you gotta be fuckin kidding me

[Ladywriter 7,783]

We survived Bush. You will survive Obama.

Liberals, progressives, and moderates all have different ideas for our great country. Just because we, as a group, do not agree on a single subject does not mean that we are not all part of the same family. The point I'd like to make tonight is that while we may never agree on everything, one thing we can agree on is that we do not need a Republican in The White House. We must stick together, or they will win.

we must stick together or they'll win...

we did and they have anyway.

yes, the dems have made some progress these last 2 years but that progress has costs attached to it.

So you can't be denied for pre exsisting conditions, well thats great... considering you will no longer have a choice as to whether or not you want or can afford to pay for health insurance. In theory everyone should have health ins, in practice w/o a low to no cost way (the strangled in its crib public option) to provide plans to everyone it is not going to happen. It's forcing people to buy something from for profit companies just for being a living breathing American. We are not cars out on public roads, we're people. Unbelievably I agree with the baggers *clutch chest* that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. If healthcare reform is repealed it will be because of the unconstitutional mandate, ie the damn law is bobby trapped and guess who gets to play the part of the boob

this tax reform disaster is loaded w/ booby traps as well. People wail about the fall of SS...and then don't have to pay into it. Its a fantastic step forward to bankrupting and thus having to "privatize SS to save it". You really think the banksters that lost peoples private retirement funds will do any better when they have ALL American's money to play with? I don't. Just look at this years bonuses.

Does respecting and protecting the folks who have earned what they have by their own merit no longer exist? All you have to do to be super wealthy is be born into or marry into a rich family, no worries Daddy Warbucks will make sure you never have to do anything for yourself if you don't want to and as an added bonus he'll hand you to the keys to the congress he bought.

Our working poor, the dwindling middle class, vets, and most importantly our children are eating the giant shit taco. We can't give children a quality education let alone feed them all, but thats okay because Daddy Warbucks can buy another yacht this year and save a dozen jobs. Guess that bridge can just go right on ahead and collapse, but thats okay because somebody is going to have a sparkly new diamond ring on their finger this xmas.

the fucking injustice of it all is sickening. start with a shitty compromise and end with your head in the toilet.

[Ladywriter 7,783]

Just-Released IRS Data Show Effects of Our Radical New Greed-Is-Good Culture

As the House considers a bill to extend the Bush tax cuts for the top 2%, slash corporate taxes and potentially make the Estate Tax more generous to billionaires than ever before, it's instructive to put the move into a larger cultural/historical context. And thanks to newly released IRS documents, we can do just that.

As the Institute for Policy Studies reports, officials at the National Archives recently released a 67-year-old U.S. Treasury Department report detailing what the richest Americans once paid in taxes in the middle of the 20th century. IPS notes that "We have simply never had clearer evidence of just how much America used to expect out of individual wealthy Americans -- and just how little, by comparison, we expect out of our wealthy today." Here are some of the details

We learn, for instance, that 1941's top executive at IBM, Thomas Watson, collected $517,221 in compensation that year, about $7.7 million in current dollars. Watson paid 69 percent of his total 1941 income in federal income tax.

Last year, today's chief exec at IBM, Sam Palmisano, took home $24.3 million for his executive labors. We don't know how much income above that sum Palmisano reported in 2009, or exactly how much of that total he paid in taxes.

But we do know that the 13,374 Americans who reported incomes over $10 million in 2008, the latest year with IRS stats available, paid an average 24.1 percent of their taxable incomes in federal income tax.

In other words, IBM CEO Palmisano last year took home, after adjusting for inflation, over three times more than his predecessor Thomas Watson took home in 1941. Yet Watson in 1941 paid almost three times more of his income in federal income taxes than Palmisano likely paid in 2009.

So assuming that Palmisano pays roughly what his fellow millionaires pay in taxes, we've seen IBM CEO tax rates go from 69 percent down to 24 percent. That's a massive tax cut, and it's no coincidence that it came over the very same period we saw an explosion in federal deficits. And remember, these numbers compare the data that exists before this week's expected passage of even more new deficit-expanding tax cuts for the super-rich.

Save for being referenced in Bernie Sanders' 9-hour-long quasi-filibuster, these new numbers weren't a part of the debate about the new tax cuts - and they certainly didn't play a decisive role for White House and congressional policymakers. That's because the numbers represent a deeper cultural/attitudinal shift toward wealth deification in this, a radical new greed-is-good epoch (by "new" I mean the last 30 years in our country's 200+ year history). Embedded in our tax and budget debates is the bipartisan assumption that the super-rich shouldn't pay the tax rates they paid during the mid-20th century - AKA the tax rates that existed when our economy boomed.

Somehow, this assumption goes unquestioned at a time when we simultaneously wonder why we have huge deficits and why our economy is now faltering. We are so enthralled with preserving the riches of the so-called Masters of the Universe, and those Masters of the Universe have their wealth to buy off so many politicians, that we are now immersed in a culture of willful ignorance. We can no longer learn history's lessons about taxes -- even the lessons that are as crystal clear as this newly released IRS data.

[Sledgstone 8,672]

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Tax-cut-deal-What-to-expect-cnnm-3399777029.html?x=0

For people making less than $20,000 (or couples making less than $40,000), they may actual see a drop of about $210 on average in their take-home pay relative to this year, because the payroll tax break will be worth less to them than the Making Work Pay credit was.

Wonderful. Along with the 20% hike in my health insurance premium we'll be even more screwed next year.