Your rights-Your responsibilities

I cannot stress enough how much caution we all must take at the ballot box next election cycle.  Listening to the political rhetoric to make our decision on who we want to represent us is not only a huge mistake but could be catastrophic to our government.  If we cannot maintain a safe balance in our representative mix we could wind up in an industrial dictatorship or in a budget disaster worse than we have yet seen.  We must curb government spending without giving up control of our government to the industrial elite in this country.  The rich in this country have had their sites set on all of government for decades if not the entire last century.  Proof of that is in the extent that the role of our troops that has been privatized and the rise of the privately run prisons in the United States.  If big business continues to displace our troops, our armies will no longer be run by the government.  Instead of the President being the Commander and Chief of the armed forces it will have a CEO and a Board of Directors who will make command decisions strictly on profits rather than need for protection of the U.S..

Equally troubling is the privatizing of the responsibilities of the courts and prisons.  Incarcerating those that pose a threat to citizens is the responsibility of the legal system and should not be handed off to private for profit industry.  As soon as it affects someone’s bottom line innocent citizens are incarcerated to produce profit.  That is not to say that innocent people have not been wrongly convicted of crimes in the past but that was a failure of the system, not a for profit decision.  Privatizing prisons is just a short step from privatizing our police force which is an even shorter step to the police having to justify their jobs by increased arrests and convictions in the interest of profit.

I don’t ignore the fact that government run agencies are horribly inefficient and wasteful.  I also concede that private industry could possibly operate certain agencies more efficiently.  I must insist, however, that private industry would, more than likely, be more corrupt and certainly harder to control than the government agency especially if industry is allowed the type of access to government it now enjoys.  Big business should not be allowed to own the government any more than government should be allowed to own all industry.

It is very easy for the candidates, no matter what party they belong to, to say “I am going to cut the budget” or “I will work to balance the budget.”  What is important is that they tell you ‘how’ they intend to do that.  It is important that they know who they work for and if it is big business they need to say so.  It is important that YOU ask the right questions and seek the right answers to ALL the issues not just one that you find important.  Vote smart, vote independent.

Way to go Illinois voters! Elect another Billionaire!

An article by ROBERT CREAMER:


Illinois' new GOP Governor, Bruce Rauner, will personally receive a $750,000 per year tax cut as a result of his decision not to continue the state's temporary 1.25% income tax surcharge that expired last year.
His taxes were cut by an amount equal to the annual income of 14 families of four making the median income. And remember that after adjusting for inflation, that median income number has not materially increased in about 35 years, since virtually all of the income growth resulting from the massive increase in worker productivity over that period has been siphoned off by speculators like Rauner.
Rauner, who made $61 million in 2013 - or $29,000 per hour - is one of a small group of multi-millionaire speculators who would directly benefit enormously from lower state tax rates. Among them is his friend Ken Griffin, reputedly the wealthiest man in Illinois, who contributed $2.5 million to Rauner's campaign for Governor - and has also pitched in $10 million to a $20 million campaign war chest that Rauner plans to use to run opponents to members of the Legislature that oppose his policies.
Griffin and his soon-to-be former wife, Anne Dias Griffin, are involved in a high profile multi-million dollar divorce battle. He and Dias are fighting over the control of tens of millions of dollars.
One filing by Dias, quoted by CNBC, gives you a flavor:

Dias said she and their children have come to "enjoy a lifestyle reserved only for the very wealthy," including houses in Chicago, Aspen, Hawaii, Miami Beach and New York. They also have "unrestricted access" to two private jets "to travel to the aforementioned homes" as well as other destinations.

She said the family has a "large group of staff members assisting the family, including extensive household, security and family office employees," and their own company that employs staffers, called "Griffin Family Services."

Dias is asking a million dollars a month -- $12 million a year -- in child support. That's right, $12 million per year in child support - you can't make this stuff up.
Just by way of comparison, remember that a highway worker for the state of Illinois who makes an average income of $49,000 a year laying hot asphalt and filling pot holes, would take about 244 years to make $12 million. But Griffin's pal, Rauner, says he wants to cut the pay for such workers - claiming they make too much and should be paid something closer to the $39,000 a year he says they make in surrounding states.
None of this seems to bother Rauner one bit, since at the same time he and his friends get that big tax cut, Rauner's new state budget promises draconian cuts in services that benefit the middle class and the poor.
Rauner proposed six billion dollars in cuts for state spending on universities, health care, local governments and pensions for state employees.
Here are some high points:

• Limiting eligibility for Department of Aging Community Care Programs.
• Cutting health care benefits for homecare workers.
• Slashing funding for the Department of Children and Family Services.
• Eliminating all Department of Children and Family services for youths 18-21.
• Cutting adult dental and podiatry services as well as kidney transplants for undocumented children.
• Eliminating exemptions for drugs for severe mental illness from a state 4-prescription limit.
• Reducing payments to facilities for children on ventilators, supportive living facilities and children with severe mental illness.
• Cutting Medicaid spending by1.5 billion - including735 million in cuts to hospitals serving Medicaid patients.
• Eliminating assistance to families with Hemophilia.
• Freezing intakes on childcare for children over 6.
• Increasing childcare copays for working parents.
• $27.5 million in reductions to community substance abuse programs.
• $82 million reduction to community mental health programs.

Eliminating State funding for specific organizations providing: - Services for people with disabilities - Services to children with autism - Services to homeless young people - Services to run away teenagers - Immigrant integration services - Advanced placement classes - After school programs - Agricultural education - Arts and foreign language programs - Parent mentoring - Safe Schools initiatives

• Cuts to breast and cervical cancer programs.
• And a 31.5% cut to higher education.

His plan would also move state employees - most of whom make middle class salaries or less - into pension plans with lower benefits. Rauner claims that his proposal is a "turnaround budget." "Like a family, we must come together to address the reality we face. Families know that every member can't get everything they want," he said. Unless, of course, you are Bruce Rauner or one of his mega-wealthy friends.
Seems that the state can't afford more childcare for working parents, but it can afford huge tax cuts for the very rich. After all, Ken Griffin needs to make that million dollar a month "child care" payment.
The fact is, of course, that Illinois - like most other states - are not in the midst of dramatic declines in economic performance that would require this kind of "belt tightening." In fact, Illinois, like most of America, is wealthier today per person, than at any other time in its history.
The problem is that the wealthy have rigged the economic rules of the game to allow people like Bruce Rauner and the millionaires who got him elected to siphon off most of the wealth for themselves and leave middle income incomes flat.
One of those rigged rules is found in the Illinois State Constitution. It would make sense to get much of the money needed to finance public services from those who have benefited most from the state's economy - rather than those whose incomes have been flat. You'd do that with higher income tax rates on millionaires and billionaires than the one charged for ordinary working people.
But when the state constitution was rewritten in the 1970's, the wealthy organized to insert a provision preventing State Government from having progressive income tax rates. They wanted to keep their own share of taxes low, and to shrink state revenue in general by requiring that if tax rates go up for them, they have to go up for ordinary people as well.
That problem needs to be fixed with a Constitutional amendment that allows a progressive income tax - which of course Rauner adamantly opposes. But in the meantime it would still be possible to raise desperately-needed revenue in ways that mainly target the wealthy taxpayers by providing substantial personal exemptions in any new tax aimed at replacing the state's temporary income tax surcharge that expired last year.
Rauner, of course, opposes any new state taxes and if you want to know why, just ask the mega-wealthy donors who financed his $63.9 million campaign to occupy the Governor's mansion.
Through his new state budget, Rauner intends to continue his life's work excavating the pockets of the poor and middle class in order to benefit himself and his wealthy associates. That's why Rauner serves as the personal embodiment - the poster boy -- for Wall Street's War on the Middle Class.
Bruce Rauner may think that he is auditioning for a spot on the 2016 GOP ticket or a cabinet post in a Bush, Walker or Christie administration.
In fact he could easily become the national symbol of the trickle down economic theory that has failed to produce benefits for everyday Americans and is at the core of the economic philosophy of every one of the 2016 Republican Presidential aspirants and their billionaire backers.
Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partners and a Senior Strategist for Americans United for Change. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer.
Follow Robert Creamer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rbcreamer

An article by Jeff Spross first published in THE WEEK

How conservatism's grand tax experiment fell apart

Jeff Spross

January 16, 2015

 

Later today, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback will unveil his proposals for repairing the state’s gaping budget hole. His task is a cruel one, and largely of his own making. It's also a useful glimpse into the limits of Republican economic thinking at the foundational level.

In 2012 and 2013, Brownback and Kansas Republicans passed what has become infamously known as a kind of grand experiment in tax policy. A top income tax rate of 6.45 percent for families making over $60,000 was eliminated completely. Rates dropped from 6.25 to 4.9 percent for those making over $30,000, and from 3.5 to 3 percent for those making less, with further reductions for the former bracket to come. “Pass through” companies — whose profits go directly to their owners rather than to a corporate legal entity — saw their state taxes reduced to zero.

A handful of tax credits were also eliminated, and a scheduled drop in the sales tax to 5.9 percent — following a hike to 6.7 percent in 2010 — was changed to 6.3 percent, to try to make up some of the lost revenue.

Still, Kansas’ budget faces a shortfall of $280 million for this fiscal year and as much as $648 million for next fiscal year. That’s because the one thing the tax cut was supposed to create — renewed job growth in Kansas — has not materialized.

Job growth over the 2012-2013 period was 2.5 percent — a modest improvement over the 2.3 percent from 1998 to 2012 — but it fell to just 1.6 percent in 2013 specifically. Defenders point out that job growth nationwide dipped that year, but then the whole point of the tax cut was to pull Kansas away from the pack. Job growth on the Kansas side of the Kansas City metro area topped the Missouri side at 2.2 percent to 0.4 percent in 2013, then flipped to 0.4 percent on the Kansas side and 1.5 percent on the Missouri side in 2014. New business creation in the state also fell through 2012 and 2013.

At root here is a disagreement over the “ecology” of economies. Just how is it that economic growth happens? Conservatives and sympathetic economists have long insisted that high investment is the key to growth, and the point makes sense: investment means new equipment, new hires, new capacity of every sort. This is growth by definition. All that new economic activity will lead to new income, which will then lead to more spending.

This is the basis of “supply side” economics — policies that focus on unburdening the mechanisms that supply jobs, like deregulation and cutting taxes on income, business profits, and investments. And it was the conceptual justification for the Kansas tax experiment specifically: “To cut the tax out on these certain types of income — business income — is an incentive for people to hire more people,” Kansas State Senator Les Donovan (R) told NPR’s Planet Money. 

But there’s a hitch. Businesses don’t hire people just to hire people. They hire people when they think it will boost their profits; when the business believes there’s untapped demand for their goods and services that a new hire could exploit. Supply-side policies rest on a critical unspoken assumption: that consumers’ current capacity to spend will support a greater supply of jobs, and all that’s required to tap that pent up demand is the removal of the supply-side barriers.

 

 So what happens when that assumption is wrong? What if businesses are already getting all the job growth they can out of what consumers can spend? What iof job growth is low because consumers can't spend that much, and then policymakers cut taxes anyway? In that case, the money’s just going to sit there.

Planet Money actually did a story late last year on Kansas’ tax cuts that illustrates this in very concrete terms. Alex Harb runs a restaurant and a computer store chain in Wichita, so he got the zero percent tax rate for pass-through businesses, and used the money to buy a bunch of iPads — i.e. more investment. But he never hired anyone. “You hire people, not based on how much money you have, [but] based on your business,” Harb explained. ”I didn't really notice any more business purchasing, you know, around here. So didn't really trigger anything to hire more employees.”

Around the same time, the Kansas City Star talked to Dan Doyle, a partner at an Overland Park law firm, another one of those pass-through businesses. He said the firm hired some new people when it took on a particularly big recent case, but the tax windfall itself didn’t inspire any new hires. Doyle did, however, decide to take his family to Cancun.

The tax cut's more sober defenders argue this is a long-game attempt to boost the state's economy, and time may yet render a verdict in Brownback's favor. Maybe. But that brings us back to today’s budget announcement. Kansas is legally required to balance its budgets over two-year periods. The state has already tapped into reserves and the highway budget to fill the hole, but Brownback has promised a revenue-positive budget, and few of his (politically realistic) options are good: there’s talk of hiking the state’s sales tax, increasing taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and slicing into the state’s education budget. What all these options have in common is that they will suck even more money out of the pockets of Kansas consumers — especially the low-income ones — as well as the state’s education infrastructure. The Planet Money story has an especially poignant note about the small ghost towns left behind in rural Kansas by school closures.

But as long as Brownback and his allies insist on maintaining the tax cuts, all of their budget-balancing choices will require this trade-off in some form. They’ll keep trying to boost Kansas’ economy with one hand, while slowly bleeding it with the other.

And the money Brownback is handing to Kansas businesses will likely keep going to Cancun.