America Has the Second-Lowest Business Taxes In the World
October 21, 2008 11:56 am

David Sirota

.....Everyone pays some form of taxes, whether it's income, property, sales or payroll taxes. When you take all those taxes together, most working- and middle-class Americans pay a higher effective tax rate than the Warren Buffetts of the world (as Warren Buffett, by the way, readily acknowledges)....

.......It sounds like a credible storyline, especially considering that officially, our corporate tax rate is somewhere between 35 and 39 percent. But, as always, the devil is in the details.

To know how high - or low - the effective tax rate is, you have to go beneath the top-line rate and account for all the loopholes, subsidies and write-offs - and the way to do that is by looking at corporate tax revenues as a percentage of a country's GDP. That way, you know how much corporations are actually paying as a share of your overall economy - in other words, you know the real corporate tax rate, not the fake one advertised by top-line numbers. And when you look at America's tax structure through this lens, you see that even the Bush Treasury Department admits we have the second lowest effective corporate tax rate in the industrialized world (see page 42 of this report).

Indeed, this explains the dissonance between Republican claims of "highest corporate income tax rate in the world" and the recent Government Accountability report showing that most corporations pay no corporate income taxes at all. The latter is the truth - most corporations don't pay any taxes because of loopholes, writeoffs and subsidies that allow them to effectively reduce that 35 percent corporate tax rate to zero. In fact, many profitable corporations actually collect tax rebates. But as I told Fox News, we don't hear criticism of that kind of "corporate welfare" from the Republican mouthpieces deriding Obama's middle-class tax cuts as welfare.

As you can see from the video clip, when the GOP parrot I'm debating throws out the standard "high corporate tax" canard, I revert to the actual facts over and over and over again, to the point where Fox News feels the need to drown me out with music at the end.......

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94 Filibusters
October 22, 2008 6:55 pm

Wes Clark

A responsible withdrawal from Iraq? Filibuster.

Reform the health care system? Filibuster.

Investment in renewables and a new energy economy? Filibuster.

That's what we can expect to happen to Barack Obama's agenda if we don't elect enough Democrats to the Senate on November 4. Republicans have filibustered a record-breaking 94 times in the last two years! Imagine what they will do when faced with Barack Obama's agenda for change.

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Roubini: Recession, this is going to be three times as long, three times as deep
October 22, 2008 7:25 pm

First economist I've heard that approaches the Deflation scenario outlined by Elliott Wave International.

CNBC: The US economy is entering a two-year recession that will be longer and deeper than previously feared, said Nouriel Roubini, a well-known economist and professor at New York University.

"I believe we're going to have two years of negative economic growth," Roubini said on CNBC. "The last two recessions lasted only eight months each ... This time around this is going to be three times as long, three times as deep. This is going to be the worst recession the US has experienced since the 1980s."

A slowdown in global economic growth combined with continued problems in credit markets and housing will haunt the economy, Roubini said.

In addition, he sees hundreds of hedge funds getting wiped out, combining with earnings to provide another weight on stocks.

"I believe that the worst is still ahead of us. I think that the next few weeks and months are going to be negative surprises on the economy," he said. "I think that overall the earnings are going to surprise to the downside."

An expected short recession will be replaced by a reality of a longer and more drawn-out slowdown, Roubini said.

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Ron Howard's Call For Obama With Andy Griffith And Henry Winkler
October 23, 2008 4:21 pm

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Wassup 2008
October 25, 2008 9:47 pm

The original in 1999:

The new one in 2008:

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Time for Answers
October 26, 2008 12:56 pm

Josh Marshall

It is time for the McCain campaign to come clean about what role any of its staffers may have had in hyping or pushing the press to hype the charges stemming from Ashley Todd's vicious and reprehensible hoax.

As Greg Sargent reported yesterday, McCain Pennsylvania communications director Peter Feldman pushed reporters on a highly incendiary version of Todd's hoax -- providing reporters with quotes from the fictitious attacker and telling them the the "B" scratched on Todd's face stood for "Barack." As the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson aptly put it, Feldman's actions showed "not just a willingness to believe it but an eagerness to incite a ... racial backlash against the Obama campaign."........

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RIP John Galt
October 26, 2008 5:49 pm

Devilstower

In 1966, Ayn Rand collected a series of essays into the book, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Twenty of the essays in the were written by Rand. The rest came from a trio of Rand's acolytes, followers who had already been writing the newsletter of her "Objectivist" cult for more than a decade. Among these were three essays from a member of Rand's inner circle; an economic advisor and dropout from the graduate economics program at Columbia -- Alan Greenspan.......

....Chief Disciple Greenspan carried this torch for the next half-century and beyond. Pro-business conservatives (not surprisingly) found great comfort in a philosophy that said squeezing every dime out of the system was not only fair, but the only moral solution. Not long after the publication of his essays in Rand's book, Greenspan was invited to become an advisor to the Nixon administration. When Ford replaced Nixon, Greenspan became the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. And when Reagan took power, Greenspan was no longer the voice crying in the wilderness, he was the very center of the establishment. Objectivism and Conservatism had united in Market Fundamentalism, and that force was on a jihad against regulation of any kind.

For the next thirty years, Greenspan would cheer the deregulation of the S&Ls and join John McCain in trying to protect Charles Keating from regulators. He would praise the deregulation of energy trading, and assure everyone that companies like Enron were pointing the way to greater efficiency and lower consumer prices -- and collect the 2000 "Enron Prize" in exchange. He would urge not only the creation of credit default swaps, but applaud their lack of regulation and invisibility in the system. He would argue against oversight, against limits on CEO pay, and for the increasingly complex systems by which banks generated new instruments of credit.

No one person did more to spread Rand's message of unregulated markets, unconstrained free trade, and unlimited power for corporate officers than Alan Greenspan......

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Attacked by a McCain Supporter!
October 26, 2008 6:49 pm

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Sarah Palin: Fiscal Conservative?
October 26, 2008 10:44 pm

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