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Finally! Hallelujah!
Next up: Single payer!
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I wish our black president was a bit more like this guy:
“Perhaps…the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
“Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.”
“Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to work to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
“A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.”
“The words 'bad timing' came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning...they did not realize that it was ridiculous to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay.”
“The slaveholders of America had devised with almost scientific precision their systems for keeping the Negro defenseless, emotionally and physically.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait
And he knows that.
Does he think we are all morons? Or in the words of his buddy, Rahm Emanuel, fucking retarded?
A peculiar aspect of the Obama years has been the disconnect between the rage of Obama’s enemies and the yawns of his sort-of allies. The right denounces financial reform as a vast government takeover — and lobbies fiercely against it — while the left dismisses reform as symbols without substance. The right accuses Obama of being a socialist stealing the money of hard-working billionaires, while the left dismisses him as having done nothing to address inequality.
On all these issues, the truth is that Obama has done far more than he gets credit for — not everything you’d want, to be sure, or even most of what should be done, but enough so that the right has reason to be furious.
The latest case in point: taxes on the one percent. I keep hearing that Obama has done nothing to make the one percent pay more; the Congressional Budget Office does not agree:
According to CBO, the effective tax rate on the one percent — reflecting the end of the Bush tax cuts at the top end, plus additional taxes associated with Obamacare — is now back to pre-Reagan levels. You could argue that we should have raised taxes at the top much more, to lean against the widening of market inequality, and I would agree. But it’s still a much bigger change than I think anyone on the left seems to realize.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/why-the-one-percent-hates-obama/?_r=0
You're going to make a few left-leaning Independents on this thread predictably bashing President Obama cry. 
What makes a regressive system
The taxation systems in the 10 most regressive states shared a number of features, the authors found. Four lack personal income taxes, while five have virtually flat (or non-progressive) personal income taxes. Six of the states rely too heavily on sales taxes, which are regressive because consumption and incomes do not rise in lockstep. (Consumption accounts for a larger share of income for low-wage earners than high-wage earners.)
As the chart below shows, income taxes are typically the most progressive, on average, while property taxes are slightly regressive. Sales and excise taxes tend to be very regressive, since spending as a share of income tends to fall as income rises.&w=1484
While Delaware’s income tax is not particularly progressive, it’s heavy reliance on income taxes instead of consumption taxes make its system the least regressive overall. Though not comparable to a state, D.C. ranks as the next least regressive tax system, followed by California, Oregon, Montana and Vermont. D.C., Minnesota and Vermont make their tax systems fairer by providing generous refundable Earned Income Tax Credits to lower-wage earners.
Of course, the way a tax is structured matters, too. An income tax’s progressiveness is often determined by two factors: a tax rate that gradually rises with income and the availability of refundable tax credits targeted at the lowest earners. As the chart below shows, while California, Louisiana and Alabama all levy personal income taxes, California’s is far more progressive.&w=1484
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/01/14/how-state-tax-systems-unfairly-burden-low-income-earners/
Thanks for the links, particularly the WaPo one. I excerpted parts of it above. They were quite informative.
The CNN link showed the difference between Oregon and Washington. Oregon was high (#3) on the income tax ranking but on the bottom (#50) for sales taxes. Washington was about the opposite: no income tax and high (#3) in sales taxes.
In general, 8 of the top 10 states in terms of sales tax are Southern red states - Washington and Hawaii being the exceptions - while only 2 of these Southern red states (Kentucky and North Carolina) were in the top 10 in terms of income taxes.
Manny, did you write this??
The Politics of Gesture
Looking forward to Tuesday's State of the Union address, we are seeing a somewhat bolder Barack Obama. The White House has already pre-announced or leaked several "fourth-quarter initiatives," in the president's words. Some of these can be accomplished by executive order; most will require legislation.
...The time to have fought for such policies was when Obama still had a majority in Congress. But back then, in 2010, he was promoting deficit reduction.
And there are two deeper problems. None of Obama's proposals will fundamentally change the distribution of wealth and power in America. None addresses the structural erosion of decent payroll jobs.
With one hand, the administration proposes some useful, if marginal, help to working families. With the other, it is promoting trade deals such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), both of which will increase the power of corporations to weaken health, safety, labor and environmental regulations and increase the outsourcing of jobs.
Obama also insulted regular working people when he tried to appoint a Wall Street deal-maker, Antonio Weiss, to the top Treasury job in charge of financing the national debt. The problem was not only that Weiss had been a key figure in arranging strategies for U.S. corporations to avoid paying taxes. He had no background to qualify him for his proposed job at Treasury. He was a deal-maker, not an expert in the government bond market....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/the-politics-of-gesture_b_6498154.html
How predictable. 
You make good, though uncomfortable points.
I'll be waiting for his NEW POSITION (i.e. reversed) on TPP as well.
But I'm also waiting for Godzilla to clean-up Fukushima.
Think it'll happen?
