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The Republican justice's disgust me. They don't care about you or me just lining their pockets with more riches and to hell with America the free..................
mathboy wrote: "The problem is that Art. I, Sec. 3 specifically says each senator shall have one vote. That means the Senate rules can't override that even in procedural votes.
But it doesn't say all votes must WEIGH the same. Our entire federal system is based on vote weighting/dilution... and the absurdity of this is all the more apparent since we went to popular elections for Senators.
I know... it's a long shot. But the system is getting more and more antidemocratic and more reformproof... yet this issue is entirely ignored by the media, both parties, and the public.
BTW, with regards to education in the U.S? With Common Core running rampant these days, our children are at risk of perpetuating the 'slave system' that many of us have been duped by for decades. Please open the link in my first comment to research this government fraud. Also youtube the trouble with Common Core!
ATTN Thom Hartmann!!
Not sure how else to get this important info to Thom and his staff, so hoping someone will bring this to his attention. There is a Judge in Alaska, Anna Von Reitz, that has done extensive research into the validity of the US Inc. (government), and it can be viewed here. I have known of this for several yrs. now, and this all seems to be verifiable with numerous documents, articles and links available. This is a game changer, and requires our immediate attention! Please forward to other sites, and share with your readers, thanks.
http://annavonreitz.com/
Peace out, Todd.
It should be no surprise that republicans want to cut spending on education...after all, an uneducated populace is easier to decieve.
I saw a Hitler mustache in an old photo on Facebook yesterday. The mustache had nothing to do with the post.
I really like the German language for the most part, but I detest the formality of interpersonal relations concomitant with the pronoun "Sie". In my life, I've never gotten the hang of moments of transition like the one Thom mentioned. I rely on the ability to drift in or out of relationships without having to suddenly relabel them. On the other hand, if I'd grown up in that atmosphere, maybe I'd actually be able to handle it.
If anyone deserves to be imprisoned it is justice Roberts for putting our America up to the highest bidder. He should be among those made an example by harsh punishment for destroying democracy. We have to fight in every way we can to get America back to what it used to be.
"Quaternary" is the word Thom was thinking of--primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary. There's also a geologic period by that name, running from 2.588 million years ago to the present, but I'm guessing we'll have a period division soon, considering climate change, impending mass extinction, etc.
The problem with letting business holdings out of inheritance tax is that the very rich can create shell corporations to hide money from taxation. It's easier to set the exemption amount and the tax rate to fair levels than to find a way to keep shell corporations from existing.
I think I found Johnnie Dorman's problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_States#Tentative_tax. I can't sort out how there's an exemption for over $5,000,000 but amounts under $100,000 are also taxed.
Alice I think, like I mentioned above if it is after taxed dollars in a checking account then there is no tax but if it is pre taxed say in some kind of retirement savings plan then it is taxed. I always suggest to freinds even if it is a small estate to see a estate planer. I am sure you would want your money to go to your children or a charity rather then into a military budget or something like it.
So when as mentioned above Clinton cancelled welfare was it replaced with anything? Is welfare what you mean by a guaranteed income.
The problem is that Art. I, Sec. 3 specifically says each senator shall have one vote. That means the Senate rules can't override that even in procedural votes. (So that cancels my idea above. Dammit.) The only thing I can think of would be to add on procedural votes that only more-populous states' senators can participate in, and I'm not sure that's allowable.
Oops, looks like the graph didn't copy. Still worth checking out the site referenced and finding figure G (it's on page 8).
You can find great information about federal income from estate and gift taxes at http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2221181/A-History-of-the-United-States-Estate-Tax-through-2007. The really glaring information is in figure G, "Estate and Gift Receipts as a Percentage of Total Revenuie, 1917-2007" (copied below). There is a HUGE spike in 1937 - the year that John D. Rockefeller died and 10% of the entire federal government's income came from the estate tax. This is exactly what the Koch's and the Walton heirs are trying to avoid.
The fear of the citizenry has driven fiscal policies of the wealthy establishment. From Madison to Norquist; from leveling spirit to wealth distribution, the wealthy have always manufactured hysteria about the government taking away people's money and property. The sad fact is that it works on enough people to keep it alive in the national narrative and not enough information is given in the main stream to counter. These machination to undermine the publics mind to accept a wealth friendly ideology goes relatively unchallenged since most national media figures are among the established wealth interest of America.
Even when the kind of information that Thom just laid out is presented to some people, they can not bring their selves to see it. Denial and indoctrination into a capitalist fantasy built out the most flimsy of justifications, but the most well crafted of emotionally driven propaganda that is at the heart of American delusion - That capitalism with giant tax breaks and subsidies to the job creators, and a deregulated free market will send America into a Milton Friedman style utopia.
If ignorance is bliss, the people that buy into the wealthy man's propaganda must be as giddy as a monkey with two hands filled with pooh.
Reply to #2: Johnnie, I'm mystified. That was a modest inheritance you've described and the tax on that sounds beyond excessive. I've known people to inherit a lot more than that without being taxed on any of it.
Reply to #8: I would agree with you about a 100% tax on inheritance if (1) everyone in society had a guaranteed income, employed or not; and/or (2) there were plenty of jobs to go around, all paying a liveable wage.
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Our poverty crisis didn't "just happen," nor was it forces on America. It is the result of policies chosen and supported by our middle class. That said, there's a huige difference between religion, and the exploitation of religion. In the US, religion is exploited by the right wing -- and then, only those parts they choose. Consider that both our international and domestic (economic) policies are in direct contradiction to Christ's teachings, from our hyper-militarism to this generation's war on the poor.
Every step of the way, from Reagan's deregulation mania to Bill Clinton ending actual welfare aid for the very poor, we are living with the politics and policies chosen by the middle class. They looked at the policies and programs implemented from FDR to Reagan, which took the US to its height of wealth and productivity, and decided to do the direct opposite, essentially restoring the agenda that had plunged the US into the Great Depression of the 1930s. The proverbial masses -- middle class and poor, workers and the jobless -- have been deeply divided, evidently leaving us all powerless, unable to push back against the corporate state.
I would do like would Marx and Engels and eliminate inheritances, tax them 100%.
There are always sob story exceptions to prove the rule but inheritance taxes are to prevent a return of feudalism and wealth , power, position and privilege from being inherited rather than earned. The inheritance tax is and can be so high because inheritance is considered "unearned income". If the bar owners were never taxed and continued to rake in millions for generations, privileged and entitled from birth to step on common people that wouldn't be good either. Inheritance tax keeps too many people from starting at the top.
Tax them now and if they can't afford to stay open someone or something else will take their place.
Anyway, Kend, what people do, if they have children who are serious about working the business and have been working it, demonstrating that seriousness, is to sell the business to those children for a dollar.
"Higher-income families are able to provide better nutrition and safer environments for their children, which in turn promotes better brain development." Given that research finding........with one out of four children living in poverty in the richest country on the planet, it would seem that standardized testing is at best a hollow way to measure teaching ability. Why don't we instead give standardized tests to all of the elected House and Senate members and then rate voters from each state on how well their elected official scores?
"Ther Republicans are doing everything in their power to help the one percent get even richer." This includes convincing the religious right that government is violating their basic rights, in other words government is just a bad idea and it needs to shrink away. The billionaires love this type of programming, it makes looting and concentrating the wealth on par with stealing candy from a baby.
I firmly believe the self-righteous force of religious beliefs on others with acts of bigotry is nothing more than a desperate attempt to validate the uncertainty of ones own mythology. How many have died violently the last 2000 years as a direct result of this type of fanaticism...... and how many more in the near future? 1692 anyone? How about some more inquisitions?......yep theocracy really works!
OK, off blog topic, on one topic of today's show...
As per Thom and Dr. Cohen’s discussion;
I know this sounds conspiratorial, but if one believes climate scientists like Guy McPherson, even if civilization collapsed tomorrow, climate change would still destroy the planet in the near future. I think also, if I’m not mistaken, if too many of the trees die, then the atmosphere would be destroyed as well making the Earth a ‘dead’ planet like Mars. Given the fact that greed is usually superseded by self preservation, I have long asked myself why the elites and oligarchs would push their own planet to the brink of climate and nuclear devastation. Then I remembered something my aunt, a retired nuclear physicist, told me years ago. Nuclear winter is the only way to stop climate change and save the planet once the tipping point is passed. The atmosphere would remain intact and the radiation would dissipate over time. If we’ve passed the tipping point, the oligarchs know it, they’re not stupid. They wouldn’t want to waste time retooling for green energy if they know it’s too late. I’ll bet there’s plenty of room in places like Cheyenne Mountain and on the International Space Station for those that “count”. What’s freaking out the .01% is that climate change is happening so much faster than they predicted and they aren’t ready. Are they scrambling to prepare for nuclear war?
I heard the opposite. When I was a young student of sociology I came across a Sociobiology text that described some research by a couple of sociobiologists that indicated that Hopi children developed faster, had better eyesight and seemed to have better cognitive skills than white children.
It was hypothesized by others reading the research that the custom of Hopi mothers of carrying their newborn infants strapped to their backs was, in some way, to account for that by giving the child's brain some gentle movement or some such thing.
So then all the wine and cheese, Whole Foods liberal types started buying baby backcarriers to carry their babies strapped to their backs like the Hopi so that their children might also benefit in the same way.
It was all false though. Back carrying had nothing to do with the Hopi children's advantage. The children of African bush men, Asians, Latin Americans and, really, any group that wasn't of Western Civilization showed similar advanced development. Previous research showed some slight similar advantage for African American children compared to children of white Americans - although this was discounted because it was not what researchers were looking for, they were looking for an advantage for white children and a disadvantage for African-American children and, having found none, declared the two groups equal. Similarly, poor, American white children exhibited a slight advantage when compared to better off counterparts.
What was happening here seemed obvious. he poor, economically disadvantaged children were from populations less sheltered from the forces of natural. Where they were from the stupid do not survive.
Thus, far from the common, conservative, social darwinistic thinking, the rich and dominant weren't so because they deserved to be because of any innate, natural superiority, they were, in fact, in a very short time of only a feee genetations, quite inferior to those whom they felt entitled to hold it over.
So how does inheritance tax work. If it is after tax dollars in a checking account there should be no tax. If it's in a 401k where it hasn't been taxed yet, Then it should be taxed. If you inherit a company no tax should be paid until the company is sold, it would just keep running as normal to protect all the employees. I am in Scottsdale AZ and a great biker / dive bar called Greasewood flat just closed because the kids could not afford the inheritance tax. Yes the land there dad bought 50 years ago is worth millions but the family would have just kept running the bar. This is a perfect example why it shouldn't be taxed until it's sold. Damn shame it was a very cool place. Now the family will sell the land off and they will put in a Walmart and Starbucks.
Out of 78 thousand dollars of my family inheritance, I was taxed nineteen thousand dollars. That kind of bugs me, because I needed that money for dental work that I need. I feel that the estate tax should be applied to people who inherit more than a million dollars. Sucking taxes out of my small inheritance while the top one percent hardly pays any taxes seems unfair to me.