Robert Reich: In truth, the most important variable explaining the rise and fall of tax revenues as percent of GDP has been the business cycle, not the effective tax rate.
California’s Silence of the Scams
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Craig Williams: The best cure for California’s budget problems might be a big statewide tax reform campaign based on the commercial property tax legislation proposed by the progressive organization Cal Tax Reform (CTR) and sponsored by Assembly member Tom Aminao.
Unauthorized Immigrants Pay Taxes, Too
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Seth Hoy: One of the biggest myths perpetuated by restrictionist groups is that the roughly 12 million unauthorized immigrants currently living in the U.S. use a variety of public services yet paying nothing in taxes.
Tax War!
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Tina Dupuy: Republicans claim to be the arbiters of fiscal discipline, but their record says otherwise. The Ryan Plan, which passed the House, was like a cat burglar writing the charter for the neighborhood watch.
Disaster Capitalism in the Budget Debate
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Adam Eran: Historic tax reductions on the wealthy, and the Wall-Street-Fraud recession, have reduced public revenues, and this reduction now makes otherwise too-popular-to-cut programs vulnerable. But are such cuts really necessary?
A Crock Pot Tax-Exempt Idea
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Walter Brasch: “There are four million words in the IRS Code,” said Marshbaum. “Lower-class and middle-class Americans get a few thousand of those words. The rest of the code is a roadmap to help the wealthy and their corporations avoid paying taxes.”
How Democrats Can Become Relevant Again
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Robert Reich: Republicans offered Democrats two more weeks before the doomsday shut-down. Democrats countered with four. Republicans held their ground. Democrats agreed to two. This is what passes for compromise in our nation’s capital.
Fighting ‘Divide and Conquer’ in Wisconsin
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Lydia Howell: Madison is ground zero for resistance to the dismantling of workers’ rights and cutting anything in government budgets that serves human needs while corporate “persons” get subsidies and tax cuts and are in effect made exempt from law supposedly governing such offenses as pollution and worker safety.
Progressivism and a Tea Party Approach to State Government
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Walter G. Moss: Florida’s new governor, Rick Scott, is demonstrating why most of us who consider ourselves progressives dislike the politics of Tea-Party-backed candidates. For many of us, compassion and empathy are central political values, and Scott’s first budget proposal, unveiled on February 7th, reflects little of either value.
Answering The Anti-Tax Whiners
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Mark Dempsey: After having reduced taxes without reducing spending, the Republicans can now get Jerry Brown and the California Democrats to do the politically unpopular work of terminating programs that would otherwise be too popular to touch. It’s clever, but hardly non-partisan.
Is No New Taxes What Voters Really Want?
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Steve Hochstadt: The voters spoke in November: They picked Quinn and a tax increase over Brady and no new taxes. One reason is that Brady could not identify for voters where he would cut much spending. The opponents of taxes did not propose any reasonable alternative to raising taxes to solve Illinois’ debt crisis.
Why Inequality Matters
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Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer: The only alternative available to working people that offers real prospects for success are mass mobilizations in the streets and strikes – the kind of militant struggles that scored so many gains in the 1930s.
Tax Deal Will Normalize Bush Era
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Joseph Palermo: Whatever President Obama accomplished during his first two years in office, with most of the heavy lifting thrown on Nancy Pelosi’s shoulders, his decision to normalize the sweeping changes in American governance of the George W. Bush period will likely neutralize any lasting positive effects for Democrats.
Why America’s Two Economies Continue to Drift Apart
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Robert Reich: Nothing is trickling down to the Average Worker economy. Job growth is still anemic. Unemployment won’t get down to pre-recession levels for 20 years. And almost half of October’s new jobs were in temporary help.
Why the Bush-Era Tax Cuts Should Not Be Extended to the Nation’s Top 2%
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Tracy Emblem: Let’s give the new legislation which provides tax breaks and job incentives for “small businesses” time to work before blindly accepting McConnell’s argument that allowing the Bush-era tax cuts to expire would hurt small businesses. We must start closing the deficit gap.
Why Democrats Should Disregard Bill Clinton’s Endorsement of Obama’s Tax Deal
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Robert Reich: The Democratic Party can no longer ignore critical investments in the productivity of average workers. Nor can it ignore the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the very top, and the inability of America’s middle and working class to get the economy moving again.
Why the Tax Deal Confirms the Republican Worldview
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Robert Reich: As income and wealth have risen to the top, so has political power. Money is being used to bribe politicians and fill the airwaves with misleading ads that block all of this.
Serious Tax Problems
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Tom Degan: The debt that the United States has incurred in the last ten years is now at a level where it’s probably insurmountable. The only solution (and that’s assuming there is a viable solution) will involve taxes – decades of serious taxation.
The Myth of the Overtaxed Europeans
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Steven Hill: In return for their taxes, Europeans get valuable support systems like childcare, senior care, university tuition and healthcare. Americans must pay exorbitantly, out-of-pocket, for these support services often going without because the cost is prohibitive.
The Perfect Storm
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Robert Reich: The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.
Republicanomics
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Tom Hall: Every time that they’ve had the chance, Republicans have given our tax dollars to corporations for the specific purpose of moving our jobs to China and other anti-democratic Asian nations.
The Politics of Taxes
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Tracy Emblem: Bush Tax cuts have conferred the most benefits, by far, on the highest-income households – those least in need of additional resources – at a time when income already is exceptionally concentrated at the top of the income spectrum.
The Defining Issue: Who Should Get the Tax Cut — The Rich or Everyone Else?
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Robert Reich: Republicans are hell bent on demanding an extension of the Bush tax cut for their patrons at the top, or else they’ll pull the plug on tax cuts for the middle class. This is a gift for the Democrats.
The California Budget Mess Backstory
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Adam Eran: So the origin of California’s tax reductions, and even its current budget deficit, is arguably oil price inflation. If we want a stable economy, and government without deficits, we need to stop kidding ourselves that spending is a the root our budget problems, and attend to our energy addiction.
Corporate America: Don’t Kill the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg
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Tracy Emblem: America has always been the land of opportunity which is why Corporate America must begin to renew its investment and partnership in our nation’s job force and keep America’s promise to keep the American Dream within reach.
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