2011 Legislative Goals

2011 Legislative Goals

his draft was approved by the JRLC Board and referred for ratification to the Boards of Directors of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, the Islamic Center of Minnesota, the Minnesota Catholic Conference, and the Minnesota Council of Churches.

Agriculture and Rural Communities Our state must do more to improve the vitality of rural communities. JRLC endorses programs to assist beginning farmers, to support sustainable agriculture, to build infrastructure of local agricultural markets, and to ensure that rural communities have full access to education, transportation, and telecommunication resources. (See JRLC’s Gifts of the Earth, 2000.) Criminal Justice We support restoration of funding for the court system, including public defenders, to ensure equal justice under the law. We endorse funding for family supports and restorative justice initiatives that hold offenders accountable yet enable reintegration. The right to vote should be restored to persons with felony convictions upon release from prison or jail. We support automatic expungement of arrest records for non-person crimes when proceedings are resolved in favor of the arrestee. JRLC opposes capital punishment in Minnesota. (See JRLC’s Felon Voting Rights, 2008 and Crime and Justice in Minnesota, 1992.) Early Care and Education Minnesota should fully fund child care assistance programs that allow children to spend their earliest years in stimulating, nurturing environments where they can learn, thrive, and prepare for success in school and life. We support quality early education for every child, making sure that all our children are ready to begin kindergarten on an even footing. (See JRLC’s Childcare Assistance, 2005.) Eliminating Poverty JRLC supports initiatives that enhance earnings for low-income Minnesotans. We support an increase in the minimum wage so that every full-time worker can, at a minimum, earn a poverty-level income for a family of three, about $8.80/hour. We favor increased income benefits for people in poverty and we recommend expansion of Minnesota’s Working Family Credit to make sure earnings can secure basic needs. (See JRLC’sMinimum Wage, 2005 and Taxes and Justice in Minnesota, 1992.) We also support a community-based, comprehensive public benefit outreach and enrollment system. We support the removal of most asset-tests and urge the creation of asset development accounts. Minnesota should also adopt a realistic household poverty measure and a clear set of benchmarks by which we can measure progress toward ending poverty. (See JRLC’s No Poor Among You…, 2010.) Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability We must protect the integrity of creation and our public health by ensuring the quality of the natural environment and food sources. We must continue to invest in sustainability — in clean, renewable energy, and we must reduce emission of greenhouse gases. (See JRLC’sEcology Positions, 1997.) Gambling We oppose the expansion of gambling or increased state reliance on gambling proceeds. (See JRLC’s No Expansion of State-Authorized Gambling, 2005.)

Health Care Minnesota must move swiftly toward a common, universal coverage system by expanding public and private programs, mandating comprehensive insurance coverage (including mental health and dental), and adopting risk pooling and publicly sponsored financing to make sure every Minnesotan receives the health care they need. (See JRLC’s Health Care and Justice in Minnesota, 2008.) Housing and Healthy Neighborhoods Our state can play a strong role in supporting safe towns and neighborhoods free of both environmental pollution and crime, where all families have access to clean air and water, and where children can play outside free of fear. We support appropriations to operate supportive housing programs to address and prevent homelessness. We support the rehabilitation and development of affordable housing, especially targeting individuals and families under 30% of the median income. Housing must be free of lead, mercury, and other toxic substances that affect children more adversely than adults. We support legislation that protects consumers from predatory lending practices. (See JRLC’s The Faithful City, 1999.) Human Rights JRLC recommends that the state require school boards to adopt policies that prohibit harassment, bullying, intimidation, and violence based on characteristics such as actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, disability, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, physical characteristics, or association with a person or group with one or more of these actual or perceived characteristics. (See JRLC's To Secure These Rights: Confronting Bigotry in Minnesota, 1988, and Human Rights with Regard to Sexual Orientation, 1993.) Hunger We must ensure that SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly Food Stamps) benefits and WIC programs are accessible to all who need them. We support programs that provide easier access to healthy foods and nutrition programs for children and their families. (See JRLC’s Justice for All: Confronting Hunger in Minnesota, 1997.) Impartial Judiciary JRLC recommends that the state’s constitution be amended to allow for the following method for selecting judges to the district and appellate courts: merit nominations by a merit selection commission; gubernatorial appointment from a list of candidates prepared by the commission; performance evaluation by a performance evaluation commission; retention elections by the public. (See JRLC’s Selecting Impartial Judges, 2008.) Tax Policy The solution to our state’s financial crisis must include raising sufficient revenue to fund social infrastructure, education, and basic human needs. Tax justice means that our state-local revenue system is progressive — meaning based upon ability to pay, and that revenues are sufficient to build the common good. (See JRLC’s Taxes and Justice in Minnesota, 1992.)

Tea Partiers Have a Very Mixed-Up Notion of What the American Revolution Was About | | AlterNet

Tea Partiers Have a Very Mixed-Up Notion of What the American Revolution Was About | | AlterNet

Memo to Tea Party: The major political battle during the American Revolution was over the proper uses of money and credit. Not getting government out of the economy.

March 1, 2011 |

�Note: Think the Tea Party has a monopoly on American history and values? Think again. With 'Founding Finance', the Roosevelt Institute's New Deal 2.0 blog reclaims the progressive narrative from the earliest days of the Republic, showing how ordinary Americans bravely stood up to financial elites. Tune in every Monday for author William Hogleand's rousing stories of our forbears who fought for economic prosperity.

“I got debts that no honest man can pay … ”~~Bruce Springsteen, “Atlantic City”

O. Max Gardner III, a patrician lawyer in Shelby, North Carolina, has started a movement for resisting home mortgage foreclosures.

In what Reuters describes as “legal jiu jitsu,” Gardner teaches techniques for using a bank’s lumbering hugeness to enable people to stay in their homes long after banks want them gone. He’s not alone. A foreclosure resistance movement has gained national traction in the past year. The Times has reported on local sheriffs’ refusals to evict, and in an especially pointed act of guerilla theater, Patrick Rodgers of Philadelphia recently turned the tables on Wells Fargo by starting a foreclosure against the bank’s local mortgage office. According to ABC News, the bank had not paid Rodgers a court-ordered judgment it sustained in the process of failing to respond to his demand under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) for information about his mortgage. Rodgers thought his foreclosure gesture would at least get the bank’s attention.

Much more good stuff on the link above !!

YouTube - Corporations Pay Less In Taxes Than YOU, Yeah YOU - by comedian Lee Camp

YouTube - Corporations Pay Less In Taxes Than YOU, Yeah YOU - by comedian Lee Camp

Obama stakes out deficit-cutting vision - MarketWatch

Obama stakes out deficit-cutting vision - MarketWatch

By Robert Schroeder, MarketWatch

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — President Barack Obama staked out his long-term vision for deficit reduction on Wednesday, proposing to save the government $4 trillion in 12 years or less by offering proposals to reform Medicare and overhaul tax policies that differ dramatically from a plan offered by congressional Republicans.

Obama addresses U.S. spending
President Obama unveils a framework to reduce borrowing over the next 12 years by $4 trillion. Video courtesy of Fox News.

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In a speech at George Washington University, Obama said he would control Medicare’s growth and cut its spending on drugs; end tax breaks for families making $250,000 a year or more; and squeeze $360 billion from programs including agricultural subsidies and federal pension insurance. Read summary of Obama's plan from the White House web site.

Obama’s ideas contrasted sharply with Republican proposals to lower taxes for individuals and corporations to a top rate of 25%; privatize Medicare and turn Medicaid over to states to administer. Raising any taxes is a “nonstarter,” Republicans say.

Trumpeting past agreements that asked for “shared sacrifice,” Obama said that high earners like himself don’t need a tax cut and that the United States wouldn’t be a great country without programs like Medicare. Read First Take about Obama's speech.

“This debate over budgets and deficits is about more than just numbers on a page, more than just cutting and spending. It’s about the kind of future we want,” Obama said. Read prepared text of Obama's speech.

Markets showed little immediate reaction to the speech, as stocks edged between narrow gains and losses, tracking moves in oil prices and hamstrung by a drop in bank shares.

The competing proposals will set the political tone right through the 2012 elections, with Republicans vehemently opposing any tax increases and seeking a much smaller role for government.

Many of Republicans’ debt-reduction ideas are contained in a plan to be voted on later this week in the House of Representatives.

Unveiled last week by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, the GOP’s fiscal 2012 plan aims to cut $6.2 trillion from government spending over the next decade. That’s more than $5 trillion beyond what Obama proposed in his fiscal 2012 budget plan back in February.

Obama proposes to save about $1 trillion through tax-code reform. He would end the George W. Bush-era tax breaks for high-income individuals making $200,000 or more and families earning $250,000 or more and limit itemized deductions for the wealthiest 2% of Americans.

By contrast, Ryan’s plan would cut the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25% and seeks to scrap Obama’s health-care law, which the budget chairman says would result in $800 billion in tax increases. Republicans also want to make the Bush-era tax cuts for individuals and families permanent. Late last year, Obama and congressional Republicans struck a deal to extend the cuts for two years.

Also among Obama’s proposals: a “debt failsafe” that would trigger an across-the-board spending cut if by 2014 budget projections don’t show that the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio has stabilized. Similar proposals have been tried before but with little impact.

The president’s plans also include speeding up availability of generic drugs and prohibiting brand-name drug companies from entering so-called “pay for delay” agreements with generic companies.

Obama punted on Social Security reform, saying only that he supports bipartisan efforts to strengthen it for the long haul. Rep. Ryan’s budget outline would require the program’s board of trustees and the president to submit a plan to Congress for restoring balance to Social Security’s fund if it’s not sustainable.

Our Fiscal Security - Taxes Matter - Taxes on the Wealthy: New Top Brackets Needed for the Have Mores

Our Fiscal Security - Taxes Matter - Taxes on the Wealthy: New Top Brackets Needed for the Have Mores

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13, 2011 AT 9:59AM

Click to enlarge

Any solution to the nation’s fiscal challenges will require tax increases, and tax increases on high earners in particular. But as the debate over the wealthy and taxes revs up yet again, fueled by President Obama’s renewed call to repeal the Bush tax cuts, it is time for some fresh thinking about how much the rich—and especially the super rich—should be paying.

Under current law, the top income tax rate applies to all earners making above $373,650—treating the merely affluent no different than the super rich. This doesn’t make sense. A couple making $400,000 a year in a major metro area is certainly very well-off, but they are not rich in the way of a CEO who pulls down $10 million a year. The tax code should reflect this reality by including new brackets for the richest of the rich.

The need to make distinctions between the Haves and the Have Mores has grown as those at the tippy-top of the income ladder have pulled far away from even the upper rungs. Between 1979 and 2008, according to data compiled by the scholars Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the upper rungs (households in the top 10 percent) saw their average incomes nearly double from $135,429 to $233,711 (in 2008 dollars)—nice gains, and far greater than middle class households.

But folks in the top 10 percent may feel downright poor when they look upward, given that the top 1 percent really raked it in, seeing their incomes nearly triple during those decades, going from an average of $336,311 to $905,570.

And the inequality within the top 1 percent is even bigger. Between 1979 and 2008, average income in the top 0.1 percent of households quadrupled, soaring to $3.98 million a year. That’s a lot of money, to be sure. But maybe not when compared to the real winners of the new Gilded Age: households in the top .01 percent saw their average incomes grow from $2.57 million to $17.1 million—a whopping sevenfold increase.

Put another way, when President Reagan enacted historic tax cuts in 1981, households in the top .01 percent made about 2.5 times more than those in the top 0.1 percent and eight times more than those in the top 1 percent. Today, those at the very pinnacle of the income stream make over four times more than those in the top 0.1 percent and 19 times more than the merely affluent in the top 1 percent.

A lot of numbers, I know. But the point is that the largest income disparities in America today can actually be found among the wealthy. The U.S. tax code should reflect this new reality.

Last month, Representative Jan Schakowsky introduced the Fairness in Taxation Act that would enact new brackets for income starting at $1 million. Here’s how it would work:

• $1-10 million: 45%
• $10-20 million: 46%
• $20-100 million: 47%
• $100 million to $1 billion: 48%
• $1 billion and over: 49%

The Fairness in Taxation Act would also tax capital gains and dividends as ordinary income for those making over $1 million a year.

Higher taxes on the super wealthy are sure to meet stiff resistance. Objections will be made on the grounds that such taxes are unfair and will stifle growth. Neither argument holds water.

Taxes pay for the public structures that make wealth creation possible: the infrastructure, schools and universities, courts, scientific investments, and all the rest. As Andrew Carnegie pointed out in “The Gospel of Wealth” over a century ago, and as Warren Buffet likes to stress, people get rich by capitalizing on these common societal investments. It is reasonable that those who do the best in this regard contribute the most to bolstering the public systems that underpin success and wealth.

As Carnegie argued, taxes paid by the wealthy allows these winners to “recycle” the opportunities they have had for others. Without such regeneration, Carnegie feared that the U.S. would be dominated by the inherited rich and face economic stagnation.

History suggests that higher taxes on the wealthy can actually fuel growth by helping to bankroll new investments in the future. The United States had average annual growth of 4.4 percent during the 1950s and 3.9 percent in the 1960s, decades that saw major new public spending on education, infrastructure, and science—and very high taxes on the super wealthy. President Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy and presided over a historic boom, with average growth rates of 3.9 percent.

In contrast, George W. Bush slashed taxes on the wealthy and drove taxes down to their lowest portion of GDP since 1950. The result? The worst economic years in postwar history, with an anemic 2.1 percent growth, almost zero net job creation, and stagnant income for most households.

Ultimately, all Americans will do better economically in a country that invests in the foundations of prosperity. But even those whose yachts are lifted highest these days will more than recoup the cost of higher taxes if these contributions help ensure robust growth. And the legacy they leave for the next generation will be the tools of opportunity that were available to them.

— By David Callahan, Demos Senior Fellow and Editor of Policy Shop

The graphic above may be republished free of charge with attribution to Demos. Contactmhirsch@demos.org for high-resolution file.

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tagged Andrew Carnegie, Bush Tax Cuts, Fairness in Taxation Act, Inequality, Jan Schakowsky, Ronald Reagan, Super Rich, Top Ten Percent

~ Corporate Taxes: KEY FACTS ~

TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 2011 AT 11:16AM

Graphic by Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch, click to enlarge. This images may be republished free of charge with attribution to Demos. Contact mhirsch@demos.org for high-resolution file.By David Callahan

Many Americans were appalled when it was revealed recently that General Electric would pay no taxes for 2010, despite U.S. profits of over $5 billion.

But I doubt that there is a single top tax attorney or chief financial officer in the country who was all that surprised. You see, these people are denizens of Loophole Land – a very different place than W-2ville where most Americans live.

In Loophole Land, nothing is quite as it seems. Yes, there is a top corporate tax rate of 35 percent, but it is well understood that nobody actually pays that. On the contrary, many companies pay nothing at all.

How can this be?

For starters, Loophole Land has no national borders and so it is easy to shift money around in ways that avoid taxes. General Electric works all over the world, and under tax law, it isn’t taxed on its foreign profits as long as it says that it is reinvesting those profits abroad. Many companies become expert at shifting profits abroad to foreign subsidiaries in low-tax or no-tax nations. In 2008, Goldman Sachs, had 29 subsidiaries located in offshore tax havens and reported profits of over $2 billion. It paid federal taxes of just $14 million on those profits.

Loophole Land is also a place where past business losses are never, ever forgotten. So, for instance, if you run a giant conglomerate with a profit-hungry credit division that makes a lot of stupid loans to people who can’t pay them back, fear not: you’ll be able to write off those losses – in effect getting ordinary taxpayers to subsidize your gambling debts. General Electric is widely seen as a manufacturing company. But up to half of its profits during the Bush years came from its large consumer lending business, GE Capital, and that business suffered huge losses during the crash – reportedly $32 billion. Now we are all helping GE foot the bill for that unlucky streak.

Another thing about Loophole Land is that it is replete with generous tax breaks and subsidies. That’s because over time, different industries have convinced the rulers of Loophole Land that they are so important that they need a break. TheNational Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform identified 75 different tax breaks and 30 different tax credits offered to business, calling this system “a patchwork of overly complex and inefficient provisions that creates perverse incentives for investment.”

One final point about Loophole Land: It is place where corporations find it easy to keep creating new loopholes and have enough clout to defend existing ones. General Electric spends millions every year to lobby Congress on arcane provisions of the tax code and is famous for hiring former IRS officials and former congressional staffers to help with this work. Meanwhile, at the local level, corporations have been masters at playing states and cities against each other to secure huge tax breaks, threatening to go elsewhere if they don’t get the perks they demand.

As I said, things are different in Loophole Land than W-2ville. And when you pile up all these accounting tricks and tax breaks, it is no surprise that many companies barely pay corporate income taxes. Indeed, the General Accounting Office reported in 2008 that “two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005.”

Loophole Land has been good to its fortunate inhabitants, but not everyone wants the fat times to continue. President Obama’s deficit commission argued that all corporate tax loopholes be closed, and the President has said pretty much the same thing. The flap over GE’s 2010 tax bill has enraged many residents of W-2ville, even though GE finally pledged that it would pay some taxes for that year after all.

Still, corporations have many defenders, including House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan who wants to do away with the corporate income tax altogether and replace it with a Business Consumption Tax. Ryan and others argued that high corporate taxes are hurting U.S. competitiveness.

Is this true? No. Thanks to the laws of Loophole Land, the effective corporate tax rate is actually lower than in the U.S. than many other countries. A recent study by the World Bank showed that the U.S. effective tax rate was below that of many of our top competitors, including Germany, Canada, India, China, Brazil, and Japan. As well, corporate taxes make up a lower percent of GDP in the U.S. than in many other industrialized countries.

In 2009, corporations made about $1.5 trillion in profits and paid $225 billion in taxes, an overall rate of 15 percent.

It is widely expected that reforms of the corporate income tax will be revenue neutral –closing loopholes while lowering rates, as the deficit commission proposed. But why not ask corporations to make a bigger contribution in this hour of fiscal need?

Back in the 1950s, corporate income taxes made up 23 percent of federal revenues. Now that figure is under 8 percent. Put another way, corporate taxes were between 5 to 6 percent of GDP when Eisenhower was in office, but have since fallen to 2 percent today.

Yes, it is time to say goodbye to Loophole Land. But reformers should also seek to reverse years of decline in corporate tax revenues as a way to meet the country’s fiscal challenges.

Biggest Corporate Tax Cheats, From General Electric to Google to News Corp. - The Daily Beast

Biggest Corporate Tax Cheats, From General Electric to Google to News Corp. - The Daily Beast:

"As GE continues to draw criticism for avoiding U.S. taxes, The Daily Beast looks at other corporations, from Google to News Corp., that have creatively kept billions from Uncle Sam.
As reported Friday, General Electric concluded 2010 with $14.2 billion in profit, for which the Internal Revenue Service is paying them a tax benefit of $3.2 billion, thanks to a shrewd use of U.S. tax loopholes, aggressive lobbying and favorable international tax provisions. They’re far from alone.

Gallery: 15 Major Corporate Tax Dodgers"

AP Falls for Hoax About GE Taxes - The Daily Beast

AP Falls for Hoax About GE Taxes - The Daily Beast

s

AP Photo

The Yes Men—the satirical duo that has pranked major corporations including BP, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Dow Chemical—can add two new scalps to its count: GE and the AP. Wednesday morning, they issued a press release purporting to be from GE, saying that the company, which has been under fire for using loopholes to avoid paying corporate taxes, had decided to pay the government $3.2 billion. The release quoted CEO Jeffrey Immelt as saying, “We want the public to know that we’ve heard them, and that we know many Americans are going through tough times.” Of course, it wasn’t real—but they fooled plenty of people, including the Associated Press, which published an article on the news.

Read it at Business Insider

The Peasants Need Pitchforks | Common Dreams

The Peasants Need Pitchforks | Common Dreams

n Lennon told us in his song of that title, “is something to be/ Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/ And you think you’re so clever and classless and free/ But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.”

The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is a myth blown away by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current issue of Vanity Fair. In an article titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” Stiglitz states that the top thin layer of the superwealthy controls 40 percent of all wealth in what is now the most sharply class-divided of all developed nations: “Americans have been watching protests against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet, in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.” Protesters yell at people looking out from the windows of an AIG building in New York during a 2009 rally against government bailouts for corporations. (AP / Jason DeCrow)

That is the harsh reality obscured by the media’s focus on celebrity gossip, sports rivalries and lotteries, situations in which the average person can pretend that he or she is plugged into the winning side. The illusion of personal power substitutes consumer sovereignty—which smartphone to purchase—for real power over the decisions that affect our lives. Even though most Americans accept that the political game is rigged, we have long assumed that the choices we make in the economic sphere as to career and home are matters that respond to our wisdom and will. But the banking tsunami that wiped out so many jobs and so much homeownership has demonstrated that most Americans have no real control over any of that, and while they suffer, the corporate rich reward themselves in direct proportion to the amount of suffering they have caused.

Instead of taxing the superrich on the bonuses dispensed by top corporations such as Exxon, Bank of America, General Electric, Chevron and Boeing, all of which managed to avoid paying any federal corporate taxes last year, the politicians of both parties in Congress are about to accede to the Republican demand that programs that help ordinary folks be cut to pay for the programs that bailed out the banks.

It is a reality further obscured by the academic elite, led by economists who receive enormous payoffs from Wall Street in speaking and consulting fees, and their less privileged university colleagues who are so often dependent upon wealthy sponsors for their research funding. Then there are the media, which are indistinguishable parts of the corporate-owned culture and which with rare exception pretend that we are all in the same lifeboat while they fawn in their coverage of those who bilk us and also dispense fat fees to top pundits. Complementing all that is the dark distraction of the faux populists, led by tea party demagogues, who blame unions and immigrants for the crimes of Wall Street hustlers.

My book on the banking meltdown, “The Great American Stickup,” begins with the following words. “They did it. Yes, there is a ‘they’: the captains of finance, their lobbyists, and allies among leading politicians of both parties, who together destroyed an American regulatory system that had been functioning splendidly. …” They got to rewrite the laws to enable their massive greed over everything from the tax codes to the sale of toxic derivatives over the past quarter century, smashing the American middle class and with it the nation’s experiment in democracy.

The lobbyists are deliberately bipartisan in their bribery, and the authors of our demise are equally marked as Democrats and Republicans. Ronald Reagan first effectively sang the siren song of ending government’s role in corporate crime prevention, but it was Democrat Bill Clinton who accomplished much of that goal. It is the enduring conceit of the top Democratic leaders that they are valiantly holding back the forces of evil when they actually have continuously been complicit.

The veterans of the Clinton years, so prominent in the Obama administration, still deny their role in the disaster of the last 25 years. Yet the sad tale of income inequality that Stiglitz laments is as much a result of their policies as those of their Republican rivals. In one of the best studies of this growing gap in income, economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that during Clinton’s tenure in the White House the income of the top 1 percent increased by 10.1 percent per year, while that of the other 99 percent of Americans increased by only 2.4 percent a year. Thanks to President Clinton’s deregulation and the save-the-rich policies of George W. Bush, the situation deteriorated further from 2002 to 2006, a period in which the top 1 percent increased its income 11 percent annually while the rest of Americans had a truly paltry gain of 1 percent per year.

And that was before the meltdown that wiped out the jobs and home values of so many tens of millions of American families. “The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles,” Stiglitz concludes, “but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.”

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