Year: 2015

Worker loses her job

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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.

Government Handouts The Rich Get

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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.

Making the poor prove they’re worthy

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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).

Arthur Laffer – supply-side plans for GOP

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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.

A major party gone mad?

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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.

“… we cannot escape history.”

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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.

Tom Cotton: Bombing Iran would take just days

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In short, Tom Cotton, 2015: “Several days air and naval bombing … “
Donald Rumsfeld, 2003, on the prospect of war with Iraq: “It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
Uh-huh. About that …
If the war in Iraq had ended after the six months that Rumsfeld thought was so unlikely, maybe Cotton could fool Americans into thinking that bombing Iran now wouldn’t have broader implications.

Obama Denounces Homophobic RFRA Laws

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Scott Walker is a joke and this time everyone is noticing.  It’s been one fuck up after another since he started running for President.  He compared union nurses and teachers to ISIS.  He stated he’s qualified to command the military because he served in the boy scouts.
He told bizarre lies and fetishized Ronald Reagan’s bible.