Tax Policy and the Presidential Race

Taxes. When other topics play themselves out during this presidential race, it's taxes that pops up again...and again...and again. So it may very well be that your choice for president in 2012 could come down to one question: whose tax policy do you like better? Romney's or Obama's?

I'm not going to make a case for either one here. I'm just going to describe each policy in broad strokes, according to studies by non-partisan institutions who are actually capable of understanding the overall implications of tax policy. So here goes.

Without saying whose is whose, the first policy, let's call it Policy A, would lower current tax rates for the wealthy and increase the tax burden for the middle and lower class. Policy B would raise tax rates for the wealthy and keep them unchanged for the middle and lower class. That's it, really. Choose A or B and you've got your presidential pick.

Policy A is Romney's, and it was analyzed by the Brookings Institute (Brookings Institute on Romney tax plan) and commented on by the Wall Street Journal (http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/08/01/study-romneys-tax-plan-hits-middle-class/). Policy B is Obama's, and it was also analyzed by  the Brookings Institute (Brookings Institute on Obama tax plan) as well as the Tax Policy Center (Tax Policy Center on Obama tax plan). My descriptions of the fundamental effect of each tax plan comes from those publications.

Sure there are other issues in the race. Some issues may be more important to you, taxes be damned. But if you vote with your pocketbook, just find your class above to choose your candidate.

Income Inequality Has to Get More Popular, As a Cause, That Is

When it comes to those who are manipulating and controlling the ill-informed to get or keep wealth, I think compassion has to move over for activism. For this cause, there is no time left to try to persuade those who are unaware that the misery they're enduring now is a result of unbridled greed by the rich. It's time to get focus on this issue any way we can, because it's only getting worse.

So what? Well, you might want to give a listen to this TED talk by Dr. Richard Wilkinson ("How Economic Inequality Harms Societies"), in which he explains that a whole lot of other social ills increase as income inequality rises. According to his data, the U.S. is now the worst county in the world when it comes to life expectancy, obesity, mental illness, literacy, infant mortality, drug and alcohol addiction, and even levels of trust among us, and that dive to the bottom correlates remarkably with our increase in income inequality in the past decade. The Economic Policy Institute recently noted in a feature on inequality that "...those at the bottom of the income distribution are not only less likely to get ahead financially, but they have also been left behind when it comes to recent gains to overall life expectancy." Somethin', huh?

There's more and more press and publications on the issue such as the examples below, so while I'm out holding up an Occupy sign, check these out and see if your activism button gets pressed, too. 

"It's the Inequality, Stupid" 

Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot, March/April 2011 Issue

"Income Inequality: It Wasn’t Always This Way"

Data taken from an interactive chart on the State of Working America web site.

"Debt Inequality is the New Income Inequality" 

Tami Luhby @CNNMoney, May 2, 2012

Sunday Book Review

Benjamin M. Friedman, May 25, 2012

"....In 'The Great Divergence,' the journalist Timothy Noah gives us as fair and comprehensive a summary as we are likely to get of what economists have learned about our growing inequality. Noah is concerned about why inezquality has widened so markedly over the last three to four decades, what it means for American society and what the country can — and, he argues, urgently should — do about it. As he makes clear, what has mostly grown is the gap between those at the top and those in the middle. As a result, his book resonates more with the recent focus on 'the 1 percent' than with more traditional concerns about poverty."

"Why 'Income Inequality' is a Losing Issue and How to Fix It" 

Jimmy Zuma, May 24, 2012

"...Today crossing from poor to rich is virtually impossible. In recent years the very rich have doubled their share of the nation’s income but the number of rich people hasn’t increased markedly. The United States lags behind all leading European Union countries in the possibility of moving up."

Mr. Rogers Was a True Believer

I just read an article about Mr. Rogers, the creator of the long-running PBS children's program. The article contained little-known facts about the man and his life, the most interesting of which--to me, at least--was that Mr. Rogers never mentioned God on his program.

He was an ordained minister who believed strongly in his message of love and acceptance of your fellow man, yet he transmitted that message without benefit of religious authority or reference. He was a true believer, living his faith in every character, song, and message he created for his audience. He could make children (and even adults) feel safe with just the sound of his voice, and he provided the caring and simple friendship that many were missing. Rather than tell children some entity loved them, he made them feel loved.

How is it that so many religious leaders, purportedly schooled in theology and trained as ministers, have bastardized the premise of their god's message to follow his lead and love one another? When did Christianity lose the sophistication that the ideology of Jesus is less important than its practical application?

On last night's program, Rachel Maddow showed a clip of a Baptist minister suggesting that anyone who doesn't believe in Jesus should get out of America because it is a Christian nation. The suggestion was part of an introduction of Rick Santorum who was to speak at the church. Rachel's guest, the Reverend C. Welton Gaddy (also a Baptist minister), said the minister in the clip was conducting the real 'war on religion' referred to often by Republicans. He said, "What's happened is that people who've lived so long with an assumed establishment of [Christian] religion... are now having to play by the same rules that [non-Christians do] and [Christians are] saying that's persecution." He said politicians who say Christians are under attack are just trying to scare people to get them on their side and such politicians would create a very different America that actually would suppress religious freedom for non-Christians.

There were very few Christians in existence in Jesus's time (duh), yet Jesus didn't jabber on about becoming Christian. Instead, he showed what being Christian meant through his acts of compassion and kindness. He gained followers by embodying and practicing the concept of love thy neighbor, so many followers that politicians got worried about his influence and crucified him. Now that's persecution.

I don't think the loudest pulpit pounders--or those in their congregation who are smart enough to know better but aren't crying "foul" on them--have anything to worry about when it comes to real religious persecution.

But their influence needs to be countered. Compassionately of course.

Justice and the Banks

OK, just thinking here. So the banks almost failed because they played high-stakes games with our mortgages and lost, which caused our economy to tank even though we bailed these same banks out. Now they're doing fine, their execs are getting big bonuses, but we lost our jobs, our houses, our equity, our credit, our savings, and much of the value of our investments. So now the federal and state attorneys general are trying to work out a settlement with the banks where the banks pay now to avoid future lawsuits. The thinking, I'm told, is that we need a settlement so the lawsuits won't get out of hand because then the banks would be hurt too much and wouldn't be able to help our economy recover. So the government would get some of its/our money back, the banks would continue to do fine as they have throughout this mess, but we as individual losers still get bupkiss, less than bupkiss I guess since we've suffered such losses and still have to make up the difference for the bailout with the taxes we pay. Is this justice?

It's Hard To Compete with Fox

Even Politifact itself acknowledges that when MISinformed is distinguished from ILLinformed, Fox viewers are the most consistently misinformed just as Jon Stewart said last week. With this evidence and the leaked emails from Fox manager Bill Sammon last December in which he directed Fox journalists to use certain labels and language to sway public opinion about the health care bill, it seems probable that if it were a crime for news media to knowingly and deliberately spread misinformation to the public then Fox News would be convicted.

I find it very hard to debate my Fox-viewing friends and family on the important issues of our time when they have been convinced by Fox that the fundamental facts and science about the issue are untrue. Yesterday I emailed my family a link to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, Are You Smarter Than a Fox Viewer?, that demonstrates, at least to me, how out of balance our country has become in terms of what people consider the 'truth'. How can you make progress on solving problems when you can't agree on what the problem is?