Just the Sin City Saint THINKING OUT LOUD!
“If you owe $1 million, I’m going to knock on your door,” he told the paper. “If you just owe $700,000, we’ll hope you get a job sometime so we can levy.”
Wage garnishment is normally the IRS’ most effective tool for securing repayment, but that tactic is useless against most of the people who are skating away with government money at this point. Most of them are wealthy enough not to work a steady job, so there are no checks to garnish.
[Q]: A third Texas president, L.B.J., created Medicare in the mid-’60s. Your hero Ronald Reagan campaigned vigorously against that, saying it would lead to socialized medicine, would end liberty in the United States. Who was right: L.B.J. or Reagan?
[Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz]: It’s not worth tilting at windmills. I don’t know. I wasn’t alive then.
Who was right? Who’s to say? That was in the before-times. I have no opinions on the before-times.
Rand Paul spent the first day of his official candidacy testily explaining to reporters that nothing he said before about 2009, when he began running for office, is in any way relevant to his presidential run now and so it’s all off limits. In one case, he even claimed that something he said in 2009 was said in 2007, pushing it back out of the acceptable-to-ask category, per his rules.
one of America’s most fundamental problems is that the alliance between the current form of Southern labor and the current form of New York finance is with us still. The Southernization of the Republican Party and the increasing domination of Wall Street’s over the nation’s economic life have combined to erode both the income and the power of U.S. workers. Unions are anathema to Wall Street and the GOP.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/30/after-a-story-is-published-a-minimum-wage-worker-loses-her-job/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_3_naShanna Tippen was another hourly worker at the bottom of the nation’s economy, looking forward to a 25-cent bump in the Arkansas minimum wage that would make it easier for her to buy diapers for her grandson. When I wrote about her in The Post last month, she said the minimum wage hike would bring her a bit of financial relief. (she’d need to earn nearly $12 an hour to live above the poverty line.)http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/17/the-25-cent-raise-what-life-is-like-after-a-minimum-wage-increase/In 1968, somebody could live above the poverty line with a family of three on a full-time minimum wage job.
In case you are still skeptical the rich receive benefits from government (for which we don’t make them pee in a cup or promise not to buy luxuries),
1. The mortgage interest deduction for big houses and second homes. Thanks to this tax break, the 5 million households in America making more than $200,000 a year get a lot more housing aid than the 20 million households living on less than $20,000. Deductions for mortgage interest incentivize people already capable of buying big homes to buy even bigger ones.
We don’t drug-test farmers who receive agriculture subsidies (lest they think about plowing while high!). We don’t require Pell Grant recipients to prove that they’re pursuing a degree that will get them a real job one day (sorry, no poetry!). We don’t require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don’t use their homes as brothels (because surely someone out there does this).
Laffer’s theories are so far detached from mainstream economics that “there is no point of contact,” said Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist … “This is not a wing of professional economic thought, … This is not at all the same kind of enterprise as what even conservative economics professors do.”
Republicans love Laffer, Krugman said, not because his message is simple but because it conforms perfectly to a preexisting limit-the-government worldview: “The point is, he’s telling them what they want to hear.”via
Arthur Laffer has a never-ending supply of supply-side plans for GOP – The Washington Post.
There was never any evidence to support strong supply-side claims about the marvels of tax cuts and the horrors of tax increases; even freshwater macroeconomists, despite their willingness to believe foolish things, never went down that road.
Since the 1970s there have been four big changes in the effective tax rate on the top 1 percent: the Reagan cut, the Clinton hike, the Bush cut, and the Obama hike. they predicted dire effects from the Clinton hike; instead we had a boom that eclipsed Reagan’s.
what unites the Republican Party, on this 150th anniversary of the murder of Lincoln, is that they are against the type of progressive legislation that gave rise to their party. Lincoln is an oil painting in the parlor, to be dusted off while Republican leaders plot new ways to kill things that he would have approved of.