Here is a list of the Richest people in America, compiled by Forbes.
Note that the Koch brothers, Charles and David, together have more money than Bill Gates ($84 Billion.)
Here is Forbes list of America’s richest families.
The two lists are confusing when seen together because the Gates family and the Bezos family are not on the second list but families with far less billions are.
Oh, well.
During the Eisenhower administration—the 1950s—the highest marginal tax rate was 91% for those at the very top. There was less income inequality then than now. The average CEO made about 20 Times more than the average worker. Today, the average CEO makes 270 times more than the average worker.
Here is a valuable article showing the decline in the progressivity of income tax rates from 1960-to 2004. In 1960, there were many more tax brackets, and those at the top paid a rate of 71.4%. Today they pay about 35%, not including loopholes and deductions.
Income inequality underlies much of the social and economic misery in our society.
Read “The Spirit Level,” by Richard Wilkinson, et al, which makes the case that greater equality creates happier, healthier societies.
Obviously the Republicans are not going to make a turn towards increasing the progressivity of taxes.
But it is a goal we should work towards.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When making historical comparisons about tax policies, I think it’s always better to look at effective tax rates, rather than just top marginal rates. My admittedly dim memory is that nobody paid anything close to 91% under Eisenhower, and that the effective rates the very rich paid were much, much lower. That said, effective historical tax rates can be hard to come by.
I fully support a top rate of 91%, as long as that bracket starts higher than my income!
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“Effective tax rates”?
What are the “effective” tax rates of the rich today? Or under Bush/Cheney? It seems as if we only mention “effective” tax rates when Republicans want to deny that the 1950s American economy was able to flourish so much under this huge taxation. But it did.
There were tax shelters under that 91% tax rate, as there are tax shelters today. But the “effective” tax rate in the 1950s was higher than the “effective” tax rate for the very richest Americans today.
Since the tax rates are marginal and under real progressive taxation the Americans who would pay the highest marginal tax rate would be in the .01%, anyone lucky enough to hit the very highest tax rate should be grateful to this country and should recognize that without previous Americans paying high taxes they would be living in a oligarchy where their ability to accumulate wealth was dependent on how corrupt they were willing to be.
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“But the “effective” tax rate in the 1950s was higher than the “effective” tax rate for the very richest Americans today.”
What was the effective tax rate in the 1950s for the very richest Americans, and what is it today?
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The top marginal tax rate during the Eisenhower years was 91%; it is 39% today.
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Yes. NYCPP was talking about what the “effective tax rate” was back then versus today (i.e. what percentage of overall income and capital gains was paid back to the government in taxes).
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FLERP,
The article linked inside the post shows how the progressivity of taxes has steadily and sharply declined since 1960, when it was 70%.
See pp. 12-13: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/piketty-saezJEP07taxprog.pdf
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FLERP!,
You are the one who said we should compare “effective” tax rates.
You said “I think it’s always better to look at effective tax rates, rather than just top marginal rates. My admittedly dim memory is that nobody paid anything close to 91% under Eisenhower, and that the effective rates the very rich paid were much, much lower.”
Is your argument that the highest marginal tax rate and the “effective” tax rate today are exactly the same NOW but they weren’t in the 1950s?
Let me take back everything I said so you can’t parse words.
I believe that the “effective” tax rate for the very rich TODAY is lower than the highest “marginal” tax rates for the very rich. Just like you believe that the “effective” tax rate for the very rich in the 1950s was lower than the highest “marginal” tax rates for the very rich.
So what? Unless you want to argue that the “effective” tax rate on the very richest Americans today is lower than the “effective” tax rate on the very richest Americans in the 1950s, then what is your point?
It seems to be that no matter how high the marginal tax rate is, the very wealthy will find a way to make it lower.
I agree. So what?
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I find discussions about tax policy to be a lot more intelligent and productive when they focus on effective tax rates. It’s a surprisingly poorly understood concept, but it’s a very important concept.
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Sorry, in response to your question, my memory (from Piketty’s book) is that effective tax rates for the “very wealthy” are now lower than they were under Eisenhower, although nowhere near as much as top marginal rates have fallen for that same group over the same time. Again, my memory on this is fuzzy, so don’t quote me on it.
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Consider this:
In the 1950s, the average pay of a CEO was 20 times that of the average worker.
Today, the average pay of a CEO is 270 times that of the average worker.
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Here is a good short article about tax rates for the wealthy: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/08/07/the_history_of_tax_rates_for_the_rich.html
The data in the short article comes from a new working paper by Pikkety, Saez, and Zucman (found here: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2017.pdf). The working paper is a bit on the technical side, illustrating how hard it is to do this sort of thing right, but folks might be interested in the figures near the end of the paper. Figure 4, for example (p 45) shows that the share of national income going to the top 1% hit its low point in the mid 1970s, well after the Eisenhower administration.
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Exactly!
Lowering their tax rate — and it IS lower now than it was in the 1950s no matter how you calculate it — allowed them to accumulate a vast quantity of wealth in amounts that weren’t true back when Republican politicians believed in democracy (see Eisenhower) and not oligarchy and getting as rich as they could by demanding that the middle class and poor settle for much less.
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Yes, I believe it is almost certainly lower now. My point was that it actually does matter how you calculate it. Because when you say that the top marginal rate was once 94 percent and is now 39.6 percent, and then someone points out that top marginal rates aren’t an accurate expression of the tax rates that are actually paid, you ideally want to be able to respond by noting what effective rates were in the past versus now. Because that’s the accurate measurement. Someone (me, probably) should look up what Piketty wrote about historical effective tax rates by income level.
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Sigh.
Why do you want to have the debate on right wingers’ terms?
You just acknowledged that when marginal rates on the richest Americans were higher, the “effective” rates were higher. And when marginal rates were lower, the “effective” rates were lower.
Since when does the IRS say “we aren’t going to have any marginal rates anymore, so you all just figure your effective rate and do whatever you want?”
The IRS sets a marginal rate. Rich people do what they can to shelter some of their income. The rate they pay will be less than the marginal rate. That is a truism no matter what the marginal rate is.
Why does the fact that rich people will pay less no matter what their marginal rate is have to do with anything except a way to distract from the matter at hand?
We need to raise taxes on the rich to levels that they paid during the ’50s. Including the estate tax (with a slightly higher exclusion but not the ridiculously high $5 million).
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Effective tax rates are the correct terms. If you have the facts on historical effective tax rates, you will understand what’s happening with tax policy better, and you will be able to combat right-wing talking points that don’t hold the water that they think they do.
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The right wing has never had any interest in genuine debate.
They just want to shut down debate. They will demand that you prove what the “effective tax rate” during the 1950s and today is. And how can you prove to their satisfaction was the “effective tax rate” is?
In a perfect world, where two people are discussing an issue and are both very willing to agree on basic facts, what you are saying makes sense. We haven’t lived in that world since the 1990s.
That is what “fake news” is all about. How can you get a Republican to agree to what an “effective tax rate” is when they will just insist that those rates are invented if they don’t help their agenda.
With historic marginal rates, the rates are clearly documented. That doesn’t mean that the Republicans won’t deny them anyway, but it makes it harder for them to do so.
The right wing talking points will always be that the very rich pay most of the taxes and that half of the Americans pay nothing, so giving the richest American a huge tax break and making everyone else pay more is “fairness”. You won’t get them off that talking point. The tax rate for a billionaire could be 1% and the tax rate for the people making minimum wage could be 30% and the billionaires will still complain that “we’re paying millions more in taxes than those minimum wage workers so raise their taxes to 50% and lower ours to 1/2% because our tax bill is still higher than theirs.”
To address the right wing claims of just wanting to be “fair” to the suffering billionaires, I find it useful to point to the fact that those “suffering” billionaires are being extremely greedy because rich people in the 1950s paid much higher tax rates than they do now and with those taxes we supported the strong infrastructure that allowed today’s rich people to accumulate so much wealth.
If the greedy rich people today demand that they should pay the lowest tax rate in history because they are selfish and not patriots and insist on being greedier than patriotic Americans in the past, then we should call it out. Today’s rich billionaires are the greediest Americans in the last 80 years. And instead of being grateful that they are paying far lower tax rates than rich Americans of the 1950s, they are so greedy and selfish and unpatriotic that they demand that their tax rate be even lower than the very low rate it is now.
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I don’t think you need to be hostile to the idea of accurately expressing the changes in relative tax burdens over time. But as Michael F. sometimes says, I think we’ve exhausted this thread.
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FLERP!,
Can you come up with data as to what “effective tax rates” were during the 1950s and more recent times and have conservative economists agree?
teachingeconomist talks about “how hard it is to do this thing right”. You can’t come up with the exact data yourself. I can look up any year and tell you the highest marginal tax rates and those are facts.
I’m not hostile to the idea of accurately expressing the change in tax rates. But how can you have ANY discussion about historic tax rates if you refuse to use historic data and insist we use “effective tax rates” even if no one can agree with that true “effective tax rates” are?
If you want to spend the next five years debating what the effective tax rates are so we can never get to the discussion of whether tax rates on the richest Americans are historically low or not, then I am sure there are many right wing Republicans who are happy to have that debate with you. They much prefer arguing that we can’t ever say for certain what any year’s “effective tax rate” is than actually addressing the bigger issue. That the rich are paying historically low taxes right now.
Unless you can present agreed upon “effective tax rates”, I’m not playing that game. But as I say, many right wing Republicans would love to debate effective tax rates with you so that they don’t have to acknowledge the truth.
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NYCPSP, you make the point that “fake news”/ rightwing talking points will prevent information on results of tax policy from coming to light [so why bother honing the info & making more effective arguments]. I’m not so sure.
I’ve been listening daily to “J Q Public” call-ins to CSPAN’s Washington Journal show for 2 or 3 years. Reasonable $’s-&cts analysis, repeated over & over, does seem to eventually sink into all but the most pathologically-rwnj minds. There is a sea change ongoing among conservative callers-in on govt-provided healthcare, for example. And I’ve begun to hear more of them take exception to Rep proposals that strike them as anti-middle-class. Today I actually heard a staunch Rep cite the ’50’s tax brackets & CEO-multiplier cites we’re discussing here!
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bethree5,
You said: “Today I actually heard a staunch Rep cite the ’50’s tax brackets & CEO-multiplier cites we’re discussing here!”
That is my point. He cited the actual tax brackets. That is what I am trying to do.
FLERP! is insisting that instead of using actual tax brackets that are there for everyone – like this staunch Republican – to see, we should cite “effective tax rates”.
That would be perfectly fine if everyone agreed what “effective tax rates” are in each era. As far as I can tell, they do not.
So what FLERP! wants me to do is cite this “effective tax rate” from the 1950s INSTEAD of using the tax brackets that the staunch Rep. used.
Can you imagine if that staunch Republican was citing the ’50s tax brackets and FLERP! said to him: “no, your use of marginal tax brackets from the 1950s is not correct and you should be using “effective tax rates” instead, which you can get from this book that was written by a liberal but I’m sure you’ll agree with me that all his facts are accurate. Say what??
Talk about distracting from the main point!
I agree with you about using facts. That’s why I don’t find it useful to spend all my time arguing with Republicans about “effective tax rates” and convincing them to accept them as fact, especially when we can simply look at marginal tax rates which both sides accept as fact.
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Flerp didn’t “insist” on anything unless you are having a private conversation. The suggestion was made that historical date on effective tax rates would be useful. It would. How easy or hard it would be for individuals not in the financial world to compile that information is pertinent but beyond me.
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cx; data
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speduktr,
Okay, I defer to your semantics. Both Diane Ravitch and I mentioned historic tax rates and FLERP! said
“When making historical comparisons about tax policies, I think it’s always better to look at effective tax rates, rather than just top marginal rates.”
And:
“I find discussions about tax policy to be a lot more intelligent and productive when they focus on effective tax rates.”
Here is where I disagree with you and FLERP! :
I find discussions about tax policy to be useless if someone claims that we need to look at effective tax rates but can’t actually tell us what the effective tax rates are and acknowledges that they are very confusing and no one seems to be able to come up with an agreed upon rate.
In my humble opinion, if you can’t cite the effective tax rates you want to use instead of historical tax rates, then you are wasting our time.
The only “discussion” that comes out of that is that we can’t discuss anything at all!
Discussion closed. We can’t talk about whether rich people should pay higher taxes at all as we are forbidden from doing so from people who insist that only the nebulous “effective tax data” is allowed to be used even if they can’t actually tell us what that is. And saying “read this book I’m sure you’ll find it someone in there” is not an acceptable answer.
Are you willing to concede that the tax rates in the 1950s on the rich were higher than they are today, whether you use the actual historic data or the “effective” tax rates that some scholars cite?
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“Are you willing to concede that the tax rates in the 1950s on the rich were higher than they are today, whether you use the actual historic data or the “effective” tax rates that some scholars cite?”
I just wrote a long response that disappeared in wordpress’s insistence that they didn’t know who I was. I am trying to figure out how not to have to sign in every time I comment. All of that aside, I don’t have to concede anything because I already agree with you as does, I suspect, Flerp. Wanting to include more data to bolster a response does not mean disagreement. I am probably protesting too much since I have no intention of even attempting to pursue that research. It is beyond me. I would welcome someone else who has the skills doing it. We have several people on the blog who are very skilled at providing research to support their opinions in education policy. I so appreciate their professionalism. I rely on it to formulate my own thoughts. Having more data on historical tax data would be valuable especially in tackling creating more equitable tax policies. The more we understand what has driven the growth in wealth and income disparity in both economic and social thought the better we will be able to formulate a policy that honors both individual and community interests.
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Yes, that was my point. I posted a graphic in another recent thread that shows the changes in average tax rates (which may not be the same as “effective” tax rates — it’s a technical and non-trivial distinction, but average overall rates certainly tell you a lot more than just top-bracket income rates, so it’s valuable data regardless—after WWII among different income groups. It shows that the tax burden on the bottom 50% of American taxpayers has been increasing more or less consistently over the last 60 years, while the burden on the richest Americans has fallen.
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that second em-dash should have been a close-parenthesis.
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“All of that aside, I don’t have to concede anything because I already agree with you as does, I suspect, Flerp. Wanting to include more data to bolster a response does not mean disagreement.”
Using more data to BOLSTER a response?
FYI, if FLERP! had simply said that, I would not have replied as I did. I suggest you look at very first response to Diane Ravitch and find where I should have understood that FLERP! was agreeing that the rich paid higher taxes in the 1950s and explaining that the “effective tax rates” BOLSTERED Diane’s comment.
FLERP! did no such thing. The comment FLERP! wrote did not “bolster” Diane’s argument at all.
That’s why Diane Ravitch wrote her response to FLERP:
“The article linked inside the post shows how the progressivity of taxes has steadily and sharply declined since 1960, when it was 70%.
See pp. 12-13: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/piketty-saezJEP07taxprog.pdf
If FLERP!’s original comment was meant to “bolster” Diane’s argument, then that was obviously lost on both of us.
By the way, for all FLERP!’s research, we still don’t know the effective tax rates that supposedly must be known before we can make such sweeping statements as the rich aren’t paying as much in taxes as they did in the 1950s.
FLERP!, are you now saying that you don’t know what the effective tax rates are? Because THAT was my main point, too.
Do you even know if the “average” tax rate you are now citing is based on real or “effective” tax rates?
How can you argue that it’s wrong to use actual tax rates and not not “effective tax rates” and then use any charts that you aren’t certain are based on effective tax rates?
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This dialogue is going nowhere, NYCPP. I’ve tried to explain that effective tax rates are “actual tax rates.” They are the tax rates that people actually pay on their income. They give a far more accurate picture of tax policy. I don’t think that’s a debatable point, but I can’t force you to agree with me. You are free to refer to and consider any tax data you like. If you want to talk solely about top marginal tax rates because you think it has more rhetorical bang for the buck, have at it.
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“In 1960, there were many more tax brackets, and those at the top paid a rate of 71.4%.”
This of course (along with the proliferation of deductions) became the basis for one of the arguments in favor of tax reform under Reagan, which we still hear today: the Code is too “complex.”
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The number of brackets has nothing to do with how “complex” the Code is. No matter how many brackets there are, it’s just a simple look-up table. In fact, no one has to look up anything these days because TurboTax does it for you.
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Probably more accurate to say that it has little to do with how complex the Code is, in the whole scheme of things. The least complex Code is one based on a flat tax, with one bracket for all. Calls to simplify the Code are almost always accompanied by proposals to reduce the number of brackets (as well as eliminating deductions).
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But, to be clear, I agree with your point that a multi-bracketed tax Code is not cripplingly “complex.”
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Calls to “simplify” the tax code are almost always disingenuous. What would really simplify things would be eliminating deductions, exemptions, credits and other tax havens – that’s where the real complexity comes in. The people calling for “simplification” don’t want that. Calls to eliminate or reduce the tax brackets have little if anything to do with simplification (as I said, it’s just as easy to look up your tax with one bracket as it is with 20 brackets – the government provides the tables for that, you don’t even need to worry about what bracket you’re in). Such calls for reducing or eliminating brackets have to do with making taxes less progressive. The rich want us all paying 25% (give or take) tax, but they want to keep all their deductions, credits and exemptions so they in effect would pay 0 while the rest of us schmucks actually pay the full 25%.
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Fact of the matter is if you or anyone is making excess of multiple millions, they should be taxed at a higher rate – 70-90 percent. This way the Koch Bros, the Bloombergs and the Gates of the world can be kept in check rather than having these neophytes creating social policy – especially in EDUCATION.
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What good are higher tax rates when overseas tax havens are the order of the day. The rich pay nothing. Their money is elsewhere. Yesterday, I read in the Times of India that the country struck a deal with Switzerland to provide investment transparency via third parties. Where’s our deal? There won’t be one because we live in an oligarchy with democratic façade. Our government exists not to provide for us, but to monetize us. I half expect the Alien and Sedition Acts to be revived to protect the oligarchy.
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This is part of the reason Flerp is probably bringing up effective tax rates which is the amount you pay taxes on after all deductions, etc. Right? My gut feeling is that rich people didn’t have as many ways to hide income in the 50s and 60s, so they actually paid a higher percentage of their income because their marginal tax rate would have been higher, or, to put it another way, more of their earned income was subject to tax. I know next to nothing about all of this stuff, but it is pretty clear that rich people have been favored by government policy for a long while to have built the kind of wealth they have.
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The wealthy should be paying more but the GOP prefer to take away Medicare, Medicaid and the supplements to ACA to make room for money for the wealthy.
…….
The GOP’s Tax Cut Bonanza Is a Major Attack on Medicare @alternet
…According to the Congressional Budget Office, the GOP tax bill will instantly trigger $400 billion in automatic cuts to Medicare in the next 10 years, including $25 billion in the first year after enactment alone.
These cuts are the result of a law known as Statutory PAYGO. That law requires an automatic cut in spending when Congress increases the deficit. The tax bill is, in Donald Trump’s words, “a big, beautiful Christmas present”—for Trump’s family and other billionaires. If the Republicans are successful in passing a tax bill that increases the deficit by $1.5 trillion, as they intend, the provisions of PAYGO will be activated.
To be clear: If the tax bill passes the Senate and is signed into law by Trump, nothing more needs to be done to cut Medicare. If the House and Senate do nothing, the cuts take effect immediately after the end of the congressional session and get bigger every passing year. A vote for this tax bill is a vote to cut Medicare….
Statutory PAYGO is a law that never should have been passed. It makes it much easier for Congress to force cuts to vital programs like Medicare by passing unrelated bills which then need to be offset….
The tax bill is one enormous attack on our health. It takes away the ability of those with large health care costs to deduct those costs from their taxes. It repeals the part of the Affordable Care Act that seeks to make health insurance affordable. The consequence of that is $185 billion less in health insurance subsidies and $179 billion in Medicaid cuts. All so Republicans can shower huge tax giveaways on their wealthy donors.
https://www.alternet.org/activism/vote-gop-tax-bill-vote-cut-medicare#.WhQ979lfU6g.gmail
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And attacks on Social Security are always lurking.
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When Trump’s tax plan causes an enormous deficit, they will put any and all social safety nets on the chopping block. Perhaps this plan is a devious way to ax social programs.
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It’s so obvious that I’m not sure we can even call it devious.
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The 1% gets more and more greedy and we the 99% aren’t paying enough attention to this!
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Agree!
(with the title)
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Diane, I haven’t seen mention of your review, “Big Money Rules” in the Dec 7th NYReview of Books.
A must read review of two books on the radical, libertarian right.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/07/big-money-rules/
“Big Money Rules”
Diane Ravitch DECEMBER 7, 2017 ISSUE
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
by Nancy MacLean
Viking, 334 pp., $28.00
The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time
by Gordon Lafer
ILR/Cornell University Press, 259 pp., $29.95
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HA. Some unions are requesting to get it in writing that members will get an increase in salary if the corporate rate is dropped to 20%. Corporate profits have been at an all time high for some time but wages have remained stagnant. Trump is an ignorant A** who just wants to sign something to prove how great a leader he is. I seriously doubt that he has any idea of what is in the ‘tax reform’ bill. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney has stated that corporations will do what is in their best interests. That’s a dead give-away about what to expect.
………………
Will a Corporate Tax Cut Lift Worker Pay? A Union Wants It in Writing.
Posted on 11 hours ago
…Jamie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase and chairman of the Business Roundtable, told the Economic Club of Chicago this week that if Congress had already passed a tax overhaul bill, “some companies would have made huge investments.”
“We know one thing for sure: Investments drive productivity, drives jobs and wages,” he added.
Mr. Trump has put a number on it, saying a typical American would see a $4,000 raise if the corporate rate was reduced to 20 percent from a high of 35 percent today, as both the House-passed bill and the pending Senate version propose. His Council of Economic Advisers says the increase could go as high as $9,000 for the average household….
A prominent survey of top economists from across the ideological spectrum — the IGM Economic Experts Panel — found this week that almost no economists agreed with the notion that the size of the American economy “will be substantially higher a decade from now than under the status quo” if the tax bill passed.
Critics note that wage growth has remained relatively sluggish over the past several years, even as corporate profits hover near all-time highs as a share of the economy, and the unemployment rate continues to fall to levels that economists normally associate with rapid increases in worker pay.
“Perhaps the most intuitive reason we know these cuts will fail to spark wage growth is that corporate profit rates have been historically high since 2007, while business investment has been historically low,” Josh Bivens, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, wrote this week….
In a letter sent this week to the top executives of Verizon, AT&T and six other companies, the communications union asked them to pledge a $4,000 annual pay increase for employees for every year that the corporate rate rests at 20 percent. The union, which has called the tax measure “an outrageous money grab” and urged lawmakers to reject it, also asked the companies to say that they will not take advantage of other changes in the corporate code to send American jobs to other countries.
The companies largely declined to comment or dismissed the letter as a stunt….
“My guess is, if I’m a Fortune 500 C.E.O., I’m not going to tell my competitors, who are sitting in the aisle next to me, what I’m going to do next year,” the White House budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday morning. “They’re going to do what’s in their best interest.”
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Here is a bunch of hooey coming from an email from the WH. None of the economic reports that I’ve seen say we can count on getting a 3% growth from this tax ‘reform’ that is meant to give money to corporations and the wealthy.
……………………..
Nine prominent economics experts wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin published in The Wall Street Journal explaining why both the House and the Senate tax reform bills are “pro-growth.” Both bills would spur the investment and economic activity ultimately needed to drive down the cost of reform. A Wall Street Journal editorial citing the letter agrees on that point: “A mere four years of 3 percent growth – the U.S. historical norm – could fill a $1 trillion hole.”
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Seth does a good job of telling the truth. The phoniness of the tax plan for the middle class comes up.
………………………
Trump Stands by Roy Moore, Pushes GOP Tax Plan: A Closer Look
Late Night with Seth Meyers
Published on Nov 27, 2017
Seth takes a closer look at President Trump going all in on backing the accused sexual predator running for Senate in Alabama.
https://youtu.be/zs34ko3ZF7s
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Here is another ‘sweet’ posting that just came from the WH. Isn’t this tax reform just wonderful for the middle class? I can hardly wait until there are no medical deductions and funding for Medicare is cut. Teachers don’t need that troublesome $250 tax deduction. Wow. I can hardly wait to dream up uses for all those thousands of dollars that I will get.
………….
“GOP SHOULD UNITE FOR LEGACY TAX-REFORM VOTE”
-Bernie Marcus in The Hill
Bernie Marcus, chairman of the Marcus Foundation and retired co-founder of The Home Depot, writes in The Hill that delivering tax relief to the American people is “a legacy for which every U.S. senator should be remembered.” Marcus suggests Republicans “focus on the bill, not the shills” and look at the facts: Doubling the zero tax rate, doubling the child tax credit, and expanding the 12 percent bracket would save middle-class taxpayers thousands per year.
“That’s a huge relief for the four-fifths of working Americans who live paycheck-to-paycheck,” says Marcus. “For many senators, this will be a legacy-cementing vote for which they will be remembered and thanked long after they’re gone.”
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Complete scum. I confess I find it difficult to care much about education-specific issues when the earth beneath 99% of Americans’ feet is collapsing.
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I just watched on a Rachel Maddox show the vote in the Senate Budget Committee. It was disrupted by protesters chanting, “Don’t kill us, kill the bill.”
They were dragged out. 36 were arrested.
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Correct me if you disagree, but this seems to me to be the single biggest legislative assault on the American people in the lifetime of anyone alive.
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Corporations need to have their tax loopholes closed. What good is lowering the corporate tax rate to 20% when a company can legally pay no taxes? What will happen to the economy if this horrible tax ‘reform’ bill is passed? [Ryan made a case for corporate tax reform? How long ago was he bought off?]
……………………
GE FILED 57,000-PAGE TAX RETURN, PAID NO TAXES ON $14 BILLION IN PROFITS – WEEKLYSTANDARD.COM
1:11 PM, NOV 17, 2011 | By JOHN MCCORMACK
General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn’t pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.
The fact that GE paid no taxes in 2010 was widely reported earlier this year, but the size of its tax return first came to light when House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan (R, Wisc.) made the case for corporate tax reform at a recent townhall meeting. “GE was able to utilize all of these various loopholes, all of these various deductions–it’s legal,” Ryan said. Nine billion dollars of GE’s profits came overseas, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. tax law. GE wasn’t taxed on $5 billion in U.S. profits because it utilized numerous deductions and tax credits, including tax breaks for investments in low-income housing, green energy, research and development, as well as depreciation of property.
http://tws.io/1Xr5iF5
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This is from the Onion…a JOKE! (Not far from the truth.)
………………………….
NEWS IN BRIEF
New GOP Plan Offers Tax Breaks On All Contributions Tucked Into Congressmen’s Suit Breast Pocket
WASHINGTON—In an effort to motivate Americans into giving more generously, a new GOP plan unveiled Tuesday would offer generous tax breaks on all contributions tucked into congressmen’s suit breast pockets. “Under this new proposal, Americans would be afforded the ability to write off any donation that is coolly slipped into the breast pocket of a congressman’s suit,” said Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), explaining that if the plan passed, taxpayers would receive even greater deductions for larger wads slid into elected representative’s front pocket with a wink and a nod. “This should hopefully provide much-needed incentive to Americans to palm off larger denominations while shaking their senators’ or representatives’ hands.” McConnell went on to say that supplemental tax credits would also be provided on each luxury car belonging to the keys that just happen to appear on a congressman’s desk.
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