Corpublican Party!

I know, I hate it when someone "cleverly" reforms a party name too, but I couldn’t help it this time.

After reading the following article from NY Times’ Charles Blow, I felt inspired and angry. The media has allowed the GOP to get away with telling Americans a complete lie about taxes.

4 on the Bullshit Scale

Republicans have decided to play chicken with the nation’s credit — insisting on spending cuts while steadfastly resisting tax increases.

This is part of the modern doctrine of a compassion-free conservatism that’s using the fog of the fiscal crisis to push a program of perverse wealth inequality as sound economic policy: The only way to jump-start the economy is to slash taxes on the wealthy and on companies; the only way to compensate for the deficits that those tax cuts exacerbate is to slash benefits to the poor and vulnerable. It would be comical if it weren’t so callous.

Not only is this faulty logic, it’s a false choice. We’ll need sensible tax increases and sensible spending cuts to address the deficit, and both can be offset to some degree by stronger economic growth. It’s not an either-or proposition.

The full stealing from the plates of the starving simply isn’t an American ideal.

This might be in the weeds info, but Blow provides proof:

Quarterly earnings at luxury retailers like Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Movado and Tiffany all beat expectations, signaling that the rich can still splurge … the tax burden of American companies is lower than that of other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, as economist Bruce Bartlett pointed out this week. Also, a report issued on Wednesday by Citizens for Tax Justice looked at 12 Fortune 500 companies from 2008-10 and found that on $171 billion in profits earned, their effective tax rate was negative-1.5 percent because of corporate loopholes, shelters and special tax breaks … And, as Time magazine reported in its June 6 issue, “In the 18 months since the Great Recession, which ended in June 2009, U.S. annualized corporate profits rose 42 percent, to a record $1.68 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2010.” Corporations aren’t hurting. They’re hoarding.

Federal taxes are at their lowest level in more than 60 years. The last year in which revenues were lower was 1950, according to the OMB. Yet if one listens to Republicans, one would think that taxes have never been higher … One would not know from the Republicans … that corporate taxes are expected to raise just 1.3 percent of G.D.P. in revenue this year, about a third of what it was in the 1950s. The G.O.P. says global competitiveness requires the United States to reduce its corporate tax rate. But the United States actually has the lowest corporate tax burden of any of the member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The average federal income tax rate on the 400 richest people in America was 18.11 percent in 2008, according to the IRS, down from 26.38 percent when these data were first calculated in 1992. Among the top 400, 7.5 percent had an average tax rate of less than 10 percent, 25 percent paid between 10 and 15 percent, and 28 percent paid between 15 and 20 percent.