The GOP, America’s “Party of the Rich,” will love this.
D’SOUZA
First, some background:
The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced today that DINESH D’SOUZAwas sentenced in Manhattan federal court to five years of probation, with eight months during the first year to be served in a community confinement center.
He pled guilty to violating the federal campaign election law by making illegal contributions to a United States Senate campaign in the names of others.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara stated: “Dinesh D’Souza attempted to illegally contribute over $10,000 to a Senate campaign, willfully undermining the integrity of the campaign finance process.
Like many others before him, of all political stripes, he has had to answer for this crime – here with a felony conviction.”
This extreme right-winger was one of the many crooks pardoned by Donald Trump. The irony is that he broke campaign laws and produced a phony movie blasting Democrats for — you guessed it — breaking campaign laws.
Now he has a suggestion for the GOP, America’s “Party of the Rich,” they are bound to love, for it combines the two things they most desire. Ending the IRS and taxing the lower income more.
Dinesh D’Souza on Twitter:
“The House GOP should pass a bill basically wiping out the IRS and the tax code and instituting a flat tax of 15%.
The rich pay more, but they pay at the same rate.
This won’t become law now, but it can become a central plank for Republicans in the 2024 presidential election.”
The notion of “wiping out the IRS” has some merit. Our Monetarily Sovereign government neither needs nor uses the tax dollars (or any other dollars) that come into the Treasury.
In fact, federal taxes begin in the M2 money supply measure, but upon reaching the Treasury, they cease to be part of any money supply measure. They are effectively destroyed, disappearing into the Treasury’s infinite money supply.
The IRS is not on anyone’s list of favorite federal agencies, but no one dislikes them more than the rich do.
If you’re salaried, there’s not much you can do about income taxes and virtually nothing you can do about payroll taxes. The rich continually try to game the system by stretching the meanings of tax laws to the breaking point.
I’m pretty well off, but even I can’t begin to imagine the Byzantine translations of tax laws that the wealthy use.
You undoubtedly have read that you paid more taxes in the past 15 years than did billionaire Donald Trump. We all did because he paid virtually none.
Now he is being investigated and may even have to pay a bit. You can be sure he and his fellow billionaires despise the IRS.
The main problems with felon D’Souza’s recommendation are:
He believes (or only claims) federal taxes are necessary, and
He advocates a flat tax to replace the current graduated tax.
The non-funding purpose of federal taxes is to control the economyby taxing what the government wishes to limit and by giving tax breaks to what the government hopes to encourage.
This could be accomplished without taxes simply through rewards and non-tax penalties.
Number 2 reflects the very rich’s desire to widen the income/wealth/power Gap between them and those below them.
The flat tax is the anti-equalization version of the graduated tax. The ostensible purpose of our graduated tax system is to narrow that Gap.
Sadly, it has been perverted by the numerous tax breaks afforded to the rich that are not available to the rest of us.
As weak as our graduated system is, the flat tax is worse. It is the ultimate dream of the rich and their lackeys, the Republicans.
The reality would be that tax breaks would not disappear, but the published tax rates on the rich would decline to 15%.
In short, a convicted felon, “right-wing conspiracy wingnut,” and mouthpiece for the rich has made two suggestions for further enriching the rich. We now await his applause from the GOP.
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and Monetary Sovereignty (MS) are united by the understanding that a Monetarily Sovereign government cannot unintentionally run short of its own sovereign currency.
Thus, the U.S. federal government, unlike state and local governments, which are monetarily non-sovereign, neither needs nor uses tax dollars to fund its spending.
Federal taxes may find purpose in helping to direct the economy by making some products and services more or less attractive, but federal taxes do not provide spending funds.
Even if federal tax collections were $0, the federal government could continue spending forever.
Further, being sovereign over the U.S. dollar, the federal government has the unlimited ability to set the value of the dollar i.e. control inflation.
Yet a leader of MMT, Professor Randall Wray has written: “Taxes or other obligations (fees, fines, tribute, tithes) drive the currency.”
This forces one to ask, “Specifically, what does ‘drive’ mean?” Does it mean:
1. When taxes are reduced, the value of money falls?
2. If taxes were zero, the value of money would be zero?
3. Do cryptocurrencies, which are not supported by taxes, have no value?
The answers: No, no, and no.
Professor Wray also claims, “the Jobs Guarantee (JG) is a critical component of MMT. It anchors the currency and ensures that achieving full employment will enhance both price and financial stability.”
Specifically, what does “anchors” mean?
1. Since JG does not currently exist, is the U.S. dollar “unanchored”?
2. Does providing college graduates with low-intelligence, ditch-digging jobs enhance price and financial stability?
3. Is forcing people to work morally and economically superior to giving them money and benefits?
Again, no, no, and no.
We often have criticized the JG here, here, here, and elsewhere. JG is an impractical, obsolete concept, more suited to the Industrial Age than to the current and future Artificial Intelligence (AI) age.
The essence of Bill Mitchell’s article can be found in this line:
“We are buffer stock. We must labor to receive benefits.”
“The MMT Job Guarantee . . . is a buffer stock mechanism which unconditionally hires at a fixed priced in order to redistribute labour resources from an inflating sector to a fixed price sector or from a zero bid state to a fixed price state.“
Translation: JG sets salaries at a single, low level, where raises are not allowed, but provides jobs at those levels where none are available.
Is this what our nation needs?
According to Randall Wray, the essence of MMT is JG, and according to Bill Mitchell, the JG is a buffer stock (of human labor) mechanism to control inflation.
Thus Modern Monetary Theory adherents believe the central economics problems addressed by MMT primarily involve employment and unemployment.
Supposedly, the Jobs Guarantee (JG) and a “buffer stock” control over inflation are the key solutions to what ails an economy.
By contrast, Monetary Sovereignty (MS) suggests that providing a job to each person who wants money already is an outmoded view, as robotics augmented with Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly demonstrates every day.
The notion that humans must labor in order to receive the fruits of an economic system reflects a combination of biblical work ethic applied to increasingly obsolete manufacturing methods.
On the horizon lurks the day when very few people will be “employed,” as we now understand the term. Machines will do the vast majority of the work, and people will reap the benefits, without human labor.
Why focus on work when we should focus on benefits?
In short, employment is not what people crave. Rather, they crave money, or more specifically people cravewhat money can buy.
(There’s an old line that goes something like this: “Not many people die whispering, ‘I wish I had spent more of my life in the office.'”).
JG doesn’t address fundamental human desires. It ignores them.
Here is Wray’s summary of his JG version:
1. The JG should pay a living wage with good benefits.
In line with other progressive proposals, the JG wage should establish a national minimum wage at $15 per hour, with free Medicare-style healthcare. It should also provide free childcare to enable parents to participate in the program.
Because you don’t work, you get no money.
Comments:
A “living wage” is not, and never can be, “a national minimum wage” of any specific amount. A “living wage” (whatever that term may mean) in Manhattan or San Francisco is considerably different from a living wage in a Mississippi town.
Further, while adding Medicare and childcare makes JG more palatable, they are not intrinsic parts of JG. They are parts of the Ten Steps to Prosperity.
What about free education, and why not offer “Medicare-style” benefits to those not participating in JG? Is there a moral objection?
2. Congress will appropriate the necessary funds to pay program expenses. No additional taxes will be levied.
Comments:
Correct: Federal taxes do not fund federal spending. No federal program ever requires taxation.
3. The JG should be universal in the sense that it serves every community, offering jobs where people live and providing real benefits to their communities.
Comments:
Here is where the academic ignorance of reality comes to play.
Exactly how will the government be able to “offer jobs where people live”? How will JG offer jobs in every city, every town, every village and every hamlet in every state in the U.S.?
I may have missed it, but I have not seen an MMT description of the department structure and mechanism by which the U.S. government can accomplish this task.
It’s a pie-in-the-sky wish, not a plan.
4. The JG should not devolve to either workfare or welfare. The social safety net should not be dismantled; no existing social services should be eliminated.
Individuals should be able to continue to receive existing benefits if they do not want to work in the JG program.
Comments: But workfare is exactly what JG is. You must work at a minimum-wage job, to get money and many social benefits are contingent on employment and income.
All those laws would need to be changed, somehow.
At the same time, the JG should not provide income support to those that do not work in the program. The JG should be seen as an employment program in which workers are paid for work.
The program should have visible benefits to communities so that the workers in the program are recognized as making positive contributions in return for their wages. The program’s purpose is to provide paid work, not welfare.
Comments:
Do communities really feel that minimum-wage workers — street sweepers, fast food workers, Walmart greeters — must make “positive contributions”?
Workers can be fired for cause—with grievance procedures established to protect their rights, and with conditions on rehiring into the program
Comments:
Visualize millions of minimum-wage workers spread all over the 50 states, each working in different jobs. Who will supervise each of them? What are their rights and who will protect their rights? What are the conditions for firing and rehiring them, and who will do the rehiring?
It’s all very nebulous, as though these human “details” don’t really matter.
5. However, there should be room in the JG for time-limited training and education.
While on-the-job training should be a part of every project, proposals can be solicited for specific training and basic education programs that will prepare workers for jobs in the JG — and, eventually, for work outside the JG. It is important that these are time-limited and that the training is for jobs that actually exist.
Comments:
Who will do the training?
Who will train and supervise the trainers?
Who will create and conduct the basic education programs?
Why “time-limited” and what is the time?
And this is the big one, visualize trying to figure out which jobs “actually exist” and are wanted by each trainee in America.
6. Project implementation and management will be decentralized. There should be diversity in the types of employments and employers —- to help ensure there are projects that appeal to workers and their communities.
Projects should go through several layers of approval before implementation (local, state or regional, federal) and be evaluated at these levels once in progress.
Decentralization helps to protect the program from whatever political winds emanate from the du jour occupant of the White House.
Comments:
The above is so ridiculous it was difficult to keep from laughing as I read it. Think about bureaucrats making sure there is:
–Diversity of types of employments
–Diversity of types of employers
–Several layers of approval (local, state, regional, federal)
–Decentralization
Surely, this cannot be serious. It describes the largest bureaucracy in American history. It would dwarf the military. In of itself, it would eliminate unemployment in America.
7. Where possible, proposals should scale-up existing projects with proven track records and with adequate administrative capacity to add JG workers. Federal spending should not subsidize administrative expenses.
Comments:
Scale up existing projects? That’s like growing companies. Who in the U.S. bureaucracy would do that?
How would these government funded businesses not compete with the private sector that is not blessed with federal funding?
And if administration is not federally funded, who would do the administering?
8. The JG should not be used to subsidize the wages of workers employed by for-profit firms. This distorts markets and is not likely to generate substantial new employment.
According to my formulas, JG should work if you’re buffer stock.
Private business is already heavily subsidized by all levels of government. The JG should not be used as yet another corporate welfare program.
However, private firms will benefit indirectly (and greatly) from the program as it provides a pool of hirable labor and as it contributes to economic growth that improves markets for firms.
Comments:
Are the workers employed by the government or by private industry. If by the government, that competes with private industry.
If employed by a private industry, that subsidizes the wages of that industry.
The notion that private industry is “heavily subsidized” by the government, is mysterious. Does being “subsidized” mean being a vendor? I wouldn’t call that a subsidy.
Or does being subsidized mean receiving tax credits, i.e. being penalized less, which also is not a subsidy.
9. Direct employment by the federal government for the JG should not dominate the program. Most employment should be administered at the local level -— where the workers are, in the communities where they will work.
Comment:
So, it’s partly government workers and partly private workers. So who will hire for the government and in what departments?
And who will be the employment agency for private jobs?
Who will “administer” employment at the local level, in the thousands of communities across this vast nation?
The JG program will probably need to create 15 million new jobs—six times greater than the number of federal employees today.
Comment:
The federal government is going to supervise 15 million new jobs all over America?? Who is qualified to do that? How will they do it?
If all 15 million were to join the federal workforce, supervision of all these new workers would, alone, require hiring a large number of additional federal employees. This would be politically difficult even if the massive scaling-up of the federal workforce were administratively possible.
Comments:
“Politically difficult” is the understatement of the year. It would be functionally a disaster.
The federal government’s role in the direct provision of jobs should be focused on providing projects to underserved communities and workers—after not-for-profits and state and local governments have employed as many as they can.
Comments:
“Underserved communities” are communities with few jobs. But Professor Wray wants the government to find most of the nonexistent jobs in the private sector.
10.Inclusivity and experimentation should be encouraged. The federal government should solicit proposals for novel approaches to job creation. For example, workers’ co-ops could be formed to propose projects in which wages, benefits, and limited materials costs would be covered by the federal government for a specified time period.
Comments:
I have no idea what this means, and I suspect Professor Wray is similarly at sea.
11.Consistent with point 10, project proposals put forth should not be summarily dismissed simply due to political bias.
Comment:
You’ll have to go to the original proposal to figure this one out. I can’t.
12. With decentralization, the types of projects permitted would take account of local laws and rules, including prevailing wage laws and union wage rates. With the JG paying $15 per hour, this means that in many states and localities, rules and laws will prohibit various types of work, including construction. In those areas, JG workers will not build infrastructure, for example.
Comments:
As if the job weren’t complicated enough, the federal bureaucrats would have to keep track of, and follow, “local laws and rules.” That should prove interesting.
13.Exceptions to the uniform wage should be considered, but this should not become the norm. For example, state or local governments might want to subsidize (at their own costs) the federally paid wage of $15 per hour in order to increase wages to some higher level. This might be because of high living costs locally. Or some JG employers might want to offer additional benefits (at their own cost) to workers, including housing allowances for high rent areas.
Comment:
And of course, the federal bureaucrats would be expected to allow for these exceptions when offering federal jobs in each locality. What could possibly go wrong.
14. Limited pilot programs that experiment with different models deviating from what is described above might also be considered. For example, a pilot program run by the federal government, with all participants hired as federal employees, might be tried before the JG is imple-mented on a national scale
Comment:
According to the the 2012 US Census Bureau there were 90,000 local governments of all types in the United States, each with different sets of laws that an employer must consider.
Learning, keeping updated with, and following those myriad laws should be quite a challenge, something the JG folks have not even begun to consider.
Bottom line: JG is a program created by economists who are hoping that “some devil” will be able to figure out the details because these business-ignorant folks don’t bother with such trifles.
The sad part is the thousands of hours MMT people have devoted to the academic side of economics, without understanding business realities.
I personally have spent 50 years managing and owning businesses. The MMT professors, some of whom know me, could have asked for my thoughts before wasting all those years on naivete jobs and “buffer stock,” rather than on human needs.
I resent all those brilliant men and women, who are blind to the facts that jobs are not a human goal, and that no one wants to be buffer stock. These economists have focused on their charts, graphs, and mathematics, and have overlooked the personal element of their science.
The human problem is not jobs; the problem is the income/wealth/power gap between the rich and the rest. Not only does JG not solve the gap problem, but it exacerbates the gap by enticing people and families into a minimum-pay existence.
I have only two good things to say about JG:
It would be expensive, requiring the federal government to pump many billions of stimulus dollars into the economy.
It wouldn’t cost taxpayers one cent, because no federal spending requires or uses tax dollars.
Otherwise, the Ten Steps to Prosperity(below) is a far better, and easier-to-implement program, than JG, and it would narrow that damn Gap.
The single most important problems in economics involve the excessive income/wealth/power Gaps between the have-mores and the have-less.
Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.
Implementation of The Ten Steps To Prosperity can narrow the Gaps:
Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which leads to civil disorder.
●Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.
●To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive.
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What about the IRS scandal?
OUTRAGEOUS! LAWS HAVE BEEN BROKEN!! HEADS MUST ROLL!! THESE PEOPLE MUST BE SENT TO JAIL!! SHOW NO MERCY, OR THEY’LL JUST KEEP DOING IT!!
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What about the spying-on-the-media scandal?
OUTRAGEOUS! LAWS HAVE BEEN BROKEN!! HEADS MUST ROLL!! THESE PEOPLE MUST BE SENT TO JAIL!! SHOW NO MERCY, OR THEY’LL JUST KEEP DOING IT!!
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What about the Benghazi scandal?
OUTRAGEOUS! LAWS HAVE BEEN BROKEN!! HEADS MUST ROLL!! THESE PEOPLE MUST BE SENT TO JAIL!! SHOW NO MERCY, OR THEY’LL JUST KEEP DOING IT!!
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What about the first family’s “expensive-trips-all-over-the-world” scandal?
OUTRAGEOUS! LAWS HAVE BEEN BROKEN!! HEADS MUST ROLL!! THESE PEOPLE MUST BE SENT TO JAIL!! SHOW NO MERCY, OR THEY’LL JUST KEEP DOING IT!!
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What about the “rich criminal-bankers not going to jail” scandal?
uh. er, ah. well . . . rich bankers . . . uh. . . see it’s like this. . . uh, criminal . . .
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Uh, where’s your proof? Anyway, let’s not be too hasty. These rich bankers have wives and children
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And these rich bankers have employees, who have families
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And these rich bankers have shareholders, who have families
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And these rich bankers have given us big political contributions, and promised lucrative employment for our our wives, our children and us
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At long last, can’t we show a little compassion?
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I told Boehner the same thing I told what’s-his-name, you know. The Attorney General. I said “Lay off the rich people.”
Boehner agreed. What’s-his-name, the Attorney General, also agreed.
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Yep. That’s me, and I agree. I do agree. I do. I do. I do.
Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone. Click here
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%
10 Steps to Economic Misery: (Click here:)
1. Maintain or increase the FICA tax..
2. Spread the myth Social Security, Medicare and the U.S. government are insolvent.
3. Cut federal employment in the military, post office, other federal agencies.
4. Broaden the income tax base so more lower income people will pay.
5. Cut financial assistance to the states.
6. Spread the myth federal taxes pay for federal spending.
7. Allow banks to trade for their own accounts; save them when their investments go sour.
8. Never prosecute any banker for criminal activity.
9. Nominate arch conservatives to the Supreme Court.
10. Reduce the federal deficit and debt
No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia.
Two key equations in economics:
1. Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
2. Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption – Net Imports
Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which leads to civil disorder.
●Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.
●To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive.
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Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (housing the best economics department in America, if not the world), wrote the following article for Naked Capitalism: How Dare DOJ Insult HSBC’s Crooks as Less “Professional” than Liberty Reserve’s Crooks?
As usual, with Bill’s articles, he details the utter criminality of the “too-big-to-fail” banks and their “too-big-to-jail” leaders.
For example:
I described in a prior article how HSBC hit the money launderer’s trifecta.
1. Laundered billions of dollars for some of the most murderous drug gangs in the world. These gangs have murdered many thousands of Mexicans and devastated much of the nation.
2. Aided Iranian entities to evade U.S. financial sanctions on Iran. If Iran is actually developing a nuclear weapon and if it uses such a weapon to attack it could kill tens of thousands of people and HSBC and Standard Chartered will likely have proven useful to Iran in developing the weapon.
3. Aided Hamas, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda to evade U.S. financial sanctions. The U.S. considers them terrorist organizations.
And, just as we often have, Bill complains about the Obama adminsitration’s willingness to jail comparative small fry like Liberty Reserve, but reluctance to go after the big crooks.
And as usual, Bill tells a compelling story, but fails to tell WHY the government won’t jail the banksters.
The answer, as we have been telling you for years is: Barack Obama has been bribed by the upper .1% income people to govern for their benefit.
When I ask MMTers why they refuse to use the “B” (bribed) word, they tell me there is no evidence of bribery. (To these innocent souls, bribery looks like a fat envelope, surreptitiously slipped into the desk drawer of a cigar-chomping politician.)
Sorry, MMT, that is not how you bribe the President of the United States. Little, dumb Chicago aldermen get caught that way, but big-time, national politicians use a different system — a system they have made legit — a system endorsed by the Supreme Court of the United States.
At the Hilton, about 100 supporters were on hand at a reception where tickets started at $1,000 each and topped out at $5,000 for two tickets and a photo.
From there, Obama headed to the Streeterville home of longtime supporters Bettylu and Paul Saltzman. Tickets there ran from $10,000 for dinner and photo to $50,000 for a table, photo and preferred seating.
When you read a number like $50,000 for a table, photo and preferred seating, you have to believe one of two things: Either rich people don’t care about money, or they want something special done.
My acquaintance with rich people tells me the former never is true, while the later always is true. For instance:
Chicago business executive Penny Pritzker was nominated by President Barack Obama to become the new Secretary of Commerce on Thursday, in an expected move that could prove controversial for the longtime political supporter and fundraising heavyweight.
Her nomination, which still needs Senate confirmation, also could bring up questions about the failure of a bank partly owned by her family.
(She) was Obama’s national finance chair in his first campaign for the White House and co-chair of his reelection campaign.
Billionaire Penny Pritzker is Obama’s big money. She also is Chicago’s big money. No expensive deals are done in Chicago without her knowledge and/or involvement.
Another Chicago Tribune article said:
A 61-page report carrying the seal of the Treasury’s inspector general, chronicles the 2001 failure of Pritzker’s Superior Bank after Pritzker and her family expanded subprime lending there and did pioneering work with the kind of mortgage-backed securitization that would eventually spread and help spark the worst recession since the Great Depression.
When it closed, Superior was one of the nation’s largest bank failures in a decade. Throughout the 1990s, Superior had reported rising profits that allowed it to distribute about $200 million in dividends to shareholders, specifically the Pritzkers.
Clint Krislov, a Chicago attorney who represented depositors in both the state lawsuit and a federal one against the bank and Penny Pritzker accused her family of improperly taking those dividends based on an over-valuation of the bank’s assets. “No one else appears to have taken a crashed bank and crashed it again and kept $200 million in profits,” said Krislov.
Fear not. The Department of Justice won’t investigate Barack Obama’s cash machine.
Next easy step: If campaign contributions are easy step 1 in bribing a President, what is easy step 2?Lucrative work afterward.
According to a CNN analysis of 12 years of federal financial records, former President Bill Clinton had his most active and profitable year on the lecture circuit in 2012, delivering 73 speeches for $17 million from mid-January 2012 through mid-January 2013.
That brought his total haul in speaking fees since leaving the White House to $106 million.
That’s an average of $233,000 per speech. The upper .1% run the charities and the other groups that are ready, willing and able to hire Bill Clinton and give him that obscene amount of payback.
The crown jewel of Clinton’s administration was his federal surplus, which caused the recession immediately following his exit from office. Recessions widen the gap by hurting the 99.9% far more than the .1%.
Bill did his job, well, and he has been rewarded well.
Then, there is the 3rd easy step in bribing a President. Take care of the family:
Chelsea Clinton was an assistant vice provost at NYU. She’s also a special correspondent at NBC News.
Chelsea might have great qualifications to be “assistant vice provost” (whatever that is) at New York University. And she may be a top notch “special correspondent” (whatever that is) at NBC News.
And maybe paying off her father for his services rendered, had nothing to do with her getting those jobs.
But watch for Michelle, Malia and Sasha to get extremely pleasant and lucrative jobs, when Barack leaves office.
In summary, bribing the President is a 3 (easy) step procedure:
1. Political contributions, while he’s in office.
2. Lucrative jobs for him when he leaves office.
3. Take care of the family.
That is the gentlemen’s agreement between the .1% and the President. They know it. He knows it. And to get along, he goes along.
How? Here’s just one of many, many examples. Tax breaks.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the top 10 major tax breaks “are distributed unevenly across the income scale,” with the top 1% of households — those who make more than $450,000 a year — receiving more than 17% of the savings in 2013.
The top tax breaks include the mortgage-interest deduction, the low rate on dividends and capital gains, breaks for charitable giving and the tax-free status of employer-sponsored healthcare plans.
Almost 70% of the benefit of the lower tax rate for capital gains and dividends is going to households in the top percentile.
The tax code is skewed to favor the rich. That is why taxes on payroll income are levied at a higher rate than taxes on capital gains. And that is why businessescan deduct for business expenses, but families cannot deduct for family expenses.
There you have it. Three simple steps in the bribing of a President. No envelope slipped into a desk drawer. The money is way too big for an envelope.
Greedy Presidents are well aware of the established quid pro quo: “Mr. President, you take care of us now, and we’ll take care of you later.”
And it’s all legit. The lawmakers, i.e. the bribed, passed the laws that make taking bribes O.K.
Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone. Click here
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%
10 Steps to Economic Misery: (Click here:)
1. Maintain or increase the FICA tax..
2. Spread the myth Social Security, Medicare and the U.S. government are insolvent.
3. Cut federal employment in the military, post office, other federal agencies.
4. Broaden the income tax base so more lower income people will pay.
5. Cut financial assistance to the states.
6. Spread the myth federal taxes pay for federal spending.
7. Allow banks to trade for their own accounts; save them when their investments go sour.
8. Never prosecute any banker for criminal activity.
9. Nominate arch conservatives to the Supreme Court.
10. Reduce the federal deficit and debt
No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia.
Two key equations in economics:
1. Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
2. Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption – Net Imports
I told Boehner the same thing I told what’s-his-name, you know. The Attorney General. I said “Lay off the rich people.”
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 