TAXING THE CEOs & OTHER HOARDERS to JUMPSTART THE ECONOMY NOW—THIS IS A NO BRAINER
TAXING THE CEOs & OTHER HOARDERS to JUMPSTART THE ECONOMY NOW—THIS IS A NO BRAINER
By Kevin Stoda, write-in and online candidate for USA Senate
Last week, I reported to you that in an interview on DN, entitled “Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession” that CEOs that fire the most people get the best pay and bonuses in America
http://eslkevin.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/in-2009-ceos-of-the-fifty-corporations-responsible-for-the-biggest-layoffs-were-paid-an-average-12-million%e2%80%9442-percent-more-than-the-average-pay-for-the-standard-poor%e2%80%99s-500/
In my article, I re-stated the quote from an interview on DN: “[T]he CEOs of the fifty corporations responsible for the biggest layoffs were paid an average $12 million—42 percent more than the average pay for the Standard & Poor’s 500” in 2009.
Now, according to Democracy Now {DN}, “There’s a battle looming in Washington over the future of tax cuts for the wealthy. The cuts enacted by President Bush are set to expire at the end of the year. Republicans, led by House Minority Leader John Boehner, have called for extending the $700 billion in tax breaks for the rich. But President Obama strongly criticized the GOP and emphasized his opposition to extending the tax cuts.”
AMERICA, this is one of the top 2 or 3 issues in the election campaigns of 2010. I encourage you all to put pressure on Congressmen to tax the wealthy hoarders of America and jump-start the economy. (We can’t lose—unless we let the hoarders blow any recovery chances in 2011-2012.)
I am not simply talking about tax-cuts to those Americans earning $250,000 or less. I am talking about getting an appropriate progressive tax—as needed for a great economy in the short and mid-term.
TAXING THE CEOs and HOARDERS OF AMERICA
DN spoke on Thursday with the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, David Cay Johnston who makes it clear that taxing the wealthy investors who are not spending money but hoarding their capital savings and earnings, is the appropriate thing to do in order to get the economy rolling.
Johnston is the author of a book, FREE LUNCH, on “how the wealthiest Aemricans enrich themselves” at our “government’s expense”.
http://www.freelunchthebook.com/
All these issues and changes are until now only quietly being discussed. Get loud America!
Johnston noted in his DN, i.e. when he was talking about making the tax-rates more sensible and appropriate for the needs of our day age, that in the USA today “we have a large number of people in this country now who are making multimillion-dollar annual incomes, and we’re not talking about a higher tax rate on them. We’re starting actually at a very low level. And the very highest-paid workers in the history of the world, hedge fund managers, at least twenty-five of whom made a billion dollars last year, pay a current tax rate of zero. The news media keeps saying 15 percent. They pay the 15 percent, when they cash out, which could be decades from now. None of that is on the table.”
Until they cash out, these CEOs and other large corporate players and bankers pay nothing on their earnings—not even the supposed 15%.
WHAT WILL THE LOOPHOLES BE AND ARE THEY GOOD?
Juan Gonzalez of DN asked, “Now, what about the President’s proposal this week to extend basically tax breaks to small business as a means of attempting to further stimulate the economy?”
Johnston reported, “Well, what the President has proposed doing, essentially, is something called expensing. If you own a small business and you go buy, say, a new computer system, you have to write it off over a period of years if it costs more than a quarter of a million dollars. In the case of computers, it’s three or five years. The President is proposing that if you make an investment in 2011, you can write it off immediately. Now, the effect of that is simply timing. It’s not a tax cut. It just means you get your tax break in full today rather than over a period of years. That will tend to encourage businesses to buy equipment that year. But it also means, as we saw with the ‘Cars for Clunkers’ program and the homebuyer credit, that it brings some demand forward, and then demand falls off later on. The business community is not eager for this, because to pay for it, the President says we should tighten up on a bunch of other business loopholes. And that’s been one of his fundamental principles. If you’re going to cut a tax somewhere, you need to pay for it somewhere else. And the business community doesn’t see expensing as being valuable to them, especially if it means, in other areas, some of the loopholes will be tightened up.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/9/obama_fights_to_end_bush_tax
IT’S BASIC ECONOMICS, STUPID!
Amy Goodman finally asked Johnston, “What do you feel would single-handedly most stimulate the economy and make the biggest difference right now?”
Johnston responded, “Well, a recession is, by definition, the collapse of demand. People don’t have money to spend. If you own a small business, you don’t care nearly as much about a tax cut as having more customers who can spend more money buying your products and your services. One way to think about this is that thirty years of supply-side economics have left us with this enormous supply of capital. American companies have $1.8 trillion of cash right now. Now, understand what that means. It’s $6,000 for each man, woman and child in America, cash they’re not investing, they’re not using to create jobs, to increase their profits; they’re just hanging onto it.”
Johnston added, “So, on the other side of this, people don’t have jobs. We have 15 million people nearly out of work, many of them more than six months, and another 12 million or so who can’t find as much work as they want or who have quit looking for work. We have an imbalance. And in the same way that in your body your arterial and venous blood flows have to equalize or you don’t live, we have these huge pools of capital that cannot be profitably put to work right now. So what the government should be doing is focusing on demand. And if Obama turns out to be a one-term president, the principal reason, I suspect, will be that he did not put in a large enough stimulus package in the beginning to overcome the collapse of demand brought about by years of policies that focused on pushing down wages and increasing profits to businesses.”
http://fora.tv/2008/04/14/David_Cay_Johnston_Talks_About_Free_Lunch
By Kevin Stoda, write-in and online candidate for USA Senate
Last week, I reported to you that in an interview on DN, entitled “Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession” that CEOs that fire the most people get the best pay and bonuses in America
http://eslkevin.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/in-2009-ceos-of-the-fifty-corporations-responsible-for-the-biggest-layoffs-were-paid-an-average-12-million%e2%80%9442-percent-more-than-the-average-pay-for-the-standard-poor%e2%80%99s-500/
In my article, I re-stated the quote from an interview on DN: “[T]he CEOs of the fifty corporations responsible for the biggest layoffs were paid an average $12 million—42 percent more than the average pay for the Standard & Poor’s 500” in 2009.
Now, according to Democracy Now {DN}, “There’s a battle looming in Washington over the future of tax cuts for the wealthy. The cuts enacted by President Bush are set to expire at the end of the year. Republicans, led by House Minority Leader John Boehner, have called for extending the $700 billion in tax breaks for the rich. But President Obama strongly criticized the GOP and emphasized his opposition to extending the tax cuts.”
AMERICA, this is one of the top 2 or 3 issues in the election campaigns of 2010. I encourage you all to put pressure on Congressmen to tax the wealthy hoarders of America and jump-start the economy. (We can’t lose—unless we let the hoarders blow any recovery chances in 2011-2012.)
I am not simply talking about tax-cuts to those Americans earning $250,000 or less. I am talking about getting an appropriate progressive tax—as needed for a great economy in the short and mid-term.
TAXING THE CEOs and HOARDERS OF AMERICA
DN spoke on Thursday with the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, David Cay Johnston who makes it clear that taxing the wealthy investors who are not spending money but hoarding their capital savings and earnings, is the appropriate thing to do in order to get the economy rolling.
Johnston is the author of a book, FREE LUNCH, on “how the wealthiest Aemricans enrich themselves” at our “government’s expense”.
http://www.freelunchthebook.com/
All these issues and changes are until now only quietly being discussed. Get loud America!
Johnston noted in his DN, i.e. when he was talking about making the tax-rates more sensible and appropriate for the needs of our day age, that in the USA today “we have a large number of people in this country now who are making multimillion-dollar annual incomes, and we’re not talking about a higher tax rate on them. We’re starting actually at a very low level. And the very highest-paid workers in the history of the world, hedge fund managers, at least twenty-five of whom made a billion dollars last year, pay a current tax rate of zero. The news media keeps saying 15 percent. They pay the 15 percent, when they cash out, which could be decades from now. None of that is on the table.”
Until they cash out, these CEOs and other large corporate players and bankers pay nothing on their earnings—not even the supposed 15%.
WHAT WILL THE LOOPHOLES BE AND ARE THEY GOOD?
Juan Gonzalez of DN asked, “Now, what about the President’s proposal this week to extend basically tax breaks to small business as a means of attempting to further stimulate the economy?”
Johnston reported, “Well, what the President has proposed doing, essentially, is something called expensing. If you own a small business and you go buy, say, a new computer system, you have to write it off over a period of years if it costs more than a quarter of a million dollars. In the case of computers, it’s three or five years. The President is proposing that if you make an investment in 2011, you can write it off immediately. Now, the effect of that is simply timing. It’s not a tax cut. It just means you get your tax break in full today rather than over a period of years. That will tend to encourage businesses to buy equipment that year. But it also means, as we saw with the ‘Cars for Clunkers’ program and the homebuyer credit, that it brings some demand forward, and then demand falls off later on. The business community is not eager for this, because to pay for it, the President says we should tighten up on a bunch of other business loopholes. And that’s been one of his fundamental principles. If you’re going to cut a tax somewhere, you need to pay for it somewhere else. And the business community doesn’t see expensing as being valuable to them, especially if it means, in other areas, some of the loopholes will be tightened up.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/9/obama_fights_to_end_bush_tax
IT’S BASIC ECONOMICS, STUPID!
Amy Goodman finally asked Johnston, “What do you feel would single-handedly most stimulate the economy and make the biggest difference right now?”
Johnston responded, “Well, a recession is, by definition, the collapse of demand. People don’t have money to spend. If you own a small business, you don’t care nearly as much about a tax cut as having more customers who can spend more money buying your products and your services. One way to think about this is that thirty years of supply-side economics have left us with this enormous supply of capital. American companies have $1.8 trillion of cash right now. Now, understand what that means. It’s $6,000 for each man, woman and child in America, cash they’re not investing, they’re not using to create jobs, to increase their profits; they’re just hanging onto it.”
Johnston added, “So, on the other side of this, people don’t have jobs. We have 15 million people nearly out of work, many of them more than six months, and another 12 million or so who can’t find as much work as they want or who have quit looking for work. We have an imbalance. And in the same way that in your body your arterial and venous blood flows have to equalize or you don’t live, we have these huge pools of capital that cannot be profitably put to work right now. So what the government should be doing is focusing on demand. And if Obama turns out to be a one-term president, the principal reason, I suspect, will be that he did not put in a large enough stimulus package in the beginning to overcome the collapse of demand brought about by years of policies that focused on pushing down wages and increasing profits to businesses.”
http://fora.tv/2008/04/14/David_Cay_Johnston_Talks_About_Free_Lunch
posted by Kevin Anthony Stoda at 5:44 AM
1 Comments:
Refrain, it's Jump starting the Economy Stupid.
Johnston, author of FREE LUNCH, a book on how the wealthiest corporate leaders are milking the government of its money, stated last week in DN that if Obama is not re-elected president, it will be largely because he did not put enough money behind the stimulus packages in 2009-2010.
Obama's last chance to jumpstart the economy for next year is before us this autumn election.
Johnstonalso explained succinctly basic rules of economics that many corporations do not wish the American electorate to consider in 2010:
Well, a recession is, by definition, the collapse of demand. People don't have money to spend. If you own a small business, you don't care nearly as much about a tax cut as having more customers who can spend more money buying your products and your services. One way to think about this is that thirty years of supply-side economics have left us with this enormous supply of capital. American companies have $1.8 trillion of cash right now. Now, understand what that means. It's $6,000 for each man, woman and child in America, cash they're not investing, they're not using to create jobs, to increase their profits; they're just hanging onto it.
So, on the other side of this, people don't have jobs. We have 15 million people nearly out of work, many of them more than six months, and another 12 million or so who can't find as much work as they want or who have quit looking for work. We have an imbalance. And in the same way that in your body your arterial and venous blood flows have to equalize or you don't live, we have these huge pools of capital that cannot be profitably put to work right now. So what the government should be doing is focusing on demand. And if Obama turns out to be a one-term president, the principal reason, I suspect, will be that he did not put in a large enough stimulus package in the beginning to overcome the collapse of demand brought about by years of policies that focused on pushing down wages and increasing profits to businesses.
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