Media Assault- Taxes and Budget Cuts

  The following post comes by way of the activist over at Daily Kos, who wish to have this idea for raising revenue to curb the deficit passed around to all of the news outlets possible. You may wish to also spread the word to you congress-critters while you are at it.

  This idea of taxing stock trades and such with something similar to a sales tax could go a long way towards cutting the deficit as well as stopping the assault on Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare.

This morning we have the usual conservative politics with a new wave.  We have had the Tea Party /Right wing effort to stop an extension of the debt ceiling.
Now we have "moderate" proposal from the Gang of Six, which is essentially the Simpson-Bowles plan. That is another conservative, not so crazy, right wing assault on benefits and working people.  And, since it is not the crazy Tea Party, the press is picking up on it.

Our task.  Today.
Get as many posts up as you can, letters to the editor, responses on web news stories.  In each case argue for the opposite- a financial transaction tax.  The information you need is on the DSA site;  here. http://www.dsausa.org/...

intro;
Despite what conservatives often say, there are several potential sources of money to pay for the needs of our country.  Perhaps the most promising is a tax on the trading of financial assets, a financial transaction tax, often called an FTT or a “Tax on Wall Street Speculators.”
Q:  How would an FTT work?
A: An FTT would be a small tax on all trading in stocks, currencies, and debt products such as treasury bills and bonds (and futures and options contracts on all of these). Think of it as a very small sales tax. It could be a tax of $1 on every $400 of stocks traded (0.25%); one-quarter of one percent, and $1 on every $800 dollars of currency or debt traded (0.125%), one-eighth of one percent.

Q: How much money could it raise?

A: This tax would have raised between $750 billion and $1.2 trillion during each of the past five years (2005 – 2009).  With that amount of revenue we could put a large number of people back to work on the projects that are needed to rebuild our economy.

We should be as creative as possible.  And, certainly among the people here on line there are some additional good ideas on how to penetrate the main stream media.  Even church newsletters and labor papers have value. ( because they are friend to friend).

We should be as creative as possible.  And, certainly among the people here on line there are some additional good ideas on how to penetrate the main stream media.  Even church newsletters and labor papers have value. ( because they are friend to friend).

Certainly Facebook and other social media.  The idea is focus.  for just 3 days, repeat and repeat. Financial transaction tax. Not cuts to social security and Medicare. It also helps if you can link to similar pieces, that raises the Google counting.
See the good essay on this by Dean Baker yesterday. http://www.cepr.net/...

 

Technorati Tags: Debt Ceiling,Deficit,Budget Cuts,Conservatives,Wall Street,Social Security,Taxes,Financial Transaction Tax,Current Events

More Washington Doublespeak on Social Security

   By  Congressman Dennis Kucinich    Tue Jul 19, 2011

Today the so-called 'Gang of Six' published a draft report that acknowledges the solvency of Social Security, but incorporates it into a deficit reduction plan anyway.

This latest bipartisan plan to reduce the deficit says on one hand that it will 'reform Social Security on a separate track, isolated from deficit reduction.' On the other hand if 'Social Security reform' gets sixty votes in the Senate, then it would be combined into a single bill with the deficit reduction plan. If the Social Security bill does not get 60 votes the deficit reduction bill is 'vitiated' or made invalid.

So an undefined Social Security 'reform' starts out on a separate track, joins the track of the deficit reduction bill, which lacking 60 votes becomes a train wreck.

Why are members of Congress and the Administration continuing to mix the '75 year solvency' of Social Security with the deficit, when Social Security, by the report of its own trustees, has enough resources to pay 100% of benefits through 2036, without any changes whatsoever? Who or what is driving this effort to simultaneously insist that Social Security reform is 'isolated from deficit reduction' and that deficit reduction depends upon Social Security reform?

Technorati Tags: Dennis Kucinich,Debt Ceiling,Social Security,The Deficit,Current Events

Debt Ceiling: No Party Scores Good With Public

   Though President Obama and the Democrats have unfavorable ratings with the public, it is the American Taliban ( Republicans ) who are at the top of the publics dislike according to a new CBS News Poll, with the GOP getting a 71% disapproval rating from the public.

Americans are unimpressed with their political leaders' handling of the debt ceiling crisis, with a new CBS News poll showing a majority disapprove of all the involved parties' conduct, but Republicans in Congress fare the worst, with just 21 percent backing their intransigent resistance to raising taxes.

President Obama earned the most generous approval ratings for his handling of the weeks-old negotiations, but still more people said they disapproved (48 percent) than approved (43 percent) of what he has done and said.

    Maybe the Republicans should just stick to the things at which they are pros at, like job creation and hollering for more tax cuts for corporate America.. Okay, so they are pros at one of them.

  Even GOP party supporters do not care for they way in which their peters leaders are handling things, as noted by Brendan Nyhan:

Even half of the Republican respondents (51 percent) voiced disapproval of how members of their own party in Congress are handling the talks. Far fewer Democrats expressed disapproval of their own party's handling (32 percent) or President Obama's (22 percent) of the urgent quest to raise the nation's debt limit ahead of a looming default on Aug. 2 if action isn't taken.

Technorati Tags: CBS Poll,Polling,Debt Ceiling,Republicans,Democrats,Barack Obama,Current Events,Budget Cuts

Those Republicans Are Toast

 Here is a look at the Republican Party  by a paper based in Germany. As is usual, they are dead-on with their views.

die Tageszeitung, Germany
The Republicans Will Lose

By Ulrike Herrmann
Their stubbornness means future tactical problems for the conservatives.
Translated By Ron Argentati
15 July 2011

Edited by Gillian Palmee

Germany - die Tageszeitung - Original Article (German)
Is America going broke? Of course not. The sound-effects thunder in Washington is loud, to be sure, but it’s already certain that Republicans and Democrats will compromise on further borrowing. Neither party can risk bankruptcy for the United States because it would be Americans who suffer. By far, the largest portion of America’s debt lies not in China, but in domestic pension funds and insurance companies.
The losers in this political showdown have also been decided already: Republicans who had assumed they could fall back on a strategy of permanent boycott because of their House of Representatives majority. This intransigence assured them only tactical problems. First, President Obama has already made huge concessions to the opposition and comes off looking like a reasonable statesman. Second, the business community and investors have begun having doubts about the Republican strategy and are turning to the Democrats. Third, moderate Republicans recognize these dangers, but the radical tea partiers do not.
The “Grand Old Party” is now so terribly divided that it is unrecognizable even to voters who want to defeat Obama in the next election. Conservative media outlets like the Wall Street Journal are expressing outrage at how stupidly Republicans are acting.
But the Republicans have not only lost tactically. The demands they’ve made in negotiating future budgets may also result in an election disaster for them. They insist on making reductions in Medicare. Many Americans don’t appreciate that idea in the least, as evidenced by the recent congressional election in New York. The Republicans suffered a surprise defeat there principally because their candidate also supported cutting Medicare.
That pattern may well repeat itself.

CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL VERSION

 

Technorati Tags: Watching America,Republican Party,Tea Party,2012 Elections,Medicare,Current Events,Politics