Governor Rick Perry’s 20% Flat Tax, Plus the Others — Another Class-Warfare Giant Tax Cut for the Wealth Class
2011 OCTOBER 30
Republican Governor Rick Perry’s 20% Flat Income Tax Plan, & others, posing to reform the current messy Federal Income Tax Code/System, loop-holed with tax breaks & escape provisions to a moon of Swiss cheese by Congress & special-interests lobbyists, is/are a ruse & far worse than the current system.
Perry’s flat tax plan & Republican candidate former U.S. Congressman & Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s resurrected, newly announced, on 10-25-2011, even lower 15% flat income tax plan (years ago an idea) are monkey-see, monkey-do, follower-the-leader, tax-reform plans intended to compete with Republican retired, rags-to-riches, millionaire-businessman Herman Cain’s predecessor 9-9-9 tax reform plan of this campaign round fabulously popular with Republican voters (the designation 9-9-9 refers to a 9% national [federal] flat income tax on persons, a 9% national sales tax and a 9% national flat income tax on corporations, amounting to an 18% federal overall income-and-spending tax on individuals [inclusive of non-corporate businesses] & corporations). The substance of the Perry & Gingrich plans is similar, but significantly differs on their tax rates, explaining why odious Gingrich has sprung from nearly the last place Republican presidential candidate to 3rd place, behind former MA governor Mitt Romney, in first place, & Cain, in second place (the latter under a cacophany of sexual-harassment character-assault charges in the mass media).
Any alternative federal income tax system to a progressive tax system apportioning level of tax to level of income, such as we have, be it a federal national sales tax or flat federal income tax, is a sweetheart dream tax idea from the miserly wealthy for a giant tax-cut benefit for the Scrooge, screw you!, wealth class, at the expense of the common-good government programs & services for everyone else.
All three Republican tax-reform plans constitute class warfare for the wealth class because they benefit the wealth class to the overall & net economic & public services & works sufferance of the middle & under classes, as well as of U.S. society in general, to pay for them, as explicated in the following analysis & commentary. The current highest federal rate of tax on income, on the highest income earners, is 35%, scheduled to increase to 39.6% in 2013, when the extension on the Bush-II Administration tax cuts expire. The lowest tax rate, on the lowest income earners subject to tax, is 10%, with no scheduled increase in 2013. Under any of the Republican proposed federal income tax reform plans the highest-taxed highest income earners would receive a tax cut of 43% (under the Perry plan) or more (under the Cain & Gingrich plans) on their taxable earned income, not counting tax cuts on inheritances worth ten of millions of dollars & above to billions of dollars they may receive, whereas the bottom tax-rate income earners & low-income earners would experience giant federal tax increases (percentage-wise) or taxation they were exempt from because of their poverty-level incomes. While they campaign to reduce the tax rates on the wealthy by income-tax-reform proposals for a changeover to federal flat & sales taxes, the Republicans are also unified in hectoring & attempting to negotiate the Democratic Congress members & President into making permanent the extended Bush-II-Administration giant tax cuts for the wealthy.
No tax reform system will be able to do away with a tax investigation & collection force for enforcement of tax-paying compliance as, like under the current miscellaneous tax systems (business & consumer sales taxes, & excise, property & income taxes) at municipal, state & the federal levels, there are & will be tax evaders, tax noncompliers (including businesses that collect but keep the taxes & black market & informal businesses that disregard taxes & the tax systems, antitax-system believers & tax dissidents or protesters objecting to taxes being used to fund wars of aggression and so forth) & tax delinquents (those who default in paying over or paying taxes because of financial management problems, negligence & procrastination).
A national sales tax system or a significant reliance on such a system as the primary source of tax revenue by the federal or a state government, in a combined federal & all-local sales-tax scenario, would most likely give rise to, in many or most venues, a difficult-to-control, tax-free black market economy for every kind of good & service in advantaged competition with licensed & tax compliant mainstream businesses, undermining these & subjecting them massively to failure. It would likely take a large totalitarian-size undercover tax collection force to fight a no-win, very expensive (possibly unprofitable) war against this rival black market economy that would be a temptation to consumers generally & highly popular with them for its low prices & easy-to-escape taxes, as people react to this bad tax psychology with sticker shock & tipping-point ire to up-front, in-your-face abrupt & frighteningly larger retail purchase bills top heavy with now compound local & federal sales taxes on every purchase, with these sales taxes making up & adding circa 20-25% in added charges to every walk-in, mail-order & internet mainstream-store purchase bill. This bad income tax psychology in the form of a national sales tax would markedly blunt major-item real-estate, road-vehicle, aircraft, watercraft, equipment, appliance & furniture sales permanently (especially of real estate, road vehicles, aircraft, watercraft & certain commercial equipment required by law to be registered with government registry offices) — based on the psychological proposition that it hurts worse to lose significantly more of what you actually see & have (your personal funds & greater indebtedness from on-hand credit-card & loan spending), especially constantly, than what you don’t actually see & have presently (your forthcoming paychecks or alternatively after-taxes net pay) & that you receive periodically, associated with significantly lower points-of-sale, local-only sales taxes. “Oh oh no!, Absolutely no and not!,” the libertarian flat taxers would say. “We can’t have this, 20%+ sales taxes on real estate, motor vehicles, yachts, personal aircraft, appliances and expensive, high-end upper-crust artwork and jewelry” (already annoyingly expensive for even the rich), and so forth. Ah hah, and so the tax breaks and loopholes start over and begin again under the flat tax regime, predictably, as expected!
Taxes are the cost & fare we pay for a high-quality-of-life, advanced civilization. What has made the U.S. socially highly stable, great & able to respond to & compete with continuous economic, technological & military challenges from other nations heretofore has been the U.S. system of public schools & mass education (that has worked & works for many while not for many others — a school system that has become an example for mass education adopted by many nations, including nations that are our economic & technological competitors), public & private trade & technical schools, elite science & engineering higher education & such public institutions, the universality of libraries, (altogether respectively continuously supplying highly-developed brainpower & valuable fresh knowledge & skills to industry, government & society generally); commitment to & requirement & support for infrastructure (schools, the armed forces & Coast Guard & their installations & schools, the transcontinental & southern railroad systems for the comparatively rapid & efficient transportation of commercial, consumer freight on a mass scale, compared to transport-obsolete horses & wagons, & often ships & trucks; national electrification for powering artificial lighting & plug-in electrical appliances as well as telecommunications; roads & state & federal interstate highway systems, dams, shipping ports & airports, & aircraft & road-vehicle traffic control; universal residential & commercial plumbing & sewage systems; regulated openness to immigration here of particularly healthy, entrepreneurial & educated and skilled people from all parts of the world contributing to our society’s unique nature as an oasis of cultural & intellectual eclecticism & revolutionary creative & innovative fusion & synergy; bureaucracy & laws protecting common people, real & personal property, communities & health & safety, public order, the currency & banking system, business, & intellectual property with patents & copyrights in reward of talent & creativity; public employment development & skills centers; aid to the unemployed & disabled; guaranteed pensions & health care for the elderly; & more). Amusingly, it should come as no surprise to us that with the succession of giant tax cuts on the affluent & rich starting with the Reagan Administration in the 1980s the cost of once free & cheap public higher education has soared, along with oppressive college-student indebtedness, resulting in a domestic shortage of hard-sciences & engineering Ph.D.s & in SciTech industries resorting to importing from & outsourcing abroad employment of available & needed Sci-Tech educated talent to fill the domestic SciTech educated talent shortage, often conveniently far less expensive educated talent from technically & industrially developing nations in mainly south Asia & the Far East of Asia. If & when any of these underpinnings of our civilization, inclusive of the social safety net, is sacrificed or critically weakened by tax defunding in the giving of giant or cumulatively giant tax cuts to the rich, our nation will eventually, in the near term, cease to be sufficiently competitive with the best competitor nations & our civilization will deteriorate & degrade socially and economically for a critical mass of the population, & possibly implode.
Always at the top of the heap of the trash talkers against the government social safety net, particularly Social Security retirement & Medicare-Medicaid health care, are the lifetime financially over-secure millionaires & billionaires — supported by their think-tank, lobbyist, politician, publication & broadcast media propaganda power structure — who don’t need it, &, resenting it, don’t want to pay taxes for masses of others in society who need it. Broadcast media conservatives Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Pat Buchanan, Glenn Beck, & their ilk, are corporate-made millionaire trash-talking, class-warfare broadcasters for unfettered U.S.-corporate & wealth-class investor monopoly & militarily-protected & advanced imperial worldwide free-for-all marketplace capitalism; they are hireling, mercenary mouth guns & cannons. Similar propagandistic, articulate trash- & vitriol-talking former politicians (like nutty & miscreant professor, glib Newt Gingrich) may be given crony jobs making them millionaires, too, as may be some occasional, rare such minority group individual (like inarticulate news-media-circus-buffoon Herman Cain) who verbally flagellates his or her low-status & socially widely demeaned and marginalized minority group with members, disproportionately in percentage relative to the size of their minority group as opposed to head-count numbers relative to other racial & ethnic groups, receiving housing support, aid to families with dependent children & food stamps from government — how dare Herman Cain endorse the Republican presidential candidacy of repetitive big-time moral & ethics hypocrite & U.S. House leadership ethical outcast & pathological omnibus bigot & demagogue Newt Gingrich, who, when he was speaker of the House, attempted circa 1994 to whip up a national lynch mob frenzy against black people per se, by implication, based on the alleged but false charge that “a” black man had carjack-kidnapped the children of Susan Smith, until the car was found crashed in a river with the children drowned in it & Susan Smith confessed to the drowning of her children when her story of the carjacking and kidnapping fell apart under police questioning of her!. The financially elite snob class & their think-tank, publication, broadcast, lobbyist, politician & political officeholder, & public-speaker propaganda power structure (network) continuously trash talk & campaign against government, & needy financially low- & non-achievers receiving government assistance, & their faults but downplay, disregard & focus no attention on the deficiencies & misdeed of most & major mainstream industries & business (fossil-oil CO2 pollution, spills & contamination, wild-life kill offs, scenic coastal & water-body blight & fishery & coastal recreational & tourist business disruption & destruction; NG [natural gas] -fracking contamination of agricultural & community water tables & land; nuclear power plant leaks, environmental susceptibility, malfunctions & contamination, & long-life nuclear-waste indisposability & radioactive threat to the environment, wild life & humans; coal mining & plant pollution, coal-mine explosions & cave ins & environmental contamination; unsafe & injurious products & unsafe & injurious, irresponsible & unscrupulous business & medical practices; & rampant business & investment services & stock-market failure, disasters, predation & debacles, to the detriment of public entity & employee, educational-institution, company & industry worker 401(k) pensions, modest-cash private individual & such elder-citizen investors). At the same time they call for stock-market investment of Social Security pensions (after repeated credit-union & banking system corruptions & scandals of respectively the 1980s & late first decade of the 2000s & junk-bond & stock-market scandals & busts of respectively the 1980s & Y2K & 2008 that greatly permanently diminished & destroyed, massively, public & private-industry employee pension as well as small individual stock-market investors’ investments in the stock market), privatization of Medicare into investment in insurance companies that profit by minimizing & avoiding major expenses & major liability or expense clients (or prospective or likely such clients), privatization of government services by business, translating really into income producing corporations for major financial institutional investors & the parasitical investor wealth class, including privatization of, or services of, to the extent possible, public schools, prisons, NASA-JPL & the military. Also while calling for the gutting of the government-provided social safety net & social spending on & for America’s citizens and children, they cheer lead & advocate for a worldwide U.S. military presence & unlimited war on terrorism abroad & benevolent development (nation building or rebuilding) of Afghanistan & Iraq by corporations of the U.S. & coalition member nations at U.S. taxpayers’ expense. Given their discretion, one day soon their corporate executives, investment strategists & staff lawyers may be the oversight escort & desk minders & advisers of generals & admirals in the Pentagon, at the headquarters of military bases, in the field & on ships & of ambassadors & military chiefs in U.S. embassies, as well as of all intelligence agency bosses & top science staff of federal regulatory agencies – bigger than the big brother imagined with foreboding by political-nightmare writer & visionary George Orwell & something that was under way in its beginning stage during the Bush-II/Cheney Administration.
What the financially elite snob class calls class envy & class warfare on the part of the middle & under classes is reciprocally viewed by the middle & under classes as socially privileged & specially entitled snob class contempt & spite for & class warfare callousness by the arrogant snob wealth class toward the middle & under classes & their economic & socially upward mobility (like low- cost & free SciTech education & employment-skills training) needs & aspirations. If our society wants an abundance of affordable, financially satisfied & happy world-class competitive, hard-sciences outstanding doctors, dentists, nurses, physicists, engineers, mathematicians, chemists, biologists, geologists, meteorologists, computer and information science techs, etc., to overcome the native-born shortage of SciTech college & university graduates & Ph.D.s to pioneer new, novel, unforeseeable SciTech innovation & industries & to supply industry sufficiently with these permanently, SciTech-tracked college/university student education by official policy should be very low cost in general & free for those scoring 85% in the average of each separately objective tests & regurgitative, applied knowledge & concepts written tests, with no score for the ended school semester or quarter of less than 75%, without regard to letter grades & not based on statistical classroom, department or student body grading curves. Students carrying a full-load course of study, with a majority of courses in SciTech & maintaining numeral scores in all classes of 95% & above, should by official policy earn tax-free free books & school supplies & such stipends for free housing & meals on (set-asides) or off campus. When the cost of higher education is too high, oppressive & debt enslaving, many cognitively exceptionally- & well-endowed & functional middle-class & under-class people, particularly young people, well educated at the high-school level, otherwise potentially highly beneficial to society by virtue of their natural high-level cognitive capability or brainpower, may be financially shut out of higher education, or being financially desperate or in financial despair, may forego, straggle through or long delay for a goodly number of years or for several or more decades a higher education. Many of the smart & technically or administratively achieved educated people of middle and under class origin one might know, including doctors, dentists, elite surgeons, physicists, scientists of all kinds, engineers, science & technology company CEOs, etc., might not have their education, credentials & valuable & lucrative knowledge & skills if they had not been educated in the era of low to moderate cost public higher education during the 1960s into the 1990s (most of the achievers who were college or university educated during the public-higher-education very-cheap 1950s & before are retired or deceased).
Inexpensive public education open to all comers in large part acts as a sieve for sorting out high efficiency information-processor & conceptualizer people; fast, capacious &/or durable learners & such intellectual-performance adapters; & disciplined, deep & creative thinkers, developing these academically to the best of their capability, particularly in SciTech disciplines to the ongoing technological progress & industrial & economic champion-class competitiveness of our nation internationally, in addition to our nation’s like academic international competitiveness inasmuch as the graduates from this system would continuously produce the educationally most highly developed teachers & college/university professors possible from generation to generation. Many comers who may not be top SciTech learners & performers or who may not succeed in higher education initially, may have a unique or special cognitive gift or multiple gifts (manifested as a striking level of capability, independent of the speed of its development or expression, or such facility for its acquisition in a high quality state) & succeed at their own pace or on a later try when they are functionally or circumstantially ready, or may be latent learners who leave higher education early with latently evidenced valuable learned know-how or skill roots that may serve them & others well, nevertheless. In recent decades, when public higher education was inexpensive & open to all comers at the junior or community college level & to most academically qualifying for public universities (qualifying with respect to high-school or junior-college grade-point-average & SAT-score criteria), take-all-comers junior colleges and universities for the academically prepared & qualified for matriculation to a university served as very important pillars of what is termed the American meritocracy (not uncontaminated by organizational & partisan party politics as well as religious, gender and race/ethnicity bias), in which university professor selection & job tenure, government-civil-service & corporate-career achievement were overwhelmingly based (with some bias) on job application testing, educational background & credentials, on-the-job performance & accomplishments, performance ratings by superiors and sometimes, where appropriate, internal-entity job change or advancement tests. When the collective quality & integrity of the U.S. SciTech intelligencia & technocracy of the U.S. meritocracy are sacrificed & undermined for the sake of tax cuts for the wealth class & the minimization of expenses & maximization of U.S.-based corporate & other business profits from global operations, at significant cost to fellow Americans & our society, in the furtherance of maximized wealth for the wealthy, at a minimum oligarchical capitalism will have, or has, trumped democratic capitalism for our nation & our nation will have, or has, ceased to produce human performance as well as products & services on the champion competitive world-class level & will cease to harness & realize its own greatest potential in collective brainpower & the highest realizable quality of its products & services, rendering our nation’s workforce technologically, industrially and commercially uncompetitive in net effect with the SciTech-industrial best educated & trained workforces among the workforces of other nations of the world.
Noblesse Oblige: Much is required of those who have much. In an absolute sense, personal or private wealth owes itself to and is derived from the overall natural and social sources and girding providing for its acquisition and preservation. Private wealth is maintained, preserved and protected by social institutions, relationships, innovations (including weapons) that draw from the communal legacy of innovations & body of knowledge & skills that preceded them as well as from natural resources & the laws of nature, & by human law & law enforcement (judicial, police and military) & thereby has a permanent indebtedness & obligation to society, substantially in the form of taxes commensurate with level of wealth or income, or benefit from inherently communal natural resources (grant deeds or land grants, licenses, patents, copyrights, contracts & other claims on nature & the derivations of nature & human nature are conferred, or acknowledged & honored, & enforced by government, be it the pack, gang, tribe, militia, warlordship, community, ruler, crown, head of state, legislature, hegemon or other). Bill Gates Sr. (a Washington State attorney & the father of famous Bill Gates) has written & lectured on this as well as has a number of prominent public intellectuals & economists, including U.C. Berkeley professor of economics & public policy Robert Reich, Labor Secretary in the Clinton Administration, & Harvard professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, an expert on bankruptcy & consumer law, formerly with the Obama Administration, campaigning in a U.S. senatorial contest to replace incumbent Tea-Party Republican Senator Scott Brown as U.S. senator for MA. If a victorious domestic revolutionary government or invasion military government confiscates &/or abolishes (nullifies or does not recognize, honor or uphold title to or in, etc.) the wealth of denizens holding it & changes the money (like the U.S. did significantly in Iraq & NATO-supported victorious rebels just did significantly in Libya), poof, like magic, it’s gone for those folks or the affected (sometimes selectively liquidated or uncirculated, or annihilated en masse, in the wealth confiscation &/or abolishment process for its new control & ownership in whole or part). This is the template of wealth in human history. Wealth is not autonomous & unalienable, nor God or Allah, etc., given; rather, its very basis & existence come from & depend on society, nature & the wide-ranging pool of human labor, talent & skills, the product of cumulative ancestral communitarian or communal (dare I say “collective”) genetics, biology, culture (including, most valuably, language & mundane, practical & technical knowledge) & formal & informal education & training, & ingenuity & creativity, over the ages from the beginning of our species & evolution — read past & observe & read current history for confirmation.
Meritocracy v.s. Aristocracy in a Social Democracy, & The Nature of Money
Anathema to the meritocracy of both the private and public economic sectors & incompatible with the shared economic prosperity of any socially democratic society is the tax-free or low-tax and flat-tax hereditary transfer of “massive” wealth from one family generation to another, in actual instances cumulatively, to grandiose levels, indefinitely, giving rise to a hereditary aristocracy able to exercise capitalization and majority ownership-share control of any financially promising new major enterprise or industry looming on the business or financial horizon, or able to stop or impede new technology, innovation, mass arts & entertainment (like the pop, rock ‘n’ roll and rap music genres that forced their ways into the music marketplace by subversion of the status quo via broadcasts from Mexico, payola, & once independent, renegade black American radio stations & audacious, rebellious white American & British DJs, risking their jobs & sometimes adverse legal action, not to much mention now legalized erotica publications & film, most vigorously opposed by often hypocritical American puritanical, puritan-ethic right-wing media figures [the likes of nowadays provocative broadcast infotainer lame-brain, convicted-junkie, drug-dazed-&-crazed, whacked-out tongue-slinger, shit-talking dumbo Rush Bozo Limbaugh], politicians and church leaders [where churches in our society control vast insular empires of untaxed revenues & property wealth, in addition to huge numbers of voters, yet receive government services of all kinds & benefit from government infrastructure like all the rest of society, whereas Jesus himself said in regard to taxes "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's...," referencing that Caesar's image was on the coins of the realm, Mark 12:17, Luke 20:25] & the austere social & mind censorship, anti-sexual, perhaps jealousy tinged, brand of feminism, tyrannically wanting to define monolithically, direct & command all women on how to think & on how to comport their private lives & on their life and work choices – where many heterosexual sex-loving women [on their own female & idiosyncratic terms & based on their own criteria: with whom, in what kind of relationship, when, where, under what conditions & in what manner, etc., they choose or negotiate consensually with a mate], including sex models & actresses, are feminists in their own way & view their physical beauty & sexual attractiveness as a resource &/or asset & an undeniable gift of, or advantage from, nature and as a source of power), enterprise and industry disruptive to their complacency with status-quo business that is steadily lucrative to themselves, although passe & dangerous to health and the environment, like nuclear, fossil-oil & coal energy resources & industries fighting the aggressive arrival & rise of clean fuel-energy technologies and industries (including solar electric-tech that with molten-salt storage & night-time solar cells developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the latter publicly announced 02-29-2012, http://www.greenwala.com/channels/green-technology/blog/13103-Scientists-Develop-Affordable-…, can now generate & supply electricity around-the-clock 24/7, & cat-tail, bladeless wind turbines that can generate electricity without endangering birds & bats, Wind Power Without the Blades: Big Pics : Discovery News news.discovery.com › Tech News). Given their vast web of communications media & business control, employment or employer power, directly or indirectly, & political-candidate campaign funding power & donations to religious & advocacy organizations & entities, they are or in a position to be de facto, largely unanswerable & unaccountable, dictatorial societal rulers (by virtue of their wealth & the applied influence and power of their wealth). Wealth needs ever increasingly even more wealth to sustain its splendorous lifestyle, preserve & extend its inviolable financial principal (under ongoing cost-of-living and inflationary challenges), the basis of its financial security, pay its constant incidental and revolving bills & expenses and exercise control or increased & expanded control. As a reward to achievers, democratic societies worldwide should permit a tax free estate to pass to child, sibling & parent heirs of the equivalent of perhaps $5,000,000.00 each, adjustable periodically upward over the decades with rises in the cost of living, with progressive taxes on inheritances exceeding $5,000,000.00 in value graduating to a tax rate of 100% on an inheritance of $50,000,000.00 or more in value. Let the tax money from inheritances go primarily to fund public education & job skills training, public health, science & NASA, conversion of municipal sewage treatment plants to biomass-biodigester plants for cleanly converting human sewage (excrement, bio & biodegradable hospital waste, etc.) & environmental waste to environmentally sequestered methane gas extraction for further conversion to distributed clean electricity to municipal electricity rate payers, with the residue from this process sold as the high-grade soil fertilizer that it has proven to be, & to fund interstate & national infrastructure. However, taxes on the incomes of citizens in general, on a sliding scale based on level of income, should be kept cautiously near the minimum of what is necessary to fund critical government services & works (including the social safety net), by mechanization & computerization, with superior results to human performance, as much as possible of government services & works in all regards, including education, so as to reduce the need for & employment of costly & forever-rising human wage/salary labor, with its per individual costly bundle of fringe benefits, at taxpayer & many times government budget-busting burden & expense, wherever possible – taxes must not become broadly oppressive on & suffocating to citizens’ money & financial liquidity & a threat to their assets or unduly to their incarceration. Elected executive branch & Congressional as well as business, private university & interested citizen organization leaders & their expert & competent representatives or staff members, along with relevant tech expert individuals, should form brainstorming task forces for planning, pilot-project testing & refining & implementing this taxpayer-expense-cutting mechanization & computerization of government, permanently reconstituted periodically for further such mechanization & computerization of government.
Money, along with being a convenient fungible and portable denominated medium of exchange of value (i.e., a transferable purchase-value proxy for goods & services & representing abstractly or generally the gamut of property, resources, products [also including the secondary financial instruments substituting for money of stocks, bonds, bona-fide checks, collateralized or secured debts, credit accounts, debit & the various other bank accounts, etc.] & services in societies in the course of commerce — as in fiat government paper tender of various specified values as well as other s0-value-assigned tender of other material of varied size & weight, most commonly as of silver, nickel, copper & sometimes gold) for goods & services, is also a transferable warrant or demand (or even a claim on or right to) of degree, based on the denominated value amount of one’s money, upon the gamut of goods & services offered & available in society. In this context, artificially, yet as a matter of social reality, one’s warrant-demand ownership share of nature in & the assets of a society is proportional to the total denominational value of the money one owns & controls in that society, &, inasmuch as the more capital one has, so it is the more money generating assets one can purchase or control, with the unfortunate circumstance that ultimately a comparatively small hereditary wealth class (the born aristocracy: the “heiristocracy” or hereditary feudal-lord investor class of heirs or “heiristocrats”) at the financial helm of society, with such overwhelming social stranglehold wealth in the aggregate, unchecked by tax, domestic revolution or military defeat by a foreign adversary, could, like a predatory reproductive ruling species, own & control virtually everything in that society (namely, the U.S.A.), especially with the power of computerization & the computerization of Wall Street. Indeed, in this respect, they become the womb-to-tomb, cradle-to-grave wealthfare, financial-headstart, fawned-over, privileged, affirmative-action, entitlement for the parasitical born-rich sponge class, based on the happenstance of being the product of birth to achiever parents or such a parent & not based on individual, personal merit, mirroring & epitomizing in an opulent image for themselves the public social safety net as well as poor receiving government assistance they & their communications media critics chronically bad talk & mock. Talk about a welfare queen driving a Cadillac, what about lifelong freeloader wealthfare kings & queens driving Mercedes Benzes, etc., & being chauffeured in limousines & waited on by housekeepers & sometimes servants?!
Michael Hudson, professor of economics & the history of finance, warns, in liberal paraphrase & interpretation of him, of a creeping undemocratic economic society in which the large majority of folks become all-points toll-booth payers to & interest-shackled accounts-receivable and notes-receivable slaves of monopolist investors, the banking system & finance — with this triad overlapping, superimposed on & bolstered by FIRE-LI: finance, insurance, real estate (in addition to building & community development, or construction, subsuming agriculture, forestry, food in general, mining, fossil ore extraction, &, moreover, almost all business & housing, etc.), energy or education (I didn’t clearly hear which), law (legislation, litigation, law enforcement, etc.), monopoly investment & information (“information” presumably consisting of information & entertainment media, as well as marketing, or commercial, surveillance databasing), posing as good-guy free-market capitalism endeavoring to privatize for itself public infrastructure & government functions, as spoils of their effective ideological campaign of belief against the competence of & need for government (in the public interest). They carry on this self-righteous, self-promoting idiots’ campaign of myth-making & stupidification (manufactured ignorance & misinformation as well as pejorative generalization) unceasingly despite the fact that, in the public interest [in fostering low prices, for especially food & fuel, U.S. competitiveness in world trade, maximal employment & averting precipitous mass unemployment & cause-effect chain-reaction mass business failure], vital & strategic industries have been subsidized & facilitated by government, substantially by tax policy &/or law, at every level & some major manufacturing corporations & the banking & finance systems have been rescued, the latter repeatedly, from their collapses often resulting from reckless, short-sighted, short-term greed-driven investment, widespread institutional mismanagement &/or corruption, grand fraud & investment-system cannibalism, enabled by the Republican & free-market libertarian recurrently failed dogma of business deregulation & unfettered, on-the-honor-system, free-market capitalism by legislation & executive branch policy (most notably, the Republican & libertarian marketplace deregulated, free-market stock-market & banking-system collapses of the Great Depression of 1929 & the 1930s, the late 1980s S&L collapse of the Republican deregulated, free-market 1980s, & the 2008 investment & retail banking system collapse of the Republican, libertarian deregulated, free-market first decade of the 21st Century, not to speak of more than in passing of the junk bond market securities fraud convict Michael Milken & brazen insider stock trader convict Ivan Boesky of the Republican, libertarian deregulated, free-marked 1980s, the Y2k dot.com bust, WorldCom, Enron & herd corporate criminal misconduct of the Republican, libertarian deregulated, free-market first decade of this 21st century prior to 2009 & the multibillion-dollar Ponzi swindlers Bernie Madoff & Allen Stanford of the Republican, libertarian deregulated free-market persuasion exposed in their uncontainable self-destructive zeal in the Republican unrestrained free-market first decade of the 21st Century prior to 2009). And the mess keeps spewing to now, the summer of 2012, with the multibillion-dollar bank-gambling losses & potential losses of depositor money & unethical interest rate manipulations as well as obfuscations & apparent lies of JP Morgan-Chase Bank, led by its warm & fuzzy CEO Jamie Dimond, & Barclays Bank, led by its CEO Bob Diamond. Deregulated, on-the-honor-system free-market economics scholars & experienced practitioners know that in the boom-and-bust and feast-and-famine cycles of our economy the bust and famine back ends are not inevitable but are the debris, or fall out, of the shark feeding frenzy (or the barbarian rape, pillage & burn time) of the front ends of the policy practice of this unfettered cannibal capitalism marketplace philosophy, & the practitioners & beneficiaries of this philosophy & kind of market want those front ends to keep cycling back to them, even if not fully fattened & ripened by rehabilitation & restoration by rescue governance time. Possibly to their peace of mind, it’s mainly the “most” egregious few of the many rogues benefiting from deregulated, unfettered, on-the-honor-system free-market economics who are criminally prosecuted & meaningfully punished.
From the libertarian free-market point of view (laissez-faire economic philosophy) & practice, marketplace deregulation means the granting of commercial license to dump, spill, pollute, poison, taint, contaminate, blight, injure, maim, disable, cripple, mutilate, disfigure, bloat with bad & junk food & beverages, disease, sicken, devastate, deplete, uproot, displace, render extinct, destroy & kill as well as misrepresent, con, defraud, cheat, swindle, loot, rob & steal with impunity or token amends, in the promotion & pursuit of revenue maximization & profit, by government policy & the absence of protective & compensatory law or adequate such law for victims (whether victims be humans, flora or fauna, habitat or environment), really to major & politically favored enterprises & entrepreneurs, unless the victims or objectors are sufficiently wealthy or socially important. It also means no or weak curbs on cartels & monopolies in the marketplace, able to distort & destroy democratically fair-play, equal-opportunity (level-playing field) marketplace competition benefiting consumers & society on the whole.
Germane to this latter issue, the author of this writing repudiates the fossil-fuels expansionist drill-baby-drill, ravage, pollute, poison, spill, blight & kill national-fuel-energy agenda of primacy-of-profits 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney & rejects his candidacy & strategy of opacity regarding the public disclosure of his financial and tax, with emphasis on “income tax,” paying integrity & character in publicly vetting, as a presidential candidate, the status of his publicly accountable & verifiable ethical fitness to occupy the highest public office in the nation, without his insistence that the public rely on & trust his self-serving mere words & uncorroborated assurances of financial & tax-paying rectitude. All federal civil servants & members of the armed forces are subjected to an agency or FBI character background check or investigation & all proposed presidential cabinet secretary appointees are subject to Congressional challenge & confirmation as well as an FBI background check. Traditionally in modern times all other presidential & vice-presidential candidates, except for one, have made extensive public disclosures of their income-tax & financial background – incidentally, in separate property marriages, in which a non-candidate spouse of a candidate for political office may have entered the marriage with substantial personal assets or an inherited fortune, the political-office candidate spouse has no right to or involvement with those assets by law so long as those assets remain separate property & disclosure of that spouse’s personal separate assets & related financial affairs may be a liable trespass against the privacy of that spouse & a liable basis for divorce of the offending spouse. Certainly mega-millionaire scion Mitt Romney knows this when he facetiously cites former presidential candidate U.S. Senator John Kerry, D-Mass (who promptly made a thorough public financial & income-tax disclosure on himself during his candidacy), as having not made a public financial & tax disclosure on his wife, the heir to a large fortune before his marriage to her, & dishonestly makes reference to this appropriate nondisclosure (a disclosure John Kerry would have had no legal right to make) as a justification and excuse for making a peek-a-boo minimal, scant & untimely (in effect “I’ll reveal the other financial & tax tidbit on myself after the election.”) disclosure of his own financial & income-tax filing & paying background & history. The same legal situation applies to U.S. Senator John McCain, R-Az., and his presidential bid in 2008 when he, also as an exception to the clean-politics norm like Romney, disclosed publicly only his own controversially two most recently due and filed 2006 and 2007 federal income tax returns but appropriately nothing on his premaritally independently rich, mega-millionaire heiress wife, another example of minimal financial and tax disclosure on a presidential candidate and nondisclosure on a wife by a presidential candidate Romney cites as a justification and excuse for his not making a full or extensive financial and tax disclosure on himself. Apparently Romney is obstructing full or extensive public disclosure on himself because he is embarrassed & has something disturbing to hide & feels the harm to himself from a tiny disclosure or nondisclosure is tolerable in comparison to the devastation a full or extensive disclosure might precipitate. It is suspect when he says in effect “I have paid lots of taxes” & avoids the term “income taxes” — he seems to be fudging with the use of this hedge language. His remark that his tax returns are proper but that if he were to publicly release & disclose them Democrats would pick through them to find fault insinuates that there are concerning, culpable faults with them, indeed, that are grist for political controversy & damage to him & his presidential candidacy. Romney is of dubious financial & income-tax paying & filing character until there is certified documented revelation to the contrary, which may, however, result in a finding of disreputable character.
Like in any election, character is and always is a crucial issue. It is incumbent on the voting citizen public to thoroughly audit and know everything about its prospective leaders and to make its choices of elected leaders based on its examination and full and certain knowledge of the candidates for elective leadership office — for making informed decisions and choices — “beyond words and arguments.” Character, especially long-time entrenched adult character, is the foolproof indicator and predictor of an individual’s inclinations and future patterns and habits of conduct and action, and not at all an individual’s words or words separated from deciding-others’ knowledge of that individual’s character. Do not trust shadowy figures, especially those insistent on remaining shadowy, as regards matters of their character, such as Mitt Romney. It is a truism that behind many a big fortune is a big crook and a path beaten thereto by crookery, often a path beaten by ruthless fortune-hunter or glory-hog individuals with a flair for finery and a way (forte) with words — “All that glitters is not gold.” Just like it is foolhardy to entrust our money or lovely, or gorgeous, daughter, wife or girlfriend with a stranger or unsavory individual, it is a most probable unpardonable, regrettable blunder in the making to entrust the leadership of our nation to a shadowy individual of dubious or uncertain character. Do not let the seductively, for some, glib Republican duo of glitz and glamour both demagogue, and scaremonger us on, the competence of government (while ignoring the endless procession of grandiose incompetence, recklessness, roguery — the most recent high-profile such rogues being J.P. Morgan-Chase Bank and its CEO Jamie Dimond and Barclays Bank and its CEO Bob Diamond in July of 2012 — and failures in private enterprise, pretending and mythologizing that somehow and magically humans in government service are different and lesser than humans in commercial employment), Social Security retirement, Medicare and Medicaid and dupe/sweet talk divide and conquer the older and younger generations into approving the fracturing and gradual destroying of Social Security retirement, Medicare and Medicaid, now free of investment in the turbulent and often equity-destroying stock-market casino, with promises of preservation of the current defined benefit models for those 55 years of age and older at the time of system reform to the privatization, marketplace models they propose (to attract the voting support for the reform from the particulary voting active bloc of elder voters, giving them a sense of safety and remaining-life security for themselves). If the generations declare with their unified votes in the majority that these defined-benefit, and government protected and administered, social-safety-net programs will not be deprioritized and are not subject to compromise, they will not be diluted and compromised and they will be prioritized and made to work permanently by politicians who observe and understand that their political-office jobs depend on their viability, in disregard of the talking-heads and tongue-wagging news-talk commentators of the mainstream mass news media of public persuasion owned by the corporate wealth class. Let us not be swayed into believing that the foe of these programs and the social safety net in general, being Romney’s VP running-mate Paul Ryan, is suddenly now the friend of Medicare with the gimmick of his trotting out his 78-year-old mother as a political prop before an adoring Republican crowd and announcing that she is receiving Medicare and attesting to his want to save Medicare (yes, his no-change protection plan for those 55 years old and above at the time of legislative enactment of his proposed Medicare system reform and changeover for future recipients would take care of her and of course any mother would like to see her son to be the vice-president of the U.S.) — expediency and shameless duplicity are a centuries-old, tried-and-true successful ploy of many desperate and ruthless politicians.
Incidentally, Perry’s proposal of a flat-tax simple postcard tax return goes back to a proposal circulated in the Treasury Department during either late in the second term of the Clinton Administration or early in the first term of the Bush-II Administration; it is not Perry’s nor his campaign organization’s idea & went nowhere way back because it had no legs, nor a wheelchair.
More of “False face doth hide what false heart doth know,” the timeless relevance of William Shakespeare
Republican Governor Rick Perry’s federal-income-tax-reform plan, announced on 10-24-2011, of an individually-optable 20% flat tax system, proposed to run parallel with and as an alternative to the traditional progressive tax-bracket federal income tax system, with individual discretion also to opt out of the federal Social Security retirement system and invest one’s otherwise Social Security contribution, or a part of it, in the stock market or suggestively an insurance-company, or other financial-services, offered annuity plan, would result in a drastically reduced revenue stream to the federal government for funding and supporting the capacity and viability of the federal Social Security retirement system as well as all other federal government services, that are often disaster and crisis aid and services, in addition to other important federal support, to states and municipalities. Inevitably and of course, the wealthy who, for the most part, do not, will not and are unlikely to need a Social Security pension or to retire under the Social Security retirement system, and many misled, irrational and stupid others (the financially-gifted, functional mentally ill, survivalists, anti-all-government anarchists), and, some, despite their college education, truly educated fools and intellectual idiots, who resent paying taxes for indispensable public infrastructure and services provided by government, on which they and all of society rely all day and night daily, without exception, will rush and lead the herd-instinct charge to conveniently and shortsightedly opt for the tax-cut, lower, 20% flat income tax system, superficially benefiting themselves tremendously. They nevertheless feel, or pretend, that they have no need for government (until they are victims of an overwhelming natural disaster or arson, their daughter is kidnapped or has disappeared, they’ve been blackmailed, extorted or fleeced, they are under threat by violent social unrest, their plane crashes in a forest or on a snow-covered mountain, or they’re stranded at sea, etc., ad infinitum) and so have no interest in and feel they have no legitimate obligation in financially contributing toward the common good (for which our federal [national] constitution prescribes as a mission of government that it provide for this, the common good), being the at-large community, for which they have no concern beyond their own dwellings or enclaves – obligation and shared support for such they, in large part, regard as socialism. They cannot sincerely claim to be patriotic yet not be concerned citizens, concerned about the good of the nation on the whole and its people collectively — that is, be concerned for the common good and community as a nation and demonstrate shared love of and support for our country commensurate with one’s benefit in and from society and one’s means — as opposed to very often and in large numbers posturing as patriots for supporting endless war and exhorting “Support the troops” (a euphemism for “Support the war”), for whom they do not care as persons, but only as obedient fighting bio-automatons and sport-of-war gladiators in the arena of demolition, blood-and-guts and slaughter combat for their desirably victorious troops, with victory by the troops to bolster their nationalist ego pride (sense of triumphant esteem, or superiority over others) and imperial financial power. Many other people needing money in the here and now, and financially seduced or conned into investing their otherwise Social Security retirement money in the stock market and in insurance-company annuities, almost the worst of all investments, aside from losing one’s money to a swindler or in the stock market, as is common, will elect for the 20% flat tax and withdraw from the federal Social Security insurance retirement system, to the detriment, also, and fatality of the Social Security retirement system, the federal social-safety-net programs and other valuable, critical government services.
The point of Social Security insurance retirement is that no matter what befalls an individual (including stay-at-home homemaker spouses of income earners) and one’s assets during one’s working, pre-retirement years that when one reaches retirement age, a time when for a large percentage of working people the body is noticeably deteriorated and debilitated regardless of an increase in lifespans, one will have a Social Security pension (a permanent, guaranteed income) with which to still financially fend for oneself, along with such health care insurance (Medicare) for medical services, until one dies, however infirm one is or becomes in the interim. Antigovernment, anti-tax, deregulated free-market, primacy-of-profits, financial libertarian assertions that charity will take care of the indigent dying and disabled, have nots and homeless, and dependent-age orphans and brutalized and abandoned children, and that charity will not allow anyone to go hungry, medically uncared for and die homeless and without help, are facetious, crazy talk and writing, and are outrageous, if not arrogant and malicious, falsehood. Greed has no top. Greed has no bottom. Greed has no perimeter. Greed is gluttonous and insatiable. Greed and avarice have no limits, are unreasonable and have no conscience.
From the beginning of the Republican presidential candidates pre-primaries debate campaign this year for the 2012 presidential election, Governor Rick Perry of Texas has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme (a long-term financial fraud) and proposed scrapping it, to the objection of a majority of staunch Republican voters, which resulted in his plunge from first place Republican presidential candidate to petty-percentages third place candidate since, despite his dominant campaign funds chest and fundraising position. His flat tax proposal is intended to politically salvage his candidacy and make him competitive in popularity with Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, whose precedent, equally destructive, 9-9-9 federal income tax reform plan that, along with his exclamation, in close paraphrase, in retort to Perry’s putdown of Social Security, was that “People need Social Security!; they depend on it!,” has catapulted Cain (a heavily-accented black man in a political party that right-wing, xenophobic media commentator Pat Buchanan is alleged to have said, in effect, is or should be the white people’s party), shockingly, from the last place Republican presidential candidate to the fluctuating first and second place candidate consistently in the consensus of the major independent political polls. Rick Perry’s proposal is structured to give another giant tax cut to the rich (his mainstay and major campaign contributors and long-time general backers) while fiscally starving Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to functional collapse and death, with the volitional flight of taxpayers into the 20% flat-tax income tax system and with enough of them withdrawing and redirecting their money permanently from Social Security and Medicare insurances. His position on Social Security reflects that he is of the same political-economic philosophy as that expressed by unconscionable, psycho-minded Grover Norquist (a Harvard MBA and head of the Americans for Tax Reform and a hero to primacy-of-profits, antigovernment, anti-tax financial libertarians), infamous for having said, according to Wikipedia, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Doesn’t he really need to be in the rubber-walled room of a psychiatric ward for the criminally insane?! And what about his worhippers and supporters too?
With exception, Republicans, conservative Democrats (who founded the bi-partisan American Liberty League opposing the New Deal social-safety-net programs of the Great Depression era) and financial libertarians — all largely of a miser ideology and mentality — have opposed and called for the abolishment of, as they refer to it, the public entitlement system (the social safety net, which even Republican Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and ultra conservative Ronald Reagan defended from their meat cleavers), since its inception in the administration of Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt. Where the core tenent and mantra enunciated by the wealth-class-turned Republican Party of late and financial libertarians, an extremist wing of the Republican Party that includes the Tea Party, is that tax cuts for the wealthy or rich create jobs, contrarily, empirical economics 101 documents that foremost and overwhelmingly mass consumer demand, financial means and ability to purchase (purchasing power and its deployment) drive business production, sales, income, profit, hiring, upgrade, growth, research and development, implemented development, investment and attraction of outside investment. When domestic common consumers do not have their jobs outsourced to low-wage foreign nations and their service, retail, factory and building and other construction trades jobs outplaced to a nonstop flood of uninsured, low-wage and no-fringe-benefits illegal immigrants and are not burdened with onerous education debts and exorbitant (usury) interest rates on debt itself and credit cards (really ‘debt cards’), they have more money for financially fueling and supporting a sustained, strong retail and wholesale goods and services production and sales economy. Job outsourcing to lowest and low-wage nations and outplaced to minimal expense, lowest and low-wage illegal immigrants and tax-underfunded public infrastructure, schools and institutions of higher education burdening students with staggering debt and debtors with exorbitant credit interest rates (interest rates that squander the money and severely diminish the purchasing power of consumers indefinitely, as well as drive up, along with the debt burden itself, the cost of professional services of eventual doctors, dentists, nurses, attorneys, architects, engineers, accountants, commercial artists, etc., who graduate from college with huge debts) only enriches unscrupulous entrepreneurs, company and bank executives and investors by use of the inflexible, hard-nosed maximization-of-profit and minimization-of-expense strategy, with investor wealth further maximized with tax cuts, all at the expense, and often impoverishment, of maximal domestic employment, public infrastructure, essential government services, the citizenry, the common good and the nation. It is another right-wing, wealth-class Republican Party, financial libertarian and Tea Party myth and falsehood that Americans don’t want these jobs, which they use to cover up their true agenda, identified in the aforementioned. It is a further canard of theirs that the Republican Party is the party of small business, a categorization they dangle before the public as a tax-cut sympathy-drawing decoy to garner gaint tax cuts for the rich (like the tax-free inherited estate tax, for the 8 years of the Bush-II presidency, that went to the entitlement and privileged class of indulged, wealthfare-raised, -cultured, -educated, -gilted and financially lifetime-endowed freeloader children of mega millionaires and billionaires) behind the pretense and guise of protecting the family farm or business from the ravages of inheritance, scary “death taxes” (officially and in emotionally neutral language termed decedent-estate inheritance taxes), with these and all inheritances before the zero tax of the Bush-II administration on decedent estates having had a $3,500,000.00 exemption from taxation (before taxation was applicable).
The upshot consensus thesis of the independently pro-Keynesian-economics (economic ideas of British economist John Maynard Keynes advocating government intervention in the economy during times of economic collapse or crisis, such as the Great Depression of 1929 and the 1930s, with rescue, activist commerce-stimulating and job-creating spending and not with budgetary and spending austerity, even in the presence of large budget deficits) views of Nobel Prize economists each Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz is that capitalism does not work or becomes grossly dysfunctional when a small minority of the population owns or controls the majority or large majority of the national wealth, like the top 20% owning or controlling 80% of the wealth or money pie and that for capitalism to be robust — that is, for the free-market economy to be healthy, resilient and dynamic on the whole and for the long term — it must be based on democratic capitalism, that handsomely rewards business, investment and product initiative, talent, creativity and innovation but that widely diffuses or distributes abundant money and wealth to the laboring general populace whose spending keeps the money in ongoing plentiful circulation feeding investment markets, commerce, business, employment and government revenues for funding infrastructure and common-good and vital public services and programs. Other economists of our time warn that extreme disproportionate wealth (including income) ownership or control by a small minority of the population (concentrated wealth control by a small minority), whether it be the wealthiest 1, 10 or 20-plus percent of the population, is a cause of economic constipation, or the lack of healthy economic flow and dynamism of a nation.
The reason the U.S. is in a state of a protracted economic crash and sluggishness, or protracted economic slump, denied any longer to be technically a recession, is due to profligate war spending, the 1999 repeal of the great-depression-era federally enacted Glass-Steagall Act restricting commercial banks from dealings in securities investments, the massive banking liar-loan debacle (related to shaky sub-prime mortgages), huge financial losses from greed-driven high-risk and competitive investment gambling by commercial, or retail, banks, the fleecing of employee retirement investment money by employing corporations and unscrupulous players in the stock market, the plundering of corporations by CEOs and top level executives, the strategy of hard-nosed minimization of expenses and maximization of profits via exporting manufacturing and jobs abroad and the outplacing of wanted domestic low-skill (like food service, food processing and cannery, janitorial, street and environmental clean up and maintenance, waste management, fabric, garment, hotel service, valet, automotive servicing such as oil changes, lubes, tire repair and change, window change, body repair and painting) and building-trades and construction jobs to a continuous massive influx of illegal immigrants by a great many businesses large and small, as applicable, and giant tax cuts for the wealthy.
As it is the case that there are many Americans who are low and modestly skilled and educated and are not high-skills or higher-level education achievers and are glad to have even a secure and adequate-paying humble or simple job on which to make a living and support a family and have a family life, they want these jobs regardless of what out-of-touch, insensitive and pugnacious, financially well compensated mass-media talk-show hosts and their partisan, ideologue guests, as well as columnists, high-profile social figures and politicians, representing the profit and wealth class or exercising social diplomacy, say. Many drop out of high school and college. To many of these people, to have a steady job with a livable income and health insurance, friends and a family, or romantic life, is the top priority in life. Wake up! There are individual differences in ability, aspiration and motivation among people of any kind, anywhere, including in families. The ranks of the unemployed, imprisoned and homeless are bloated with frustrated, simple, ordinary folks, young and old, who may in big numbers be unskilled or modestly skilled, and lowly to modestly educated, in want of a steady living-wage job, almost of any kind, with health insurance, so long as they are treated with respect on the job (by superiors, co-workers and customers).
The exportation and domestic outsourcing of jobs to low-wage, no-benefits foreign workers and unlawful-entry immigrant labor are just another means of domestic labor union busting and the busting of union scale pay compensation packages for all workers as well as often of employers circumventing government imposed minimum wages domestically. Union workers who vote for the union-busting Republican Party and its candidates for political office in response to the constant Republican call for and lure of tax cuts are also voting for the export and outsourcing of their jobs and the reduction of their wages, job fringe benefits and job security. Nevertheless, plenty of them can be depended on to vote for shortsighted tax cuts and whine in bewilderment when their financial world collapses around and on them.
By the way, union leaders and members must bear in mind that people go into business or invest in business to respectively make a living or make income in the form of net income from profit, with profit defined here for the sake of KISS (keeping it short and simple) as gross business income minus all business expenses. When there is no profit or when profit is insufficient to substantially support the private lives of business owners or is unattractive to investors, the business is at risk of imminent failure or headed toward failure, with the losers being the business owners, investors, employees and business-to-business vendors, as well as the regular customers and tax authorities, supposedly and hopefully, representing the general public interest. A business also needs profit-derived rainy-day financial reserves (set asides) for sometimes relocating, replacing deteriorated or outdated assets, remodeling, improvement, modernizing, expanding and competing as well as for surviving periods of disruption of or harsh downturns in business traffic and slack income or income droughts.
Granted, there is a reluctant domestic labor pool for stoop agricultural work, which should be available to immigrants to the U.S. from our neighboring nations, with a path to U.S. citizenship to them after 25 years or so of such labor, since this is physically highly stressful work people cannot do into late-age career or working years. However, whatever the government policy is regarding illegal immigrants in general, particularly should they be given stay amnesty, whether conduct-contingent permanent non-citizen residency without citizen rights or outright citizenship, they, except for their children born in the U.S. and those accepted into military service and completing it with an honorable discharge, should be barred by predetermined failproof law from Social Security retirement pensions, Medicare and Medicaid, so as not to have these programs be a magnet and incentive for illegal immigration and for them not to threaten further the solvency of these programs. In addition, they and their hosts, employers and landlords should, by failproof law (which will be challenged by unlawful immigrant defenders and attorneys), be charged registered unlawful-entry amnesty residency taxes and they (the unlawful-entry immigrants) should be required to register their unlawful entry presence in the U.S. by a deadline in order to qualify for unlawful-entrant or entry amnesty residency status. The registration process should include a small fee, finger printing and a DNA sample, among other identification and domicile information collection. Post-deadline, unregistered undocumented, or illegal, immigrants and their hosts, employers and landlords should be levied unregistered unlawful-entry immigrant taxes and charges to in part pay the cost of their apprehension, detainment and deportation. Sheriff, police and ICE departments and offices should be legally authorized to administratively seize and sell the assets of undocumented or unlawful immigrants, and retain all monies therefrom, in their names and possession and in the name/s and possession of others, whether persons or entities, again, post-deadline for registration of unlawful-entry immigration status and qualification for conduct-contingent amnesty for permanent residency without citizenship rights and with permanent disqualification for citizenship. Disqualification for citizenship for even those qualifying for and granted conduct-contingent permanent residency gives resolute notice that in no instance whatsoever, retroactively, now or henceforth, will citizenship be granted for any unlawful-entry immigration or immigrant — stay amnesty in the form of conduct-contingent permanent residency ought to be offered given the impracticality and imprudence of deporting 12,000,000-plus unlawful-entry persons complexly integrated into our society and economy. They should also have to pay into a health insurance, disability insurance and retirement insurance system for stay-amnesty unlawful entry residents, perhaps co-funded by Congressional statute by hosts of the illegal immigrants, including host churches and religious and other host organizations and sanctuary municipalities and states, and sanctuary-granting elected authorities — material supporters, incentivizors and settlement facilitators of unlawful entry immigrants and immigration — as well as the central governments of their native nations (for the latter, by law suits in international court). This will go a long way toward solving the illegal immigration problem. Illegal immigration is an additional economic problem in that, according to the most recent official government report on this matter, the taxes paid by illegal immigrants in toto are far less than the value of what they consume in public services (having cost $26,000,000,000 to the federal government alone while having paid $16,000,000,000 in federal taxes, per Center of Immigration Studies), Immigration’s Impact on Public Coffers – Center for Immigration …… burden (taxespaid minus services … year versus 800,000 would increase the dollar value of … Illegal Immigrantsand the Federal Budget A good deal of research) …www.cis.org/articles/2006/sactestimony072606.html, and much of the money they earn in the U.S. is not re-circulated and reinvested in the U.S. but is sent abroad, Economic costs of massimmigration (legal and illegal immigration …) … 2004 study by Bendixen & Associates 6 found that legal and illegal immigrants send a … this report… The results of this study … theU.S. send $30 billion a year in remittances …www.cairco.org/econ/econ.html, whereas the great majority of the money earned by their counterpart blue-collar U.S.-citizen workers in the U.S. is retained here.
Children of unlawful-entry (illegal) immigrants or migrants born in the U.S., and thereby Constitutionally made U.S. citizens by birth, should be conferred with compulsory dual citizenship (that of their illegal immigrant or migrant parents or parent and that of the U.S.) by statute legislated by Congress and remanded to the custody of their parents (in deference to and observance of the common-law principle of generally recognizing the sovereignty and intactness of the family concerning children) until they reach the age of emancipation, 18 years old, at which time they would be able return to the U.S. as age-emancipated, adult U.S. citizens. Only such alleged children officially documented (such as by a recorded official birth certificate) and confirmed to have been born in the U.S. should qualify for automatic return to the U.S. to exercise their U.S. citizenship as age-emancipated adults. If such a child is the offspring of a U.S. citizen and an unlawful entry immigrant or migrant, that child should remain by law in the custody of the parent agreed by the parents, where both are available, or with the parent in possession of the child, where only one of the parents is available. If the parents have married, or are unable to agree on which parent should have custody of the child, both parents may consider departure together from the U.S. to remain together.
In further comment on securing the solvency of the Social Security retirement system, perhaps a way to fiscally fortify this system while securing state and municipal government budgets and treasuries against busts from runaway and unsustainable pension and health-benefit obligations for their government-worker retirees would be for all federal, state and municipal governments to pay into the Social Security and Medicare systems for their employees’ primary retirement pensions and retirement health care, rather than for each division of government to have its own pension plan and retirement-system funding arrangement, per and within each state and for the federal government. This would permit all government employees to get defined pensions, not subject to the vicissitudes and whims of investment in the stock market and it would put a damper on pressures for special parcel (real estate) and licensing taxes and fees to sufficiently fund local government budgets and treasuries and correct problems or shortfalls with them. It also would derail efforts by self-contradictory patriotic fiscal conservatives, calling for the elimination, other than a replacement 401(k)-style stock-market-invested pension system, of 20-year-service retirement pensions for career soldiers and sailors, in a mortally high-risk & highly hazardous occupation.
Just like the Republican demanded and negotiated freezes on Social Security pension COLAs (cost of living adjustments: increases) and federal employee wages in part subsidy-financed the extension of the Bush-II-era giant tax cuts for the rich, still in place, under the Obama Administration, so too any flat tax would provide a big tax cut for the rich subsidy-financed by a loss of federal tax revenues from major reductions in tax on the high income earners under a flat tax, resulting in an underfunding or defunding of the federal social safety net and valuable and critical other federal government services provided directly to the public by the federal government as well as indirectly through the state and municipal governments by federal funds to them, federal funds in danger of being lost or significantly reduced under a flat federal income tax system. Herman Cain’s and New Gingrich’s tax reform plans, with even lower net tax rates than Perry’s plan, would result in even larger federal income tax cuts for the higher and highest income earners.
The current highest tax rate is 35%, scheduled to increase to 39.6% in 2013, for the highest income earners. The lowest is 10%, not scheduled to increase, for income earners with the lowest income subject to tax. Four of the 6 current tax brackets are from 25% to 35%. The lower two are 15% and 10%. In light of this tax bracket information, Governor Perry’s flat tax would result in a 43% federal income tax reduction on the currently top tax bracket of 35%, and, unless he excludes from the proposed flat tax the bottom taxable income earners currently taxed at 10%, they will incur a 100% increase in their federal income taxes under the flat tax system to help finance the 43% tax cut for the top bracket of taxpayers and tax cuts for the other three brackets of taxpayers currently taxed at above a 20% flat tax rate. This federal income tax bracket information was obtained from http://www.moneychimp.com/features/tax_brackets.htm.
On the morning of 10-29-2011 I heard a radio talk show guest who had attended an Occupy event say that he saw one particularly memorable sign, being carried by an activist, with the striking words “Capitalism is Socialism for The One Percent.” Incidentally, the Occupy movement is a populist rallying outcry in protest of gross and growing intolerable national economic injustice and in demand of economic justice — gross economic injustice and devastation resulting from the pathological and rabid financial misconduct of financial plundering and reckless investment gambling of the public’s money by major banks, corporations and high-wealth-controlling individuals subscribing to and/or practicing the financial Libertarian shortsighted economic philosophy of an unfettered free market and the primacy of profits and profits before people, the habitat, wildlife, planetary health and our planet itself.
Unfortunately, however, Occupy’s big-tent ideal is indeed attracting all kinds, including irresponsible and dangerous rogues, idiots and pariah hurting Occupy’s intended image of peaceful expression of its legitimate concerns about our political, economic and financial systems gone awry to the severe harm of our society overall, but to the financial benefit of the ultimately controlling relatively few rich and most powerful people and corporations, domestically and abroad. These problematical people and their misconduct adulterate the Occupy movement and distract and divert attention away from Occupy’s incisive and popular message. Also, a movement without a leadership structure, an agenda and explicit goals, which Occupy is said to eschew, is inclined to incoherence, chaos, aimlessness, pointlessness (apart from unpurposeful speechifying and emotional venting), ineptitude, discredit and disintegration or withering. In addition, Occupy activists should gather and disperse daily and not undemocratically squat, erect dwellings and domicile on and seize self ownership or possession of the public commons or private property or let itself be used as a roost, stalking ground, camouflage or hiding place for uncontrollable violent revolutionaries, anarchist, criminals, troublemakers, crazies and the such stupid to carry on and wreck havoc, otherwise Occupy will alienate from itself the sympathy and morale support of the majority of the citizenry, most of whom are employed, welcome and enjoy the amenities of a civilized society and enjoy shopping, indulging themselves and having a good time — they are not against small or ordinary businesses that supply their apartments, homes, plumbing, toilets, appliances, utilities, heat, furniture, public transportation, cars, fuel (but they may be ambivalent and uncomfortable about this and its sources and suppliers), clothes, jewelry, deli and restaurant food and beverages, groceries, electronics and gadgets, entertainment, infrastructure, etc., nor are they against public order, safety, cleanliness and aesthetics, nor against professional police protection and service and firefighter and emergency-medical-technician services.
The claim by some Occupy activists that pitching tents on and taking control over or taking over public or private property is an expression of their right of free speech is fallacious and a legally losing argument, in the same way that no one can claim hi-jacking police cars or taxis is the exercise of the right of free speech that is immune from legal repercussions. To further illustrate, legally, no one has the right to erect a dwelling or significant fixed structure of any kind on any real property, public or private, or use that property for any purpose in disregard of real property building and use zoning laws and ordinances by government regulating real property development and use. Not even can a big-money corporation legally set up shop and engage in any activity it wants on land it has purchased in disregard of land development and use zoning laws and ordinances instituted by government. Nor can one strip off one’s clothes and masturbate in public with immunity from legal repercussions based on an argument that such conduct is the exercise of one’s Constitutional first amendment right of symbolic free speech. Government has the right to control and punish potentially hazardous, damaging and blight conditions and behavior, which legally unpermitted and unregulated tent cities are inclined respectively to constitute and give rise.
Read Governor Perry’s income tax plan at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204777904576651330270547222.html.
There will be capitalism with a conscience or there will be no capitalism. Capitalism with a conscience but not with a dunce cap.
Folks, check out this tweet feed of 12-17-2011 titled ‘Rwanda’s Poo-Powered Prisons’ by BBC news, with a news video link at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16203507, something I added to my blog promoting a similar but bigger idea, The Fast Lane to Clean Fuel Energy Independence: the lead & bridge fuel to total clean renewable fuel-energy dominance http://powerticspowerpolitics.blog.com/2011/04/21/fast-lane-to-clean-energy-independence/. We can get off of dirty & environmentally dangerous & disruptive traditional fossil fuels abruptly if only we decided to do so & did so, at lesser energy bills expense at home, work & on the roads.
