As a quick glance at January's presidential fundraising numbers confirms, the unlimited cash flowing into SuperPACs is fundamentally distorting the 2012 election. The millions flowing into conservative SuperPAC coffers are not only far outpacing the GOP candidates' own campaigns, but continuing to overwhelm their Democratic counterparts. But for the likes of Charles and David Koch, the Walton family, Foster Friess, Sheldon Adelson, Meg Whitman, the Marriotts and the rest of the SuperPAC-Men, a multimillion dollar contribution isn't an eccentric hobby, but a wise investment. After all, if Republicans win in November, their plan to eliminate the estate and capital gains taxes would divert billions of dollars from the United States Treasury to the accounts of nation's richest families. Of course, that gaping hole would have to be filled by all other American taxpayers.

As Mother Jones reported last month, as of December 31, 2011 conservative SuperPACs reaped $60 million of now-unlimited contributions, compared to just $8 million for liberal groups. That tidal wave of corporate cash and play money from the wealthy has filled the coffers of Karl Rove's American Crossroads, Mitt Romney's Restore the Future, Rick Santorum's Red, White and Blue Fund, Newt Gingrich's Winning the Future and a litany of other right-wing SuperPACs. Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul worth an estimated $25 billion, said, "I might give $10 million or $100 million to Gingrich." And as Amanda Terkel detailed, the Koch brothers and their allies pledged to raise much more to defeat President Obama:

At a private three-day retreat in California last weekend, conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch and about 250 to 300 other individuals pledged approximately $100 million to defeat President Obama in the 2012 elections.

A source who was in the room when the pledges were made told The Huffington Post that, specifically, Charles Koch pledged $40 million and David pledged $20 million.

But that figure is chump change compared to the eye-popping return on investment the Kochs can expect if their side wins in November. Ending the estate tax, a policy endorsed by Mitt Romney and every other Republican presidential candidate, would literally be worth billions of dollars to the heirs of Charles and David Koch. As ThinkProgress explained last year:

According to a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, the Koch brothers' heirs' would save a combined $17.4 billion in estate taxes thanks to Romney's plan.

Each of the Koch brothers -- Charles and David -- is worth about $25 billion. They are each married, so they would receive an exemption on the first $10 million that they pass down, and then theirs heirs would pay a 35 percent tax, or $8.7 billion, on the rest of their vast fortunes.

Now, this is an exceedingly rough calculation, as it's almost certain that the Koch's have engaged in extensive estate planning and would pay nowhere near that amount. But 35 percent is the rate on the books, and Romney's plan to eliminate the estate tax entirely would undeniably save the Kochs a boatload of money.

Here's why. Despite Republican mythology about family farms and businesses being lost to the so-called "death tax," by 2009 only 0.24 percent of estates even paid the levy. And that was before the December 2010 compromise President Obama inked with Congressional Republicans extending the Bush tax cuts further slashed the estate tax. The reduced 35 percent tax is now applied only to couples with estates greater than $10 million, a change which will cost Uncle Sam roughly $15 billion a year. Now, the Tax Policy Center calculated, only 0.1 percent of estates are impacted. Only 50 family farms and small businesses will be affected, and they contribute "less than one tenth of 1 percent point of the total revenue the tax will collect." Who pays the estate tax?

TPC estimates that 8,600 individuals dying in 2011 will leave estates large enough to require filing an estate tax return (estates with a gross value under $5 million need not file a return in 2011). After allowing for deductions and credits, an estimated 3,270 estates will owe tax. Roughly 90 percent of these taxable estates will come from the top ten percent of income earners and nearly half will come from the top one percent alone.

Estate tax liability will total an estimated $10.6 billion in 2011. The top ten percent of income earners will pay 98 percent of this total. The richest 1 in 1,000 will pay $5.4 billion or 51 percent of the total.

Among that richest 1 in 1,000 are the Koch brothers and the family behind Walmart, the Walton clan.

Continue reading »

If nothing else, the 2012 Republican presidential contest has forced GOP White House hopefuls to run a gauntlet of ever more draconian pledges demanded by party purists. At the top of the list is the Grover Norquist's Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which demands candidates "solemnly bind themselves to oppose any and all tax increases."

But at a time of record high income inequality, historically low federal taxes and rising national debt their party is largely responsible for producing, the GOP presidential wannabes must take a two-part vow about their own tax-cutting proposals:

(a) If my tax cut plan is enacted, my family and I will save ________ in federal taxes every year.

((b) If my tax cut plan is enacted, it will add ________ trillion dollars to the national debt of the United States over the next decade.

Call it the "MyTaxCut Pledge."

The need for the MyTaxCut Pledge became glaringly apparent after the 2008 presidential campaign. Republican nominee John McCain offered a Treasury-draining tax cut plan that would have produced a massive windfall for him and his heiress wife, Cindy. As the Center for American Progress explained at the time:

McCain favors making the Bush tax laws permanent, and also plans to repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax, double the dependent exemption and offer tax breaks on business income...Had McCain's tax proposal been in place in 2006, [they] would have done incredibly well - saving even more than they did under the existing Bush plan. John and Cindy McCain would have walked away with $373,429 in their pocket.

McCain's tax plan was radically more regressive than even that of President Bush - it would have delivered 58% of its benefits to the wealthiest 1% of American taxpayers. But John and Cindy's winnings wouldn't have ended there. As both the financial crisis and his slump in the polls deepened, John McCain proposed slashing capital gains taxes (a halving from 15% to 7.5%). Again, the gains from his scheme go overwhelmingly to the richest Americans (almost 60% of its benefits to families earning over $1 million a year), including his wife:

The McCains made $746,395 in capitals gains last year. A new analysis by Michael Ettlinger, Vice President for Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, reveals that McCain's capital gains cut would have reduced the McCains' taxes by $55,980 in 2007.

But the McCain's proposed personal payday pales in comparison to the vault-stuffing espoused by his surrogate Meg Whitman. During her failed 2010 run for governor of California, the billionaire former eBay CEO proposed killing the state's capital gains tax altogether. As the Los Angeles Times' Michael Hiltzik noted, ending the capital gains tax would cost California up to $10 billion in revenue annually even as it would put tens of millions of dollars directly into Meg Whitman's pocketbook.

The Whitman campaign refused to tell me this week what percentage of Whitman's income derives from capital gains (which can be defined as profits on stock, bond, real estate and other such investments). Whitman has thus far refused to make public her tax returns, which might hold a clue...Capital gains might even represent the majority of her income in some years.

As Chris Kelly of the Huffington Post aptly put it, "Meg Whitman's Tax Plan: She Stops Paying Hers."

That recent history suggests that the 2012 GOP presidential field should come clean about what their respective tax plans will do for their own personal finances. After all, by any standard most are wealthy, with Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman and Herman Cain especially so. (Romney's fortune has been estimated as high as $250 million dollars.)

Alas, the odds of any of the Republicans taking the MyTaxCut Pledge are virtually zero. After all, as Politico reported earlier this year:

A POLITICO survey of the major GOP hopefuls found that none are promising to making their tax returns public, as then-candidate Obama did in 2007 and 2008 -- as well as during his Senate campaign in 2004 and later in 2006.

But if the would-be Republican presidents won't fess up about the personal bonanzas their tax policies are certain to produce, at least they could come clean about what they'll do to the national debt.

Continue reading »

Record-breaking amounts of money were spent this year vying for seats in the mid-terms here in California. Meg Whitman reportedly spent $160 million of her own money--or roughly $42 per vote--to not win the California governorship. Carly Fiorina spent $5.5 million of her own money (along with more than $10 million in donations and $4.8 from the Republicans) to launch an unsuccessful challenge to Barbara Boxer's Senate seat. Add Linda McMahon's unsuccessful run for Chris Dodd's seat in Connecticut and you have an astounding $217 million spent to not win an election. That's a hell of a lot of money . Gail Sheehy looks at what could have been done with that money instead:

Instead of laying out a combined $217 million to run for office, Whitman, Fiorina, and McMahon could have saved America’s commuters some serious cash. They could have footed the toll bill for half of the 52.1 million vehicles that cross the George Washington Bridge yearly, or one-third of the 102.2 million vehicles that cross the Bay Bridge.

Whitman’s spending could have bought full tuition for 23,553 California residents at the University of California-Berkeley, which would almost double current undergraduate enrollment. She could have made 95,764 connections for at-risk youth through Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles. Or, if she wanted to be known as the Savior of San Jose, she could have wiped out the megalopolis’ budget deficit twice over.
..
Fiorina('s) [..] total campaign spending could have doubled the total assets of Goodwill of Southern California. It could have fully funded Pajaro Valley Unified School District for a year, saving the schools’ sports programs. Or, if Fiorina wanted to befriend folks closer to her mansion in Northern California, she could have increased the budget eight-fold of Raphael House, which provides low-income family services and shelter in San Francisco. Maybe she would have earned more headlines if she’d used her campaign budget to go global and purchase one million bed nets to combat malaria in Africa or provide micro-loans to more than 350,000 small businesses in South Africa, most of them to poor women.

McMahon, who laid out $41 million during her run for senator of Connecticut, and her partner-husband had amassed a net worth estimated at at least $1.1 billion as of 10 years ago. Each of the 498,306 votes cast in her favor cost $84.08. That would have covered a full year’s worth of salary and benefits for 802 state employees facing furloughs because of the state’s budget shortfall. It could have provided heating assistance to Connecticut families in need for seven years. It could have paid for 15 million school lunches across the whole country, or paid for two years of enhanced security for our troops in Iraq.

The numbers we're talking about are hard to wrap your brain around...and its expenditure hardly seems like fiscal responsibility (nor does the spending on the Democratic side). It's clear we need to re-prioritize the way we run elections, especially in a post-Citizens United country, because I promise you these numbers will look like a pittance compared to the amounts spent for 2012's election.

The only real answer is to publicly finance elections. No one can talk about fiscal responsibility or curtailing unnecessary government spending until we do.

Wow. Wow wow wow.

This tweet is just too much, given the undocumented labor scandal Lou Dobbs is now embroiled in:

Meg Whitman had an illegal immigrant maid for 9 yrs and fired her when she found out? She didn't try to help her get legal status? Not good 2:20 PM Sep 29th via web from Midtown Center, New York

Now, he may be right about Whitman, but talk about casting the first stone... Today Lou Dobbs becomes the latest uber-wealthy public figure to shamelessly flog the immigration issue while simultaneously benefiting from undocumented labor in his home (or rather, estate).

The Nation has a devastating report out today, the result of a year-long investigation, on Dobbs' use and abuse of undocumented workers. Five of Dobbs' workers stated that the ex-CNN anchor knew that they lacked papers but looked the other way as they tended his multi-million dollar estate.

Watch the take-down video:

The reporter, Isabel McDonald, spoke to one immigrant worker, who she identified as Marco Salinas:

An old friend of Salinas's worked as a groom with some of the horses owned by Dobbs, and he had sent word that Salinas could be hired on as a groom at the Vermont stable contracted to care for the Dobbs Group horses.

Continue reading »

California's Republican gubernatorial candidate, Meg Whitman, is getting hit from all sides today on immigration-- not just because of her flip-flopping on the topic, but because of the shocking allegations being brought forward by her nanny of nine years, Nicky Diaz Santillan.

At a press conference yesterday, the former housekeeper choked back tears as she described her treatment by Whitman:

Santillan said she asked Whitman for help in finding an immigration attorney in June 2009, and explained to her that she moved from Mexico because she had "no job, no food, no place to live, and for that reason we made a decision to move here."

Whitman terminated her not long after she made the appeal, Santillan said, telling her, "don't say anything to my children, I will tell them you already have a new job and that you want to go to school and from now on, you don't know me and I don't know you. You never have seen me, and I have never seen you. Do you understand me?

Whitman "treat me as if I was not a human being," Santillan added, suggesting the candidate was "throwing me away like a piece of garbage."

Now, SEIU has released ads that take Whitman on over both her immigration positions and the nanny scandal (in Spanish):

Continue reading »

In order to secure the Republican nomination for the governorship of California, Meg Whitman dug into those deep pockets of hers and ponied up an unbelievable $71 million dollars (or $65.29 per vote). She has already spent more on the electoral campaign than anyone else in the history of the country, some $119 million, and we're still six weeks from the election. What that has resulted for my fellow Californians and me is wall-to-wall negative advertising, including one using Bill Clinton to slam Democratic rival Jerry Brown. Ironically, Clinton has very vocally endorsed Brown.

Unfortunately, for all its media saturation, Whitman's ads have been...how should we say it? Less than factual. Despite being debunked by national organizations like FactCheck.org and newspapers up and down the state, Whitman has continued to run these misleading ads. And of course, you can't count on journalists to ask tough questions at her few (completely choreographed) press briefings. So, instead, frustrated by the non-stop barrage of negative and deceptive ads, a Yelp employee spoke up at a meet-and-greet at Yelp's San Francisco headquarters:

The star of Meg Whitman's 40-minute appearance Wednesday at Yelp headquarters in San Francisco was Susan McKay. The 24-year-old account exec from Walnut Creek fired a question at the GOP guv that's been the talk of the nation (and the subject of our story the other day): Meg's widely-discredited ad featuring a 1992 clip of Bill Clinton ripping Jerry Brown's tax record as CA guv.

The short version of Susan's question -- uttered there before her fellow Yelp employees and bosses:

"Why are you refusing to remove an ad that has been proven to be false and therefore misleading? Why would you knowingly and purposely run a campaign that is based on lies?

Why have you made smear tactics and an overall negative focus such hallmarks of your campaign? It doesn't seem to me that defaming your opponent will help California in any way?"

The room burst into applause.

McKay was less than impressed by Whitman's essentially non-response of "the other side does it too!"

Sadly, those deep pockets and lies are having an impact. The most recent polls show Brown and Whitman in a dead heat, although Brown has just started releasing ads himself this week. I'm afraid that these frustrating "how can you let them beat you?" campaigns will be a hallmark of the Democratic Party this election year.

Out here in California, eMeg is spending up a storm -- over $100 million so far. That's before Jerry Brown cranks up his campaign machine.

Problem is, no one likes what she's saying. The more money she spends, the higher her unfavorable ratings go up, and not just with liberals and moderates.

According to SF Gate, the (euphemistically labeled) "conservative wing" of California's GOP plan to call her out on her mixed, muddled messaging around Arizona's AB 1070.

Whitman, who remains in a dead heat with Democrat Jerry Brown despite spending a record-busting $104 million of her own money, will face criticism from some of the 1,000 grassroots party members descending on the Manchester Grand Hyatt starting Friday.

Much of the blowback will come from members of the California Republican Assembly, a group of activists that former President Ronald Reagan called "the conscience of the Republican Party."

Conservatives want the state GOP to approve a resolution backing Arizona's law targeting illegal immigrants and a similar California law, Proposition 187, approved by voters in 1994 but later overturned by a federal judge. Whitman opposes both measures.

The debate could be toxic for Whitman. As far as I can tell, her campaign has been based on a few weird promises to increase state unemployment rates by terminating 40,000 state employees and a lot of vague promises to run the state like a corporation. As far as her views on immigration are concerned, it seems that Whitman adopts whatever position will garner her the most votes. On that score, the conservatives have it right:

Greig isn't worried that a high-profile conversation about the divisive issue will hurt the party's chances in November. "We are standing on principle here," she said. "I do not think pandering to the illegal alien community will help us. They don't vote."

That may be true. But Hispanics vote, and there are a lot of them here in California. Legal ones. With the legal right to vote, and they might not take kindly to the xenophobic attitudes that eMeg and her party espouse.

Bring it on.

Crooked Timber: Plucky King Leopold.

Angry Bear: What caused the budget deficit before the financial crisis?

The Aristocrats: Come see our beautiful beaches!

Steve Audio: "Battle-Tested" Meg Whitman.

Morialekafa: The disappearance of the concept of "doing the right thing."

The Satirical Political Report: The GOP plan on unemployment.

Guest post by Batocchio. Temporarily e-mail tips to batocchio9 AT yahoo DOT com.

During the primaries, Meg Whitman did her damndest to paint her Republican rival as a secret liberal. She spent 71 million of her own personal dollars, cozied up to Mitt Romney and former CA Gov. Pete Wilson, all in the effort to assure California voters that it was she, the person who couldn't even bother to vote for 28 years, who was the only true hard line conservative running for the governorship of California. All of her ads promised a zero amnesty/closed border response to immigration.

Well, that was then, this is now.

Meg Whitman, pivoting away from a primary that drove her much father to the right than she would have liked, will remind Hispanic Californians that she opposed Arizona's controversial immigration law in an ad slated to run on the Spanish-language broadcast of today's Mexico-France World Cup game.

"She respects our community," says the ad's narrator, according to a Spanish text provided to La Opinion's Pilar Marrero. "She's the Republican who opposed the Arizona law and opposed Proposition 187," say the ad, referring to the 1994 initiative -- later ruled unconstitutional -- to bar illegal immigrants from receiving public health care and education.

The ad marks a dramatic tack a way from a primary in which Whitman was at times visibly uncomfortable with her campaign's hard line, denying at one point -- mistakenly -- that her campaign was airing ads with images of a border fence.

Whitman is trying to undo damage done to the Republican Party among Hispanics that began in earnest with the fierce opposition to a broad immigration overhaul -- and the naturalization of many illegal immigrants -- that began in the middle of the last decade.

DOWNLOADS: (614)

PLAYS: (1689)

Embed

Of course, you knew as soon as you heard that open mike tape of Carly Fiorina dissing Sean Hannity, Meg Whitman and Barbara Boxer -- meow! -- that it would be only a matter of time before we'd see Fiorina on Hannity's Fox News show, purring and groveling abjectly and begging for forgiveness.

Sure enough, Fiorina was on Hannity's show last night. She tried to play the whole incident as a "compliment" -- "You're a tough interview, Sean".

Yeh, right. Anyone listening to the tape could tell that she was talking about the need for California Republicans like Whitman to distance themselves from the wingnuts like Hannity in the general election.

But it's always great for high-schadenfreude amusement value to watch these sneering conservatives grovel piteously before their masters in the right-wing media.