class war | Blog on the Run: Reloaded

Sunday, April 11, 2010 11:35 pm

Gasping for breath

The deluge is not over, but the worst of it has passed, and I now have a wee bit of breathing space. So, let’s see, what has happened while I’m gone? Nothing good, it seems:

Man, Poland just cannot catch a break.
Not only are we whacking American citizens without due process, we’re having interagency spats about who gets to do it.
A federal appeals court rules against the FCC on Net neutrality, but the FCC seems to think there may be more than one way to skin a cat. It’s pushing ahead with (what appears to this layperson to be) well-thought-out broadband regulation, and when its critics lie, it is aggressively calling them out. Which is good, because there’s nothing riding on this except the future health of the economy.
I’m beginning to think it would be wrong to call the accidental killings of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq isolated incidents.
The most scathing, incisive criticism of the teabaggers I’ve seen yet turns up in, of all places, a forum dedicated to motorcycling. (h/t: DougJ at Balloon Juice) And here’s some research backing up the poster’s thesis.
Washington is up to its usual sound and fury on financial reform, but if “reform” doesn’t 1) get taxpayers completely off the hook for commercial banks’ losses and 2) hold the ratings agencies accountable for their role in the current disaster, then it will be meaningless.
Colin Powell’s former chief of staff claims Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld knew in 2002 that a majority of Guantanamo detainees were innocent but wouldn’t release them because admitting they’d screwed up on that scale would be politically disastrous. And how sad it is that all I can muster in response is, “Well, duh.“
Dawn Johnsen withdraws from consideration to be head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. This is a huge loss for the country, which desperately needs someone of her integrity in that position. And perhaps I’m wrong, but I think it shows Obama intends to head right down the trail of illegality blazed by his predecessor. (Because there are, and always have been, 60 votes for her confirmation, if Obama really wanted her. (Glenn Greenwald, who knows a lot more about this than I do, agrees with me, as does Jason Linkins.)
From 1983 to 2007, in constant dollars, the average wealth of the wealthiest 1% of U.S. households went from about $7.9 million to $17.1 million. During the same period, the average wealth of the middle 20% of households — the middlest of the middle class — went from $15,600 to $26,000. But … but … class war!
Tim Geithner says unemployment will remain “unacceptably high” for a long time, a fact about which he intends to do … nothing. I’m guessing he and I have different definitions of “unacceptable.”
A court says that if the government doesn’t want to try to prove it had a legal reason for an otherwise illegal case of wiretapping, then the wiretapping victim wins. Moreover, the judge rules that although George W. Bush claimed that the Authorization for Use of Military Force enacted after 9/11 allowed him to disregard the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, George W. Bush was wrong. So, for the record, a federal district judge has ruled that a sitting president of the United States committed a felony. Don’t all y’all go arrest him at once, now.
Westboro Baptist Church — the lunatics who believe bad things happen to America because we’re not crucifying gays fast enough, or something — went to do their thing in West Virginia on the occasion of the 29 coal miners dying. And the good people of West Virginia were simply not in the mood.
I have no idea who Cord Jefferson is, let alone what possessed him to go back and listen to the radio propaganda that motivated Hutus to massacre Tutsis in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. But he did. Not only that, he compared it with transcripts from Glenn Beck. Yeah, context and all, but damn, those are some creepy parallels.
ABC News outsources journalism.
Memo to Fulton, Mississippi: All Constance McMullen wanted to do was take her girlfriend to the prom. But no. I hope you held your head high in church today. I also hope you’re not mistaking yourselves for grownups.
Mines are going to keep blowing up until the CEOs that run them are brought up on manslaughter charges. Seriously. I guarandamntee you that fines alone are not going to stop this slow-motion genocide.
In Florida, at least, a boatload of attempted foreclosures may be based on fraudulent documents. Color me surprised.
U.S. forces murdered a wounded Reuters journalist and a couple of his would-be rescuers in cold blood and then lied about it. And nothing, but nothing, is going to happen as a result. John Cole, relatedly, points out that the Secret War in Laos was no secret to the Laotians, so to speak: American media may shield Americans from this stuff, but in other parts of the world people know which way the wind blows. (Even if the Pentagon “lost” its copy of the video.)
Sara Robinson asks a damn good question: Conservatives, are you with America or not?
Erick Erickson opens his mouth and removes all doubt as CNN apparently joins the Wall Street Journal op-ed page in requiring its contributors to have had lobotomies.
The Pope hisownself has been sheltering pedophile priests. Resign already, you criminal. And the pope’s own priest compares criticism of the Church over pedophilia to the Holocaust. Oh, yes, he did.
Big banks caught lying to public. Again. (Memo to Congressional Democrats playing at “banking reform”: Either you fix this problem for reals or voters, including this one, are going to hang the next crash around your necks.)
One of the more ridiculous defenses of waterboarding was that we did it to our own troops in training and it didn’t hurt them. The issue of training vs. real world aside, that training did, in fact, hurt some of them.
If you want to spread the federal income-tax burden more broadly, you’re going to need to spread income more broadly. Just sayin’.
Matt Taibbi takes a break from gutting the vampire squid to put his finger on one of the many things I don’t like about David Brooks.
We’re getting old, and by “we,” I mean “humans.”

I have no idea when I’ll be back, so this’ll have to do ya for a while.

Comments (4)

Monday, February 22, 2010 5:31 am

How the other 400 live

Filed under: You're doing WHAT with my money?? — Lex @ 5:31 am
Tags: class war

Just in case you were wondering, David Cay Johnston has the scoop:

The incomes of the top 400 American households soared to a new record high in dollars and as a share of all income in 2007, while the income tax rates they paid fell to a record low, newly disclosed tax data show.

In 2007 the top 400 taxpayers had an average income of $344.8 million, up 31 percent from their average $263.3 million income in 2006, according to figures in a report that the IRS posted to its Web site without announcement that were discovered February 16. (For the report, see Tax Analysts Doc 2010-3372 .)

The figures came at the peak of the last economic cycle and show that widely published reports in major newspapers asserting that the richest Americans are losing relative ground and “becoming poorer” are not supported by the official income data.

The long-term data show that under current tax and economic rules, the incomes of the top earners rise when the economy expands and contract during recessions, only to rise again. Their effective income tax rate fell to 16.62 percent, down more than half a percentage point from 17.17 percent in 2006, the new data show. That rate is lower than the typical effective income tax rate paid by Americans with incomes in the low six figures, which is what each taxpayer in the top group earned in the first three hours of 2007.

Taxpayers on the 95th to 99th steps on the income ladder paid an effective income tax rate of 17.52 percent, according to calculations by the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit research group that favors less taxation and lower rates. Taxpayers in this category earned between $255,000 and $451,000 in 2007, compared with an average daily income of almost $945,000 for the top 400, who paid lower effective tax rates on average.

Payroll taxes did not add a significant burden to the top 400, not changing the rounding of rates by even one decimal. With payroll taxes taken into account, the effective tax rate of the top 400 would be 17.2 percent in 2006 and 16.6 percent in 2007, my analysis shows — the same as not counting payroll taxes. As a point of comparison, about two-thirds of Americans pay more in Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment taxes than in federal income taxes. …

Since 1992, the bottom 90 percent of Americans have seen their incomes rise by 13 percent in 2009 dollars, compared with an increase of 399 percent for the top 400.

The annual top 400 report was first made public by the Clinton administration, but the George W. Bush administration shut down access to the report. Its release was resumed a year ago when President Obama took office. The Statistics of Income Division at the IRS created the top 400 reports at the urging of Joel Slemrod, a business professor at the University of Michigan.

The top 400 reports understate actual top incomes because of deferral rules. For example, managers of offshore hedge funds who deferred their gains may not be counted in the top 400 reports, which are based on the figure on the last line of the front page of Form 1040.

At least three hedge fund managers made $3 billion in 2007. It is not known how much, if any, of their income they deferred.

But remember, kids, if we’re going to avoid economic DEE-zaster, we must cut the hell out of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; we cannot raise taxes on the wealthy for that would be commiesociofascistictude.

Also, to avoid economic DEE-zaster, we must continue to tax income derived from work about twice as heavily as we tax income derived from wealth, or the commiesociofascistictudenoids will eat us in our beds or something, and if this means that you and I continue to subsidize the lifestyles of the banksters, well, is this a great country or what?