How banks are getting richer off the poor, Harry’s Game, the Mitt has hit the fan, the GOP’s dystopian tax future, guess who’s getting purged from the voter rolls, Rush Limbaugh is a level 20 fat sack of excrement, “intellectuals”, we need more Warren not less, Krugman on DeMarco, and how we all spend our money.
Welcome to the Daily Sausage.
First up, if you’ve never rage vomited before, be prepared to do so: here’s an article from Forbes’ writer Halah Touryalai on how the Big Banks are squeezing the poor for their last dimes.
Normally I take the position that corporations in their many forms are amoral; they are incapable of having a conscience, so when they act in unconscionable ways we should not be surprised. I can’t really make that case about the American financial industry. They don’t act in an amoral way; they deliberately seek out and execute the most evil plans possible in the pursuit of higher profits.
Next up, we have a post from TBogg at FDL, titled “Harry’s Game”. This is very relevant to our interests:
Harry Reid is the honey badger; he doesn’t give a shit. He has the advantages of being the Senate Majority Leader which comes with a bully pulpit that can’t be ignored, he’s not some bomb-throwing back bencher, and he is a fellow Mormon who, like Jon Huntsman, seems to harbor a white-hot hatred of all things Mitt. Reid is most likely serving his last term in the senate and he’s is plainly tired of fucking around with Republicans and fully intends to bury their standard bearer which can have down ticket implications if depressed Republicans decide to stay home on election day because their top of the ticket prospects look like they are deader than Bob Dole’s dick.
Republicans have to be in a panic (see above). They haven’t even nominated their guy, they don’t trust him, he’s a terrible campaigner, his wife may be worse, everyone hates him, his campaign staff is a clown car chock full o’ bumblers, stumblers and maladroits, his foreign tour was a disaster, the media (which he ignores) is growing to loathe him more than the general public does, and the Republican convention is only four weeks away at which time Republicans are expected to formally tie the knot with him despite the fact that his unreleased tax returns are undoubtedly a ticking time bomb loaded with tax avoidance maneuvers, overseas accounts, and financial 3-card montes.
Allow me to pile on.
This is what Harry Reid did. He got Fox News to put, in BIG LETTERS, “MITT DIDN’T PAY TAXES FOR 10 YEARS”. Who gives a shit if it’s true? We live in a post-truth era now. Mitt Romney has been lying his ass off for months now and the national press is so cowed by the idea of fairness and civility in politics that precious few people are willing to call Romney or his surrogates out on their bullshit. So, good for Harry Reid.
Mitt, by the way, responded by telling Reid to reveal his source, saying “Well, it’s time for Harry to put up or shut up.” Harry Reid’s response?
It’s clear Romney is hiding something, and the American people deserve to know what it is. Whatever Romney’s hiding probably speaks volumes about how he would approach issues that directly impact middle-class families, like tax reform and the economy. When you are running for president, you should be an open book.
I understand Romney is concerned that many people, Democrats and Republicans, have been calling on him to release his tax returns. He has so far refused. There is only one thing he can do to clear this up, and that’s release his tax returns.
In other words, Harry Reid told Mitt Romney “You first.”
Speaking of bad Fox News infographics:
Yes, you’re reading that right. That’s a graph that goes from 34% to 42%, showing a 4.6% change in the tax rate for individuals making over $250,000 a year. Visuals are everything.
Since I’ve exhausted my supply of Star Trek movie title Mitt Romney puns, I’m moving on to poop jokes instead, because hey, who doesn’t like a good poop joke?
Anyway, here’s today’s Mitt Romney Poop Jokes Pun, The Mitt Has Hit The Fan.
As we’ve previously mentioned, Mitt Romney’s IRA is huge. Unfortunately, it’s way bigger than it’s supposed to be. House Democrats on the Budget, Ways, and Means as well as the Education and Workforce Committees want to call hearings on how Mitt Romney’s IRA contributions are 100,000 times the annual limit, and how the wealthy’s investment strategies cost the Treasury badly needed revenue.
The going theory is that investment groups like Bain Capital dramatically undervalue certain investments and then use them as the IRA contribution, knowing that they’ll dramatically increase in value later, which allows the IRA holder to avoid a tax hit.
Speaking of Mitt’s Taxes, let’s talk about his tax plan. Namely, the fact that no one; no economist, analyst, think tank, reporter, budget office, or anyone else, has been able to make Mitt Romney’s tax math work.
Romney claims he can cut everyone’s taxes by 20% without adding a penny to the deficit. My collegiate career consisted of eight credit hours of Accounting, and three credit hours each of Taxes and Finance. I am by no means an expert, or even a novice on any of these topics. However, I do remember enough to know that what Mitt Romney is suggesting is impossible. Not “possible under the right circumstances”. I mean legitimately impossible. You can’t cut taxes across the board by 20% and not add a penny to the deficit unless you’re also massively increasing wages across the board to provide an equivalent amount of cash to the percentage cut.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you have someone making $50,000 annually. They pay 25% in taxes, or $12,500 annually. They get Mitt Romney’s 20% tax cut, which means they pay 5% in taxes, or $2,500 annually. To make up the difference between what they used to pay and what they currently pay in real dollars, their income would have to increase to $250,000 annually. Unless Mitt Romney also has a secret plan to deal with massive inflation due to minimum wage workers making six figure salaries, his plan is a complete and utter steaming pile of horse crap.
In actuality, Mitt Romney’s tax plan would cut taxes for the 5% ($200,000 or greater in annual income), and raise them for the 95%.
Of course, that’s not the only half-baked Mitt Romney idea floating around. His jobs plan would cost the economy 360,000 jobs in 2013 alone.
In case you were thinking that this is just wishful Mitt Romney thinking, it’s not. The GOP has mapped out a tax reform plan in the event they hold both houses of Congress and the Presidency.
Here’s the problem with that plan: it requires the GOP to control all three branches of Government.
When you have Rasmussen reporting that Richard Mourdock is only up two points on Joe Donnelly in deep red Indiana, you know you have some really, really big problems.
Of course, there are ways to deal with that. They’re called voter purges, and they disproportionately target minorities, urbanites, singles, the young, the old, and women. Let’s see here: minorities, urbanites, singles, the young, the old, and women. Unless I’m mistaken, five out of those six groups are heavily Democratic constituencies. It’s almost as if the GOP is trying to rewrite the rules in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida to ensure that Mitt Romney will win, because without those three states he doesn’t have a chance.
In lighter news, Rush Limbaugh is being accused of plagiarizing a Dungeons and Dragons manual. I was going to roll a character sheet for him, but unfortunately “fat sack of excrement” isn’t an accepted class under Fourth Edition D&D rules.
Doghouse Riley is back and as good as ever, taking on conservative “intellectuals”.
Look, fifty years ago your party fell under the spell of Western “movement” “conservatism”, in an effort to halt the onrushing tide of the sixty-three-year-old 20th Century, and simultaneously adopted the idea that Bill Fuhbuckley was an intellectual, in an effort to cover your embarrassment. Neither worked; to survive, the party separated itself from the rest of the political spectrum, then from Reality Herself. Your elder statesmen now are people like Will and Dick Cheney, still pissed off that hippie girls wouldn’t lay them in the 60s, and your middle-aged mouthpieces, when they aren’t starkers, are toadies like Brooks, who bought the program when they were adolescents and still cling to it like Douthat clings to his St. Christopher medal, hoping Zombie Reagan will rematerialize if they just Believe. Of course Mitt Romney has no ideas. Your entire party has but one, and that one was disproved a generation ago.
Elizabeth Warren is in favor of regulating the crooks who ruined the economy and got away scot-free with everything they didn’t wreck. She stands for the idea that we have a political commonwealth, and that it is worth repairing, and that it has had more to do with the success of this country than all of the hedge-fund cowboys who ever lived. Her stands on social issues are dead in the middle of the mainstream of her party. She is immensely charismatic, and she is improving as a public speaker. She is the candidate for a winnable Senate seat that the Democrats really need. And we should all take pause because Jason Altmire is dumb enough to say she’s an extremist and Luke Russert is dumb enough to quote him?
Krughtulu rises from his slumber and savages Edward DeMarco, the Bush-appointed head of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which President Obama can’t get rid of due to Congressional Republican obstructionism.
And finally, a look from NPR on how the rich, the middle class, and the poor all spend our money.
The rich spend less on basic necessities like food, transportation, utilities, and healthcare as a percentage of income, and instead plow that in to education and savings/retirement. The poor, as a contrast, spend significantly more on basic necessities, and almost nothing on education and savings/retirement.
