US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

anyway, i've said it before i'm saying it now and i will say it again ... i worry more about the Blue Dogs, the gabbnebs and the apparatchiks w/n the party and the Beltway insiders/media outside always urging "moderation" than i worry about the crazy people/mad dogs (who don't know any better).
― It's Britney, bitch! (Eisbaer), Wednesday, 13 April 2011

funny to see gabbneb become a name for this!

well it hasn't caught on nationally yet

Don't know if Dan Savage is going to care enough and 'frothy mixture of compromise and concession to powerful interests' just doesn't have the same ring to it

you know it's weird, all that time and i still can't really think of what gabbneb believed one way or another on any issue.

maybe that's the point everyone is making, but i honestly can't remember him saying one thing about policy, either in a krugman/reich direction or a third way/clintonoid direction or anything. plenty about the game tho.

he was damn good on country music recommendations though!

huh? I completely missed that about him.

He was one of the guys who persuaded me to check out Strait and Paisley years ago.

he understands Flyover Country!

wow this guy is fucking awesome: http://www.tbd.com/articles/2011/04/mayor-vincent-gray-protest-budget--58362.html

A day after D.C. mayor Vincent Gray, several councilmembers and several dozen protesters were arrested...
― k3vin k., Wednesday, April 13, 2011 10:25 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

he isn't awesome really but i do love that of the various campaign promises he's broken one of them is "i will not get arrested protesting for dc statehood'

yeah i don't know anything else about him but doing that was awesome

yeah no doubt that made me proud

/itechnicallyliveinvirginiabutstill

gabbneb was all about Dems winning elections by being Rethuglican Lite, that leads to policy in short order.

^^^ morbz is da winner.

Dunno if you guys already mentioned the imminent defeat of the Texas bill allowing concealed car on college campuses, but hoorah for the status quo for once? http://www.fairwarning.org/2011/04/guns-in-college-classrooms-not-in-texas-afer-campuses-fire-back/

lol @ "concealed car"

Is that a heh heh hummer in your pocket or are you etc.?

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/223/492268440_cdf7fb53c8.jpg

<3 tfg

http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/04/13/wealthy.taxes/index.html

I'm only linking this to point out that they pulled this quote from FB against higher taxes for the wealthy: "Nathan Rennicker of Dover, Ohio, also weighed in on Facebook, saying his dad would be the "one getting screwed" if Obama gets his way. That "hurts me for schooling, he makes 'to much' for the gov't yet not enough to support the family fully, about time the people who live luxurios lives suffer as well."

luxurios

luxirios: breakfast of champions

hah well obviously 250K is a pretty arbitrary number, but the top 2% Obama was talking about in today's speech make multiple millions of dollars a year so if its a huge sticking point the number could be raised a bit I think...

Unless 250k isn't arbitrary and that's literally as high as our tax brackets go... which honestly would not surprise me, and in that case we need some serious tax code reform.

the tax bracket goes to something like 350k, or so someone said above, which came from some comments on some other site. very reliable I know.

im having a hard time imagining the tax rate on a $350k salary that would make it difficult for someone to "fully" support a family?

Meanwhile, Emily Feldman Wiesenthal, originally from Florida and now living in New York, said grouping a couple making $250,000 a year is not exactly fair.
"Plenty of people just starting out have a good salary but have things like student loans, mortgages, young children, etc., that make raising taxes for this group a hardship," she said on the Facebook post. "A household making 250,000 with $100,000 of student loan debt left to pay off isn't necessarily rich."

http://www.nypress.com/article-22306-tax-the-rich_.html

The Republicans and a key Democrat, Senator Charles Schumer of New York, fought to keep the tax rate on hedge fund managers at 15 percent, arguing that the profits from hedge funds should be considered capital gains, not ordinary income, which got a lot of attention in the news.

What the news media missed is that hedge fund managers don't even pay 15 percent. At least, not currently. So long as they leave their money, known as "carried interest," in the hedge fund, their taxes are deferred. They only pay taxes when they cash out, which could be decades from now for younger managers. How do these hedge fund managers get money in the meantime? By borrowing against the carried interest, often at absurdly low rates—currently about 2 percent.

Lots of other people live tax-free, too. I have Donald Trump's tax records for four years early in his career. He paid no taxes for two of those years. Big real-estate investors enjoy taxfree living under a 1993 law President Clinton signed. It lets "professional" real-estate investors use paper losses like depreciation on their buildings against any cash income, even if they end up with negative incomes like Trump.

Frank and Jamie McCourt, who own the Los Angeles Dodgers, have not paid any income taxes since at least 2004, their divorce case revealed. Yet they spent $45 million one year alone. How? They just borrowed against Dodger ticket revenue and other assets. To the IRS, they look like paupers.

In Wisconsin, Terrence Wall, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 2010, paid no income taxes on as much as $14 million of recent income, his disclosure forms showed. Asked about his living tax-free while working people pay taxes, he had a simple response: Everyone should pay less.

perfect dn for that post

I've been hesitant to get into this guy, but I really can't find anything assailable about this piece:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-real-housewives-of-wall-street-look-whos-cashing-in-on-the-bailout-20110411?page=1

It's like he writes what at first sounds like needlessly inflammatory hyperbole, but then when you go over it everything he's saying is true.

Taibbi is great, as long as you don't watch him live on the Daily Show, etc..

taibbi is one of the best journalists in america

yeah taibbi is a hero

It's like he writes what at first sounds like needlessly inflammatory hyperbole, but then when you go over it everything he's saying is true.

Yep. He still curses too damn much.

Financial crises brought few prosecutions

A household making 250,000 with $100,000 of student loan debt left to pay off isn't necessarily rich."

Yeah, paying off the entirety of your family's student loan debt in one year and being left with only $150,000, that must really suck.

did you even spend like 3 seconds thinking before you wrote that

did you even spend like 3 seconds thinking before you wrote that

of all the occasions upon which I've called for a new ILE board description, I feel that this one merits especially close consideration

like i get how a family of say five living in NYC bringing in ~$250,000 would not think of themselves "rich" (250k in NYC would be like 135k around here), especially after fed and state taxes, but it's still a pretty sweet friggin life. also, i'm prompted to ask (again) why the hell a family bringing in $373,000 (or whatever the top marg rate is) is in the same bracket as some dude pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars a year?

of course, dudes making hundreds of millions are probably exploiting the shit out of the loopholes described in Morbs' link

Fed and state and city taxes. But I wouldn't spend 3 seconds thinking about that sentiment, either. $250,000 is like 5x the average income for most of this country, right?

also here's a Politifact rundown of all the GOP weeping and and gnashing of teeth w/r/t the communist-supported expiration the Bush tax cuts and ZOMG AMERICA"S ECONOMIC ENGINE SMALL BUSINESS

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2010/nov/23/top-5-falsehoods-about-bush-tax-cuts/

I'm not trying to say that $250 a year isn't a lot of money for a family; it is! However, chopping $100K off the top all in one year is going to have a non-negligible impact on your bottom line, especially if you live in NYC/DC/LA/Boston/SF/insert your favorite expensive US city here.

No one should feel bad for the $250K family but it's kind of stupid to assume they're rolling in luxury (unless of course your definition of "luxury" isn't really that luxurious)

lol $250K

families making 250k in NYC might 'feel poor' but whenever someone writes one of those 'this is why you shouldn't tax me, look at my expenses!' articles, they're loaded with 'keeping up with the joneses' spending. big house in the right neighborhood, private schools, nice cars, whatever.

I kind of feel like any education expenses a family chooses to take on should be exempt from ridicule/scorn, but this is partially because I wish that we'd get taxed at like 60% and have most of that go into federally-funded education and research.

Obama said yesterday he envisions "a final agreement on a plan to reduce the deficit ... by the end of June."

If he's gonna keep his word and not preserve the Bush tax cuts this time, and the Republicans refuse to do what even Ronald Reagan did 7 times (raise taxes) that leaves us where?

Right, we all agree about the total lack of pity for their terrible plight angle. But also, in the example given (by that idiot woman), she's talking about YOUNG people, which means you come out of college knowing your debt load and you don't even EXPECT to be keeping all of that $250,000 that you're somehow (magically) making. You don't assume the expenses of a $250,000-household because you AREN'T that household yet.

And student loans don't get paid off in one year. She's an idiot.

6 figure student debt is basically its own problem and shouldn't be used to defend our horrible tax system. most people with that much debt don't make 250k + pay a greater % of their disposable income for loans.

The only person who said anything about paying off your entire student loan in one year is Adam