Pretty good essay from a poster on The Daily Kos on the true logic and justice behind progressive taxation policies.

One of the most illegitimate and yet seductive arguments the Republicans have is, “Why should people who have or make more money have to pay more taxes?” This is the argument that underlies the call for a flat tax, for an elimination of estate taxes, and even for reductions in capital gains taxes.

It took me quite a few years to understand why a progressive tax system is fair and reasonable and why the Republican tax arguments are nonsense.  My goal here is to share the knowledge I’ve gained by discussing a bit of history, a bit of political theory, and quite a bit of miscellany.  

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Bill Moyers describes the shameful state of education in America. He delivered these remarks in October of 2006 to the Council of Great City Schools, an organization of the nation’s largest urban public school systems.

“Education should be the centerpiece of a great and diverse America made stronger by equality and shared prosperity. It has instead become the epitome of public neglect, perpetuated by a class divide so permeated by race that it mocks the bedrock principles of the American Promise.”

Moyers’ analysis is excellent for many reasons. Not the least of which is the fact that it goes beyond the discussion of education unto itself and analyzes some of the underlying core issues involved in the continuing degradation of America’s public education system, most notably the class war being driven by the economic elites of this nation against the very idea of the commons and a shared public good for all our citizenry.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in and/or involved in America’s educational system, or for that matter anyone interested in the future state of our national health and well-being.

Read Bill Moyers’ piece in full here on TomPaine.com

Bloody Markets
By Jim Bliss
The Quiet Road
August 15, 2006

The problem, as is so often the case, is free markets. You see, they are maybe possibly perhaps a half-decent way of handling the distribution of new computer games, for instance. But they’re an awful way of dealing with essential non-renewable resources. Seriously awful. In fact, if you had to design a system with the express purpose of bungling resource management you’d probably arrive at something a lot like free market economics.

We’ve arrived at a system which provides as motivation for the production and supply of essential non-renewable resources; the generation of profit. And it bestows the right to choose how the resource should be consumed onto those wealthy enough to purchase it.

I see it as being somewhat akin to a national blood bank / transfusion service being run exclusively for the profit of those who own the system. And to make matters worse, there’s a cabal of millionaires who get their kicks buying blood to bathe in. I mean, let’s be honest, there’s no reason at all for a defender of the free-market principle to object to that.

Certainly if millionaires are buying blood to bathe in, it’ll raise the price and - presumably - generate a greater supply. But this is a finite resource we’re talking about. Over 10% of the population has “needle phobia”. Another 10 - 15% are barred from giving blood because of various contamination issues. And health and safety recommends that nobody should donate blood more than once a month (restricted to 4 times a year in many countries). It’s a finite resource and increased demand will not generate an increased supply beyond the limits imposed by nature.

So first our hypothetical cabal raises the price beyond the capability of the NHS to pay for transfusions, then it raises it beyond the capability of most private patients to pay. Do proponents of the free market believe this is an acceptable situation? Is it OK for rich people to deliberately waste a resource vital to sustain the lives of those with less purchasing power? Is it still OK when it’s your ten-year-old daughter dying in hospital because Peter Stringfellow, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Richard Branson want to sit in a bath of blood?

Of course, nobody bathes in blood. Leastways nobody you’d invite round for dinner. But I was drawing an analogy, not suggesting that Richard Branson actually has a blood fetish (though you do have to wonder about Lloyd-Webber.. nothing would surprise me about him). And it’s an analogy that can be applied more directly than perhaps you’d imagine.

There are rather worrying reports emerging from some of the poorer African nations; Zimbabwe in particular. These reports are unconfirmed and I’ve only read them (thus far) on peak oil mailing lists (so I’m not using them as “evidence”; merely illustrative examples of how market forces will affect essential resource distribution. i.e. if this is not happening now, then it will be soon). As the recent rises in oil price kicked in, the poorest nations have been forced to cut back on the quantity they imported. This is what free markets are all about, after all.

However, in Zimbabwe this is resulting in a major curtailing of the - already decrepit - ambulance service*. People are dying right now because western consumers are willing to pay more for petrol to drive their SUVs to the hypermarket than the Zimbabwean health service can afford to pay to keep their vehicles on the road.

Bloody markets, eh?

And yes, yes, I’m aware that the unique political disaster occurring in Zimbabwe is a major factor in the collapse of the health service (and just about everything else). However I trust you’re smart enough to realise that merely explains why Zimbabweans can’t afford to fuel their ambulances. Saying “Oh! Oh! Mugabe is a Bad Man!” loudly while sticking your fingers in your ears doesn’t actually redress the basic injustice that people are dying for want of a global resource while others are frivolously squandering it.

Nice to see this issue getting some ink in the major media.

The gap between rich and poor is unfortunately an old story.

It is the stuff of parables and literature. It is a force in social history and political economy, from electoral campaigns to reform movements and revolutions.

But in the United States today, there’s a new twist to the familiar plot. Income inequality used to be about rich versus poor, but now it’s increasingly a matter of the ultra rich and everyone else. The curious effect of the new divide is an economy that appears to be charging ahead, until you realize that the most of the people in it are being left in the dust. President Bush has yet to acknowledge the true state of affairs, though it’s at the root of his failure to convince Americans that the good times are rolling.

The president’s lack of attention may be misplaced optimism, or it could be political strategy. Acknowledging what’s happening would mean having to rethink his policies, not exactly his strong suit.

But the growing income gap - and the rise of the super-rich - demands attention. It is making America a less fair society, and a less stable one.

For more good history and overview of this whole phenomenon, I recommend the Kevin Phillips’ excellent “Wealth and Democracy”.

Another sign of the growing awareness of this uncomfortable reality of wealth and class inequalities is outlined in this piece by William Greider in The Nation.

So it’s a big deal when Robert Rubin changes the subject and begins to talk about income inequality as “a deeply troubling fact of American economic life” that threatens the trading system, even the stability of “capitalist, democratic society.” More startling, Rubin now freely acknowledges what the American establishment for many years denied or dismissed as inconsequential–globalization’s role in generating the thirty-year stagnation of US wages, squeezing middle-class families and below, while directing income growth mainly to the upper brackets. A lot of Americans already knew this. Critics of “free trade” have been saying as much for years. But when Bob Rubin says it, his words can move politicians, if not financial markets.

Of course, the incentive for Rubin and his class of financial lords to confront this problem is not to solve it for all the people of the nation, but because it potentially risks the continuation of the prevailing order of control over our society by the governing financial elites. They don’t want to see things go so far off the rails it results in the return of Paris or St. Petersburg, or the Haymarket of Chicago.

There are a number of references and assumptions in these articles which I would take issue with as not clearly defining the true source and causality of the problems at hand. For instance, notice the glaring and likely disingenuous combination of two unrelated processes, defined as one whole, of equating capitalism with democracy? One is a system of economics, the other of political organization. But as a major media expose on the fact we have a very serious problem on our hands, one that easily equates to the potentially terminal threat the Gilded Age (as dubbed by Mark Twain) of the late 1800’s posed to our society, its value is apparent.

This time, however, let us not fall short in the efforts put forth by movements such as that originally driven by the Populists, which was short circuited and watered down by the Progressives, resulting in inadequate measures being taken to counteract that anti-democratic and republic-threatening policies of the ‘malefactors of great wealth’, as these scions of capital corporatism were aptly defined by Teddy Roosevelt. Those measures, some of which were propagated by the same Roosevelt and his compatriots, were partially instituted to placate rising democratic populism of the time, as well as to regulate and control those same forces of democracy.

It is why those advances in social, political and economic policies did not hold. This time, we must push for rights-based changes and not regulatory-based changes in our nation. For more on what these should look like and how to go about making them happen, check out the work of CELDF.

Another sign of the cancer, potentially terminal, of global corporatism and the privitization of the public commons (or more appropriately, the ‘piratization’ of the commons).

Roads and bridges built by U.S. taxpayers are starting to be sold off, and so far foreign-owned companies are doing the buying.

On a single day in June, an Australian-Spanish partnership paid $3.8 billion to lease the Indiana Toll Road. An Australian company bought a 99-year lease on Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway, and Texas officials decided to let a Spanish-American partnership build and run a toll road from Austin to Seguin for 50 years.

Few people know that the tolls from the U.S. side of the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, go to a subsidiary of an Australian company - which also owns a bridge in Alabama.

So just what are we spending trillions of dollars in so-called “defense” spending to protect America from, when our country’s wealth is being shipped out the door to offshore bank accounts of the corporate rich, and the national infrastructure is being sold of to foreign interests to pay off the debt we’ve racked up to pay these corporatists with?

Read The Full Article Here

This is an interesting editorial, and confronts the myths we live by in America head on.
One comment I should make about the 8th paragraph:

Another reason that the unemployment rate is lower in the US than in some European countries is that the United States has skewed the way it keeps and reports unemployment statistics to artificially produce a lower number. The actual number of people who want to work but do not have jobs is much higher than the official unemployment figure. Additionally, France seen as a part of the EU (which includes areas with much lower unemployment such as Ireland and the Netherlands) is not much different from Michigan seen as a part of the US. And unlike the US, France has an effective infrastructure in place to provide them and their families with health care during their unemployment.

Read the full article from Mark Weisbrot from Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services Here

- Ed Lacy
USTV Media

Oh boy, what a surprise. Too bad we can’t actually apply brakes and controls on these animal concentration camps, regardless of the overwhelming amount of evidence compiled to their negative health and environmental impacts. Certainly couldn’t dream of taxing them to help pay for this mess. That would entail actually potentially interfering with the profit margins here, and forcing an end to the externalization of costs by these scions of private enterprise.

Factory farming and the international poultry trade are largely responsible for the spread of bird flu, and wild birds are being unfairly blamed for the disease, a new report says. The report says the deadly H5N1 virus developed inside intensive poultry units in Asia and has proliferated through exports of live birds and the use of chicken droppings as fertiliser. Its publication by Grain , an agricultural pressure group, follows an announcement that the virus has been found in a turkey farm in eastern France. Though the farm was close to where two infected wild ducks were found, all its 11,000 turkeys were kept indoors with no contact with wild birds. Dissident scientists accept that the flu began in wild birds, but say it developed in the cramped conditions of Asian factory farms. Research published in the official journal of the US National Academy of Sciences blames the poultry trade for the virus spreading from China to Vietnam. BirdLife, a charity, says the virus’s spread across Russia last summer - widely attributed to migrating birds - took place when birds were moulting and unable to fly. It adds that an outbreak in Nigeria took place on a factory farm far from migratory routes.

Read Geoffrey Lean’s piece in the Independent UK

Records showing how thoroughly the Internal Revenue Service audits big corporations and the rich, and how much it discounts the additional taxes assessed after audits, are being withheld from the public despite a 1976 court order requiring their disclosure, according to a legal motion filed last week in federal court in Seattle.

So how come author David Cay Johnston isn’t a regular on those talking head shows? This guy has done loads of research on what is really going on behind the economic curtain in this country.

Read The Article

Richest Are Leaving Even The Rich Far Behind
By David Cay Johnston
The New York Times
June 5, 2005

When F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced that the very rich “are different from you and me,” Ernest Hemingway’s famously dismissive response was: “Yes, they have more money.” Today he might well add: much, much, much more money.

The people at the top of America’s money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Call them the hyper-rich.

They are not just a few Croesus-like rarities. Draw a line under the top 0.1 percent of income earners - the top one-thousandth. Above that line are about 145,000 taxpayers, each with at least $1.6 million in income and often much more.

The average income for the top 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002, the latest year for which averages are available. That number is two and a half times the $1.2 million, adjusted for inflation, that group reported in 1980. No other income group rose nearly as fast.

The share of the nation’s income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2002. The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell.

Next, examine the net worth of American households. The group with homes, investments and other assets worth more than $10 million comprised 338,400 households in 2001, the last year for which data are available. The number has grown more than 400 percent since 1980, after adjusting for inflation, while the total number of households has grown only 27 percent.

The Bush administration tax cuts stand to widen the gap between the hyper-rich and the rest of America. The merely rich, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, will shoulder a disproportionate share of the tax burden.

President Bush said during the third election debate last October that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans. In fact, most - 53 percent - will go to people with incomes in the top 10 percent over the first 15 years of the cuts, which began in 2001 and would have to be reauthorized in 2010. And more than 15 percent will go just to the top 0.1 percent, those 145,000 taxpayers.

The Times set out to create a financial portrait of the very richest Americans, how their incomes have changed over the decades and how the tax cuts will affect them. It is no secret that the gap between the rich and the poor has grown, but the extent to which the richest are leaving everyone else behind is not widely known.

Read the complete article…
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/national/class/HYPER-FINAL.html

In This Recovery, Corporations Win - Workers Lose
By David R. Francis
The Christian Science Monitor
May 2nd, 2005

By historical standards, the economic recovery in the United States has been unfair. It has devoted too big a share of income growth to corporate profits, too little to workers.

Indeed, in 2004, wages and salaries received the lowest share of total national income ever recorded, with the data going back to 1929, the year the Great Depression began, note Isaac Shapiro and David Kamin, economists at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, in a new study. By contrast, corporate profits’ share of national income last year, at 11.4 percent, was “exceptionally high,” the study found. The trend has both political and economic implications. For example:

Wage earners suffer: Democrats will surely blame Republicans for the weak job and wage scene. “The distribution of earnings is becoming more unequal,” complained Sen. Jack Reed (D) of Rhode Island earlier this month. Since last May, when the economy began creating jobs again, average hourly earnings of nonfarm production workers have actually fallen - by 0.7 percent - after adjusting for inflation.

Investors benefit: High corporate profits are always good news for investors. Last month, the Dow Industrial Average notched its biggest one-day gain since 2003. “There are many factors that affect stock market prices,” notes Mr. Shapiro. “But robust corporate profits always help.”

Social Security weakened: If wages were growing more robustly - and not so inequitably - the financing gap in the Social Security system would not be so big. In fact, economics, more than demographics, are causing a large part of the Social Security gap, says Jack Bivens, an economist at the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

In 1983, the year of the last major reform of the system, payroll taxes were imposed on 90 percent of all earnings. But over the past four years, the cap has covered only an average of 85 percent of earnings. That’s because the cap - $90,000 this year - has not been increased sufficiently to make up for the more rapid growth in income of prosperous Americans.

“This erosion of the taxable base of Social Security, driven by rising earnings inequality, has greatly exacerbated the long-run outlook of the system,” Mr. Bivens notes in a new study. Raising the cap so it again covers 90 percent of earnings would cover 40 percent of the gap in financing over the 75-year planning period used by the Social Security Administration, says Bivens.

Read the rest of the article here…
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0502/p17s01-cogn.html