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Friday, May 21, 2004 |
FEATURED ARTICLES
- Covert Campaign To Rig Our Tax System, David Cay Johnston, Democracy Now
- Shifty Tax Cuts, by Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning."
- - Warren Buffet
KNOW YOUR HISTORY - MAY 21st
1881 -- American Red Cross founded by Clara Barton.
1918 -- US President. Woody Wilson signs the Sedition Act, making it a crime to hinder the war effort by making false statements, obstructing enlistment or speaking in any way against the US government, the constitution, the flag or the production of war materials.
1956 -- "Operation Redwing." The 1st hydrogen fusion bomb dropped from an airplane explodes over Namu Atoll at the northwest edge of the Bikini Atoll. The fireball was four miles in diameter. Makes Bikini Atoll unlivable. Your parents tax dollars at work.
1981 -- US Senate approves funding of 20 billion US taxpayer dollars for US full-scale production of chemical & nerve-gas weapons (aka Weapons of Mass Destruction).
RHINO HERE:
Rhino wonders how many Americans planning to vote for George Bush are doing so cause they want those Bush tax cuts come next April. And then there's those $300 US Treasury rebate checks in the mail.
Today's blog offers 2 brief, yet detailed evaluations of how American family budgets have actually been effected by the Bush tax cuts. The 1st piece is an interview the ever admirable Amy Goodman did this week with Pulitzer Prize-winning NY Times reporter David Cay Johnston about his new book Perfectly Legal. Johnston argues that most Americans are "being duped into supplementing the incomes and extravagant lifestyles of the rich and powerful."
The BOTTOM LINE's by Sean Gonsalves of the Cape Cod Times summarizing last months insightful report by
United for a Fair Economy (UFE) entitled "Shifty Tax Cuts: How They Move the Tax Burden off the Rich and onto Everyone Else." Here's what John Nichols of The Nation said of UFE:
"United for a Fair Economy is the single most effective group in the country when it comes to publicizing issues of economic injustice, income disparity, the racial underpinnings of the gap between rich and poor, and . . . the yawning chasm between the salaries of corporate CEOs and those of working Americans."
MORE ON United for a Fair Economy AT:
http://faireconomy.org
http://faireconomy.org/press/2004/ShiftyTaxCuts_pr.html
The Covert Campaign To Rig Our Tax System
to Benefit The Super Rich - And Cheat Everybody Else
Democracy Now, Tuesday, May 18th, 2004
AMY GOODMAN: I began by asking David Cay Johnston about just how the tax system works.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Most Americans, no matter how much they make, assume that people who make more pay a larger share in income taxes. That is a progressive tax system. We don't have that. If you made $60,000 last year, you paid a larger share of your income in income taxes and social security taxes to the government than people who made more than 10 million a year. That top group's average income by the way, was $25.6 million. If you made $400,000, that's a lot of money, but if you made $400,000, you paid a larger share of your income just in income taxes than people who made more than $10 million. That is people who made in a week what you worked for all year. We are shifting the burden of taxes steadily off the richest people in America and onto people who work. The very top taxpayers, the 400 highest income taxpayers in America, their taxes have gone from 30 cents on the dollar, which doesn't strike me as an onerous burden, in 1993, down to 22 cents on the dollar at the end of the Clinton administration and now under the bush administration, they're down to 17.5 cents on the dollar. Everybody else in America during those year, their taxes went up from 13 cents on the dollar overall to 15.
AMY GOODMAN: Who is doing this?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Both parties are doing this. They're doing it because they're listening to a narrow group of very well to do people who do not want to pay taxes, who do not want to share in the expenses of the country that has made them rich. And they want you to pay their taxes...
ENTIRE INTERVIEW POSTED AT: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/18/1350212
MORE FROM AMY GOODMAN & DEMOCRACY NOW AT: http://www.democracynow.org
8:07:40 AM 
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Shifty Tax Cuts
By Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet, Wednesday April 21, 2004
(Rhino's Excerpt)
...* For fiscal years 2002-2004, state governments filled approximately $200 billion in budget gaps by raising state taxes and fees and by cutting services. And during those same years, newly enacted federal tax cuts delivered about as much money - $197.3 billion - in new tax breaks for the wealthiest one percent of Americans (households making more than $337,000 a year).
"Had that money instead been directed to state fiscal aid, it could have prevented virtually all recent tax hikes and service cuts at the state level, which fall hardest on low- and middle-income Americans," write the report's authors.
* The choice to send nearly $200 billion to the top one percent rather than to state governments underscores just one way the federal tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are actually "tax shifts," not tax cuts, for the vast majority of Americans.
* Between 2000 and 2003, the United States saw a federal-to-state tax shift of historic magnitude: the share of the total tax burden borne at the state and local level jumped 15 percent.
"This is the largest such shift in the tax burden since the period 1947-1950. This shift is making the tax system more regressive."
Amazingly, in 2002, Americans in the bottom 20 percent of households paid 11.4 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while those in the top 1 percent paid only 5.2 percent of their income in state and local taxes - less than half the rate of the poorest fifth...
ENTIRE ARTICLE POSTED AT: http://www.alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=18483
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6:11:00 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.
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