Archive for category Economic Exploitation
69% of Americans: Let Bush Tax Cuts for the Rich Expire on Schedule
Posted by Richard Warnick in American People, Bush Administration, Deficit, Economic Exploitation, Economy, Federal Budget, National Politics, This Blog, congress on August 21, 2010
Via Raw Story: A new CNN/Opinion Research poll released on Friday indicates that a whopping 69 percent of Americans want the Bush tax cuts for the rich to expire at the end of this year. Eighty-one percent favor extending them for the middle class.
CNN/Opinion Research poll (PDF):
As you may know, the tax cuts passed into law when George W. Bush was president are set to expire this year. Unless a new bill is passed, federal income tax rates will rise to the level they were at when those cuts were enacted. Which of the following statements comes closest to your view:
31% -Those tax cuts should continue for all Americans regardless of how much money they make
51% – Those tax cuts should continue for families that make less than 250 thousand dollars a year, but taxes should rise to the previous level for families who make more than that amount
18% – Taxes should rise to the previous level for all Americans regardless of how much money they make
To avoid ballooning deficits, all the Bush tax cuts will have to be allowed to expire when we recover from Bush’s Great Recession. The Congressional Budget Office calculates that extending the tax cuts for all but the rich would likely boost economic growth in the short-run but could hamper it over the next decade as the deficit would rise to 8 percent of GDP by 2020.
Related One Utah post:
How Long Are We Going to Keep Blaming President Bush for the Results of His Bad Policies? (June 28)
UPDATE: Mitch McConnell’s Con: Cut Social Security to Enable Tax Cuts to the Rich
Social Security Isn’t At Risk Except From the People Trying to Destroy It!
Posted by Richard Warnick in American People, Capitalism, Democrats, Economic Exploitation, Federal Budget, National Politics, Poverty, This Blog, congress on August 2, 2010
StrengthenSocialSecurity.org – Sign the petition.
Social Security is the only defined-benefit retirement plan available to most Americans. My generation paid double payroll taxes so that we could fund the retirement of the generation ahead of us, and build up the trust fund for our own retirement.
On December 1, President Obama’s secretive Catfood Commission is going to recommend cuts to Social Security in the name of deficit reduction.
Dr. Irwin Kellner, MarketWatch:
Here is the bottom line right up front: the Social Security system will remain solvent far longer than is generally expected, so there is no need to tinker with it.
…Since 1983, revenues from payroll taxes have exceeded benefits paid to retirees. In 2003, income totaled $632 billion while benefits paid were $471 billion. Assets held in special issue U.S. Treasury securities totaled $2.5 trillion (the trust fund), with this amount expected to grow significantly over the next dozen or so years.
Ten years ago, the system’s actuaries thought the trust fund would be depleted by 2029. Five years ago they thought it would be 2032. Now the date when the surplus is expected to be gone is 2042 — and the Congressional Budget Office thinks it could be 2052.
The reason for these changing projections? More money coming in than previously expected.
This alone should signal policymakers that major surgery may not be needed. But when you look at the assumptions underlying these projections, you have to be even more cautious.
The system’s actuaries actually produce three long-range projections. The one that’s been picked by the politicians, pundits and the press and turned into the conventional wisdom is their intermediate projection — the one that expects the trust fund to be depleted by 2042.
But the assumptions underlying these projections are very pessimistic — especially when it comes to economic growth.
The actuaries assume that the U.S. economy will grow by an annual rate of 1.9 percent per year over the next 75 years. This is far below the 3.6 percent average of the past 75 years — a period that includes the Great Depression.
The system’s actuaries have a somewhat more optimistic projection. It assumes, among other things, a slightly faster rate of growth of 2.7 percent per year over the same period.
While this, too, is below the economy’s 75-year average, it shows that the system never runs out of money. That’s right, never.
So before they start fixing the Social Security system, policymakers should first understand that it’s not broken to begin with.
UPDATE: The Social Security Trust Fund is $2.5 trillion, not $1.5 trillion as originally stated above.
UPDATE: James K. Galbraith has a good idea– let’s expand Social Security and Medicare to save the economy:
There are many older workers who’ve already worked hard jobs for many years. They would love to retire. But they don’t, because early retirement on Social Security is very costly: you lose benefits every month over your entire future life, unless you hang on to the regular retirement age. We should give these people a break, and lower, not raise, the full-benefit Social Security retirement age—say, to 62 for the next three years. This would give millions a chance to get out, if they want to.
…Encouraging early retirements would mean that young people—just out of school, with fresh skills, good health, and high energy—would get the jobs they need now. They would not be stuck waiting, or spinning their wheels in school, for years and years.
UPDATE: Via HuffPo:
Social Security, according to its annual report (PDF), is expected to pay out slightly more in benefits than it receives in payroll tax this year, for the first time since changes were made in 1983. But payroll taxes are only one source of income for the program, and with the others — including interest income on its $2.5 trillion trust fund, held in special issue U.S. Treasury securities — the program is expected to continue to run a surplus until 2024.
Milton Friedman’s $8 Trillion Dollar Mistake
Posted by Glenden Brown in Capitalism, Conservative, Deficit, Economic Exploitation, Economy on August 2, 2010
In a lengthy and interesting op-ed, former Reaganite David Stockman covered a lot of ground, but one passage in particular jumped out at me:
The first of these [great deformations of the national economy] started when the Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world. Now, since we have lived beyond our means as a nation for nearly 40 years, our cumulative current-account deficit — the combined shortfall on our trade in goods, services and income — has reached nearly $8 trillion. That’s borrowed prosperity on an epic scale.
It is also an outcome that Milton Friedman said could never happen when, in 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold or other fixed monetary reserves. Just let the free market set currency exchange rates, he said, and trade deficits will self-correct.
It may be true that governments, because they intervene in foreign exchange markets, have never completely allowed their currencies to float freely. But that does not absolve Friedman’s $8 trillion error. Once relieved of the discipline of defending a fixed value for their currencies, politicians the world over were free to cheapen their money and disregard their neighbors.
There’s something epic and mindboggling about those paragraphs. Friedman has been a leading preacher for the doctrine of “free markets fix everything” for decades. Stockman accuses him of misjudgment on a scale so massive it beggars the imagination.
Comcast Forced Transition to Digital
Posted by Richard Warnick in 4th Estate (Media), Capitalism, Disaster, Economic Exploitation, Entertainment, This Blog, utah on July 31, 2010
Yup, Comcast turned my TV set into a clock
I’m in the middle of the Comcast forced transition to digital cable, which the Salt Lake Tribune’s Vince Horiuchi recently described as “free and painless.” The changeover requires the installation of a digital box for every TV set.
Comcast didn’t charge for the boxes, but the transition isn’t “free.” I had to spend time installing the boxes and getting them activated by Comcast. How do we know our cable bill won’t go up now that we have the “benefit” of digital cable? The universal TV remote controls we bought are now useless for changing channels. And the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) fingers the digital boxes as notorious energy hogs. The giveaway is the extraordinary amount of heat these boxes put out. “In general, if you feel heat, energy is being wasted,” says Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist at NRDC.
Forcing customers to use these boxes isn’t enough to make Comcast the worst company in America. They really work at it. Two weeks ago, we experienced a day-long unexplained cable outage that left us with no TV and no Internet access. When I called Comcast, their voice mail system directed me to a recorded message saying “your area is experiencing a service interruption.” Which I knew already. Before that, they started bugging us about the digital changeover by mail and phone. Then they started a scroll across the bottom of the TV screen every half hour. We finally ordered the boxes, they came, and I went through the installation process on Saturday. After I discovered it didn’t work (see below), here comes a Comcast salesman knocking on the door trying to sell us phone service. I told him that losing the TV and Internet was bad enough without having the phone cut off too!
As a result of installing the Comcast power-hogging box, I got instant access to pay-per-view that I didn’t want. And I lost most of the cable channels, including all the broadcast networks (see picture). On channel after channel, Comcast’s new service helpfully told me what was on– but instead of the usual picture and sound, there was an error message. Their phone tech support guy couldn’t solve it. Somebody’s coming on Monday to try and figure out the problem. Meanwhile, I unplugged the %@#&! box so I could watch Saturday-night reruns of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. Again.
Sadly, Draper isn’t part of UTOPIA (Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency), which is bringing fiber optic connections to the tech-starved masses. Needless to say, Comcast is doing everything they can think of to stop UTOPIA.
UPDATE: Vince Horiuchi has an update, with e-mails from people struggling with Comcast’s “new and evil box.”
Related One Utah posts:
Help! Comcast is Trying to Rob Me! (August 6th, 2008)
Comcast Weans the Poor Off Politics (July 2, 2008)
Bush’s ‘Ownership Society’ – Wiping Out the Middle Class
Posted by Richard Warnick in American People, Bailout, Bush Administration, Capitalism, Disaster, Economic Exploitation, Economy, National Politics, Poverty, This Blog, Unemployment on July 27, 2010
Yesterday I got my annual property tax assessment in the mail. When President Bush’s so-called “ownership society” collapsed, the value of the house I live in plunged 40 percent in one year. Now it has come back up a few thousand dollars to the market price from eight years ago.
The “ownership society” was a right-wing article of faith, but the hard reality is most Americans got owned. By the politicians, by the banks, by the corporations. I’m actually one of the lucky ones, because I don’t owe more on my house than it’s worth– and I still have a job.
From Michael Snyder, Business Insider:
22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America
- 83% of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1% of the people.
- 61% of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49% in 2008 and 43% in 2007.
- 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
- 36% of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
- A staggering 43% of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
- 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
- Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32% increase over 2008.
- Only the top 5% of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
- For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
- In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to 1.
- As of 2007, the bottom 80% of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
- The bottom 50% of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1% of the nation’s wealth.
- Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17% when compared with 2008.
- In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
- The top 1% of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
- In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
- More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
- For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
- This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
- Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16% to 7.8 million in 2009.
- Approximately 21% of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.
- The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of our national income.
What are the Republicans proposing now that the “ownership society” has been exposed as a fraud? They want to raise taxes on what’s left of the middle class to pay for more tax cuts for the rich, and more corporate tax cuts.
UPDATE: On Walking Away: Is Strategic Default All That’s Left to Stressed Homeowners?
How Can We Stop the Catfood Commission?
Posted by Richard Warnick in Deficit, Democrats, Disaster, Economic Exploitation, Economy, National Politics, This Blog, Unemployment, congress on July 23, 2010
It is absolutely beyond the Republicans’ power to cut Social Security, even if they re-take the House and Senate in November, since Obama will continue to wield veto power. The real impetus for Social Security cuts is from the “Deficit Commission” which Obama created in January by Executive Order, then stacked with people (including its bipartisan co-Chairs) who have long favored slashing the program, and whose recommendations now enjoy the right of an up-or-down vote in Congress after the November election, thanks to the recent maneuvering by Nancy Pelosi. The desire to cut Social Security is fully bipartisan (otherwise it couldn’t happen) and pushed by the billionaire class that controls the Government.
If the Catfood Commission proposes a bill slashing Social Security and Medicare benefits and it comes to the House floor, Republicans and Blue Dog Dems will vote for it. Even if all the progressive-leaning Democrats oppose it on a straight vote, it will probably pass. Millions of retirees will fall out of the middle class into poverty.
Jon Walker on FDL thinks that House progressives can threaten to remove Rep. Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House if she allows such a vote. That does not seem likely. IMHO if they had that kind of cojones then Bush would have been impeached and health care would include a public option.
Here’s the question. How can we stop the Catfood Commission?
Related One Utah post:
Budget Priorities Left to Catfood Commission (July 6)
Budget Priorities Left to Catfood Commission
Posted by Richard Warnick in Deficit, Democrats, Disaster, Economic Exploitation, Economy, National Politics, This Blog, Unemployment on July 6, 2010
The country’s best known Nobel economist, Paul Krugman, put it plainly: “[P]enny-pinching in the midst of a severely depressed economy is no way to deal with our long-run budget problems.”
Democrats aren’t listening to Krugman. The House just passed a “budget enforcement resolution” that didn’t actually contain a budget, but did call for a spending cap of $1.12 trillion. That means $7 billion will probably have to be carved out of existing domestic spending. The bloated Department of Defense budget plus supplemental funding for Iraq and Afghanistan are exempt from cuts.
How do they propose to eliminate $7 billion in non-military spending? The details were left to President Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission (aka the Catfood Commission), which is supposed to report a long-term budget plan by December.
The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was established with little fanfare last February. It is stacked with prominent advocates of drastic cuts to social programs, including Social Security and Medicare. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky, most people have forgotten President Clinton’s plan to raid the Social Security Trust Fund for the benefit of Wall Street. Now it’s back.
There is no way the Catfood Commission is going to recommend raising taxes on the rich, quickly bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, or creating jobs for 15 million unemployed Americans. Those measures would balance the federal budget, but they wouldn’t benefit Wall Street as much as privatizing Social Security.
Marie Antoinette never said “let ‘em eat catfood.” But she was in favor of balancing the budget on the backs of low-income people, and that’s what the Catfood Commission is all about.
UPDATE: The hand wringing about $7 billion in budget cuts is astounding when you stop to think that’s ONE PERCENT of military spending. Also, the federal government hands out more than $4.5 billion a year to the oil & gas industry in tax subsidies alone (this does not include the federal leases auctioned off at bargain prices).
Robert Kennedy Jr In Utah: What we spend on foreign oil in four years would pay for total energy independence
Posted by Glenden Brown in Activist groups, American History, American People, Bailout, Economic Exploitation, Economy, Energy, Liberal on April 3, 2010
Wednesday I had the good fortune to be in the crowd at Kingsbury Hall to hear Robert Kennedy Jr speak on environmental issues.
In a wide ranging speech, delivered without any apparent notes, he described a vast array of environmental challenges and solutions. A common theme he touched on is the need for an actual free market for energy. The US provides carbon (oil and coal) with a huge array of hidden subsidies that have the net result of giving carbon based energy an unfair competitive advantage in the market. These subsidies come in the form of favorable regulations, infrastructure investments (as for example some roads in West Virginia have 22 inches of asphalt so that coal trucks can transport coal; the people of WV pay for those roads, but the coal companies bring little if any wealth to the people of WV). Read the rest of this entry »
So sorry about that HIV Positive thing but we’re cancelling your insurance
Posted by Glenden Brown in Economic Exploitation, Health Care, This Blog on March 18, 2010
Fuck the insurance companies and shoot the horse they rode in on.
Imagine this: Not long after getting word that you are HIV positive, you receive a letter from your insurance carrier. They’re revoking your coverage because, upon examining your medical records, they’ve decided you knew about your condition and hid it from them. You have no idea what they are talking about; you bought this policy before the diagnosis. But when you inform them of this, and even provide some evidence that their investigation is in error, they ignore you. Meanwhile, you’re on the hook for unimaginable medical bills, since you’re uninsured and there’s not a carrier in the world that will take you now.
Jerome Mitchell didn’t have to imagine. It happened to him. According to a new story by investigative reporter Murry Waas, Mitchell in 2002 bought an individual policy as he prepared to begin college. A few months later, he learned he was HIV positive. That’s when Fortis insurance, which is now part of Assurant, informed him they were canceling his coverage. Apparently a Fortis reviewer went through his medical file and found a nurse’s note, dated from 2001, referencing his HIV status. The memo happened to be in a pile of records from 2002, suggesting it may simply have been mis-dated; even the reviewer who found it asked whether that one piece of paper was sufficient grounds for revoking coverage.
Immoral bastards!
Previously undisclosed records from Mitchell’s case reveal that Fortis had a company policy of targeting policyholders with HIV. A computer program and algorithm targeted every policyholder recently diagnosed with HIV for an automatic fraud investigation, as the company searched for any pretext to revoke their policy. As was the case with Mitchell, their insurance policies often were canceled on erroneous information, the flimsiest of evidence, or for no good reason at all, according to the court documents and interviews with state and federal investigators.
New Health Care Bill = Corporate Serfdom
Posted by Richard Warnick in Barack Obama, Democracy, Democrats, Disaster, Economic Exploitation, Health Care, Liars (politics), National Politics, This Blog on February 22, 2010
Jane Hamsher on FDL: “The President’s new health care bill does not include a public option, but it does increase the maximum penalty for failure to comply with the mandate to buy health insurance, which rises from 2% to 2.5% of annual income (PDF).”
The Democrats, through their own fault, now have two ways to go: (1) Enact unbelievably bad, lobbyist-written health care “reform” that makes the crisis worse, or (2) Fail to pass a health care bill at all. Republicans have declared they’ll vote against any health care legislation, good or bad.
What is the problem? The public option has majority support and 62 percent of Americans are against imposing fines on people for refusing to purchase private health insurance.
In 2008, President Obama campaigned for the public option and against health insurance mandates.
UPDATE: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs tries unsuccessfully to explain why the public option is not in the president’s proposal.
UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald nails it:
Progressives: Hey, great! Now that you’re going to pass the bill through reconciliation after all, you can include the public option that both you and we love, because you only need 50 votes, and you’ve said all year you have that!
Democrats/WH: No. We don’t have 50 votes for that (look at Jay Rockefeller). Besides, it’s not the right time for the public option. The public option only polls at 65%, so it might make our health care bill — which polls at 35% — unpopular. Also, the public option and reconciliation are too partisan, so we’re going to go ahead and pass our industry-approved bill instead . . . on a strict party line vote.
With Democrats like these, who needs Republicans?
UPDATE: Jon Walker on FDL:
The public option is incredibly popular with the American people, supported overwhelming by the Democratic base, and is fiscally conservative. It is good politics, good policy, and maybe the only hope of turning around health care reform’s awful poll numbers. The only problem is that lobbyists from private insurance companies don’t like it, and Democrats have decided it is infinitely more important to keep a few lobbyists happy, instead of delivering on promises to constituents.
…At least Congressional Democrats will go down fighting for what they believe in: protecting unpopular, large, private corporations from competition, or anything that would help regular Americans save money.
UPDATE: REPORT: WellPoint Raising Premium Rates By Double Digits In At Least 11 States
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