“We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”

Leona Helmsley’s former housekeeper attributed the above to Helmsley during the 1989 tax evasion trial of the billionaire hotel operator and real estate investor, known as the Queen of Mean.

Major U.S. corporations with multi-national operations also avoid paying taxes and activists have recently begun protesting corporate tax dodgers. On April 18 – federal income tax filing day – one such protest took place at Bolingbrook’s Bank of America (700 East Boughton Road).

To learn how U.S. laws and regulations allow corporations to pay little or no U.S. taxes because of overseas tax heavens and other loopholes, please go to the following links:

http://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2011/02/bank-of-america-targeted-by-us-uncut.html

http://ctj.org/ctjinthenews/2011/02/think_progress_you_have_more_money_in_your_wallet_than_bank_of_america_pays_in_federal_taxes.php

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WHEN WILL THE DUPAGE TOWNSHIP, STATE AND FEDREALGOVERNMENT BE TRANSPARENT? The Need for Government Transparency is need NOW !!!!!!

The public needs to "see through" government workings in order to know exactly what goes on when elected public officials transact public business. When government is transparent, citizens can more fully participate in their government and hold their elected officials accountable for decisions that affect their daily lives. Corruption of the system and undue influence is also less likely when there is oversight by an informed citizenry.

Federal and State Government Transparency

Can higher taxes reduce the deficit?

After yesterday speech at George Washington University, I did some researching and this what I found out. Some of President Barack Obama’s deputies say he wants to tackle the budget deficit by raising taxes on wealthy people and oil companies, but there’s not much evidence that increased taxation can significantly reduce the annual flood of red-ink, now amounting to roughly $1,500 billion, or 40 percent of federal spending.
“This budget deficit is way too large to be solved by tax increases,” said Brian Riedl, an economist at the right-of-center Heritage Foundation.
Even optimists aren’t reassuring. “The first thing you have to ask is ‘Are you going to cut spending? said Stan Collender, a budget expert and a managing director at the P.R. firm, Qorvis Communications. “If not, you have to make up a gap of about 5 percent of GDP … you’re asking a lot.”
The deficit is being driven by the high cost of popular entitlement programs, such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, not by the relatively smaller discretionary programs, such as defense, environmental regulation and education. But the underlying problem is not economics, say advocates and experts. It is the ballot-box reward for politicians who keep spending larger amounts of taxpayer funds, no matter how much revenue comes in from taxpayers.

Tax increases can’t close the gap because any new taxes will spur further spending, argues Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University. Politicians want to be reelected, and tax-increases make reelection more difficult, so “they offset the negative political effect of [imposing] higher taxes by increasing spending,” said Vedder, who has tracked taxes and spending from just after World War II until 2009. During that period, he said, every $1.00 of increased tax-revenue spurred federal spending by roughly $1.17.

Obvious and painful tax increases, such as boosts in income-tax rates, are more likely to spur spending, he said. “Dollar for dollar, you get more political damage by raising income taxes than by raising taxes on corporations,” said Vedder.
Vedder’s analysis suggests that even if every dollar of new tax-revenue were to spur government spending by merely 50 cents, the deficit would be reduced by only 50 cents for every new tax-dollar, assuming nothing else changes.
The scale of the current deficit is another problem. Until the November election, President Obama has supported an end to the lower tax rates won by President George W. Bush. If the the Bush-era taxes on people earning more than $250,000 were boosted from 33 percent up to almost 40 percent, as many Democrats urge, the estimated 10-year deficit of $13,600 billion would reduced by only five percent, assuming the government did not increase spending elsewhere, Riedl noted.
Another common target for a tax hike are oil companies. Currently, the industry gets about $4 billion in federal tax breaks each year. But those tax breaks are similar to the investment-related tax rules governing other small and large companies, such as Microsoft, Starbucks and General Motors, said Stephen Comstock, manager of tax policy at the D.C.-based American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and gas industries. If the federal government denied the oil and gas industry’s use of those standard tax-breaks, it would shrink exploration, cut jobs, increase reliance on foreign oil, and shrivel the taxes paid by energy companies, supplies, workers and their customers, he said.
Similarly, Riedl argued that a 20 percent tax on sales would close the deficit, but only on paper. If imposed, a massive sales-tax would choke the economy and crimp revenues, he said.
There’s much evidence for this dynamic feedback between taxes and revenues, he said. For example, U.S. income-tax rates in the 1960s reached up to 91 percent, and dipped to 33 percent after 2000, but tax revenues never rose above 21 percent of gross domestic product, he said. The ceiling exists because higher tax-rates cause people to change their work, to move assets or to change business, so reducing taxes paid in the treasury, he said. “The higher the rates, the more you shrink the tax base,” he said.
The recession has temporarily pushed revenues down to 15 percent of the economy, widening the deficit. But those revenues will surge back to 18 percent as the economy recovers, assuming current taxes remain, he said.
However, that’s still far short of federal spending, which now amounts to 25 percent of the economy, he said.
Cuts to spending programs would also hurt the economy, so curbing taxes revenues, warned Jagasdeesh Gokhale, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute. That damned-if-you do, damned-if-you-don’t problem exists because benefit-cuts would shrink consumer spending and consumption, which is now roughly 75 percent of the economy. The resulting cuts to consumption would reduce economic activity and tax-revenues, he said. “We are now in a situation were both tax-increases and benefit-cuts would hurt… because the economy is basically 75 percent consumption,” he said.
The deficit is also being boosted by growing interest-payments on the fast-growing debt. Any attempt to erode the debt by stimulating inflation won’t work, Reidl said, because the international “bankers are smart… [and] they’ll raise interest rates to match inflation.”
But even faster economic growth can’t close the deficit, because the major entitlement programs grow in tandem with the economy, Gokhale said. “We need to grow [the economy] fast, but the faster growth will worsen our entitlement problem” because those programs pay to beneficiaries when workers’ productivity rises. The entitlement programs should be modified to ensure that benefits are linked to retired beneficiaries’ past productivity, not to the subsequent generation’s current productivity, he said.
“There’s no escape from hard choices,“ he said.
The only fixes, said Riedl, are reforms to the entitlement programs. Those reforms, he said, could curb benefits to wealthier individuals and also delegate money and control to individual recipients. If Medicare is reformed to allow efficiency-boosting marketplace pressures, for example, beneficiaries would reap a large slice of the efficiency improvements, and the overall burden would be reduced, he said.
“I’m not sure I see a grand [budget] compromise out there yet…. because there are not any events that gives politicians the ability to move from their positions” of either opposing tax increases or spending cuts, Collender said. A refusal by foreign bankers to fund the deficits, or deficit-driven inflation would likely prompt action, he said. Politicians would “hold hands and jump of the cliff together,” he said.
Short of those disasters, politicians are simply using the threat of a damaging deficit to advance their normal goals, such as cutting programs or raising taxes, he said. “The budget deficit is everyone’s boogyman,” he said.

Are women under attack?

You tell me, when our congress wants to do nothing more than eliminate or defund to the point of being ineffective programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, WIC, Workforce funding and Planned Parenthood............all programs that benefit women by either keeping them healthy or from being hungry and homeless it seems to me that Women are the target. I would like to say that in this 21st Century that we treat all workers the same, but Women make only .77 for every dollar a Man makes for doing the same work. Yes some could say it is the fault of the very women that are being paid less as they don't negotiate as well for wages and men do but is that fair? Women have lost ground in the political process as well, we have fewer women in congress, at every level of government. It is no coinsidence that we are under attack. Women need to organize now more than ever for the our own future and the future of our children.

What a Dictionary Can Teach Us About Wisconsin

From the American Heritage Dictionary: "coup (kōō) noun. A brilliantly executed stratagem." That word came to mind recently, so I looked it up. Following that, a coup d’état is defined by American Heritage as, "A sudden, unconstitutional overthrow of a government by a group of persons in or previously in authority."

Flipping a few pages further: "fascism (făsh' iz əm) noun. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Words are important. They matter. Watch what's going on in Wisconsin and think about the definitions of those words.

The State of Wisconsin, like so many other states, counties, cities, townships and villages, has a revenue problem. The causes are many: a depressed economy, unemployment, foreclosures, international competition. But let's go deeper: lax regulation that led to craps-table banking practices, which led to the bank meltdown of 2008, which led to no credit, which led to businesses closing up, which led to layoffs, which led to. . .well, you get the idea.

So the Republican governor of Wisconsin and his freshly-minted Tea Party majority in the state legislature has decided that the problem is not because of a failure of business or banking, but it's because of greedy police officers, firefighters, and schoolteachers. There's your cast of villains, Wisconsin! It's this group of thousandaires who are making life difficult for the millionaires because they have the effrontery to form unions! And we all know unions are bad because they don't vote Republican! To the ramparts, teabag-wavers! The schoolteacher-firefighter cabal must be broken!

Governor Scott Walker has become the new symbol of Wisconsin, and that saddens me because I like Wisconsin. It's full of nice people who live in a lovely state. But now their government has been taken over by the extreme right, through the merging of state and business leadership.

Wait...I think I've read that somewhere before. Maybe in a dictionary.

The business leadership part of that equation is a money spigot known as the Koch brothers. Charles and David Koch have been pouring millions of dollars into anti-regulatory, anti-union, and generally anti-government projects for years. The tea-party phenomenon is their most successful project, and the scorched-earth behavior in Wisconsin is their logical next step. It's significant that the prank phone call Governor Walker received last week got through to him because the caller identified himself as David Koch and demanded to talk to Walker. Of course, Walker took the call and chatted warmly with the person he thought was his political godfather.

The Republicans' gambit in Wisconsin is a coup, a brilliant stratagem to dismantle the government, which is what the modern Republican Party stands for. And as they move toward their extreme right wing, merging state and business leadership, we are going to wish we spent more time reading the dictionary and learning the meaning of the other F-word.

The Republican Congress and its Budget Dance

To nobody's surprise, the new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives set about breaking the furniture. After their Constitution-reading stunt to open the new session (to which few of them paid attention), they forged ahead on their great crusade to cut the budget. Grab the green eyeshades and sharpen the red pencils! This government costs too much, they cried. We got trouble right here, with a capital T, and that rhymes with B, and that stands for Budget!

And like Harold Hill, the con man in "The Music Man" who inspired that memorable line, the Republican leadership is selling us vaporware. The Republicans care little about cutting the budget: we know this because they danced happily during the George Bush years piling up staggering deficits. I attended a "town meeting" last fall at which 13th District Representative Judy Biggert appeared. After reciting talking points about the spendthrift habits of the Democratic majority, she was asked where she was when enormous tax cuts were passed for the wealthy while spending increased under Bush. She stammered that there was blame all around, thereby avoiding responsibility, and choosing instead to carp about the cost of road construction signs.

Since Biggert won the election we're unlikely to see her again. She prefers to spend her time among banks and insurance companies, not among annoying people who bother her with stories about losing their jobs, their medical insurance, and their homes. The budget must be cut! The banks have told me so!

The Republicans came up for air this week and announced that they want to cut the federal budget by $61 billion in "discretionary spending". This means that fixed-spending programs like Social Security won't be touched, but agencies that annoy the Republicans' corporate patrons (like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission) will see their budgets slashed.

The timing is no accident. The federal government's budget process requires that a funding act be signed by March 4th. There's not much time to work out a compromise: the Republicans want to play chicken with a government shutdown like they did when Newt Gingrich led them over a cliff.

Meanwhile, China and India are eating our lunch as they build their industry and their infrastructure, and we're wasting time as we watch our industries crumble. "Liberty!" the Republicans cry. Of course, "liberty" to them means the ability to make more money, and if you and your kids get pushed off the road, well, then you got in their way. It could be that when they were robotically reading the Constitution a few weeks ago they skipped over this part:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Maybe Biggert was right. There's nothing in there about road-construction signs.

What Libraries and Health Care Have in Common: Opponents

I have a long commute to work, typically an hour and a half each way. It's been even longer this winter with all the snow. Several years ago a friend suggested that I listen in my car to recorded books. I now go through a book every week or two, and the staff at Bolingbrook's Fountaindale Library treat me like an old friend since they see me so often.

The book I just finished is "Revival" by Richard Wolffe, subtitled "The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House." Though the title sounds like an action movie, it's actually the story of President Obama's steady hand and sense of purpose as events swirl around him. The White House's "revival" was the long-delayed passage of the health-care act in March of last year. In the face of pure obstruction by Republicans, hundreds of millions of dollars spent by anti-healthcare lobbyists, and a shallow, argumentative news media, the president kept a fundamental campaign promise.

President Obama also spent several months after his inauguration in national-security sessions planning a long-term strategy for the Afghanistan war and the removal of combat troops from Iraq. He was criticized for "dithering" on the war by Dick Cheney, which was rich -- Cheney and George Bush dithered for seven years in Afghanistan. As Obama said once in a press conference, "I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak." This is unlike George Bush, who didn't care much about his words before he spoke. The result was the tragic war in Iraq that Obama is now cleaning up, fulfilling his other fundamental promise.

This audiobook is one of dozens I've been able to listen to over the last few years. I wanted to go back to the library and pick up some more, but I remembered that Fountaindale Library is closed now for a few weeks to move into its new building. The new building is not just a bigger structure, but a true 21st Century facility that is certified energy-efficient and expandable for generations. It's the very definition of the common good funded by our tax dollars: a facility that expands opportunity for all of us and all of our children to read, learn, and think.

But that didn't matter much to local Republicans a couple of years ago when the library referendum was on the ballot. They argued that the library was too expensive and that the money would be better spent buying Book-Of-The-Month-Club subscriptions. Like their obstructionist cousins in Washington, local Republicans campaigned against expanding the library. But the people spoke and now Bolingbrook is about to open a technological showpiece that is not just a building full of books, but a true learning center holding the printed and electronic word in a structure that also carries a certificate of energy efficiency.

Electoral struggles for the common good, whether for health-care availability, stopping the waste of our precious military, or expanding libraries, are all long slogs. But when I think about President Obama's patience and determination in working for the common good, I don't worry so much about long slogs because I've seen that the time and the struggles are worth it.

Especially when I get to listen to a new book on my own long slog to work.

Top 10 reasons to become a DuPage Township Democratic Organization Member

10. Have fun. (We enjoy our meetings and each other.)
9. Stay informed about and involved in current issues.
8. Have your ideas be given serious consideration to solve problems.
7. Meet people of common beliefs and interests.
6. Be involved in the democratic process at the local, state, and national levels.
5. Help produce an informed electorate.
4. Network with others and perhaps prepare to run for political office yourself one day.
3. Do your part in preserving our democracy for future generations.
2. Be in the political "know."
1. Make a difference...in yourself...in your community...and in your world.