Eideard

“I never noticed how lovely your eyes are”

A new Tax Policy Center analysis finds that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would cut taxes for millions of households but bestow most of its benefits on those with the highest incomes. At the same time, it would significantly cut corporate taxes and add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit…

For individuals, Romney starts by making permanent both the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and the “patch” that protects millions of middle- and upper middle-income households from the Alternative Minimum Tax.

At the same time, he’d end President Obama’s 2009 stimulus tax reductions, including Obama’s more generous versions of the child tax credit and earned income credit—both aimed at helping low-income working families. He’d also repeal the tax increases included in the 2010 health reform law…

He’d cut the corporate rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, make the research and experimentation tax credit permanent, and temporarily allow firms to continue to write-off the full cost of capital investment as soon as they acquire the property. Multinationals would get a temporary tax holiday for overseas profits they bring back to the U.S….

Nearly all middle-income households would get a tax reduction. Among those making $50,000 to $75,000, the average tax cut would be about $1,800.

But much of the largess goes to those with the highest-incomes. Households making more than $1 million would get an average tax cut of almost $300,000, largely because, as owners of capital, they’d receive the bulk of the benefit of Romney’s very generous corporate tax reductions. While those making $1 million-plus pay about 20 percent of all federal taxes, they’d receive more than 28 percent of Romney’s tax cuts…

Almost everyone who makes more than $1 million would get a tax cut averaging roughly $150,000. As a group, they’d receive nearly half the benefit of Romney’s tax plan.

Romney says he’d rewrite the entire tax code–someday. But he doesn’t say how or when. Until he does, a Romney Administration’s revenue agenda would look a lot like President George W. Bush’s, just more so.

Screwing the same people. Playing kissy-kissy to the same class of society for whom money essentially is a commodity – to be traded.

The buying and selling of our politicians doesn’t seem to be changing a great deal. The same people, the same corporations end up holding the keys to the treasury.

“The direct number to the CEO of AT&T is in the top righthand drawer of your desk”

A U.S. appeals panel on Thursday upheld the constitutionality of a federal law that grants immunity to telecommunications companies that assist the U.S. government in conducting surveillance of American citizens. However, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also revived a separate lawsuit against the government over its surveillance activities.

Several lawsuits filed in the wake of revelations about warrantless wiretapping alleged that telecom companies provided authorities with direct access to nearly all communications passing through their domestic facilities. Besides the government itself, defendants included AT&T, Sprint Nextel and Verizon.

In 2008, Congress granted telecoms immunity for cooperating with the government’s intelligence-gathering activities. A district judge in San Francisco upheld the law as constitutional, and dismissed the claims against the companies.

In a ruling on Thursday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit agreed…

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leading plaintiff in both cases, said they had not yet decided whether to appeal the telecom ruling…

Cohn said it has been nearly six years since warrantless wiretapping was revealed. “I think the American people deserve a little faster justice than that,” she said.

Some of us – foolish as it has turned out to be – expected that the Obama Administration would come down on the side of Liberty for All and the rest of that good stuff and reverse the crap spying and censorship brought upon this land by the Bush/Cheney cabal.

Wrong.

If you don’t stick to the script I’ll let Cheney have you!

BONN, Germany — As dozens of nations and organizations met here on Monday to plan a transition beyond the withdrawal of American and other international forces from Afghanistan in 2014, the Afghan government had a new deadline in mind: 2024.

President Hamid Karzai and other Afghan officials here called for political and military support for at least another decade — and financial assistance that would not end until 2030. That would be nearly three decades after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 that led to the international intervention in Afghanistan.

While Mr. Karzai and others celebrated the strides made in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban — 60 percent of Afghans now have mobile phones, he said, compared to none — the conference highlighted the multiple challenges facing a fragile government undermined by corruption and threatened by a resilient insurgency…

Instead, as the months have passed, the tempo of the war has shown little sign of winding down, despite an optimistic assessment from NATO that it had reversed the momentum of the Taliban insurgents…

Even though President Obama and other NATO leaders created a timetable for withdrawal by 2014, few officials now expect any reconciliation talks to even begin by then. That has raised questions about security and the stability of Mr. Karzai’s government once international troops steadily begin to withdraw.

Mr. Karzai’s government presented a paper to the conference outlining Afghanistan’s plans for developing an economy now almost entirely dependent on international military and development spending…

…Just meeting the cost of Afghanistan’s military forces — which by 2014 are expected to total 400,000 soldiers — is estimated to cost $3.5 billion to $6 billion a year. By then, Afghanistan, the world’s 40th largest country, would have the world’s 12th largest military.

Thanks, George.

Please, let us remember come Election Day how many lies we listened to over the years from the cesspool of corruption that is political Washington.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Two months ago, the U.S. marked the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Sadly, we commemorated a tragedy without celebrating much triumph. The post-9/11 moment was an unheralded instance of national — even global — unity. The Bush administration could have used it for almost anything. And, to be fair, it did. The nation burned trillions of dollars in two wars and a budget-busting round of tax cuts. The president told us to go shopping, and the Federal Reserve held interest rates at extraordinarily low levels. The result? Deficits and a credit bubble. That was missed opportunity No. 1.

Three years ago, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. fell. The ensuing financial crisis dwarfed anything seen since the Great Depression…For a country with more than $2 trillion in unmet infrastructure needs, this is a remarkable opportunity. But it gets better. Weak global demand means raw materials are cheap. And the bursting of the housing bubble means unemployment in the construction sector is high. We can borrow at a bargain, buy at a bargain and ease the unemployment crisis in the hardest-hit sector of our economy, all while making desperately needed investments in our future competitiveness and quality of life.

Plus, if we don’t do it now, we’ll have to do it later. Delaying a dollar of bridge repair just means it’s a dollar we’ll have to pay later. And by that time, it might be more than a dollar, because it’s cheaper to repair a bridge than rebuild one that has crumbled.

So are we taking advantage of this opportunity? No. Are we seriously discussing it? No…That’s missed opportunity No. 2…

The Obama administration was able to use the aftermath of the financial crisis to pass health-care reform, which made a good start on both covering the uninsured and controlling costs. It also secured a package of financial- regulation reforms to limit the risks of another catastrophic meltdown. Today, Republicans want to repeal both laws, and if they win the next election, they might just get their wish. In the meantime, they’re defunding the implementation of the two laws, and bogging them down in the courts.

It’s entirely possible that we could wake in 2013 only to realize that we have made no durable progress on any of our pressing national problems over the course of the Bush and Obama presidencies, and have, in fact, made some problems worse. That would mean a loss of 12 years during which we could have been moving forward as a country. And we won’t be able to blame it on a lack of opportunities.

I don’t read Ezra Klein often enough to know if his remedies would have differed or agreed with mine as we trudged down this primrose path. Rules made by the incompetent and administered by the inept seem predestined to ennui and unproductive finger-pointing.

The hope we had following universal revulsion at Bush’s policies has been undone by reliance on uncreative legislation and leadership that smacks more of cowardice than clarity. Heading towards the potential of a second term for Obama versus a Republican party that wavers between simple-minded allegiance to corporate America and truly reactionary scumballs – I can’t rev up very much enthusiasm for one more election where I get to not vote for the evil of two lessers.

The number of people living in neighborhoods of extreme poverty grew substantially, by one third, over the past decade, according to a new report, erasing most of the gains from the 1990’s when concentrated poverty declined.

More than 10 percent of America’s poor now live in such neighborhoods, up from 9.1 percent in the beginning of the decade, an addition of more than 2 million people, according to the report by the Brookings Institution, an independent research group…

The report analyzed Census Bureau income data from 2000 to 2009, the most recent year for which there is comprehensive data.

The data captures the first part of the decade most clearly, when growth in concentrated poverty was highest in metropolitan areas in the Midwest. Of the neighborhoods where poverty became most acute, three were Midwestern: Toledo, Youngstown and Detroit.

The report estimated that in metropolitan areas, worsening economic conditions in 2010 may have bumped up the portion of those living in concentrated poverty metro areas to 15 percent, a notch below the 1990 level, 16.5 percent. The biggest rises were in Sun Belt areas like Cape Coral, Fla., and Fresno, Calif., where the housing bust was biggest…

“It’s the toughest, most malignant poverty that we have in the United States,” said Peter Edelman, the director of the Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy at Georgetown University. “It’s bad outcomes reinforcing each other.”

Just one more thing the Bush/Cheney era can take credit for.

U.S. Air Force F-15E drops a GBU-28 “Bunker Buster” 5,000-pound Bomb

President Obama secretly agreed to sell Israel 55 bunker-busting bombs, according to a Newsweek report…

With the sale of deep-penetrating bombs called GBU-28 Hard Target Penetrators, Obama is satisfying a weapons request Israel first made during the Bush administration.

Israel’s request for bunker-busters in 2005 was denied. At the time, the Defense Department had frozen most military sales to Israel because of concerns Israel was transferring advanced military technology to China. Pentagon officials apparently had a change of heart…

Even some of the hawks from the George W. Bush administration grudgingly give Obama credit…”If you say to the White House, ‘Obama has been very unfriendly to Israel,’ they say, ‘What do you mean? It’s the best military-to-military relationship ever.’ And that part is true,” says Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Middle East policy at the National Security Council. “If you look at the trajectory from Clinton to Bush to Obama, the military relationship has gotten steadily stronger. I don’t think Obama changed the trajectory, but he certainly didn’t interfere with it, and it continued under him.”

The bunker busters were a significant breakthrough. The Israelis first requested the sale in 2005, only to be rebuffed by the Bush administration. In 2007, Bush informed then prime minister Ehud Olmert that he would order the bunker busters for delivery in 2009 or 2010.

The Israelis wanted them in 2007. Obama finally released the weapons in 2009, according to officials familiar with the secret decision.

Secret decisions stroking the Israeli government are nothing new in any White House. One can only hope that the promises of change – someday – will mean our government is turning away Israel’s quest for Lebensraum. Who knows? That might even include being honest with all American voters, as well?

Rumsfeld at meal run by Bush’s favorite concierge – KBR

The US government has wasted more than $30bn on private contractors and grants in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade – more than 15% of the total spend – according to a bipartisan group charged with examining the issue.

The figure, described as “sobering but conservative”, illustrated the need for significant law and policy changes to avoid such waste in the future, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan said.

The body, set up by a Senate vote in 2007 to mimic the work of a post-second world war commission that investigated waste, will submit its report to Congress on Wednesday. Submitted to the same people who approved the expenditures in the first place…

At least another $30bn could be wasted if the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan are unable to keep US-run projects running after the US withdraws or simply choose not to do so, Christopher Shays, an ex-Republican congressman, and Michael Thibault, a former deputy director of the Defence Contract Audit Agency, wrote.

“Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted through poor planning, vague and shifting requirements, inadequate competition, substandard contract management and oversight, lax accountability, weak inter-agency co-ordination, and subpar performance or outright misconduct by some contractors and federal employees. Both government and contractors need to do better,” they said…

In a separate report, released on Monday, the independent Centre for Public Integrity thinktank said $140bn in defence contracts were awarded without competitive tendering last year – almost triple the sum in 2001…

The report will include 15 recommendations…most of which will be useless crap if Congress maintains business as usual – rubber stamping anything that has the words Homeland Security, Pentagon or Military in the title.

Why should the young men and women of America be required to risk life and limb, take a general pay cut, to go off and fight useless wars – while America’s corporations are guaranteed not only profits but super-profits for supplying the matériel to support the physical structure of those wars, create fresh death and destruction?

Exports to China rose broadly across the United States last year, the US-China Business Council said in annual report aimed at reducing anti-China trade sentiment in Congress.

“In 2010, exports to China rose 32 percent – faster than export growth to any of the US top five export destinations. Even in states that had a mixed export story over the previous eight years – such as Maine, Wisconsin and Tennessee – exports from congressional districts to China generally rose faster than the rest of the world,” the report said.

China is now the third largest export market for the United States, behind Canada and Mexico. In the decade since Beijing joined the World Trade Organization, US exports to China have risen 468 percent to $91.9 billion, compared to a 55 percent rise in US exports to the rest of the world…

The report examined US Census Bureau county export data for each of the 435 congressional districts represented in the US House of Representatives. It found that exports to China rose last year in 404 districts, a statistic the US-China Business Council hopes will make lawmakers think twice before voting for trade legislation that could prompt Beijing to retaliate…

California, Washington, Texas, Louisiana and Oregon are the five states that export the most to China, so not surprisingly districts in those states showed the biggest sales.

Although US exports to China have boomed over the last 10 years, the US share of that fast-growing import market has actually fallen to 7 percent, from 10 percent in 2000.

The US-China Business Council urged President Barack Obama’s administration to set a goal of raising that back to 10 percent as part of its wider effort to double US exports to more than $3 trillion by 2014.

Overdue. Though that’s true of anywhere that would be a natural export market for the United States.

It’s just that we’ve spent the last 10 years wasting what halo effect we had in Asia as a leading economic and political force. History offered partnership while our politicians and pundits demanded pride and power.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have likely cost the United States $4 trillion, and have sent damaging “ripple effects” across the American economy, according to researchers at Brown University.

While President Obama recently put the price tag for the wars at $1 trillion, researchers at the nonpartisan Watson Institute for International Studies says they will cost up to four times as much.

“While most people think the Pentagon war appropriations are equivalent to the wars’ budgetary costs, the true numbers are twice that, and the full economic cost of the wars much larger yet,” the researchers wrote.

“Conservatively estimated, the war bills already paid and obligated to be paid are $3.2 trillion in constant dollars,” they found. “A more reasonable estimate puts the number at nearly $4 trillion.”

The “human and economic costs,” however, will stretch for decades, with “some costs not peaking until mid-century,” the report concludes, pointing to the care of war veterans. “Many of the wars’ costs are invisible to Americans, buried in a variety of budgets, and so have not been counted or assessed.”

While top Pentagon officials downplay the role the wars’ costs and the size of the annual Defense Department budget have had in the nation’s economic downturn, the researchers see a connection.

“The ripple effects on the U.S. economy have also been significant, including job loss and interest rate increases,” the Brown scholars found, “and those effects have been underappreciated.”

Veterans appreciate the cost of course. And they will live for many years with that cost engraved in their minds and on their bodies. Congress and the rest of our political establishment would rather focus on causing pain – rather than its alleviation or avoidance.

Oh, and BTW. Fiscally “responsible” liars in Congress who all voted to authorize this crap and whine today about the need to diminish the federal deficit – this circlejerk of death and destruction is equal to almost 30% of the whole deficit. No negotiations, No questions about debt ceiling.

It was the British economist John Maynard Keynes who famously wrote that ideas, “both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.” Right now, I’m worried about the damage that might be done by one particularly wrong-headed idea: the notion that, in stark contrast to Keynes’s teaching, government spending destroys jobs.

No, that’s not a typo. House Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans regularly rail against “job-killing government spending.” Think about that for a minute. The claim is that employment actually declines when federal spending rises. Using the same illogic, employment should soar if we made massive cuts in public spending—as some are advocating right now…

It is easy, but irrelevant, to understand how someone might object to any particular item in the federal budget—whether it is the war in Afghanistan, ethanol subsidies, Social Security benefits, or building bridges to nowhere. But even building bridges to nowhere would create jobs, not destroy them, as the congressman from nowhere knows. To be sure, that is not a valid argument for building them…

For example, the large fiscal stimulus enacted in 2009 was not “paid for.” Yet it has been claimed that it created essentially no jobs. Really? With spending under the Recovery Act exceeding $600 billion (and tax cuts exceeding $200 billion), that would be quite a trick…In fact, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the stimulus’s effect on employment in 2010 was at least 1.3 million net new jobs, and perhaps as many as 3.3 million…

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