On the House floor yesterday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) ripped into Tea Party Caucus member Pete Sessions (R-Tx) over middle class tax cuts:
“Do I detect your smirk to mean that you don’t think Republicans will vote for middle income tax cuts, Mr. Sessions, should I take it to mean that you will continue to hold middle income tax cuts hostage, giving tax cuts to the wealthiest people in our country?
The unfairness of it is appalling, the fact that it increases the deficit is disgraceful, and that it does not create jobs is a big mistake for us to make.”
ABC News: “As the clock ticks toward a tax hike on all Americans in 20 days, President Obama predicted Republicans would join Democrats to extend current rates for 98 percent of earners before the end of the year.”:
“I'm pretty confident that Republicans would not hold middle class taxes hostage to trying to protect tax cuts for high-income individuals.”
Mitt Romney, 10/3/12: I will not reduce the taxes paid by high income Americans.
Mitt Romney, 2/22/12: There were so many misrepresentations in there it's going to take me a little while. Number one, I said today that we're going to cut taxes on everyone across the country by twenty percent—including the top one percent.
Mitt Romney, 10/3/12: The key to great schools? Great teachers. So I reject the idea that I don't believe in great teachers or more teachers.
Mitt Romney, 6/8/12: He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It's time for us to cut back on government.
Mitt Romney, 10/3/12: Actually, it's a lengthy description, but number one, pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan.
Mitt Romney, 3/27/12: If they're 45 years old and they show up and they say I want insurance because I've got heart disease, it's like: "Hey guys, we can't play the game like that." You've got to get insurance when you're well, and then if you get ill, then you're going to be covered.
Sheesh…..it’s certainly become very clear that Mitt Romney is not to be trusted at all.
Full Text Transcript of the First Presidential Debate October 3, 2012:
JIM LEHRER: Good evening from the Magness Arena at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. I’m Jim Lehrer of the PBS NewsHour, and I welcome you to the first of the 2012 presidential debates between President Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee.
This debate and the next three -- two presidential, one vice- presidential -- are sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates.
Tonight’s 90 minutes will be about domestic issues, and will follow a format designed by the commission. There will be six roughly 15-minute segments, with two-minute answers for the first question, then open discussion for the remainder of each segment.
Paul Ryan is not a policy wonk, an intellectual, or any of the other relatively admirable things he pretends to be. What he is, is a liar, and the opposite of the fiscal hawk or the policy wonk he likes to portray himself as. Here are 14 quotes1 from Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman which prove the point, all emphasis mine:
“[…] he [Paul Ryan] is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest.”
“Look, Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.”
The president’s campaign is focused on boxing Romney in on his tax plan, a plan that studies have shown to be mathematically impossible. On Thursday in Virginia Beach, President Obama promised “not to limit the deductability of home mortgage interest”:
“I refuse to ask middle class families to give up your deduction for owning a home or raising kids just so we pay for another millionaire’s tax cut.”
And on Friday in Florida, Joe Biden warned senior citizens that Romney’s plan would force them to pay more in taxes on their Social Security:
“If Governor Romney’s plan goes into effect it could mean that every one of you would be paying more taxes on your Social Security. The average senior would have to pay $460 a year more in taxes for their Social Security.”
Romney has steadfastly refused to specify any tax credits or deductions he would target in order to pay for his trillions of dollars in tax cuts. But his contradictory promises — to cut taxes on the middle class without raising them on the rich or increasing the deficit — have earned criticism as to whether his proposal is mathematically feasible.Studies have found that it is not — unless middle class incomes are defined downward from the agreed-upon $250,000.
On the Sunday talk shows, the Romney campaign continued to struggle to answer questions about how the tax math would work. On “Fox News Sunday,” vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan said “it would take [him] too long to go through all of the math.” On NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Romney surrogate and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie retorted that Romney has laid out his broad vision but “[h]e’s not an accountant.”
The Obama campaign’s new approach is an attempt to force him to take a stand on whether popular middle-class tax loopholes are at least on the chopping block if he’s elected. There’s no convenient answer for the Republican candidate: taking them off the table would further chip away at the credibility of his plan, while leaving them on the table could alienate middle class homeowners and seniors from his campaign.
Included in this latest ad from Obama-Biden, is a small portion of Mitt Romney’s interview with 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley, focused on Romney’s idea of tax fairness (broadcast on Sunday, September 23, 2012). Watch:
I missed posting this quote the first time around (January 2012), and felt it was even more relevant now since Mitt Romney has become the GOP’s presidential candidate and has even nominated another plutocrat to govern with him. Enjoy.
Asked for his opinion on the growing concern of Americans re income inequality, Mitt Romney says it’s all about envy:
“You know, I think it's about envy. I think it's about class warfare.”
Oh, there is certainly a class war going on, but it’s being waged by the 1% against the poor and the middle class. But I digress.
When Romney was asked if it’s ever okay to have a discussion about wealth inequality, Romney said it was fine to do so in “quiet rooms”:
“It's fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like.”
In other words, keep such matters from gaining wide attention or as Mitt might privately say, “We certainly don’t want the servant class to learn that they’re terribly taken advantage of in order to benefit us (the 1%), so STFU!”.
Jesse Eisinger on the big banks as the big tax moochers:
Thanks to a leaked video, we know that Mitt Romney divides the country into those who pay taxes and those who don't, the makers and the moochers.
There is one perhaps surprising group you can put in the latter category: the nation's banks. Sure, banks pay taxes, but they pay a lot less thanks to a giant and underappreciated distortion in our nation's tax code. Moreover, this tax code distortion makes the financial system and the economy more fragile, prone to bankruptcies and runs. Banks profit, and the economy teeters. Great bargain, huh?
Democratic Massachusetts senate candidate Elizabeth Warren onRomney’s remarks about 47 percent of Americans in the now infamous, secretly taped video :
“Romney just wrote off half the people in Massachusetts and half the people in America as deadbeats. This is a separate category of contempt for half of our fellow citizens.”
Conservative Independent Andrew Sullivan was brief and to the point about the lies spewed by Lying Liar Paul Ryan during his convention speech Wednesday night, formatting and emphasis mine:
“Claim: We will protect Medicare!Truth: Ryan banks more savings from Medicare than Obama does and throws out all the cost control experiments that might - just might - bend the cost curve downward.
Claim:We will balance the budget!Truth:by slashing taxes and revenues and by boosting defense, they won't, by their own accounting, for another two decades. If we really cannot wait, how do two decades of more debt accumulation help?
Claim: we protected the auto industry.Truth: they wanted Detroit to go bankrupt.
Claim:the only thing the stimulus did was add debt.Truth:yes it added debt, but it did so in large part by tax cuts that Ryan approves of.
And so you have an alternative empirical universe in which a deeply radical platform that would transform Medicare for the young, while retaining it in full for the biggest generation, and increase the debt for two more decades, is portrayed as a multicultural rescue of Medicare and the economy.”
Watch as economist and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explains the potentially devastating effects of the Romney-Ryan economic plan if it were to be enacted:
Share this video, tell your friends about it. It’s important.
At a fundraiser in Connecticut, President Obama coined a catchy, very apt new name for Romney’s tax plan:
“It's like Robin Hood in reverse – it's Romney Hood!”
The president went on to explain:
“The entire centerpiece of Mitt Romney’s economic plan is a new $5 trillion tax cut. Governor Romney’s plan would effectively raise taxes on middle-class families with children by an average of $2,000 to pay for this tax cut, not to reduce the deficit, not to invest in things that grow our economy. … He’d ask the middle class to pay more taxes so that he could give another $250,000 tax cut to people making more than $3 million a year.”
UPDATE: According to ABC News, the term “Romney Hood” was actually coined by Priorities USA, a liberal super pac:
The term, which drew the loudest applause and triggered a flood of buzz online, was coined not by Obama or his speechwriters but by a team of Democratic strategists working for Priorities USA Action, which floated the concept last week.
While Priorities USA Action and the Obama campaign are forbidden by law from formally collaborating, they have been known to take subtle cues from each other on message and tactics….
Obama Press Secretary Jay Carney (press gaggle June 6) on raising tax rates on upper-income Americans:
“President Clinton, in 1993 -- and I'm old enough to say this from experience because I covered him -- passed a budget plan that included raising rates on upper-income Americans. At the time, Republicans in the House and the Senate, including the very leaders that we have today, decried that budget plan as one that would cause a recession, economic decline, increase deficits, all the worst possible outcomes. What happened? The longest peacetime expansion in American history, 22 million jobs, and a situation where the middle class saw its incomes rise, not just for the wealthiest Americans.
Let's fast-forward to the eight years prior to President Obama taking office. Those same Republican leaders supported policies that led to a situation where the record surpluses that President Clinton bequeathed on his successor were transformed into record deficits when President Obama took office. The prescription that the Republicans put forward has been tried and it was a woeful failure. ”
Carney also pointed out that the president does not support the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent, saying that President Obama “will not extend ... the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent.” When a reporter continued to press him on the issue of a short-term extension, Carney responded, “He will not -- could I be more clear? -- he will not support extension of the upper-income Bush tax cuts.”
Referring to the fact that almost all (literally) Republicans have signed Grover Norquist’s pledge not to raise taxes, Harry Reid called the 112th Congress the ‘Grover Norquist Congress’ on the Senate floor today:
“John Boehner could never go against Grover. Grover Norquist. This is the 'Grover Norquist Congress,' because Republicans shake in their boots.”
And don’t be fooled when you land on the page Norquist calls ‘What is the Taxpayer Protection Pledge?’. The only people Norquist is interested in protecting from taxes are the millionaires and billionaires.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Wednesday criticized Republicans in a 20-minute floor speech for blocking any bipartisan agreement on deficit reduction for the last several years, which he said was due in large part to their allegiance to Grover Norquist.
Reid and other Democrats have routinely complained about the pledge — taken by most Republicans — through Norquist's group, Americans for Tax Reform, not to support proposals that raise taxes. That GOP position prevented a bipartisan agreement to cut the deficit that includes the Democratic proposal to raise new tax revenues.
Obama Campaign Maps Romney's Tax Havens, (Almost) No One Notices
If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, did it really happen? That's what you've got to wonder in the wake of this week's (non-)coverage of Mitt Romney's tax haven use. Via Tax Research UK, The Hill reports that the Obama campaign has published a handy map of presumptive opponent Mitt Romney's tax haven holdings around the world. So Tax Research UK obviously noticed. But a search ("Romney tax havens map) of the premium Nexis database shows virtually no one else did. Agence France Presse ran a story the same day (May 1) and India's The Pioneer mentioned it in a story on May 4, but that's the sum total for the week. Running the same search on Google yields the Tax Research UK article and one at The Political Carnival, plus Bob Cesca picking up The Political Carnival and then Political Ruminations picking it up from him. Where is the U.S. press on this?
“Where is the U.S. press on this?”
Is the answer that the tax havens of a U.S. presidential candidate aren't important?
Not so much.
The real truth is the same as it always is in this country: our corporate media, which our founders considered important enough to convey constitutional protections upon, tries very hard, and with great success, to ignore stuff which isn't to the liking of their corporate owners. And that simple truth is devastating for any democracy.
Watch a fired up President Obama in Ohio for the first 2012 campaign rally and/or read the full text transcript below:
FULL TEXT TRANSCRIPT President Obama Remarks in Columbus, Ohio, May 5, 2012
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I want to thank so many of our Neighborhood Team Leaders for being here today. You guys will be the backbone of this campaign. And I want the rest of you to join a team or become a leader yourself, because we are going to win this thing the old-fashioned way -- door by door, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Ohio, four years ago, you and I began a journey together.
I didn’t run, and you didn’t work your hearts out, just to win an election. We came together to reclaim the basic bargain that built the largest middle class and the most prosperous nation on Earth.
Romney’s been running around babbling that unemployment should be at 4%, something that is just not gonna happen until we raise taxes on the rich. Former Secretary of Labor under Clinton, Robert Reich, responds on Twitter:
“Rom says unemp shld be 4%. I was Sec of Lab last time it was 4%. We got there by raising taxes on rich and investing in ed and infrstructre.”
In fact, Romney’s tax plan lowers taxes on the rich.
President Obama on how tax policy is unfairly tilted to benefit the very wealthy, or the reason that the Buffett Rule is necessary, and one of the major reasons for wealth inequality:
“I’m not the first president to call for this idea that everybody has got to do their fair share. Some years ago, one of my predecessors traveled across the country pushing for the same concept. He gave a speech where he talked about a letter he had received from a wealthy executive who paid lower tax rates than his secretary, and wanted to come to Washington and tell Congress why that was wrong. So this president gave another speech where he said it was ‘crazy’ — that’s a quote — that certain tax loopholes make it possible for multimillionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary. That wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior was Ronald Reagan.
"He thought that, in America, the wealthiest should pay their fair share, and he said so. I know that position might disqualify him from the Republican primaries these days but what Ronald Reagan was calling for then is the same thing that we're calling for now: a return to basic fairness and responsibility; everybody doing their part. And if it will help convince folks in Congress to make the right choice, we could call it the Reagan Rule instead of the Buffett Rule.”
Watch:
As you are highly likely to have noticed, President Obama also offered to name it the "Reagan Rule" to make it more palatable to Republicans. And to make the Buffett Rule more easily understood, the White House has created a Buffet Rule calculator so you can see how it works.
Senior campaign adviser to President Obama, David Axelrod took some very keen shots at GOP frontrunner, Mitt Romney, on CBS this morning:
“I think he must watch Mad Men and think it's the evening news. He's just in a time warp.
You have a guy who wants to go back to the same policies that got us into this disaster. He wants to cut taxes for the very wealthy, cut Wall Street loose to write its own rules and he thinks that this somehow is going to produce broad prosperity for Americans. We've tested that. It's failed.”
“I’ll pay higher taxes. I look at it this way. I can pay higher taxes and people can have jobs, or I can pay lower taxes and I have my kid’s teacher asking me for a loan, which is true.”
- Chris Rock, quoted by the AP at the Sundance Film Festival.
“I actually think that is going to make economic sense, but for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus's teaching that ‘ for unto whom much is given, much shall be required ’.”
- President Obama promotes economic justice while speaking to leaders at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, explaining the Christian version of ‘why we need to stop allowing rich people to skate on paying their fair share of taxes’.
“On the economy, the facts are these. When Obama took office, the United States was losing around 750,000 jobs a month. The last quarter of 2008 saw an annualized drop in growth approaching 9 percent. This was the most serious downturn since the 1930s, there was a real chance of a systemic collapse of the entire global financial system, and unemployment and debt—lagging indicators—were about to soar even further. No fair person can blame Obama for the wreckage of the next 12 months, as the financial crisis cut a swath through employment. Economies take time to shift course.
But Obama did several things at once: he continued the bank bailout begun by George W. Bush, he initiated a bailout of the auto industry, and he worked to pass a huge stimulus package of $787 billion.
All these decisions deserve scrutiny. And in retrospect, they were far more successful than anyone has yet fully given Obama the credit for. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.
The right claims the stimulus failed because it didn’t bring unemployment down to 8 percent in its first year, as predicted by Obama’s transition economic team. Instead, it peaked at 10.2 percent. But the 8 percent prediction was made before Obama took office and was wrong solely because it relied on statistics that guessed the economy was only shrinking by around 4 percent, not 9. Remove that statistical miscalculation (made by government and private-sector economists alike) and the stimulus did exactly what it was supposed to do. It put a bottom under the free fall. It is not an exaggeration to say it prevented a spiral downward that could have led to the Second Great Depression.
You’d think, listening to the Republican debates, that Obama has raised taxes. Again, this is not true. Not only did he agree not to sunset the Bush tax cuts for his entire first term, he has aggressively lowered taxes on most Americans. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts, affecting 95 percent of taxpayers; he has cut the payroll tax, and recently had to fight to keep it cut against Republican opposition. His spending record is also far better than his predecessor’s. Under Bush, new policies on taxes and spending cost the taxpayer a total of $5.07 trillion. Under Obama’s budgets both past and projected, he will have added $1.4 trillion in two terms. Under Bush and the GOP, nondefense discretionary spending grew by twice as much as under Obama. Again: imagine Bush had been a Democrat and Obama a Republican. You could easily make the case that Obama has been far more fiscally conservative than his predecessor—except, of course, that Obama has had to govern under the worst recession since the 1930s, and Bush, after the 2001 downturn, governed in a period of moderate growth. It takes work to increase the debt in times of growth, as Bush did. It takes much more work to constrain the debt in the deep recession Bush bequeathed Obama.”
- Conservative-Independent, Andrew Sullivan, excerpted from a Newsweek cover story. The quoted portion of the article focuses on President Obama’s job performance in regards to the economy.
“If I’m going to use precious dollars to reduce taxes, I want to focus on where the people are hurting the most, and that’s the middle class. I’m not worried about rich people.”
And yet, Mitt Romney’s tax plan benefits millionaires to the tune of $150,000 each, and billionaires $500,000 each, while it takes dollars away from the poor, and especially from families with children. Romney’s tax plan gives little or no benefit to middle class households, and the implementation of the plan would cause the deficit to sky rocket, all so Mitt Romney can buy the favorable opinion, and thus the financial support, of his fellow one percenters. Think Progress:
The Tax Policy Center released an analysis today showing that, contrary to Romney’s rhetoric, the overwhelming majority of the benefits under the plan would go to the wealthy. In fact, compared to the policy in place today, Romney’s plan would give millionaires a $150,000 tax cut, while raising taxes on many low-income families:
A sizable number of low-income families would see their taxes go up. For instance, about 15 percent of those in the $10,000 to $20,000 income group would get an average tax cut of about $140, but 20 percent would get hit with an average tax increase of $1,000, mostly because Romney would bring back the less generous versions of those refundable credits.
About one-third of those in $40,000 to $50,000 group would get a tax cut that would average about $400, but about one-six would face a tax increase of nearly twice as much.
Almost every millionaire would get a tax cut averaging roughly $150,000. As a group, those making $1 million or more would receive nearly half the benefit of Romney’s tax plan.
Romney plan hits hardest those making less than $40,000, and primarily those households with children, as he would undo President Obama’s expansion of the child tax credit.
And Romney’s proposal only gets more lucrative for those at the very top of the income scale, giving those in the richest 0.1 percent an annual tax cut of nearly half a million dollars. In 2015 alone, the plan would add $600 billion to the deficit.
Sounds a lot like the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
“It's a very clarifying vote. We can cut taxes for 160 million Americans, 98% of small businesses - giving them an incentive to hire long-term unemployed workers, and we can actually responsibly pay for that by asking roughly 300,000 people who make over a million dollars a year to pay their fair share. I can't think of a more clarifying vote - a clear vote - about where your priorities stand.”
“We Democrats put a $4 trillion dollar plan on the table. We had $1.3 trillion of cuts, and we had $1.3 trillion in revenue. Now, some of that revenue, we’re not asking that to happen tomorrow or the next day, it could happen in a year. This is a ten-year plan and longer. So we have the ability here to do something that’s fair for all Americans. But unfortunately, this thing about the Bush tax cuts and the pledge to Grover Norquist keeps coming up. Grover Norquist has been the 13th member of this committee without being there. I can’t tell you how many times we hear about ‘the pledge, the pledge.’”
“The top 1 percent pay 38 percent of the income taxes in America. You know, how much more do you want them to pay?”
- Speaker of the House, John Boehner, to Christiane Amanpour on “This Week’ yesterday, employing the ubiquitous right wing meme, the "Poor Rich People Mantra" in defense of Republican policies.
Boehner also implied that the Occupy Wall Street protests were about class warfare, and yet, in 2010, the wealthiest 1% of U.S. citizens held 70% of all U.S. financial assets. 70%. And still, the 1% don’t pay a fair share of taxes, skating by through the use of a tax code which favors the rich.
“A middle income household making between about $64,000 and $110,000 would get hit with an average tax increase of about $4,300, lowering its after-tax income by more than 6 percent and increasing its average federal tax rate (including income, payroll, estate and its share of the corporate income tax) from 18.8 percent to 23.7 percent. By contrast, a taxpayer in the top 0.1% (who makes more than $2.7 million) would enjoy an average tax cut of nearly$1.4 million, increasing his after-tax income by nearly 27 percent. His average effective tax rate would be cut almost in half to 17.9 percent. In Cain’s world, a typical household making more than $2.7 million would pay a smaller share of its income in federal taxes than one making less than $18,000. This would give Warren Buffet severe heartburn.”
“I think you earned every dollar, you should get to keep every dollar that you earn. That's your money, that's not the government's money. That's the whole point.”
The government, the big bad government, built and maintains the roads by which you get to work, to church, to school. That same government educated you, produced vaccinations for you, tested your water to keep you safe, regulated landfills...........well, you get the point.
Still, the anti-taxers seem to feel that they shouldn’t pay for the resources they clearly use. A pity we can’t permanently export Grover Norquist.
Paul Krugman on who benefits from current U.S. tax policy, emphasis mine:
“Taken as a whole, the US tax system is probably somewhat progressive — but not as much as you might think, especially at the upper end, and very erratically. There are a lot of rich people basically free-riding on the system.”
A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans, by a wide margin, favor both increasing taxes on upper income folks, and eliminating corporate tax loopholes in order to pay for President Obama’s American Jobs Act.
Want to help? Call your House representatives today, and tell them to pass the American Jobs Act now. If you don’t know who your representative is, go here to find out.
Full Text Transcript of President Obama’s Speech on the American Jobs Act
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, and fellow Americans:
Tonight we meet at an urgent time for our country. We continue to face an economic crisis that has left millions of our neighbors jobless, and a political crisis that’s made things worse.
This past week, reporters have been asking, “What will this speech mean for the President? What will it mean for Congress? How will it affect their polls, and the next election?”
Warren Buffett tells Congress to stop protecting the super-rich in an opinion piece on The New York Times:
“OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.
These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.”
While I admire Mr. Buffett for taking this stand, let’s be honest here……..Congress doesn’t do this out of any sense of benevolence. They do it because they’re paid to do it by the very super-rich citizens (a vast majority of which are registered Republicans) Buffett speaks of. Paid, whether it be via campaign cash, endorsements, or cash under the damn table. Paid.
I used to have some respect for Jon Huntsman (R-UT), seeing as how he seemed to be the least stupid of the current crop of Republican morons, but once he announced his campaign, and began promoting the lies so typical of modern Republicans, that respect quickly vanished.
I was therefore surprised to read that Huntsman had made negative comments about corporations that don’t pay their taxes. In Miami today, Huntsman called those corporations out:
“It's criminal that you've got some corporations not paying taxes. Like GE, for instance. That's got to come to an end.”
It’s truly pathetic that one little bit of sanity from a Republican is so unusual that it grabs headlines, but there it is.
At his weekly news conference in Washington, House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor (R-VA), responded to President Obama’s demand for tax increases via closing tax loopholes for the wealthy:
“If the president wants to talk loopholes, we will be glad to talk loopholes [but they must be] coupled with offsetting tax cuts somewhere else.”
In other words, no net gain in revenues, absolutely no tax increases on the wealthy, according to Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
Wondering if the ever whiny, billionaire kowtowing Cantor is still betting his money on the collapse of the American economy.
ABC News
pretends to be. What he is, is a liar, and the opposite of the fiscal hawk or the policy wonk he likes to portray himself as. Here are 14 quotes
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