Robert Reich: The Defining Issue: Who Should Get the Tax Cut -- The Rich or Everyone Else?

Robert Reich: The Defining Issue: Who Should Get the Tax Cut -- The Rich or Everyone Else?: "

Who deserves a tax cut more: the top 2 percent -- whose wages and benefits are higher than ever, and among whose ranks are the CEOs and Wall Street mavens whose antics have sliced jobs and wages and nearly destroyed the American economy -- or the rest of us?

Not a bad issue for Democrats to run on this fall, or in 2012.Republicans are hell bent on demanding an extension of the Bush tax cut for their patrons at the top, or else they'll pull the plug on tax cuts for the middle class. This is a gift for the Democrats. But before this can be a defining election issue in the midterms, Democrats have to bring it to a vote. And they've got to do it in the next few weeks, not wait until a lame-duck session after Election Day.

Plus, they have to stick together (Ben Nelson, are you hearing me? House blue-dogs, do you read me? Peter Orszag, will you get some sense?)

Not only is this smart politics. It's smart economics.
The rich spend a far smaller portion of their money than anyone else because, hey, they're rich. That means continuing the Bush tax cut for them wouldn't stimulate much demand or create many jobs.
But it would blow a giant hole in the budget -- $36 billion next year, $700 billion over ten years. Millionaire households would get a windfall of $31 billion next year alone.And the Republican charge that restoring the Clinton tax rates for the rich would hurt the economy -- because it would reduce the 'incentives' of the rich (including the richest small business owners) to create jobs -- is ludicrous.

Under Bill Clinton and his tax rates, the economy roared. It created 22 million jobs.

By contrast, during George Bush's 8 years, commencing with his big 2001 tax cut, the economy created only 8 million jobs. And as the new Census data show, nothing trickled down. In fact, the middle class families did far worse after the Bush tax cut. Between 2001 and 2007 -- even before we were plunged into the Great Recession -- the median wage dropped.

It's an issue that could also be used to expose the giant chasm that's opened between the rich and everyone else -- aided and abetted by Republican policies. As I've noted before, in the late 1970s, the top 1 percent got 9 percent of total national income. By 2007, the top 1 percent got almost a quarter of total national income.

These figures don't even count in taxes. The $1.3 trillion Bush tax cut of 2001 was a huge windfall for people earning over $500,000 a year. They got about 40 percent of its benefits. The Bush tax cut of 2003 was even better for high rollers. Those with net incomes of about $1 million got an average tax cut of $90,000 a year. Yet taxes on the typical middle-income family dropped just $217. Many lower-income families, who still paid payroll taxes, got nothing back at all.

And, again, nothing trickled down.

As I've emphasized, the U.S. economy has suffered mightily from the middle class's lack of purchasing power, while most of the economic gains have gone to the top. (The crisis was masked for years by women moving into paid work, everyone working longer hours, and, more recently, the middle class going into deep debt -- but all those coping mechanisms are now exhausted.) The great challenge ahead is to widen the circle of prosperity so the middle class once again has the capacity to keep the economy going.

In other words, this is the right issue. It's the right time. It allows Democrats to explain what the Bush tax cuts really did, why supply-side economics is bogus, and the economic challenge ahead.
Even if Democrats feel they have to respond to the Republican charge that taxes shouldn't be raised on anyone when the employment rate is 9.6 percent, they have a powerful fallback: Extend the Bush tax cuts for everyone through 2011, then end them for the rich while making them permanent for the middle class.

Get it, Democrats? Please don't blow it this time.

This post originally appeared at robertreich.org
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Fighting to Protect Consumers

Fighting to Protect Consumers: "

Over the past several weeks, the President and I have had extensive conversations about the vital importance of consumer financial protection.

The President asked me, and I enthusiastically agreed, to serve as an Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He has also asked me to take on the job to get the new CFPB started—right now. The President and I are committed to the same vision on CFPB, and I am confident that I will have the tools I need to get the job done.

President Obama understands the importance of leveling the playing field again for families and creating protections that work not just for the wealthy or connected, but for every American. The new consumer bureau is based on a pretty simple idea: people ought to be able to read their credit card and mortgage contracts and know the deal. They shouldn’t learn about an unfair rule or practice only when it bites them—way too late for them to do anything about it. The new law creates a chance to put a tough cop on the beat and provide real accountability and oversight of the consumer credit market. The time for hiding tricks and traps in the fine print is over. This new bureau is based on the simple idea that if the playing field is level and families can see what’s going on, they will have better tools to make better choices.

If the CFPB can succeed at leveling the playing field, we can go a long way toward repairing a gaping hole in the budgets of millions of families. But nobody has ever thought or argued that the consumer bureau can fix everything. Lost jobs, stagnant incomes, rising costs for college, dwindling retirement savings—there’s a lot of work to be done.

When she was 16, my grandmother, Hannie Reed, drove a wagon in the Oklahoma land rush. Her mother had died, so she was up front with her little brothers and sisters bouncing around in the back. When I was growing up, she talked about life on the prairie, about marrying my grandfather and making a living building one-room schoolhouses, about getting wiped out in the Great Depression. She was hit with hard challenges throughout her life, but the moral of her stories was always the same: she would solve her problems one at a time by pulling up her socks and getting to work.

It’s time for all of us to pull up our socks and get to work.

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Let's Stop Torturing Facts and Start Working Together

Let's Stop Torturing Facts and Start Working Together: "

Lindsay Graham has often shown that he’s fully capable of being reasonable and bipartisan. Which made it particularly disappointing to see his misleading use of numbers yesterday.

On Meet the Press, the Senator, against a wave of evidence to the contrary, argued that the Recovery Act has been “an absolute disaster” and called for cancelling “a lot” of what’s left in the bill (transcript here).

His evidence for this claim: “...we’ve lost two-and-a-half million jobs since the stimulus passed.”

Take a look at the figure below and you’ll see why this is so misleading. He’s conflating two periods of very different employment trends. In the first, when his team’s policies dominated, employment hemorrhaged at nightmarish rates. In the second, when the Recovery Act was on the scene, job losses in the private sector began to diminish, and this year, turned positive.

read more

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Mark Green: 'But' Nothing: Why the Right to Build a Mosque Trumps the "Heckler's Veto"

Mark Green: 'But' Nothing: Why the Right to Build a Mosque Trumps the "Heckler's Veto": "

Many of those opposed to the proposed Islamic cultural center (and mosque within) say they're all for religious freedom -- and then comes the 'but.' But not Islam. But not there. But not if it offends 9/11 families.

'But' is un-American.

The entire point of the First Amendment's protections of freedom of speech, assembly and religion is that these rights can't be restricted based on their substance. Of course there are 'time, place and manner' restrictions on speech and prayer -- so people are not entitled to talk at 120 decibels in a residential neighborhood no matter their religion or views. Zoning laws can prohibit incompatible or dangerous activities, like a liquor store near a school. And obviously government can punish the bad conduct of anyone claiming to act in the name of a religion or group: For example, would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad or anyone conspiring with him.
What we cannot do, however, is condition speech or religion based on its content. That's the bedrock of the First Amendment.
Going further, courts have ruled against what's called the 'heckler's veto.' Whether a speaker is, say, for or against birthright citizenship, an audience member cannot shout him or her down; otherwise, speech would be contingent on the whim of any mob or critic. So, as painful as it was, our laws permitted Nazis to march though a community of Holocaust survivors near Skokie, Illinois in 1978.
Which brings us back to 'but.'

The opponents of the Park51 project claim this is not about rights -- it's about the difference between 'right and wrong.'

However, no group or momentary majority can be allowed to veto another's right, as Judge Vaughn Walker ruled in the protracted battle over same-sex marriage in California. If the proposed Islamic center is effectively shouted down because it's unpopular or the murderous acts of a few are attributed to an entire religion, then why can't community sentiment stop any religion with some members who've done awful things? 'But' is the exception that swallows the first amendment's rule.
Nor can there be a 'compromise' because of 9/11. Having been a city-wide official on that calamitous day, I am sensitive to the sensibilities of victims' families; they are sincere and upset. But while buildings fell that morning, our system of constitutional law did not. In America, legal questions are decided by juries or judges, not aggrieved parties.
But -- there's that word again -- what about 'hallowed ground'? Beyond the unarguable reality that the proposed center is north and out of sight of Ground Zero, even that sacred site now has a huge, new commercial building being erected on its footprint. The city could have tried to make the whole area a cemetery to commemorate that day and those deaths. But by rebuilding, Mayor Bloomberg -- and the city as a whole -- instead properly chose to focus on the future of lower Manhattan, not its past.

Frustrated that the law and the facts are not on their side, many prominent conservatives are now resorting to absurd analogies and hysterical assertions. Islam and this planned mosque, however, are not comparable to Nazis, Pearl Harbor, Saudi Arabia, Carmelite nuns at Auschwitz, or liquor stores near schools. When Fox's Glenn Beck declares that after 'you've killed 3000 people, you're going to now build your mosque?', Dick Morris concludes that it will be 'a command center for terrorism', and Sean Hannity nightly attempts to 'Sherrod' the Imam behind it with similar out-of-context attacks, they're all just assuming that those behind the mosque are terrorists. Any serious evidence? None of them has yet to explain why Bush 41's State Department (and now Obama's) chose to send Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to Arab countries because, as a New York Times profile last Sunday documented, his entire life has been as a bridge-building moderate Muslim between East and West.

(That eloquent accelerant, columnist Charles Krauthammer, on Friday finally blamed, of course, 'liberals' for playing the bigotry card. It's a verbal gimmick to blame the mirror for reflecting reality --if it's intolerant to point out intolerance, then civil rights workers in the '60s were apparently the racists.)

Here's the deal -- because of the values of the very first amendment, Fox News and Islam should both be allowed to say and pray as they wish without getting permission from offended dissenters. Curiously, they're alike in that both have about three million American followers as well as lots of angry critics.

Those who have been saying but-not-this-religion now have to be called out for their Muslim McCarthyism. Once again, demagogues and fear-mongers - Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Peter King, Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, Rick Lazio, Rush Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, O'Reilly, Krauthammer, et. al. -- are using guilt-by-association, innuendo, sophistry and sheer lies.

Now as anti-Muslim protests spread around the country far beyond the location of 9/11, two Republicans especially stand out with the potential to shift the axis of debate. With the credibility to have a Nixon-to-China moment.

One is Rupert Murdoch. He has the editorial choice of allowing Fox's slanderous attacks to continue or establishing a more fair and balanced approach that could help calm the hysteria. The other is George W. Bush, who as the President attacking two Muslim nations made clear that America was fighting al Qaeda, not all of Islam. This is the perfect moment for them to speak out and remind everyone why the new World Trade building at Ground Zero will be exactly 1776 feet tall.

Originally posted at NYDailyNews.com

Geoffrey Dunn: AFL-CIO President Compares Palin to Joe McCarthy

Geoffrey Dunn: AFL-CIO President Compares Palin to Joe McCarthy: "

Two years ago this week, at the biennial convention of the Alaska AFL-CIO in Anchorage, then-Governor Sarah Palin was whisked off by her husband to Ted Stevens International Airport for a flight to Arizona, where Palin met, first with senior advisers to Republican presidential nominee John McCain, and finally McCain himself, in a haphazard, slipshod vetting process that resulted in her being selected as McCain's running mate.

Palin was a keynote speaker at the Alaska convention in 2008 and a darling of union leadership, as she used the AFL-CIO convention for a photo-op to sign House Bill 3001, which granted an exclusive pipeline license to Canadian-based TransCanada Corp. -- an agreement which promised, at least on paper, a barrelful of union jobs in the Last Frontier.

Two years later, after her failed bid for the vice-presidency and her abandoned governorship, Palin is a darling no more. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka -- whose speech attacking racism in the 2008 presidential campaign went viral on Youtube -- went after Palin directly today in Anchorage, comparing her to the American right-wing demagogue Joe McCarthy and referencing recent comments Palin had made at the Oil Palace in Tyler, Texas, about union 'thugs' and 'waving the Jones Act.'

Palin, of course, responded with yet another hyperbolic and self-serving posting to her Facebook page, thus elevating Trumka's comments to several spins in the nightly news cycle.

Here are some of the highlights of Trumka's remarks about Palin:

What is this crazy magnet that's pulling people to the right? I mean, look at your former governor... Who is she, anyway? Sarah Palin?

She used to have a job, your governor... You knew her... Or thought you did... I know I thought I did. She seemed like a decent person, an outdoorswoman. Her husband's a steelworker. She seemed to take some OK stands for working families.

And then things got weird. After she tied herself to John McCain and they lost, she blew off Alaska. I guess she figured she'd trade up... shoot for a national stage. Alaska was too far from the FOX TV spotlight.

I bet most of you, on a clear day, can see her hypocrisy from your house.
I think Sarah Palin quit so she wouldn't have to be accountable... so she wouldn't have a record that could be scrutinized...
Instead, she's hanging out on cable TV, almost a parody of herself, coming out with conspiracy theories about Obama and his 'death panels... ' Talking about 'the real America.' Talking about building schools in 'our neighboring country of Afghanistan.' Writing speech notes to herself on her hands.

Sometimes -- about Sarah Palin -- you just have to laugh... But it's not really funny. In this charged political environment, her kind of talk gets dangerous. 'Don't retreat... reload' may seem clever, the kind of bull you hear all the time, but put it in context. She's using crosshairs to illustrate targeted legislators. She's on the wrong side of the line there. She's getting close to calling for violence. And some of her fans take that stuff seriously. We've got legislators in America who have been living with death threats since the health care votes.

And down in Tyler, Texas, she's talking about -- and I quote -- 'union thugs.' What? Her husband's a union man. Is she calling him a thug? Sarah Palin ought to know what union men and women are.

Oh, she goes to great pains to talk differently about unions and the working people who belong to them, knowing full well we're one and the same.

But using the term 'union thug.' That's poisonous. There's history behind that rhetoric. That's how bosses and politicians in decades past justified the terrorizing of workers, the murdering of organizers...

To me, it just doesn't seem OK to go where she's going... It sits wrong with me... The Mama Grizzlies, Sarah Palin says, just sense when something's not right. Well... I wonder if those Mama Grizzlies can sense something's just not right with her.

Award-winning writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn's book The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power will be published by St. Martin's Press.

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