JOURNAL-ISM

via Kevin Drum

I see that the Wall Street Journal is busily cementing its reputation as the most dishonest editorial page in the country. Today they crow yet again about the vast tax burden of the upper classes:... read on

So in 1979 the super-rich earned 3% of the money and paid 5% of the taxes. In 1999 the super-rich earned 10% of the money and paid 11% of the taxes. The Journal clearly has a different definition of "grew more progressive" than the rest of us.

In fact, these numbers might start you wondering. If the income share of the super-rich tripled but their tax share only doubled, doesn't that mean that their tax rates must have gone down? Indeed it does.

So shed no tears for the super rich in America. Their incomes have tripled in the past couple of decades and at the same time their tax rates have decreased by 9 percentage points. That's a pretty sweet deal in anybody's book.

Happy Holidays

This holiday season, credit card companies are giving the gift of unexpectedly high interest rates. According to an exhaustive report in The New York Times, credit card companies are doubling or tripling interest rates with little warning or explanation, forcing thousands of Americans to pay unreasonable and unwarrantedly higher bills. The slightest slip--like paying a utility bill late--can lead to a rate hike, with card companies "acting like modern-day loan sharks," writes The Times. Halliburton isn't the only one overcharging America.

You keep saying that you'll bring the troops home with honor. When have they not been honored? Can you please give examples? C&L and many other sites fight everyday for the rights of our troops, their health care, benefits and the conditions of Walter Reed. And the best way I know how to fight for them is to never send them to war without a true cause and bring them home now so their families can see them alive and healthy. You are against Sen Webb's GI Bill not because it doesn't give them adequate compensation for their service, but as you say, it will lead to many more troops leaving the armed forces sooner:

They are very hard to replace. Encouraging people to choose to not become noncommissioned officers would hurt the military and our country very badly." McCain argues his bill would have a smaller impact on retention rates than the legislation that the Senate passed.

Is that an honorable argument?

NonnyMouse sent this article from The Motley Fool UK, and while this is focused on the UK banking system, it was still as disturbing to me as the thought of Madonna trying to make an updated version of Casablanca set in Iraq (which is to say, on so many levels). But it also occurred to me that given the hyper-partisan and crony-favored atmosphere fostered by the Bush administration, this wouldn't be a completely out-of-left-field thing to be happening here in the US too, if only tacitly:

You may have noticed that, for the past few years, this website has compared personal loans. Thousands of people have used the comparison tool.

As a writer, my involvement with it has largely been limited to looking through data to see patterns in the loans market. We survey users to find out how their applications went, so that we can identify patterns and provide better guidance in our articles. We've found that, of course, sometimes people don't get the loan they apply for, or that the lender offers them a worse rate than the typical APR that was shown.[..]

However, analysing the data we've collated, it's clear that who you vote for in elections affects whether you'll get a loan with a bank. If the bank supports one political party through donations or other means, and you vote for that party, you're more likely to get a loan. If you aren't a known supporter, you're less likely to get the loan. If you're a known supporter of a different party, you're even less likely.

Also, you're more likely to get the cheapest rates (the 'typical' APRs) if you support the same party as the bank!

This has serious implications about data protection, amongst other things.

I'd be curious to know how private banks in the UK would get voter information...but it should serve as a HUGE red flag on the dangers of the Voter/REAL ID cards here in the US.

The Bonddad Blog: People are abandoning mortgages as prices drop, municipal bond rates are shooting through the roof, and the markets are falling. But Bubble Boy insists everything is copacetic.

Gristmill: A front for the coal industry is running some amazingly dishonest ads in advance of the Ohio presidential primary...and in other campaign news...

Ken Silverstein: John McCain's 'charitable contributions.'

Neurotopia: Convergent evolution of a gene that blocks HIV in monkeys.

War and Piece: Big trouble. More here, and here...

Sunday Bookchat: A man who was right about Iraq -- right from the start! A woman who was a mortal enemy of William F. Buckley's best buddy! An Obama critic who can't get over himself! From borderlands and bookshelves to comic books and Harlan Ellison --

There were quite a few interesting gems in the president's Fox News interview over the weekend, but this one stood out for me:

WALLACE: How does [McCain] overcome all of that and...

BUSH: Because there's two big issues. One is, who's going to keep your taxes low? Most Americans feel overtaxed and I promise you the Democrat [sic] party is going to field a candidate who says I'm going to raise your tax.

If they're going to say, oh, we're only going to tax the rich people, but most people in America understand that the rich people hire good accountants and figure out how not to necessarily pay all the taxes and the middle class gets stuck.

We've had -- we've been through this drill before. We're only going to tax the rich and all you have to do is look at the history of that kind of language and see who gets stuck with the bill.

Does this make any sense at all? Wealthy people hire accountants, so the government should leave their tax rates alone?

As Isaac Chotiner put it, "The Democrats want to raise rates on the wealthiest Americans, but Bush is saying that in fact this will screw the middle class because the rich have ways to avoid paying taxes. The obvious question is, then, why has Bush spent so much time giving tax cuts to the rich?!?!"

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Bill Moyers finds parallels with the degradation of rampant steroid use in baseball to how degraded our country has become by those seeking quick ways to short cut and short circuit level playing fields.

You don't get a level playing field with performance enhancing drugs, any more than you get an honest government with political action committees and bundled contributions, or a fair economy with some derivatives, hedge funds, and private equity managers taxed at rates lower than their janitors. You get a level playing field only when the fans demand it. Suppose people stopped attending games in large numbers, stopped watching on TV, stopped buying the products hyped by the icons. The leveling would happen, or baseball as a money-making business would die. It's not likely to happen. If we can't organize to stop a brutal, bloody war in Iraq, or rectify an economic system that divides us further every day, we can hardly expect collective action from baseball fans.

There was a lesson in George Mitchell's report that I'm not sure even he recognized. The day Americans don't feel strongly enough about the need for level playing fields to fight for them -- the day when cutting corners and seeking an edge become the national pastime -- is the day democracy will be lucky even to find a seat in the bleachers.

The entire transcript available here.

The right's biggest book publisher is apparently having trouble with some of the right's biggest authors. It could get ugly -- and for some of us, entertaining.

Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company.

In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”

[Richard] Miniter said, “It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.” He added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”

As Kevin Drum put it, "[I]f a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, what do you call a conservative who's come face to face with the naked face of vertically integrated capitalism?"

The deficit is high, the debt is growing, the war’s financial costs are exorbitant, and the nation is just coming to grips with the need for a sizable investment in the nation’s bridges and infrastructure.

Given this environment, the president has a plan: more tax cuts.

President Bush said yesterday that he is considering a fresh plan to cut tax rates for U.S. corporations to make them more competitive around the world, an initiative that could further inflame a battle with the Democratic Congress over spending and taxes and help define the remainder of his tenure.

Advisers presented Bush with a series of ideas to restructure corporate taxes, possibly eliminating narrowly targeted breaks to pay for a broader, across-the-board rate cut. In an interview with a small group of journalists afterward, Bush said he was “inclined” to send a corporate tax package to Congress, although he expressed uncertainty about its political viability.

As Kevin Drum put it, "He really is like a windup doll, isn't he? No matter what's going on in the outside world, no matter what problems we're facing, no matter what the political situation is, you pull the cord and he says 'Tax cuts!' It's like he's the Manchurian President."

Amidst the tragedy of the trapped coal miners in Utah, Bob Murray said this:

We're going to get them," said Robert E. Murray, chairman of Murray Energy Corp. of Cleveland, a part-owner of the Crandall Canyon mine. "There is nothing on my mind right now except getting those miners out.

Nothing on his mind other saving the miners, really?

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"Without coal to manufacture our electricity, our products will not compete in the global marketplace against foreign countries...and people on fixed incomes will not be able to pay their electric bills," . "And every one of these global warming bills that has been introduced in Congress to date eliminates the coal industry and will increase your electric rates four to five-fold."

Will Bunch: Better mine safety (which has nothing to do with global warming, last time I checked) is anti-American? Well, I don't think a majority of Americans agree with that, but the ones who do may find this last twist more than a little ironic:

Little was known about the six miners; only one has been identified. The Mexican Consulate in Salt Lake City said three of the men are Mexican citizens.

So let me get this straight: Robert Murray doesn't want any laws that would make the skies over America cleaner, because he wouldn't be able to give dangerous jobs in Utah...to citizens of Mexico? Man 'o' man, I can't wait to see how Hannity and Rush spin this one...read on

Yea, that might be pretty interesting....