GOP may OK tax increase that Obama hopes to block

Karl Marx, (1818-1883), believed capitalism was the next to last stage in the evolution to an earthly utopia, which would be ushered in through revolution; a revolution resulting from the tensions that existed between workers and the owners of production and commerce. According to Marx, the final stage of this evolution toward utopia would result when workers rose up in revolution to overthrow the business owners who were exploiting them through a capitalistic economy. We know Marx's "utopia" and other aspects of his philosophy by their more prominent name: communism.
“The history of all hitherto (up to now) existing society is the history of class struggles” -Marx
This crucial opening to The Communist Manifesto holds the key to understanding Karl Marx’s conception of history. Marx outlines history as a two dimensional, “linear” chain of events. A constant progression of class divisions being created and overthrown, one after the other, until the result is the utopian endpoint, otherwise known as communism.
In writing the Communist Manifesto, he argues that human history unfolds in a teleological manner; therefore it unfolds according to a distinct series of historical stages (changes), each necessarily following the other. These stages ultimately lead to a given Utopian endpoint, after which there will be no more change, an end to history. Marx thought that these stages can be forecasted, because there are scientific laws, which govern the progress of history. He believed to have discovered these laws and with certainty, predicted the demise of capitalism and the success of communism.
According to Marx, the course of human history takes a very specific form, class struggle. The reason for change in the aforementioned historical stages is class animosity.
Marx's predictions grew out of his atheistic worldview; a worldview that made him hostile toward private property and the accumulation of wealth through capitalistic means. Although his perceptions of the exploitation of workers and his solidarity with those workers has been rigorously tested and found wanting by historian Paul Johnson, his support for communism and his hatred of privatization and its corresponding freedoms have been a mainstay of the Left since at least 1917, when Vladimir Lenin took them to heart and threw Russia into revolution.

Rush uses soft ware called lexus nexus to fact check, this is a very expensive tool but he checks his facts . And is right 98.9% then he will correct it if he got wrong .and a full crew of fact checkers this is one tight organization, besides he makes me laugh.

It seems that the multi-faced GOP are only for something when it benefits them and are ONLY against something when it benefits them!

Obama campaigned on a pledge to end the tax break only for the richest Americans, but solid GOP opposition forced him to back down. now ask youself this, if you make under 1 million a year who is on your side?

Obama campaigned on a pledge to end the tax break only for the richest Americans, but solid GOP opposition forced him to back down. now ask youself this, if you make under 1 million a year who is on your side?

The right wing flip flop every day on every position the might make Obama look good!

I see now shameless GOP congress members like Republicon Ohio Rep. Steve Chabot are banning freedom of speech at public constituency town hall meetings by having police confiscating private cameras or ignoring questions they don't like. What is he afraid of? Can you imagine Limbaugh or FOX's fake outrage if Obama or a Democratic congressman pulled some crap like that on a Teahadists at Democratic town halls. LMFAO!! Like I said the REAL GOtP mantra is: Lie, Hate, Obstruct and Berate!!

Here is the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R0a8CcegxI

And this is yet another:

http://www.pixiq.com/article/ohio-congressman-bans-cameras-from-town-hall-meeting

@ Kevin: Still keeping the hope of the GOP lie alive I see:

1. If you subsidize the right wing, they pocket it spread the wealth to lazy employees and say screw the rest!

2. If you borrow and put it toward jobs instead of outsourcing them and pocketing the loans and subsidies, then you grow the economy and increase revenue and pay it back the way Clinton did! That is unless you claim to love “country first” but forget that when a Democrat is in the White House and purposefully try to tank the economy to regain power!

3. If you are the government you spend big to create jobs to stimulate the economy (Kinda like the Obama stimulus jobs that lying hypocrite Rick Perry is taking credit for to fool mindless Limbaugh ditto heads and narrow-minded FOX fans for votes ) And when the government spends on stimulus, again it gets the spent money back ten fold in sales and income revenue. However it is true that households who spend go broke because no one gives them multiple sources of revenue like the government! Households are NOT the government. So that is another right wing straw man.

4. My tax dollars went to people like Rush Limbaugh whom I guarantee paid less in tax percentile than I did. Ergo my money was actually redistributed to him or the like!

"This isn't an issue of politics. It's an issue of math. Social Security is supposed to be a tax payer funded retirement plan. You pay social security taxes in, matched by your employer which constitutes a portion of what it costs your employer to employ you. Those SS taxes are supposed to be used to fund your supplemental retirement. Last year, in order to appear to give workers a tax break, the employee portion of SS was reduced from 6.2% to 4.2%. The employer portion remained the same 6.2%. The 'tax break' was only supposed to be for one year. This tax break resulted in less revenue for Social Security, thus moving up the date which makes SS insolvent. So do you want less money for social security? What happened to worrying about whether grannies were going to get their social security checks? If the tax break is extended, less money for grannie. If the tax break isn't extended, you get 2% less money in the short term, but extend the life of the social security fund. Decision time, not politics time."

When running for President, Obama told Bush it was a bad thing to keep borrowing money, and should stop borrowing and cut spending. Obama told Bush he should not raise the debt ceiling, because it was not a responsible thing to do.

Just like Romeny said "Coorporations are people too" - interesting fascist outlook wouldln't you say?

Look at that. CBO estimates the deficit will only be $1.28T, this year.

How many hundred billion does that need to go down to meet the president's campaign promise of cutting the deficit in half? Let's be generous and say it's being cut in half from the approximate $1T deficit from the final Bush year.

The GOP/NeoCon/TeaParty folks won’t accept the facts that:

1. Barney Frank and the democrats were in the minority party most of the time from 1995 to 2007 and had no power to do much of anything. Republicans were in control of everything from 2001 to 2007, the height of the greed-soaked mess.
2. The CRA has no enforcement provisions and was only created to keep banks from discriminating against people who were in the area the bank was located. The banks could still reject loan applicants that were not creditworthy.
3. There were no problems like this with the CRA for decades until the republicans deregulated the financial industry and allowed Wall Street to get into bed with mortgage lenders.
4. The vast majority of bad loans made during the bubble were from non-CRA regulated institutions.
5. Fannie & Freddie don’t originate loans. They were only set up to buy loans that banks were responsible for making sure were not toxic. That system worked for decades until Wall Street and the mortgage lenders started their fraudulent activity.
6. Most of the bad loans made were purchased by Wall Street firms from 2003 to 2006 so that Wall Street could securitize them, have them rated fraudulently of a higher quality then make loads of cash selling them to investors.
7. Several Wall Street firms went under because of the toxic loans. Did they have a death wish? Did Barney Frank force them to buy the bad loans? No.
8. The default rate for homes with million dollar plus mortgages is about twice that of those worth much less. Are those poor, minority “Fannie, Freddie, CRA Loans”?

The real explanation is full of complex ideas like tax subsidies, derivatives, regulations, corrupt capitalism, and things the GOP/NeoCon/TeaParty Trash Conservatives can’t and won’t take the time to understand. For them, it’s easier to reach for their simple-minded, ignorance,, racism and prejudice-based explanation that once again, they have to pay for the goodies received by the dark, the poor and the undeserving.

They view health care reform the same way. They think it’s just “welfare” for lazy, poor, shiftless minorities who don’t have the gumption to find a decent job with benefits.

However, once a GOP/NeoCon/TeaParty Trash Conservative has a handicapped kid or a kid with a very expensive disease, loses their job, or in some other way becomes one of the have-nots, they’re the first in line asking for help from the government.

So you see, the GOP/NeoCon/TeaParty Trash attitude that is the driving force behind the WT Party is based on the same ignorance that conservatism has always depended on for its success in gaining power.

LMAO @ the cry baby Tom Romnek

FORBES: Top Reagan Advisor Calls Out The GOP For Lying About Taxes

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy advisor to President Ronald Reagan and a top treasury official in the George H.W. Bush administration, has committed the unthinkable – he’s called out his own party for outright lying about taxes.

In the Economix column published in today’s New York Times, Bartlett writes-

Historically, the term “tax rate” has meant the average or effective tax rate — that is, taxes as a share of income. The broadest measure of the tax rate is total federal revenues divided by the gross domestic product.

By this measure, federal taxes are at their lowest level in more than 60 years. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that federal taxes would consume just 14.8 percent of G.D.P. this year. The last year in which revenues were lower was 1950 according to the Office of Management and Budget.

Bartlett continues by explaining that the postwar annual average is about 18.5 percent of G.D.P. while revenues averaged 18.2 percent of G.D.P. during Ronald Reagan’s administration, at one point getting as low as 17.3 percent of G.D.P. in 1984.

Well, this certainly comes as something of a surprise.

After all, to listen to the GOP and anti-tax prophets such as Grover Norquist, tax rates are sky high and largely to blame for our inability to get our economy back on track.

And yet, in reviewing Bartlett’s numbers, we see that during the period of this nation’s greatest economic growth, we paid far more in taxes than we pay today.

Surely, then, the problem must be that we are overtaxing our corporations, hampering their ability to invest in new and exciting goods and services that will stimulate employment.

Nope.

Despite the Republican pitch that we must lower corporate tax maximums from 35% to 25%, it turns out that corporate taxes will contribute just 1.3% of G.D.P. this year.

And if you are looking for a rather extraordinary point of comparison, note that this 1.3% is but 1/3 of what corporations paid in 1950.

So, if we are at historic lows in personal income tax vis-à-vis G.D.P. and historic lows in corporate tax by the same measurement, what in the world are these conservatives talking about?

Ah… it must be a problem of competition. Certainly, America’s big businesses cannot possibly hope to compete with international companies if we insist on taking more in taxes from our corporations than the foreign countries take from their own?

Uh…no… that’s not it either.

According to Bartlett, the United States has the lowest corporate tax burden of any of the nations who are a part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development a who’s who of wealthy nations.

So, how is it that the Republicans are able to make the “taxes are way too high” argument and convince at least 50% of the country that this is the truth?

Aside from the reality that nobody likes to pay taxes and, therefore, any tax is too much tax, there is another explanation – the GOP relies on the statutory rates rather than the effective rates in order to make their incredibly misleading pitch.

Statutory rates are calculated by adding up the tax rates payable at the federal and state level, including payroll taxes. This is what leads some of our more disingenuous tax commentators to suggest that, were the President to have his way, taxes would be over 60% of our paychecks.

Indeed, if you were someone who earned at the top of the progressive tax rates on a federal and state level and then threw in the payroll taxes, and absolutely refused to take any of the myriad deductions and tax credits available to you, you might actually pay this amount.

The thing is, nobody ends up actually paying taxes at the highest end of the permitted rates- particularly corporations and wealthy individuals who are able to take advantage of any number of tax sheltered investments, deductions, deferrals and dodges to protect them from high taxes.

GOP claim that tax cuts raise revenues rated ‘False’

WASHINGTON – The Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checker PolitiFact took on the Republican claim that reducing tax rates has always produced higher federal revenues, rating it "false."

"Every time we've cut taxes, revenues have gone up, the economy has grown," Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) said Sunday on ABC's This Week, making the case for keeping taxes low as a way of reducing the federal deficit.

"We should first note that on its face, Walsh’s statement is not accurate," PolitiFact declared on Tuesday. "There was a small dip in 1983, after President Ronald Reagan signed off on a tax cut in 1981, though tax revenues increased the next year and all through the 1980s. More significantly, income tax revenues fell in 2001, 2002 and 2003, as President George W. Bush successfully pursued tax cuts."

The fact-checking website said that Walsh's central justification that the federal government eventually took in higher revenues years after the Bush tax cuts was an inappropriate causation, given that revenue increases are typically attributed by economists to economic growth.

"So saying 'revenues have gone up' isn't particularly meaningful in that context," PolitiFact wrote, noting that the Clinton-era tax hikes also led to higher revenues.

Walsh's argument reflects a central GOP mantra during a major national debate over taxes, spending and deficits. Party leaders invoked it in their successful push to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for high income earners last December. In recent months, they've frequently touted the claim that the U.S. government has a "spending problem, not a revenue problem."

The economic argument hinges on the theory of the Laffer Curve, which states that up until a certain point, lowering tax rates would increase revenues because it would lift the burden and encourage more output. But after that point, the theory continues, further decreases in tax rates would yield lower revenue.

Last November, PolitiFact took on the assertion by Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) that "raising income tax rates will likely actually reduce federal revenues" -- and also rated it "false."

Hey Deafsmith! Still blaming the collapse on Dems? Read this and weep:

"And so, therefore, I've called -- yesterday, I called upon the private sector to help us and help the home buyers. We need more capital in the private markets for first-time, low-income buyers. And I'm proud to report that Fannie Mae has heard the call and, as I understand, it's about $440 billion over a period of time. They've used their influence to create that much capital available for the type of home buyer we're talking about here. It's in their charter; it now needs to be implemented. Freddie Mac is interested in helping. I appreciate both of those agencies providing the underpinnings of good capital." - George W. Bush - Tuesday, June 18, 2002

I'll be waiting for your apology and retraction.

FICA is not Tax, It is Forced saving dedction from gross earned income (like A private pension) . One is supposed to get these Force saving contribution along with employers matching contribution (up till 2011) by way of monthly check from Social Security Administration with certail condition met.
President Obama is dead wrong on saying that reduction in Employees portion of deduction from 6.2% to 4.2% will help create more employment . but how ? There is no tax break to employer, He still has to contribute 6.2% of gross salary.Only this provision will provide more disposable income( i.e. net pay check) to employee & when he receive annul letter showing detail of his past wages & contribution, it will show lesser contribution of his Social security fund & accordingly lesser monthly income at the age his retiement. This is called "true Deceive bogus scheme" in prudent accounting jargen.

Ten years of the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthiest "job creators". So, WHERE ARE THE JOBS???

Pay attention to the posters like "." and "_." Note how they make comments, then refuse to respond with credible facts after their comments are shown false.

Note the near instant switch to name calling. The attempts to demean those who offer differing opinions.