Reagan cut Corporate Profits Tax from 50-percent to 28-percent.

[Octafish]

Last edited Thu Jan 3, 2013, 03:36 PM - Edit history (1)

Reagan cut top income tax rates from 70-percent to 50-, then 28-percent.

Reagan cut capital gains taxes from 50-percent to 28-percent. (It's now 15-percent.)

Big Deficits followed ever since, the result of less revenue going to Washington. The new normal also provided a built in excuse for inability to take action on education, health care and social problems.

What David Stockman said: http://m.seekingalpha.com/article/187077

Oh. And the rich got richer.
The poor got poorer.
And the middle class shrunk.

So, why are we even considering more Reaganomics and corporate tax breaks for Big Business, coupon clippers and those who've benefited most from 32 years of Trickle-Down Voodoo nonsense?

We should be boosting taxes on those who've benefited most, like Sheldon Adelman and the Koch Bros. They should look at it as their patriotic duty.

What Robert Borosage said: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/02-0

[leftstreet]

1. Axis of Evil: Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney

DURec

[Octafish]

4. Evil as the poor man's day is long.

Here is someone who was real chums with Maggie, yet has gotten near-zero press in the USA:

'I love you': Jimmy Savile gushed to Margaret Thatcher in chilling letter about "my girl patients"

He mentioned “girl patients” and "paralyzed lads" in a letter thanking her for lunch as he tried to enlist her help for a charity appeal

No byline
London Mirror 28 Dec 2012 00:00

Paedophile DJ Jimmy Savile wrote a chilling letter to Margaret Thatcher about the “girl patients” at Stoke Mandeville Hospital

He mentioned them in a letter in 1980 thanking her for lunch as he tried to enlist her help to renovate the hospital.

The perverted star, then an OBE, claimed to have waited a week before writing to the PM to declare his "love" for Thatcher.

Savile, awarded a ­knighthood in 1990 for his charitable services, received widespread praise for his work with the hospital in Aylesbury, Bucks.

But it has since emerged that it was one of a series of places where the broadcaster preyed on vulnerable people, abusing them for decades.

CONTINUED...

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/jimmy-savile-letter-to-margaret-thatcher-1508069

More than mis-directed feelings, there is an evil about people who value property over people.

[Egalitarian Thug]

2. Doing the same thing and expecting different results has become the American Way.

The conditioned response is so absolute that merely suggesting solutions that might actually solve problems is attacked by both 'sides'.

[Octafish]

5. Absolutely, correct, Egalitarian Thug. So why keep up with the nonsense?

James Galbraith says the fiscal cliff is a scam that benefits a certain class.

GALBRAITH: An artificial sense of urgency about events that are 30 or 40 years off. It's a very strange situation.
And we have obvious pressing problems—unemployment, foreclosures, energy, climate change. We have clear things that should be at the top of our priorities. And instead you have this preoccupation, obsessive preoccupation with computer projections which are easily—let's say, easily rebutted and which in any event, you know, are making statements about events that are highly conjectural and very far in the future.

SOURCE: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=9238

His old man also was a heckuva player on the side of peace and progress.

[whatchamacallit]

3. Following POTUS statement, DUers immediately started posting/polling about medicare/medicaid reform

It's clear to me now we will follow wherever they lead. We will adopt the memes, frames, and "solutions" of the right in whatever measure the president does.

[Octafish]

6. What Corporate McPravda avoids mentioning: 8 Huge Corporate Handouts in the Fiscal Cliff Bill

We need less pressure and more watchdogging.

When a salesman applies the pressure to close, I automatically decide against the purchase.

8 Huge Corporate Handouts in the Fiscal Cliff Bill

Here are the corporate subsidies in the fiscal cliff bill that you may not know about.

Naked Capitalism / By Matt Stoller
January 1, 2013

Throughout the months of November and December, a steady stream of corporate CEOs flowed in and out of the White House to discuss the impending fiscal cliff. Many of them, such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, would then publicly come out and talk about how modest increases of tax rates on the wealthy were reasonable in order to deal with the deficit problem. What wasn’t mentioned is what these leaders wanted, which is what’s known as “tax extenders” [3], or roughly $205B of tax breaks for corporations. With such a banal name, and boring and difficult to read line items in the bill, few political operatives have bothered to pay attention to this part of the bill. But it is critical to understanding what is going on.

The negotiations over the fiscal cliff involve more than the Democrats, Republicans, the middle class and the wealthy. The corporate sector is here in force as well. One of the core shifts in the Reagan era was the convergence of wealthy individuals who wanted to pay less in taxes – many from the growing South – with corporations that wanted tax breaks. Previously, these groups fought over the pie, because the idea of endless deficits did not make sense. Once Reagan figured out how to finance yawning deficits, the GOP was able to wield the corporate sector and the new sun state wealthy into one force, epitomized today by Grover Norquist. What Obama is (sort of) trying to do is split this coalition, and the extenders are the carrot he’s dangling in front of the corporate sector to do it.

EXCERPT...

4) Help a brother mining company out – Sec. 307 and Sec. 316 offer tax incentives for miners to buy safety equipment and train their employees on mine safety. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to bribe mining companies to not kill their workers.

5) Subsidies for Goldman Sachs Headquarters – Sec. 328 extends “tax exempt financing for York Liberty Zone,” which was a program to provide post-9/11 recovery funds. Rather than going to small businesses affected, however, this was, according to Bloomberg [6], “little more than a subsidy for fancy Manhattan apartments and office towers for Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Corp.” Michael Bloomberg himself actually thought the program was excessive, so that’s saying something. According to David Cay Johnston’s The Fine Print, Goldman got $1.6 billion in tax free financing for its new massive headquarters through Liberty Bonds.

6) $9B Off-shore financing loophole for banks – Sec. 322 is an “Extension of the Active Financing Exception to Subpart F.” Very few tax loopholes have a trade association, but this one does. This strangely worded provision basically allows American corporations such as banks and manufactures to engage in certain lending practices and not pay taxes on income earned from it. According to this Washington Post piece [7], supporters of the bill include GE, Caterpillar, and JP Morgan. Steve Elmendorf, super-lobbyist, has been paid $80,000 in 2012 alone to lobby on the “Active Financing Working Group.” [8]

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/print/news-amp-politics/8-huge-corporate-handouts-fiscal-cliff-bill

Why our elected and selected representatives buy the snake snake oil:

"You can play ball and good things can happen to you get a big pot of gold at the end of the Wall Street rainbow or you can do your job be aggressive and face personal ruin...We really need to rethink how we govern and how regulate." -- Neil Barofsky

SOURCE: http://www.businessinsider.com/neil-barofsky-2012-8

[closeupready]

7. Congress is getting bluer. After a couple years,

I fully expect to see discussions about reinstating those tax rates to make the rounds on Capitol Hill. No matter HOW much money the 1% throw at Congressional races.

[Octafish]

8. Old guys like me remember when companies and individuals were PROUD to pay taxes.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called taxes the "price we pay for a civilized society."

Then comes a more conservative bent. Himself a beneficiary of creative accounting, Reagan would go on to make dodging taxes fashionable nationwide.

Ronald Reagan: Welfare Queen of Montana (or: Tax Tips for Mitt Romney)

POSTED: February 7, 12:55 PM ET | By Rick Perlstein
Rolling Stone

EXCERPT...

It happened like this. One Friday in late April of 1971, a student-operated radio station at Sacramento State College reported that Reagan's 1970 California tax return claimed the governor owed precisely zero dollars and zero cents.

Brazen stuff. For one thing, Gov. Reagan pulled his tax dodge during an election year, when he was running for a second term. For another, his big crusade after reelection was fighting the Democratic legislature’s attempts to institute tax withholding on salaries to make up for a budget shortfall. He wanted people should know exactly what they were paying; "taxes should hurt," was his slogan.

The following week, the story was the talk of the State Capitol. At Reagan's weekly press conference, after he announced the state was running so short of cash that by fall it would be forced, for the first time since the Great Depression, to rely on outside borrowing to pay the bills – because, of course, Democrats were "playing fast and loose with the fiscal integrity of this state for purely partisan advantage" – a newsman asked him if it was true that he himself had contributed nothing to state coffers the previous year. Obviously taken aback, he responded slowly: "You know something? I don't actually know whether I did or not. I'd have to check up .... I have a fellow making it our for me — a lawyer makes it out." He added, "I know in the federal the last couple of years I got a rebate back."

Five minutes after the press conference his office released a one-sentence statement: "Because of business reverses of Gov. Reagan's investments, he owed no state income tax for 1970."

Well. The UPI wire service did the accounting. It turned out that, in addition to his $41,100 salary as governor, for which a Californian would ordinarily owe $2,700 without deductions, Reagan had sold 236 acres of his Yearling Row Ranch in the Malibu Mountains in 1968 to 20th Century Fox studios for a reported $1.93 million. (To figure these sums in current dollars, multiply by a factor of about 5.5). He refused to say how this all added up to an absence of taxable income. He also refused to make his tax records public, or say what the "business reversals" were – refused with a vengeance. Arriving at the Capitol the next day, asked whether he would clarify his federal tax status, he answered, "Why should I have to clarify the status? Frankly, I think the Capitol press corps demeaned itself a little by engaging in invasion of privacy." (Turn the question around, playing the victim card against the wicked jackals of the press: Newt Gingrich would absorb the lesson well.)

CONTINUED...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/ronald-reagan-welfare-queen-of-montana-or-tax-tips-for-mitt-romney-20120207

Thank you for the positive vibe, closeupready. From your keyboard to the big matrix sysadmin in the sky.

[closeupready]

9. Group hug!