Daily Topics - Tuesday October 11th, 2011
By shawnt56
See Thom on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher this Friday 10/14
Hour One: Occupy Boston police crackdown - Brad Johnson, Think Progress / Plus, Walker recall ramps up, so do dirty tricks - John Nichols, The Nation Magazine / And, Beaten in Boston! John Niles, American Veterans for Peace
Hour Two: Due process?? Secret "kill list" targets U.S. citizens - Professor David Velloney, Regent University School of Law / Plus, Koch connection to cancer in small town America? Robert Greenwald, Brave New Films
Hour Three: How to Stop the Political Insanity - David Sirota / Plus, "Everything You Know is Wrong...How Democrats and Republicans vote...at the movies" - Paul Bond, The Hollywood Reporter
Comments
#2
Separation of Corp and State!
N
#3
Since the plutocrats and their congressional lackeys have rebranded the rich as "job-creators", and label any attempt to make them pay their fair share as "Job-Killing", how about we design a millionaire tax that follows the principles of their argument?
Even though the last decade has seen very near the lowest effective tax rates on the very wealthy, this has not resulted in job growth, but let's go ahead and use their logic that job growth is primarily dependent on the incomes of the very rich.
Instead of lowering their taxes and hoping that will increase employment - a strategy that has failed over the last decade, let's do a millionaire surcharge tax that is tied to the unemployment rate - for instance set the surcharge rate at the unemployment rate minus 5%, and apply it to all income, including capital gains, royalties, etc. Thus Today's surcharge would be 9.1% minus 5% = 4.1% on all income over 1 million dollars.
This employment pegged surcharge would give the job creators an incentive to create enough jobs to reduce their surcharge to zero.
The tax advantage of this is that it should even out revenues in the face of the business cycle - in particular raising the extra revenue needed when unemployment spikes and increases the cost of entitlements like food stamps and unemployment insurance, and then when unemployment falls, the revenues lost from the millionaire surcharge is compensated by lessened need for entitlements plus added taxes collected from the newly employed.
Let's give the "job creators" an economic incentive to create jobs.
#4
I sort of agree with Thom's statement that either the Constitution needs to be amended or the make up of the Supreme Court has to shift to the left to get money out of politics. However I don't think its an either/or situation, I think both needs to be done. We need the Supreme Court to shift left so we can get a quick reversal of the citizens united ruling, then we need to get enough progressives in as representatives to make that change happen in the constitution with an amendment. Separation of Corp and State should be a self evident need that's just as apparent as separation of Church and State. Also in both the cases of the Corporations and Churches, they exist and thrive in the United States because of the protection of the Government, they need to pay they're fair share of taxes period.
N
#5
I've been looking for a way to design the tax system with balancing forces just like you described, Blue Mark. Unfortunately, the milionaires would lobby to change the definitions used in determining the unemployment numbers. Reducing the length of unemployment benefits would also be one of their goals, since that removes unemployed people from the count sooner.
#6
Any reform is susceptible to distortion by lobbying from the 1%... but we could make the formulation for the "job creators" surtax more robust by using a calculation based on U6 rather than "regular" unemployment. That would include discouraged workers, part-time and underemployed. More complicated calculation, but probably more robust. Or even base it on the gap between the available workforce and the actual number of employed.
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
Images of Thom
From Screwed:
"Hartmann speaks with the straight talking clarity and brilliance of a modern day Tom Paine as he exposes the intentional and systematic destruction of America’s middle class by an alliance of political con artists and outlines a program to restore it. This is Hartmann at his best. Essential reading for those interested in restoring the institution that made America the envy of the world."
From Screwed:
"If we are going to live in a Democracy, we need to have a healthy middle class. Thom Hartmann shows us how the ‘cons’ have wronged this country, and tells us what needs to be done to reclaim what it is to be American."
From Cracking the Code:
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An excellent article in Vanity Fair about what really happened to Elizabeth Warren. This one is a MUST READ.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/11/elizabeth-warren-201111