Bad Deeds for 7-9-2010

A falsehood uncorrected may as well be truth.” – Elon Musk

 

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board Member and Congressional Republican Want to Raise Taxes on the Poor While Providing Tax Cuts for the Super Rich – The Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire in January. President Obama has expressed a desire to preserve the cuts for the middle class while letting tax rates for the wealthy reset to where they were during the Clinton administration. On CNBC, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore went so far as to say that he can’t “see the sense” of allowing cuts for the rich to expire, and then advocated that taxes be raised on the poorest Americans in order to finance more tax cuts for the rich.

This is a stunning admission from Moore, as he explicitly advocated raising the lowest tax bracket while simultaneously cutting the highest. But he’s not the only one on the right who would like to see such a plan implemented. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has crafted a budget plan that raises taxes on 90 percent of Americans while cutting them for the richest 10 percent.

Adopting such a plan would only exacerbate income inequality that is already the worst it has been since the 1920’s. According to the latest data, “the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007.” The top 1 percent of families now receive nearly 25 percent of the country’s income, after earning less than 10 percent in the 1970s.

At the same time, tax cuts for the rich have pushed the difference in tax burden between the wealthy and the middle class to the smallest in modern history. In fact, this year the Bush tax cuts will give millionaires more in tax breaks than 90 percent of Americans will make in total income.
Retaining the tax cuts for the rich in a time of long-term structural deficits and vast income inequality would be bad enough. To actually cuts those rates while raising rates for those on the bottom of the income scale would be unconscionable.

[The Poor, Poor, Mega Rich – They Are Just So Over Taxed]

 

Republicans Have Been Lying to You About Mortgage Defaults – The biggest defaulters on mortgages are actually the rich. They have stopped paying their mortgages at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.

More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.

By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.

Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.

 

Republicans Have Been Lying to You About Jobs and Spending – Why are so many people angry at the long-term unemployed? We’re down 8 million jobs since the start of the Great Recession. We aren’t even creating enough new jobs to keep up with population growth. So what jobs are the unemployed not taking?

Economist Dean Baker suggests that the Republicans are trying to keep unemployment as high as possible right now because they think that high jobless numbers will spell disaster for the Democrats in November. And if we give the unemployed extended benefits, that money will act as a stimulus, generating more jobs. Well, we can’t have that! It’s better for the Republicans if the economy stays in the ditch.

Will the grim belt-tightening to cut all spending (except for war and weapons) in order to reduce the deficit really bring back the 8 million jobs we lost? No.

We’re at a critical point in the jobs crisis. Nearly 30 million of us don’t have jobs or have been forced into part-time jobs. There’s work that needs doing. We have millions and millions of kids to educate. We desperately need to slash our energy use–and with an army of workers, we could weatherize every home and business in the country. Our bridges and roads will take decades to repair. We need to build an entire national system of efficient public transit.

When Wall Street is in trouble, we come to the rescue with trillions in bailouts. We’ve poured hundreds of billions more into two wars. But when it comes to investing in our people to get needed work done, we can’t seem to summon the will or find the cash.

There’s a one-sided war going on between financial elites and the rest of us. They’ve engineered the economy to enrich themselves at our expense, with Wall Street taking the lead.

The numbers don’t lie: In 1970 the top 100 CEOs earned approximately $45 for every dollar earned by the average worker. By last year, it was $1,081 to one. (See The Looting of America.)

There is no economic theory that can explain this obscene gap. It has nothing to do with talent or productivity or even luck. It’s just raw power.

 

Conservatives Have Been Lying to You About the Amount of Influence of the Bible on our Country’s Founding Documents – Many conservatives have been pushing their rewrite of American History that they say is based on a study conducted by Donald S. Lutz of the University of Houston, published in 1984 in The American Political Science Review. However, they misrepresent that study in several ways to make it appear that our founding documents were based primarily on the Bible.

What revisionists typically do to distort this study is to accurately present some of the charts of the study’s findings, but omit the parts of Lutz’s explanations of these findings that explain what the numbers in the charts actually mean. Here’s one example:

The revisionists like to use the 34% number from the top-right cell of the table shown below. However, Lutz highlighted the writings from 1787 and 1788 as most important, being the crucial two year period when our government was actually being formed. The revisionists completely omit this part of the study. Why? Because Lutz found hardly any biblical citations during the time that the Constitution was being written and debated in the press, and, on top of that, not a single one of these biblical references were found in any of the federalist writings in support of the Constitution. The only ones he found were used by the anti-federalists to argue against the Constitution. Look at the chart from Lutz’s study below:

Regards,

Jim