Tag Archives: wealth

Republican National Convention: Day 2 Recap

Posted on by
Reply

Lies, lies, and more blatant lies. Paul Ryan delivered his speech last night on national television during day two of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida to rousing cheers from the only people in the US who care about him, those inside the same arena. In his speech, which he wrote himself, he managed to lie about his entire congressional record.

Let’s look closer at the lies. Ryans most bald-faced lie came when he attacked Obama for trying to trim over $700 billion from Medicare. This in itself is true, Obama has created extensive proposal calling for spending cuts across the board including Medicare and (yikes!) defense, yet Ryan represented the information as harmful to seniors, while omitting the fact that it is his budget proposals which called for even deeper cuts, an elimination of the popular senior health program, and would lead to huge out of pocket cost rises for seniors (on average $6,000 per year per senior). The fact that Ryan is attacking Obama for what he has fought hard to implement is hypocritical at best and downright lying at its worst. Luckily, people saw right through that one. Ryan has already cost the GOP Florida, and his notions of where spending cuts should fall is contrary to most American’s notions of what living in a civilized society means.

The second lie was his assertion that the bailout was Obama’s cronyism favoring corporations. This elicited laughs from all circles across the country. A Republican accusing a Democrat of corporate cronyism! It’s hard to type through the laughter! Ryan might have been right about how he defined the bailout, but he voted for the plan and was responsible for bringing tens of millions of dollars to companies in Wisconsin to protect jobs and keep industries from failing. In civil terms: a bailout during hard times, in convention speak: corporate cronyism. He also cited a story of a Janesville, Wisconsin GM plant that Obama promised to save during a speech there in 2008. Ryan then blamed Obama for the plant’s closure. The truth is that the plant closed in December 2008, before Obama was President. But that isn’t the point. Ryan is simultaneously criticizing Obama for cronyism while not doing enough cronyism in the same breath. Which one is it Paul?

Instead of steering the Republican party away from controversy, Ryan has brought on more problems than Sarah Palin in 2008, who, despite having a questionable intellect, was at least genuine. Ryan represents the type of Washington double standards that America has come to hate. What is worse now are the surfacing allegations that two billionaire brothers (the Koch family, pronounced like “Coke”) essentially bought Ryan’s selection by promising over $100 million in campaign donations to Republican-supporting groups if Romney selected Ryan. Why would anyone spend that kind of money on a political race? When the man they are backing wants to eliminate nearly every kind of tax on the super rich, it might turn out to be a good investment. $100 million to create one job. Oh, by the way, this is super illegal and will have far-reaching consequences if evidence makes it to the feds. But what is super official now: our country’s soul is up for sale.

Tax Shelters, Non-Disclosure, Evasion: Does Romney Care About America?

Posted on by
1

An editorial from the New York Times underscores what most Americans are wondering: how much effort does Mitt Romney put in to evading paying capital gains taxes, and where does he keep his money anyway? Romney says that he has offshore money in “blind accounts,” meaning that he doesn’t know where his money is specifically invested. But he didn’t blindly put money into Bermuda and the Cayman islands. He chose those places because of their favorable tax policies — tax policies that hurt the United States. 

Mitt Romney offshore accounts

Pebble-free, seaweed-free, tax-free

Romney likens these tax evasion tactics to investing in foreign businesses. It’s strange then that he only invests in the foreign businesses that are located in places that do not tax foreign income, or places that do not have sizable markets like China or India or whose economic growth do not show promise such as Latin American or certain African nations. This also does not include foreign businesses who are operating in the United States by opening up offices and creating jobs. But more importantly, why is the Republican candidate for the President of the United States putting so much money offshore? Surely Mitt Romney is a job creator, and would want to see his money employing people and taking them off government assistance programs, right?

Wrong. Romney only cares about his money, which is why he puts it in the hands of personal wealth managers who navigate the tricky landscape of loopholes, breaks, and foreign capital regulation to effectively eliminate the payment of taxes and milk the system bone dry. These are the 1% that Occupy Wall Street was fighting against, and they get away with scamming the American public out of money earned in America — which should be taxed in America — every single day.

Romney is nothing more than their example, a rich man who has hid his earnings, released only one full tax report, does not disclose how he makes money ($27 million this past year) and who takes his money away from the reach of American tax collectors to increase his wealth by a few fractions of a percentage point at a time. Is this a guy who is standing up for America? Who is being truthful with the American people? The NYTimes summed it up nicely and gave it an important historical context that voters must face:

“What information he did release provides a fuzzy glimpse at a concerted effort to park much of his wealth in overseas tax shelters, suggesting a widespread pattern of tax avoidance unlike that of any previous candidate.”

The Redistribution Of Wealth; Republican Anti-Tax Ploy

Posted on by
Reply

Republicans want you to believe that taxes are the same as early 20th century communist doctrine. They argue that taxing anyone at all is tantamount to their term of death: the redistribution of wealth. Yet this gaping fallacy neglects the fact that all governments, in every form from monarchies to democracies, utilize taxes to pay for government. Quite simply — and to us blatantly obvious — taxes are not a redistribution of wealth, because they provide services everyone uses, not transferring wealth from one to another.

Tax dollars

Tax dollars hard at work

Transferring wealth from one to another comes in the form of investment, inheritance, property, things that make up wealth. Wealth is the type of money that people save up over time and use to build homes, invest in the stock market, put aside for retirement or a rainy day. There is no structure in place in America today that allows the government to take wealth away from anyone person and give it, in kind, to another person. This just does not exist.

Still, Republicans are quick to harp on social assistance programs as examples of redistribution of wealth. Money goes from those who have more to those who have less. But social assistance programs are not wealth-generating, they are temporary stop-gaps to keep people in their homes and food in their children’s bellies.  No one is using food stamps to buy shares of Apple (the company, not the fruit). In fact if anything the programs are purposefully inadequate to make it as undesirable as possible to stay unemployed. Therefore, since assistance programs do not generate wealth, it cannot be a redistribution of wealth.

Republicans think that any tax, tax plan, tax idea, or especially tax increase is a redistribution of wealth, ignoring these critical services that we already can’t pay for. For our society to continue to function at the level we expect, we have to provide these services that Republicans talk so hard about cutting. That’s because so many of the services the government provides are deeply intwined in our everyday lives. As a result of fearing taxes, the divide between what we need and what we can actually afford explains our mounting debt.

Instead of fixing the debt problem through a balance of trimming services and raising taxes, Republicans focus on antiquated ideals of socialism and communal ownership, which would redistribute real wealth from one to many a la Karl Marx. There is nothing even remotely close to that happening today in any part of the world, even in China, where wealthy business people drive Porsches and live in penthouses like the wealthy anywhere else.

A redistribution of wealth is nothing more than a Republican ploy to poison the debate over taxes in their effort to eliminate services for the poor to close the debt. A baseless charge grounded in hatred.

Romney’s Horse: Dressage And The Masses

Posted on by
Reply

Sports are wildly popular in America. The current NBA Finals are managing monster ratings, even with a small market team like Oklahoma City. American men (and some women) paint their bodies and faces on weekend autumn days and brave freezing cold weather to support their beloved teams. Even as major sports take increasing amounts of attention, other more traditional sports carry allure too. 

dressage olympics

Just like the GOP training Romney

Rodeos are as American as Lincoln’s hat. Cowboys gave birth to swagger, and as America swept across the western territories of the Louisiana Purchase two hundred years ago, their image in civilization rose. John Wayne is still the quintessential man after all these decades. Even today, the romanticism of horses and the wild west lives strong within us.

Even horse races can captivate the nation, with winning horses at the Triple Crown events becoming celebrities instantly, like this year’s I’ll Have Another. With all the pomp and circumstance of the hats, the tradition, and the white faces, horse racing at least gets a mention in major media.

Yet there is one variety of horsemanship that normally gets left out. Equestrian sporting tends to be reserved for the super rich, who have access to farms and stables in areas where there normally aren’t many farms or stables, like Boston or New York City. Young preps hop over small fences and bushes. Some have taken the sport so far that they created “dressage” or the advanced training of a horse to respond to minimal commands: some have deemed it horse ballet.

The fact that the American public is nearly completely oblivious to dressage probably helps the Romney’s more than it harms them, as they are sending one of their horses to compete in London’s summer Olympics. What might normally be cause for ridicule, or at least alienation, has given way to general confusion. “What?” is most people’s response.

But it reveals just how deep the canyon between Romney and most of America is. He is fabulously wealthy, and if elected would be the richest President ever to hold office. He has never in his life come close to understanding how difficult it is to make a living without privilege. While he himself has been very successful in business, all this post is saying is that he has so much money that he grooms horses for dressage. A true leader would address the fundamental issues of America and maybe consider donating the metals his horse wins in London to help to feed the poor that is trying so hard to screw over.

The Bain Of Romney’s Existence

Posted on by
Reply

Volleys are already in the air. Team Obama has begun to use its advantaged position to hang out all of Mitt Romney’s past laundry, whether clean or not. Primarily, they are focusing on his work at Bain Capital, where the other Republican nomination candidates tried to label Romney a “vulture capitalist.” He has weathered these attacks before, and it is distracting from the point.

Notice of termination of employment

Turning pink to green

It says a lot about how misguided and hypocritical the Republican establishment is when they can essentially be comprised of two groups: rich white people, and poor, religious white people. Those who run for political office, i.e. the wealthy ones, are supposed to be rugged, free market capitalists who will squeeze the life out of a baby to see if a nickel drops out (just not an unborn baby). They believe that there should be less government assistance to the poor, who should work harder to pull themselves up. They don’t want to tax the rich, who deserve the money that they earned or inherited. So following these assumptions, they should love Romney.

A cross section of Obama’s supporters is dramatically different. Bolstered by rich people who believe strongly in civil rights and higher taxes, the middle class and youth that support Obama are skeptical of someone with Romney’s money. This may not have been much of an issue before the crisis, where businessmen could be seen as visionaries who brought great wealth to our nation. But after witnessing the arrogance, carelessness, and greed that spurred our country to recession, kicked hard working people out of their homes, and brought a level of government intervention unseen for generations, it seems that the electorate will have little sympathy for someone like Romney.

It really does not even matter what Romney did at Bain Capital, it just sounds wealthy. Obama will combine the public sentiment and their notions to portray Romney as someone who cut jobs in the pursuit of profits. Romney will say that in sometimes cutting jobs he saved entire companies and their other employees. He clearly made a lot of money at his job — not something that he wants to blast out across the airwaves — but a legitimate point. You don’t make that kind of money if you don’t know what you’re doing. If only he could put that into words that don’t make him sound like an insensitive Republican.