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Monday, July 18, 2011
Sadly, there are some of them who believe them.
Ignorance Index III: The Revenue Problem
How ironic that the richest country in the world is claiming poverty, saying that our country is broke and that we don’t have a revenue problem, only saying that it we are spending beyond our means.
Sadly, we are spending beyond our means but that is only because we have to in order to maintain our place as the number one power in the world and because we can’t abandon our seniors, our infirm and our sick to fend for themselves by offering real DEATH PANELS.
We are also in a quagmire on the warfront and can’t abandon our commitments…made by the previous President under false assumptions and lies…two totally unnecessary wars that we are now going to have to pay.
Whenever you hear one of these Republicans spew out this talking point, it is our duty to stop them, to call them out on their lie and set the record straight…we don’t have a spending problem, we have a REVENUE PROBLEM because Republicans keep lowering taxes for the very wealthy and the corporations.
Never mind that this top 2% of folks at the top of the feeding chain already have most of the wealth and pay hardly any taxes…at least not the at same rate as the rest of us and certainly a much lower rate than they have paid in the last 50 years. It is all a bunch of cow manure these talking points and they deserve to be silenced.
Robert Borosage on July 14, 2011 explains it very eloquently:
“Washington doesn’t have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem,” says House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). All Republican legislators have been taught to chant this tired talking point” as if it were the Hare Krishna mantra.
To borrow one of Cantor’s favorite sneers, “How could anyone believe that?” Here’s a graph showing federal revenues as a percentage of GDP. Clearly Washington has a revenue problem.
In fact, Americans are paying the lowest percentage of their income in taxes since 1958. Corporate taxes which brought in over 6% of GDP in 1950 are now near historic lows of barely 1%. Senator Carl Levin has just introduced the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act of 2011 targeting the $100 billion in taxes lost annually to offshore tax havens. (Needless to say, House Republicans vow to go to the mat to protect the corporate tax dodges since loopholes are deemed tax hikes in their Fox world)
It gets worse. Hedge Fund billionaires now pay a lower tax rate than their chauffeurs, or the teachers of their children, or the cops that patrol their streets. The IRS reports that the richest 400 Americans – who made an average of $354 million a year in 2007 – paid an effective tax rate of 16.6%, down from 30% in 1995 and 23% in 2002. Even as their incomes doubled from 2001 to 2007, their effective tax rates were virtually halved from 1995.
If you count payroll taxes, the richest 400 Americans, pocketing over $354 million a year, are paying a lower tax rate than a hospital orderly working for $29,000 a year.
Clearly we have a “revenue problem” – and a major league indecency problem.”
Once again, as they have done over and over, they continue to lie and distort reality, it is a matter of lack of morality, of lack of ethics, of serving the special interests that fill their pockets with money. Shame on you Republicans, you know taxes are the lowest they have been in decades and you know that the rich have gotten richer at the expense of 98% of the American people still repeating that now discredited and askew Reagan misguided economic formula: TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS”
SOURCE: http://www.ourfuture.org/files/images/RevenuePercentGDP-Graph.jpg
