Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

Other than a small number of fiscal conservatives who are ignored by their own party, it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares about the National Debt any more. That’s a relatively new thing. Doing something about the Debt was one of the platforms of the GW Bush campaign in 2000. Of course, what he actually did to the Debt was the precisely the opposite of what he told us he was going to do. Then came Obama, whose economic policies – certainly with...

By Steve Roth (2016) How Perfect Markets Concentrate Wealth and Strangle Growth and Prosperity The winners have us all playing a loser’s game Capitalism concentrates wealth. Ridicule Marx and his latter-day disciples all you like (I’ll help); he definitely got that right. But capitalism is a big word with lots of meanings, and enough ideological baggage to fill a Lear Jet. Let’s talk about something more precise: perfect markets, with ownership, in which...

Lindsay Wagner reports on North Carolina’s Biggest Voucher School: When a coach at one of Fayetteville’s top private school basketball programs—a school that also happens to be the state’s top recipient of private school vouchers—pleaded guilty last summer in a Wake County courthouse to embezzling hundreds of thousands of tax withholding dollars he collected over eight years from the school’s employees, he received what some might consider an odd...

Even though most states have done little to improve access to healthcare, it is ok for states to regulate ACA and Medicaid as states are supposedly closer to their constituent’s needs. If the Federal government steps in and tries to regulate voting registration requiring ID, planned parenthood, ACA, etc. because certain state(s) give a damn about discrimination, children, and human rights; then, it is a supposed violation of state rights. For once, states...

What is the GOP goal? A return to the “gilded age” (or worse) When right-wing Roy Moore said that the time when America was great was during slavery, he revealed something key to the current GOP members of Congress and state legislatures–their primary goal is to return to a time when owners of property held all the keys to the kingdom and workers were just serfs expected to do as told and whose lives didn’t really matter much to the boss capitalists....

by Hale Stewart  (originally published at Bonddad blog) Why Would Anybody Invest When Capacity Utilization is This Low? A central selling point of the tax bill is that it will encourage investment.  But that assumes that high tax rates were the primary reason why business wasn’t investing.  Instead, the data says business investment is weak because the U.S. has a ton of spare capacity. First, let’s look total capacity utilization: It has peaked at...

GOP Congress: my (wealthy) donors made me do it The GOP’s tax-complicating, deficit-increasing, wealthy-subsidizing, Arctic destroying, Health Care damaging, $1.5 trillion tax “reform” package is unpopular with most Americans, destructive to the government’s ability to fund needed programs from disease prevention to FEMA to basic research to needed infrastructure improvements, and wildly popular with the wealthy GOP donors like the (oil-rich) Koch...

Black Mirror Big Data Becomes Big Brother In China And maybe coming soon to the US as well, enough to make Orwell sit up and take notice. The first show of the 2016 season of the sci fi TV show, “Black Mirror,” called “Nosedive,” showed a future society where people have overall social scores (1-5) that are constantly being changed based on what they do and who they interact with and how.  Access to many things is based on one’s rating.  The female lead...

The 2021 Omnibus Repealer and Clawback Act A saving grace of 2017 — up until now — is that Trump and the GOP have been the Keystone Kops of Kleptocracy, consistently faceplanting in attempts at regressive domestic legislation. With the passage of the GOP tax bill, that all changes. Not only is it a massive giveaway to the corporations and the wealthy who least need assistance, it actually raises taxes over time over many if not most lower and middle class...

Do GOP House and Senate reps even know what they voted for? The House passed the awful “tax complication bill of 2017” on Tuesday.  The Senate had to make a few changes because it didn’t comply with the Byrd rules, and then will presumably pass it today. It’ll go back to the House where the HOuse will then take the final vote on the Senate changes and send it to Mr. Trump for signature. The GOP will claim that they have singlehandedly put together a...