The world is run by Politics but without Compassion, Justice, Trust, and Honor there are only failed Policies. There has to come a time when we put our Compassion before every Policy and then the World will be a better place for all.
Here [in the USA] the critical issue is economic inequity. According to the C.I.A.’s own ranking of countries by income inequality, the United States is more unequal a society than either Tunisia or Egypt.
During the Bush administration, the wealthiest were just getting wealthier and the middle class was doing okay and it seems to me were thinking that they would follow the wealthy and that the economy could not go down. I would hear people talking about a housing bubble - was it? could it all crash?
How could it not? Anyway now people are gathering and demanding changes. I agree but we must remember that whether or not we at this moment are doing well or not - inequality is inequality!!! Setting up the government to help only some is not right whether we think we can be on the beneficial side or not.
Republican: 'smaller government and more individual control' so while the rest of us are struggling to maintain our basic needs the elite can control the "small" government and structure it to benefit the wealthy that are the only ones with enough money and time to participate.
Rick Perry (R-TX), has now thrown in his hat to run for President in 2012. Is he qualified? Will he be able to help the country with job creation and a struggling economy? Well, if Texas is any example, then we can look forward to a Republican once again talking about a Small Government - while actually increasing the government. Under Perry, Texas' public sector increased by 125,000 jobs in just three years ... but his state lost 178,000 jobs in the private sector. Nothing to brag about especially when he has a "$27 billion budget deficit for the 2012-2013 budget," which will cause the lay-off of tens of thousands of workers in the upcoming budget cycle.
"Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), since he launched his presidential campaign on Saturday, has paraded around the stat that 'since June of 2009, Texas is responsible for more than 40 percent of all of the new jobs created in America.' 'Now think about that. We’re home to less than 10 percent of the population in America, but 40 percent of all the new jobs were created in that state,' Perry says."
"In fact, 'Texas has done worse than the rest of the country since the peak of national unemployment in October 2009.' The unemployment rate in Texas has been steadily increasing throughout the recession, and went from 7.7 to 8.2 percent while the state was supposedly creating 40 percent of all the new jobs in the U.S."
"Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has been basing his nascent presidential campaign on his anti-government views and Texas’ supposed job creation miracle. As we noted today, when labor force growth is taken into account, Texas actually has the worst job creation record in the nation (though it does lead the country in minimum wage jobs). But there is one sector that has been booming under Perry: the public sector."
I really thought it would take more than five minutes in New Orleans before I realized the conservative movement had landed.
But it didn’t. As I was waiting for my bags, I heard a mid-thirties woman talking on the phone. “Yah, I’m down in New Orleans for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meeting. We write legislation, and they pass our ideas. It’s the free market.”
"Healthy Families is a program to help prevent child abuse with education and early intervention. They support at risk families thereby helping families stay together and keep children out of child protection custody. A five year study shows that 98% of the children in the program are abuse free. A child in child protection costs taxpayers around $64,377 a year, while the Healthy Families only costs about "$1,671 a year per child, saving taxpayers millions of dollars."
Florida has turned down up to "$52 million in federal funding — $3.4 million of which Scott (R-FL) turned down this year and millions more in grants available under Section 2951 of the Affordable Care Act for home health visits. The money is sorely needed. In 2010, the state legislature cut a staggering 43 percent of the budget for its Healthy Families Florida program, which provides home visitation services to both expecting parents and parents with newborn children in order to prevent future instances of abuse. As a result, Healthy Families was forced to scale back, dropping services for 5,800 children in 3,500 high-risk families.
By refusing to provide, pursue, or even accept funding for child-abuse prevention programs, Scott and his GOP allies are sacrificing Florida’s children in order to cling to a partisan talking point.
The Republicans continue to talk and call the "Billionaires" - "Job Creators". The truth is right in front of everyone's faces why not just acknowledge and get this country back on track. The 2001 to 2003 tax cuts put a "$2.5 trillion hole in America’s budget and created deficits stretching on for years."
The "job creators" didn't create jobs they held onto their money and ours just like the banks are doing. They talk about Trillion $$ spending cuts - well have the rich (those who can still eat, have health insurance, and the second home along the beach) pay their share!
The American Legislative Exchange Council has since 1973 operated in relative secrecy, avoiding scrutiny from the media and watchdog groups as it has sought to impose a one-size-fits-all corporate agenda on all fifty states.
Specifically, Common Cause is arguing that, while ALEC has claimed in repeated IRS filings that it does no lobbying, its bylaws state that its goals include the dissemination of model legislation and the promotion of that legislation in Congress and state legislatures. The nonpartisan watchdog group notes that ALEC’s 2009 tax return reported an expenditures of more than $2.6 million for the work of the council’s corporate/legislator task forces and an additional $1.9 million for a series of annual conferences at which bills are drafted and presented to legislators.
A letter from Common Cause’s lawyers to the IRS outlines concerns that ALEC—which has more than 2,000 conservative legislators, along with more than 300 corporations and conservative foundations—may have filed false tax returns. The letter raises detailed questions about whether ALEC, which operates under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code (a section that places strict limits lobbying activity) has engaged in activities that put its tax-exempt, charitable status at risk. Corporations, which peovide major funding for ALEC currently take advantage of those tax benefits to deduct contributions to ALEC from their taxable income.
Referencing revelations regarding the extent of ALEC’s activities in the state—more than 850 pieces of “model legislation” are included in the ALEX Exposed archive, along with details of the linking of corporate representatives and legislators on ALEX task forces—as well as tax returns, ALEC publications and correspondence exchanged by legislators and ALEC and obtained by Common Cause through freedom of information requests, the letter to the IRS argues that “it seems incontrovertible that ALEC is substantially and indeed primarily engaged in attempting to influence legislation. All of its efforts are geared toward developing and promoting favored state legislation. These proposals are generated in a private process where the business interests of its corporate members are highlighted, then shared only with the organization’s legislator members so they can take the proposals back to their states and introduce them as their own idea.”
“By claiming to be a charity and calling participating legislators `members,’ ALEC attempts to evade disclosure of its lobbying, allows corporate members to deduct their payments as charitable contributions rather than non-deductible lobbying expenses, and does an end-run around state ethics laws intended to restrict the ability of businesses to buy access to legislators in order to promote their policy agendas,” explains the Common Cause request. “The IRS should stop allowing the continuation of this charade.”
One of the major demands that almost all congressional Republicans have made about deficit reduction is that wealthier americans and large corporations shouldn’t have to pay any more in taxes. “The House has taken a firm position against anything having to do with increasing taxes or raising tax rates,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) at the onset of negotiations over the budget deficit in May.
Yet as the Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz reports, one group that Cantor is apparently fine with making pay more is American college students. Cantor, at the White House for budget negotiations, apparently proposed that students who take out student loans should immediately start paying interest, rather than getting to make payments after graduation:
As Monday’s White House budget talks got down to the nitty-gritty, Eric Cantor proposed a series of spending cuts, one of them aimed squarely at college students. The House majority leader, who did most of the talking for the Republican side, said those taking out student loans should start paying interest right away, rather than being able to defer payments until after graduation. It is a big-ticket item that would save $40 billion over 10 years.
According to Kurtz, Obama rejected Cantor’s proposal out of hand, saying that he didn’t want to “screw students.” Cantor’s proposal comes at a time when American students are already overwhelmed by student loan debt. In 2008, the average debt that a college student graduated with was a whopping $23,000. American students continue to pay more than most of their developed world neighbors for a college education, and Cantor apparently wants to make it even more difficult for them while not touching the richest Americans.
We’re asking the poorest Americans to sacrifice. When are the wealthiest Americans going to step up and do the patriotic thing, which is to contribute to deal with this budget deficit.
Alabama’s new strict immigration law may wreak havoc on the rebuilding effort and the estimated 51,700 jobs such an effort will create. The “strongest immigration bill in the country,” which Gov. Robert Bentley (R-AL) signed on June 9
Although the funding for the law has not yet been procured, the threat is still enough to send immigrant workers out of the state in droves. And unfortunately for the disaster-stricken residents of Tuscaloosa and the surrounding counties, “Hispanic workers, documented and undocumented, dominate anything to do with masonry, concrete, framing, roofing, and landscaping,” local contractor Bob McNelly said.
This looming disaster for the Alabama construction industry follows closely on the heels of a dire labor shortage in Georgia’s agricultural sector, which is attributed to the state’s strict new immigration law that takes effect today. Around 11,000 jobs have gone unfilled, even though the state’s unemployment rate is above the national average at 9.8 percent, and the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association has estimated that around $300 million in profits have been left to rot in the fields.
Ten years ago what did President Bush say would "generate new wealth," and would "open new opportunities." Eight years ago he also said this same policy would "bring real and immediate benefits to middle-income Americans" and it would also "speed up economic recovery and the pace of job creation.” So since 2001 and 2003 is this what we have been experiencing? Who has new wealth? How many of us have new opportunities? Are you as a middle-income Am. gotten real and immediate benefits? And don't we all agree that we have had an economic recovery and an increase in job creation? Was Bush right? Who are the people that have benefited in the last ten years? Who are the people that have benefited in the last eight years?
It wasn't me and it wasn't my middle income. I have no new wealth and worry about my sons' opportunities in the future.
The above quotes are what Bush said on April 16, 2001 and also two years later about the benefits of the tax reductions for the rich. The only people benefiting from the tax cuts are the rich! Nothing that Bush said would happen has happened. Reaganomics didn't work in the 80's and isn't working now. The time that we prospered were during Clinton's tax increases!!! Read more about it at: ThinkProgress Ten Years Of The Bush Tax Cuts By Pat Garofalo on Jun 6, 2011
"It is odd, given the fantastically poor record of the Bush tax cuts on all of these measures, that conservatives are making exactly the same case for why they should be extended. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), for example, came out strongly against allowing the cuts for the wealthy to expire, saying, “If we want to spur economic growth and reduce the deficit, then let's stop these massive job-killing tax hikes.” Why does he think that if the tax cuts didn’t work the first time, that this time will be any different?"
"Lower taxes for the rich don’t help the economy, they cost too much, the money could be put to much better use, and nearly everyone in the country would be completely unaffected if we simply let the rates go back to where they were under President Clinton."
GREAT POINT by Michael Linden & Michael Ettlinger in their conclusion: "If conservatives really want tax relief, let them join with progressives to pass permanent tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans. If they want to continue protecting tax breaks for the rich in spite of all the evidence against them, they are free to do so, but they shouldn’t hold everyone else’s tax returns hostage in the meantime."
