Reality-based tax breaks

By now you’ve heard the bitter, widespread debate over whether giving the wealthiest Americans fat tax breaks will ever create jobs.

But everybody agrees on one thing – we shouldn’t just give rich people tax breaks so they can have even more money to do whatever they like with.

Don’t we?

That’s why I was intrigued by this proposal that would tie tax breaks to the actual creation of jobs.

The proposal was floated by Benjamin Barber, a Democratic theorist writing on Huffington Post.

Barber suggests a system of vouchers to make sure they’re creating jobs with their tax breaks.

“Conservatives should certainly welcome the principle of vouchers, which they have been proffering for a long time to the poor for education, groceries and housing – and now, courtesy of Mr. [Paul] Ryan, for Medicare too,” Barber writes, referring to the Republican vice-presidential candidate’s proposal to have the government give future Medicare recipients cash to buy insurance instead of health care. “The premise has been that a voucher prevents "irresponsible behavior" by those being helped, like buying drugs instead of groceries or a golf caddy instead of private schooling for the kids. It's a way to prevent the poor from getting all that "free stuff" Mitt Romney thinks they are always conniving to acquire.

Basically, it’s so simple I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t suggested it before: If you create real jobs, you get a tax break. No job creation, no tax breaks.

While Barber appears to suggest granting the tax cuts first and taking them away if the tax break doesn’t lead to jobs, I’d flip it: base the tax cut on hard proof that the jobs have been created.

Proponents of this latest version of the trickle-down theory should have no problem with the wealthy actually having to prove they’re creating real jobs to earn their tax breaks.

Because nobody wants to give away money for nothing, right?

I think the proposal could be refined to link the quality and number of jobs to the size of the tax cut.

For example, buy a yacht: no tax cut. Enjoy your yacht.

But prove you created a significant number of high-wage jobs with health care benefits and pensions, get a bigger tax cut.

Extending the logic of Barber’s idea, if you outsource jobs, shouldn’t your taxes increase?

Barber has hit on an issue that extends beyond just tax cuts – government officials have been extending all kinds of subsidies to business owners for creating jobs without ever requiring proof that the business owners actually create the jobs, or requiring that the subsidies be returned if the jobs are destroyed.

The very notion that we’ve allowed these huge tax cuts for the wealthy without demanding proof that they lead to real, not just theoretical, job creation, suggests how far we’ve moved away from the sensible fact and data-based world into a realm based on wish fulfillment for the wealthy who dominate our politics. The notion that proponents of the tax cuts want to pay for their extension by eliminating tax breaks that help the middle class, like the home mortgage tax break, also suggest how far our political debate has gone astray. Barber’s proposal suggests a way to get it back from fantasyland.

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Column / Mitt Romney / Paul Ryan / Tax breaks - 08/27/2012

Paul Ryan's battle for billionaires

Thanks to the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, we’re going to be saved from a negative campaign. Now we’ll be elevated by a campaign about Big Ideas.

At least that’s the latest tripe being peddled by the Big Media, which has spent a lot of time drooling over the insane Ryan budget plan House Republicans passed before it died, only to be joyfully revived by Democrats who sought to pin in to the chests of their Republican opponents in Congressional races, then revived again by a befuddled Mitt Romney, who seems to want to cling to it (for his base) and distance himself from it (for everybody else).

According to the media, Ryan is a cheerful wonk who is the only one brave and bold enough to propose a plan to reduce the federal deficit. Never mind that the numbers don’t add up, or that his budget scheme involves a massive future reductions not only of Medicare but all government services except defense spending.

Ryan has become a top expert at capitalizing on legitimate skepticism about government and economic anxiety in the wake of the 2008 bailout and grafting those feelings on to the austerity agenda of the 1 percent – crushing all government regulation, reducing popular government services like parks and health care for the elderly, and privatizing Social Security while placing the burden of the nation’s fiscal problems on those least able to afford it and keeping tax rates low for the wealthiest Americans.

For our media elite, these are what pass for serious ideas. There’s little scrutiny beyond reporting Ryan’s rhetoric, in which he insists he’s out to save Medicare and merely facing a fiscal reality that others are afraid to confront.

You don’t have to dig very deep to find Ryan’s real motives, and who the winners will be if he wins his fight.

As usual in contemporary politics, the reality can be found in the money that has fueled Ryan’s rise. Among his top campaign contributors: Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, UBS bank and Wells-Fargo, along with corporate powerhouses like AT&T, Blue Cross-Blue Shield and Northwestern Mutual. He’s been closely associated with the billionaire Koch Brothers’ Americans For Prosperity.

Once you look into Ryan’s actual record, he looks a lot more like your garden-variety congressional hypocrite: preaching the free-market gospel while he votes for the 2008 no-questions-asked bank bailout, trashing the Obama administration stimulus package while making sure that his congressional district got its share of the spoils.

If the media were doing its job, Ryan would be dismissed for the craven con artist that he is, not lionized. Mitt Romney claims that he chose Ryan to balance out his own inexperience in Washington. But Ryan’s efforts to push through his budget scheme have failed miserably – except at making him a media darling.

If the media were doing its job, the headlines would be describing Ryan’s real, and embarrassingly modest, legislative record since he was elected to Congress in 1998. His first successful piece of legislation renamed his local post office in Janesville, Wisconsin for longtime Wisconsin Democratic congressman and former defense secretary Les Aspin in 2000. His other legislative achievement has been a bill to amend the IRS code to modify the taxation of arrow components. (Ryan uses bows and arrows for sport.)

Along with other fellow Republicans, he signed on to the Bush tax cuts, a partial-birth abortion ban and several efforts to increase sanctions against Iran.

Aside from that, he’s co-sponsored eight pieces of legislation issuing commemorative coins and five resolutions honoring Ronald Reagan.

There must have been some tough choices involved. Just who exactly should get a commemorative coin in their honor? Not just anybody, and you’re bound to make somebody mad. But it’s not exactly a profile of courage. How much courage does it take to do the bidding of the CEOs who keep you in office, against the retirees and the poor who can’t afford fat contributions and lobbyists?

 

 

 

 

 

Congress / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / Social Security - 08/16/2012

Night on Fantasy Island

As a snapshot of the wildly dysfunctional state of our political union, last night’s festivities were a smashing success. All sides were serving up plenty of mom, apple pie and platitudes while ignoring what’s actually left on plates of millions of Americans –nothing.

I did find at least something to agree with in what each of the speakers said. Who can quarrel with President Obama when he calls on us to “win the future?” And I want my government as lean and mean as Paul Ryan and the Republicans do, without any wasteful subsidies that boost corporate tycoons and their overseas expansion rather than creating decent-paying jobs here at home.

It’s true that the tea party’s spokeswoman, Rep. Michele Bachman of Minnesota, looked like aliens had captured her brain and were speaking through her. Maybe we would have been better off if the aliens had captured Obama and Ryan too. At least Bachman briefly took note of the high unemployment rate before she went off to into her own rhetorical fantasyland.

That’s more than you can say for President Obama, who was pitching us his hallucination that his new pals from the Chamber of Commerce are going to beat their corporate profits into ploughshares in partnership with government, in an effort to foster new technologies and growth that we all share. Forgive me if I can’t get too worked up about this. Didn’t we try this government-corporate partnership recently? Wasn’t that what the bailout was?

Back here on Planet Earth, that didn’t work out so well for a lot of us, though it does seem to have worked well for the president’s friends at General Electric and JPMorgan Chase.

Both Ryan and Bachman aren’t interested in any partnerships; they want to dismantle government altogether so that GE, JPMorgan and the rest of the corporatariat can run the show without any interference at all. The only difference is that Bachman would like to do it faster, with less nice talk, than Ryan.

Neither the president, Ryan, or Bachman could focus on reality long enough to mention the long, steep decline of the middle class or the on-going foreclosure crisis, or offer any specific ideas on addressing those very real issues.

Back here on Planet Earth, we’re going to have to harness all of our ingenuity, strength and diversity just to wrestle our political system back from these leaders and their corporate backers before they plunder what’s left of it.

Congress / Financial Crisis / Foreclosures / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama - 01/26/2011