Our president proposes to extend the tax Bush Era tax cuts for the first $250,000 of earned income. The remaining income in excess of $250,000 will be taxed at Clinton Era levels or 3% higher than the first $250,000. Now let’s do some math, shall we? Presenting, Mr. Austan Goolsbee the White House chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors.

Henry Ford when asked why he paid his employees more than his competition. He said, to keep his best employees and so that they could afford to buy his cars. What has happened to the to the business community that once made this country great? They believed in the middle class. They had the wisdom to see that if the middle class thrives then, they will have more consumers for their products and thus increase their profits and thus increase their income.

I’ll tell you what happened to them. They left the guidance of businesses to spoiled and greedy children who know nothing of a work ethic or the value of the middle class to the country as a whole. To them the middle class are the great unwashed. “Poor people pay taxes, we don’t” This quote can be attributed to any member of the plutacracy that has evolved in this country since money has found a mate in government – goes back too far to know.

Just a side note: 237  elected officials in the house, senate and White House are multimillionaires.

Forbes Magazine counts 403 billionaires in this country. Most of whom acquired that wealth from the decimated middle class. There are those billionaires who do good, Buffet, Gates, Winfrey. OK 3, what about the other, 400? Oh yeah and Facebook creator, Mark Zuckerburg who has found philanthropic religion since the movie about him paints him in an unflattering light. I praise him for his generosity but wonder if not for the movie…

Dammit, how much is enough? When the average American family is in many cases homeless, unemployed, and hopeless, what does the bode for the prospects of this country as a whole? I for one think that a billionaire would not even miss an additional 3% tax which gets paid by their accountants. Buffet once said he pays a lower percentage of tax on his wealth than his maid.

Sleep well, plutocrats and enjoy your wealth while you have it. Who will pay you tomorrow if you destroy your customer today? I will leave you with the following video courtesy of Mr. Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman who oversaw our economy during the best of times, the Clinton years, for more common sense:

President Obama signs a bill that will allow small businesses to grow and hire new workers by providing tax breaks, better access to credit and other incentives. September 27, 2010.

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Originally posted 2010-09-30 19:37:07.

So let me get this straight. All that is stopping the the “job creating top 1%” from hiring is a continuation of the Bush tax cuts for them which amount to a whopping $80,000 a year.

Excuse me? The upper 1% makes 80 grand in a day or less and this is what is stopping the hiring? they spend This income bracket had the current tax cuts in place as they drove the economy off a cliff. This cut was in place as this country hemorrhaged 500,000 jobs a month. This tax cut was in place as this bracket continued to decimate the middle class and ship jobs over seas over the last 10 years.

Now, according to Republicans, we are to believe that if we would just continue to give them $80,000 a year in a tax break they will bring back the jobs they sent away and begin hiring Americans back to fix this economy. Sorry, but I have not had a sip of the Kool-Aid they are handing out.

Blue collar whites voted in these people who tell them that this is the case. C’mon man, you are all smarter than this. You allowed them to scare you with images of illegal aliens coming into this country and taking your jobs. I am so sure that the undocumented day laborer on the corner or at the home Depot looking for work for a day is responsible for you losing the well paying  manufacturing job, that got you to the middle class, that got shipped overseas, is responsible. Seriously?

You allowed them to scare you with the specter of Sharia law and the Muslim-ization of America although we already have robust Muslim communities and have had them for decades. You allowed them to tell you that the government is trying to kill grandma. You allowed them to tell you that the black guy in th3e white house can’t possibly be one of us.

You allowed an Australian born media mogul to serve you hate, fear and lies, FoxNews, and you accept it willingly because it plays on your worst fears and lowest common denominator that you share. Fear of them; the brown people, the Gay people, the woman who wants to have a choice of what to do with her own body, the Hispanics, the Middle Eastern, the black, the brown people, anyone who does not look like you.

We are about to enter a winter of discontent where nothing of any substance will get done by our government. Obstruction has been kicked up a notch with the legitimization of the Tea Baggers. You blue collar scared, narrow-minded white people will be the death of any progress in this country. You have your country back, now watch it drown.

Will you ever realize that the Fox Aussie means this country no good. He is here to make money, that is all. This is not his country, it is ours!! The current Republican leadership does not care about you. All they care about is power. The agenda was supposed to be jobs. That is what they sold you. No, the agenda is to make the black guy a one term president. How progressive!

I am calling on my blue collar white brothers and sisters who can still think for themselves to talk to the Fox zombies and explain this to them. Explain to them that the enlightened world that once respected at us is now laughing at us as the boorish, no class cowboys they portray us to be. WE CAN DO BETTER. WE MUST DO BETTER!!

A tip of my hat to 24EvelJustin24 of Youtube fame. Here is is his take:

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Originally posted 2010-11-10 14:47:46.

Told you so!!!

I said it. The current leadership talks tough about the issues they have mistakenly wedded themselves to. By pandering to the lowest, meanest, most ugly fringe in our country, they have marginalized themselves to the precipice  of oblivion. They disrespected the American attention span and memory. They lied to all real Republicans by running on job creation in 2010. Using the anxiety most Americans feel about jobs they won huge gains in Congress and called it a mandate to pursue the fringe agenda of social issues.

They counted on the Democrats angering the Progressive base to win those seats. An excellent calculation on their part. In their arrogance, they took that win to be an endorsement of fringe agendas. If you campaign on jobs and pursue union busting, denial of abortions and women’s health services, cutting of education, cutting the Social Security benefits of our seniors, Medicare for our seniors, Medicaid for our poor, restriction of access to voting, you show yourselves to be what everyone already thought of you. You are out of touch and mean spirited snakes whose only purpose is political power and control so that you may serve your big monied donors. You have shown through your actions that you care nothing about the “The American People” you love to quote in front of every microphone.

You have had an axe to grind ever since the Nixon impeachment and have proven that you have no respect at all for the office of the presidency. You have made it your mission to attempt to destroy every Democrat who wins election to the White House. Instead of governing and statesmanship we get gang warfare. We get a bunch of tough talking bullies who would destroy how our president is viewed by running easily manipulated figureheads for the office and when a Democrat wins, make sure that any attempt to govern is met with a resounding NO. You care nothing for our country or it’s people. We are merely a means to your end of maintaining the economic chasm that exists between the haves and have nots.

You will not dare support anything that could help the country or it’s people because if you did and work was actually done, you may need to resort to actually defending what it is you are really about. You have become the party of the obscenely rich and the scourge of the middle class.

HEY MORONS!! IT WAS A ROBUST MIDDLE CLASS THAT MADE THIS COUNTRY THE ENVY OF THE WORLD!!

Has America diminished since the Nixon impeachment? You bet it has. You made sure of that. You elect these yes men to the office when you win the White House and leave a steaming pile to clean up for any Democrat who would dare take the Oval Office away from you due to your own incompetence.

Look at what you are giving this country as an alternative to Obama. Your rank and file party members can’t even get behind any of them with any vigor. The inadequacies of what you have fielded for candidacy are obvious to most thinking Americans so I will not waste time going in on them. I think Colbert had it right when he did his bit on the generic candidate.

If you have so little respect for the people of this country that the best you can do is the guy above, you deserve the oblivion you are careening toward. We need statesmen not petulant children to help pull this country out of the morass. It is not President Obama who has failed, IT IS YOU!!

PS. While you are stalling and putting the full faith and credit of the United States in jeopardy in the name of what Joe Scarborough calls “simple math”. Consider this simple math. The people you are targeting with all of your over reach outnumber the people you answer to by a huge margin and you WILL hear from us in 2012.

Originally posted 2011-07-16 22:09:53.

Bitch McConnell said that the Republican top priority was to make sure that Barack Obama was a one term president.

Not deficit reduction, not job creation, not rebuilding our country, not to see our country come out of a desperate economic time. Republicans, at all costs, make sure that this president fails at everything he attempts to fix our wounded republic. They filibuster every vote and those that they don’t filibuster they require a super majority for anything to get passed. They amend with language that obscures the original intent of the legislation. When they say Obama has been a failure, it is partly true because they have done all they can to ensure it.

Here is the strategy that Obama is playing directly into. He has compromised on every major piece of legislation he has proposed resulting in watered down reforms that come no where near the original goals. He has agreed to tax cuts for the wealthy that he knows are detrimental to the economy. With every cut in government spending, another few hundred to thousands of people join the already enormous ranks of the unemployed – not to mention the cost to services we once had that once were funded. Guess what that does? It makes the unemployment percentage higher. Who are the new unemployed? Teachers, Firemen, Police, Emergency first responders, Sanitation, Government agency workers – you know the ones who used to answer your call when you were in trouble or needed answers?

This is why the Deficit is the only word Republicans know right now – why it is their main talking point. They know that if unemployment is high, odds are against an incumbent president. With the pathetic field they have in place, they will use every dirty trick in the book to get another figurehead they can manipulate into office.  This may sound like I am beating up on Obama and partly, yes I am. But when he got elected, the slogan was not YES I CAN but YES WE CAN. There was no way he was going to get anything accomplished if the opposition was not willing to work with him on ANYTHING. WE, my friends, killed the hope and change we voted for by allowing the lunatic fringe to have louder voices than ours. There are more of us than them.

Let us be clear, when our president wins, the country wins but he can not do it by himself. We must make sure that the Republican minority is so minor that they will not be able to obstruct as they have for Obama’s first 2 years. We can not afford to get angry at Democrats so much so that we allow  Republicans to get elected. Remember the carnage of the 2010 election cycle. We got rid of those pesky Blue Dogs by not turning out to vote. Unfortunately, that strategy also allowed Republicans to win. How is that working out for us now? States with Republican governors and legislatures are now seeking to make it even more difficult for traditional Democrat base voters to register and vote. We are at war for the America we really want to live in. One with a robust middle class.

Tax cuts for the wealthy. After all they are for the “job creators” aren’t they. They have had these tax cuts for 2 terms of  a Bush presidency. Mr Boehner, Where are the jobs? Explain to us all how a 3% rise in the top tax rate will suddenly impoverish the wealthy or cause a businessman not to hire any new employees. 3%, are you shitting me? The full faith and credit of the United States is being held hostage by a Republican party that refuses to raise the top tax bracket by 3%. This is what it is about. Seriously?!!!

This is what that missing 3% in revenue is costing us. Infrastructure that is the laughing stock of the industrialized world we once led. It is giving an excuse to Republican governors to bust unions, de-fund essential services for women like Planned Parenthood where many lower income women receive their primary care. That’s right they do much more than just abort fetuses. The governors can now cut public education that was once the envy of the world to point of school closings and massive teacher layoffs. But, Republican’s are all about the children, right? It is a fact that more jobs were created while that tax rate was in place for the top bracket.

• Number of jobs as of January, 1993, a week before Clinton took office: 109.725 million.
• Number of jobs as of Jan. 2001, a week before Clinton left office: 132.469 million
• Net Gain under Clinton: 22.7 million jobs.

Now for Bush, who succeeded Clinton in the White House. As already noted, the nation had 132.469 million jobs as he was taking office.

• Number of jobs on Jan. 12, 2009, a week before Bush left office: 133.549 million.

• Net gain under Bush: 1.08 million jobs.

Quoted from Politifact article: Sherrod Brown touts job growth during Clinton presidency vs. Bush’s jobs record

Now, Bitch and Boehner, explain to us again, why we should not return the top tax bracket to the 3% margin it was in the Clinton years? We need to make the Republicans a 1 term majority in every branch of government. Federal and state.

Originally posted 2011-07-09 21:54:46.