought us an economic catastrophe so great we are on the brink of national default.

     The United States passed from being the world's greatest creditor to the world's greatest debtor under President  Ronald Reagan.

     Reagan's tax cuts, like the even more disastrous, and even more dishonest, tax cuts of President George W. Bush, overwhelmingly benefited the 2 percent of citizens who own 90 percent of our nation's wealth.

     Thanks to those tax cuts, the national debt increased by 20.6 percent, as a percent of Gross Domestic Product,        under Reagan's two terms. It increased by another 13 percent under President George H.W. Bush.

     The national debt grew by 71.9 percent under President George W. Bush: an increase of 27.8 percent of GDP.

     That's a 61.4 percent increase in national debt/GDP under our latest three Republican presidents - all of whom         swore that cutting taxes would somehow reduce the debt.

     Bush II's debt increases, of $6.4 trillion, were the largest such increase in history, in absolute terms and as a    percentage of GDP.

     All statistics in this column come from the Congressional Budget Office.

     During Bush II's two terms, Congress increased the debt limit of the United States seven times.

     Without any brouhaha.

     Actually, the increase in the national debt as a result of Bush II's tax cuts, mathematically, was infinite, as Bush inherited a $236 billion budget surplus from President Clinton, and left President Obama with a one-year deficit of $1.4 trillion, which turned out to be $1.8 trillion after correcting for lies and errors.

     The budget deficits of the succeeding years: $1.3 trillion in fiscal year 2010, and another trillion this fiscal year, had nothing to do with President Obama's policies. They were the results of years of tax cuts for the rich, of two      unnecessary wars, and of the escalating cost of medical care.

     As a percentage of Gross Domestic Product under our last two Democratic presidents was the only time our        national debt has decreased in the past generation.

     The budget surplus that President Clinton bequeathed to Bush II was not a fluke: it was Clinton's third budget      surplus in 4 years. As a percentage of GDP under President Clinton national debt decreased by 9.7 percent,.

     Before Clinton, the last time the national debt had decreased as a percentage of GDP was under the administration of Jimmy Carter, when it decreased by 3.3 percent.

     This is not a question of partisan bragging rights. It's a question of national economic catastrophe, and of simple honesty.

     Ever since Reagan, increasingly under Bush II, and ever more stridently today, Republican officeholders have          claimed "tax hikes" will ruin our economy, and make us the economic basket case that we may become on Aug. 3.

     Which brings us to the original question: What, after all, is a tax hike?

     If our nation is economically healthy, reducing debt, running a surplus, and an irresponsible, vote-hunting          president throws us into the red by cutting taxes so deeply, above all for the rich, that we become the world's greatest debtor, because of those tax cuts, is it fair, is it rational, to say that a "tax increase," which will not increase taxes even         to the  point they stood at before we became beggars to China, is really a tax increase at all?

     The top marginal tax rate under President Eisenhower was 91 percent. The top marginal corporate tax rate under Eisenhower was 52 percent. Both rates top out at 35 percent today. Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, our latest Republican Savior, wants to cut the rates to 25 percent.

     Our country was not a basket case under Eisenhower. We were the richest, most powerful country and       technologically advanced country in the world.

     We were all of that until our last three Republican presidents threw trillions of dollars of our national wealth at the richest people in the world: people who don't need more money, who won't spend it or hire people with it, who never       have and never will pay their fair share of upkeep for the country that made it possible for them to become rich.

     And now these Republican zealots, these water boys for the rich, are exacerbating our economic crisis by refusing to remedy a situation their own party created. The tax-cutters are throwing our economy into the trashcan to punish the nation for what Congress did.

     Remember: the debt ceiling has to be raised today to pay the bills that Congress itself rang up.

     The Republican Party is attempting, and may succeed, in crippling the U.S. economy in quest of short-term partisan advantage.

     But this, I am afraid, is only part of the Republican plan, which is devoted to inculcating in our country what Borges called”Pedagogy of Hatred" - hatred of people who disagree with them. Borges used the phrase as the title of an essay    he wrote about the Nazi party in 1937.

_____________________________________-

U.S. Cuts Deal With Swiss Bank

By ELIZABETH BANICKI 08/03/2009

(CN) - Switzerland and the United States have agreed in principle to settle the details of a messy case that seeks to force Swiss banking giant UBS to release the names of 52,000 wealthy Americans suspected of tax evasion. A trial scheduled   to start today (Monday) will be canceled, and a final deal is expected by Aug. 7.

______________________________________

Ex Top Exec Says AARP Evades Taxes

06/26/2008

     WASHINGTON (CN) - AARP fired its director of international affairs from her $140,000 job "because she refused to assist in the commission   of unlawful acts": AARP's abuse of its tax-exempt status to evade federal taxes, Line Vreven claims in Federal Court. She claims the tax dodge is related to AARP's wholly owned subsidiary, AGN.

7 Scandals That Reveal the Real Mitt Romney

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet

Some great reporting reveals a self-serving man who is often tone-deaf to his impact on others and whose internal compass seems to spin wildly.

Mitt Romney’s current media handlers would like you to think he’s a mild-mannered guy who has become increasingly conservative over the years—especially since he was pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-tax increases, pro-gay and fairly liberal as Massachusetts governor before he ran for president in 2008 and started pandering to right-wingers.

But a more complete picture of Romney is emerging this summer. Some great reporting by journalists reveals that the man behind the smile isn’t just a political flip-flopper who can't be trusted, but a self-serving man who is often tone-deaf to his impact on others and whose internal compass seems to spin wildly.

These seven recent reports reveal the real Romney—starting with a young man who didn’t care how he made money, as long as he made it.

1. Bain Capital Launched with Funds Tied to Salvadoran Death Squads

People who start new businesses are always hungry for investors. But as Huffington Post reporters Ryan Grim and Cole Stangler found in their report, “Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads,” there was no possible way that anybody in 1984 could "check out" these families and be convinced this money was clean, as Grim told Democracy Now.

“After initially struggling to find investors, Romney traveled to Miami in 1983 to win pledges of $9 million, 40 percent of Bain’s start-up money,” Democracy Now’s report began. “Some investors had extensive ties to the death squads responsible for the vast majority of the tens of thousands of deaths in El Salvador during the 1980s.”

As Amy Goodman noted, “The investors include the Salvadorian family, whose former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, has previously accused of directly funding the Salvadorian paramilitaries. In his memoir, former Bain executive Harry Strachan writes, 'Romney pushed aside his own misgivings about the investors to accept their backing.' Strachan writes, ‘These Latin American friends have loyally rolled over investments in succeeding funds, actively participated in Bain Capital’s May investor meetings and are still today one of the largest investor groups in Bain Capital.’”

2. Romney Wants Tax Cuts For the Rich Paid By Higher Middle-Class Taxes

Romney’s tenure as Massachusetts governor showed he had no aversion to raising taxes or fees, according to a report by John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign—including raising the state fee assessed to families before cremating the dead, which the state’s media called creepy. So it is not surprising that independent analysis find Romney’s 2012 tax proposals would hit other vulnerable people.

The proposals, in an analysis cited by the Washington Post and others, would cut taxes for the wealthiest 5 percent but raise taxes on everyone else. Extreme Liberal's blog posted a graphic that shows exactly how it would work, saying, “You may notice that everyone pays more in taxes right up until you get to the top 5 percent of the population. According to the analysis, those who make $3 million dollars a year would get a TAX CUT of $250,000.”

Romney obviously wants to protect the interests of the economic class of Americans in which he resides—

the rich. But what’s emerging is a more nuanced picture: he has no qualms beating up on the poor, including playing the race card, like many previous Republican and Democratic presidential candidates.
3. Romney’s Racist Attack on Welfare

We have all seen this ugly script before. Bill Clinton went after Sister Souljah in 1992. Four years later he signed a bill “ending welfare as we know it” to win conservatives. Fast forward to spring 2012 and Newt Gingrich attacked Obama as the “food stamp” president, a swipe at poor and non-whites receiving benefits. Now Romney has accused Obama of wanting to eliminate work requirements for public assistance recipients.

As Matthew Rothschild, editor of the Progressive has written, there are so many layers of hypocrisy here. “Romney says Obama wants to take the work requirements out of welfare reform. As evidence, he cites the administration’s recent decision to let states apply for waivers on these requirements,” he writes. “Never mind that some Republican governors have been applying for them. Never mind that Romney himself applied for one when he was governor of Massachusetts. And never mind that to get this waiver, states must be able to show that they’ve recently moved at least 20 percent more of their welfare recipients into jobs than in previous years. No, facts don’t matter.”

4. Romney, the Bad Neighbor

The personal is political. Romney thumbing his nose at his neighbors at a vacation home in La Jolla, Calif. shows that Romney does what he wants and doesn’t really care about the impact on others near him. There’s no other way to interpret it, according to this New York Times report, that recounts how after Romney bought his beach house he offended his neighbors by seeking to quadruple its size.

“The only thing he wants small is government and taxes,” said Mark Quint, a Democrat who lives three doors away and who hates the prospect of more McMansions such as Romney's plan. “He likes big houses, big families and big religion.” Quint also was peeved, the Times reported, because Romney had complained to the local police about beach goers who drank or smoked pot nearby. The cops told Quint to report people smoking or drinking, saying, “Your neighbors have complained.”

Romney may end up buying another nearby large property, the paper speculated, even though he’s hired a local team to shepherd the project through the permit process.

5. Intolerant Then, Intolerant Now

There is always the question of how much people change—or don’t—over a lifetime. Before Romney entered business and politics, he was an active member of the church who took his pastoral role seriously, even as a graduate student at Harvard University.

This Washington Post profile of Romney from that time—as the young but highest-ranking Mormon in Boston—notes how he told an older, recently divorced women who had converted to Mormonism not to have premarital sex. At the time, the Post said many Mormon couples were at Harvard and the women were curious about feminism. The report goes on to say that Romney tempered his views by the time he became Massachusetts governor—which the 2008 McCain campaign opposition research reports shows. Another report from that period in Vanity Fair notes how Romney told a Mormon single mother who became pregnant to put her child up for adoption—which she refused. When she faced serious medical issues, he refused to come to her hospital bedside.

6. The Tip o the Iceberg?

As Romney seeks to convince Republicans that his views are more traditional, the question is not just "where is the real Romney?" but if he ever moderated those views in the first place. There are other stories of straight-laced insensitivity. Everyone has heard about how he put the family dog in a cage strapped to the roof of his car for a drive to Florida. But a $200 million man and national candidate who doesn’t tip a barrister?

There are many profiles of Romney—such as in Vanity Fair—that say his aloofness and clinical focus have been key to his success in business: he does not let empathy get in the way of making a profit or closing a deal. But a president has to make ordinary people think that he understands and cares about them. And this is where Romney still seems challenged.

In 2010, Romney and his wife apparently went to a Borders bookstore in Utah and ordered two hot chocolates and didn’t tip the baristas, according to the blog Jesus’ General. That was cheap. But what happened next has been called strange. They didn’t finish the drinks, so Mitt approached the baristas and urged them to drink it.

The Portland Mercury blog wrote about this incident and believes it’s true, saying, “Jesus’ General is best known as a satirical Web site, but I know the guy who plays the General, I've met him personally, and he swears that this story is true. It’s told by Bryan Young, an assistant director on the documentary This Divided State; one of the baristas in question is Bryan's brother.”

7. Romney Campaign Takes Money From Olympic Bribery Scandal Figures

Romney’s relationship with dark financial patrons cannot be explained away as youthful indescretion—the start-up funds from men tied to Salvadoran warlords. Apparently, the candidate who likes to say that he helped the 2002 Winter Games move from the fiscal red into the black, and who helped to turn a page after an Olympic bribery scandal, has allowed his 2012 campaign to take donations from figures from that bribery scandal, according to longtime investigative reporter Wayne Barrett.

Barrett, a Newsweek/Daily Beast contributor and Nation Institute fellow, told Democracy Now about the tainted campaign cash. “He was a managerial success, Barrett said. “The problem is that he was brought in because of the worst Olympic scandal in history, and he befriended and awarded contracts to people deeply involved in the scandal that caused him to be recruited to this rescue operation. And he’s still collecting money from them.”

Romney, as we all know from his tenure at Bain, has a very can-do attitude about money. He will take it where ever he can find it, and use it for whatever is most expedient.

Americans will be introduced to a very stage-managed Romney in the weeks ahead, starting with the Republican National Convention. But glimpses of the real Romney will keep coming through. And the more Americans get to know him, the greater the chances that they will not feel comfortable with him as their next president.