DOWNLOADS: (133)

PLAYS: (643)

Embed

Contrary to popular belief, there were some excellent moments for President Obama in the debate. Unlike his opponent, the president actually had some factual statements to make about our current tax structure, and used Donald Trump to illustrate the fallacy of Willard's concern trolling over small business:

“Under Governor Romney's definition, there are a whole bunch of millionaires and billionaires who are small businesses. Donald Trump is a small business. Now, I know Donald Trump doesn't like to think of himself as small anything, but -- but that's how you define small businesses if you're getting business income.”

Oh, the possibilities. But of course, the president is absolutely right. Just like Koch Industries is a small business. Lots of Mitt Romney's shell companies, even those in the Cayman Islands, are "small businesses."

I actually thought this was a good moment for the president, even though some others disagreed with me at the time, groaning that mentioning Trump would mean he'd pop up on the news cycle for another 24 hours. Hey, he'd show up whether he was mentioned or not. But I can't think of a more iconic representation of the self-absorbed nasty billionaire that resonates with the public than Donald Trump. So for me it was a winning moment.

Also, the crack about Trump not liking to think of himself as small anything was well...inviting. Imagine the snark we could raise over that remark.

So the Democrats write a Senate bill giving tax breaks to small businesses for hiring, figuring it's a cinch for Republican support. Ha ha ha ha! Charlie Brown, will you ever learn?

Senior Republicans suggested on Tuesday that they are likely to block the bill later this week on procedural grounds. They are demanding an open amendment process that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, according to staff, will not allow.

The likely failure of the measure, which is on President Obama's "checklist" of jobs bills, will leave Democrats accusing the GOP of blocking the measure to deny Obama a win. Republicans call the bill a naked political ploy and that Democrats have no real interest in passing the legislation. Debate on the bill looks likely to offer a warm-up for a fight over whether to extend the George W. Bush tax cuts that will gain steam with symbolic House and Senate votes on the matter as soon as next week.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said today that Senate Finance Committee ranking member Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, will offer an amendment that would extend all the Bush tax cuts for one year.

The Senate bill would give businesses a tax credit worth 10 percent of any amount by which they increase payrolls. By capping the credits at $500,000, the bill aims to primarily help small businesses. The measure would also extend for a year a 100 percent rate under which businesses claim bonus depreciation tax deductions on capital investments--a provision Republicans generally support.

We already know that the minimum wage doesn't pay enough to get a two-bedroom apartment in the vast majority of the country. Yet conservatives continue to push the same old lie: that raising the minimum wage causes unemployment. Now, a group of Democratic Congress members are trying to raise the issue:

If today’s minimum wage workers earned the same as their counterparts in 1968, they would receive $10 per hour. That, unfortunately, is $2.75 more than the current federal minimum wage.This would be a serious problem at any time, but it’s particularly relevant now, as the awful economy has forced millions of workers into minimum-wage jobs. (And they’re the lucky ones).

To that end, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. has introduced the “Catching Up To 1968 Act of 2012.” Within sixty days of being enacted, it would raise the federal minimum wage to $10 per hour, and beginning one year after that, would index it to the Consumer Price Index. For workers that rely on tips, the bill would mandate the cash wage to be 70 percent of the minimum wage and never less than $5.50 per hour.

“We’ve bailed out banks, we’ve bailed out corporations, we’ve bailed out Wall Street, we’ve tried to create sound fundamentals in the economy—now it’s time to bail out working people who work hard every day and they still only make $7.25,” Jackson said this morning at a news conference outside the US Capitol. “The only way to do that is to raise the minimum wage.”

Ralph Nader and Representatives Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers also attended the news conference—a roster of liberal stars if there ever was one. But it’s important to note that raising the minimum wage has often found bipartisan support. Rick Santorum, for example, wrote legislation to increase it, and until recently even Mitt Romney supported tying it to the CPI.

And with 30 million workers receiving minimum wage, it should certainly be a viable political issue. “These are not just liberal workers or progressive workers or conservative workers or libertarian workers,” said Nader. “This is a unifying issue in our country at a time when there are few declared unifying political issues.“

What is missing is a unified drive by elected members of Congress to provide the requisite courage to challenge the merciless oligarchy, which includes the big-box stores like Walmart and McDonalds, and compel them to adjust their pay.

Kucinich added that it was a tough sell inside the Beltway, but an easy sell outside of it. “We live in a bubble here in Washington, DC. This place is dripping with wealth. Wealth is just cascading into the capital to buy elections,” he said. “But when you get outside Washington, DC, and you get to the cities and the townships and the villages of America, there are people struggling to survive. There are people who can’t make it on $7.25 an hour if they even have a job.”

The federal minimum wage increased in 2007, from $5.15 an hour. There hasn’t been any evidence that it caused businesses to hire less workers, and in fact research has shown that an increase in the minimum wage doesn’t create an increase in unemployment.

And for a preview of the type of propaganda we're going to see by the right on the legislation, here's Neil Cavuto attacking the proposal as an assault on small businesses during his show on Fox this Thursday.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (222)

PLAYS: (1020)

Embed

For the perpetual tax-cutters of the Republican Party, last week's surrender on the payroll tax cut extension for 160 million working Americans was an especially damaging one. While tried if untrue GOP talking points that "tax cuts pay for themselves" and "never need to be offset" were thoroughly debunked, new polling shows the large Republican lead on the tax issue has virtually evaporated.

All of which explains why Eric Cantor and House Republicans are now proposing the "JOBS Act," a package of anti-regulatory measures and a whopping 20 percent tax cut for small businesses. Sadly for Cantor, a mountain of evidence shows that customer demand, and not government regulations, is the biggest burden to small business hiring. And with the total federal tax burden having hit its lowest level since 1950, the GOP would deliver billions in budget-busting tax breaks to millions who need them least.

Continue reading »

In a new Gallup poll released Wednesday, small business owners revealed that the lack of need for new employees (76 percent), worries over revenue (71 percent) and concern about the state of the U.S. economy (66 percent) were the top three reasons for not hiring new workers. But you'd never know that if you just glanced at Gallup's headline, which instead warned, "Health Costs, Gov't Regulations Curb Small Business Hiring." Predictably, and despite a mountain of surveys and analyses showing that weak customer demand and not "job-crushing regulations" tops small businesses' concerns, Speaker John Boehner and the conservative blogosphere are touting Gallup's misleading headline.

On Wednesday, Gallup published this table summing up the results of its latest Wells Fargo/Small Business Index survey:

Interestingly, Gallup's headline and subhead included none of the top four factors small businesses cited as reason for not hiring. Instead, the pollsters led with the fifth and sixth items found well down the list:

While Gallup has done Americans no favors by misrepresenting its own poll results, it has done a great service for Republican propagators of long-debunked talking points. As a quick glance at Republican debate transcripts shows, the 2012 GOP presidential candidates fight each other to out-repeal regulations "off the throat of small business operators." Dire warnings about "job-destroying regulations" are regularly regurgitated by Republican leaders including Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Eric Cantor.

Sadly for the conservative tall tale-tellers, overly zealous government regulation has little to do with the woes of America's businesses large and small.

Continue reading »

On Friday, the House approved the $801 billion "compromise" tax bill, sending it on to the White House for President Obama's signature. Over the next two years, that budget-busting, gilded class giveaway will cost the Treasury $70 billion in revenue lost from the top 2% of taxpayers and another $25 billion uncollected from the richest estates in America. But sooner or later (sooner, if born-again deficit hawks get their way), that bill will come due and it will be paid by everyone else. In the meantime, here's a picture of your tax dollars at work - for the rich and famous.

For openers, it's worth noting who will not benefit from the extension of the top Bush income tax rate and the gutting of the estate tax. Certainly not small business owners. Now-abandoned Democratic proposals to end the Bush tax cuts for families earning over $250,000 a year affected only 2% of all households, and an even smaller fraction of small businesses. (The Republican claim that Democrats want to "raise taxes on roughly half of small business income in America" is contingent on Bechtel, Coors, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and other multinational "S corporation" being categorized as small businesses.)

And from the beginning, the winners of the successful Republican crusade against the estate would never included family farmers. As incoming Speaker John Boehner put it in 2009:

"People who aren't wealthy, who may have built up value in land over generations and many family farms find themselves in situations where they've got to sell the farm in order the pay the taxes."

Unfortunately, that claim is just as false today as when George W. Bush uttered it during and after the 2000 presidential campaign. Now as in 2001, Republicans wrongly claimed that the estate tax led to the loss of family farms. When President Bush blasted opponents who say "the death tax doesn't cause people to sell their farms" with a mocking "don't know who they're talking to in Iowa," neither Hawkeye State farmers nor researchers could name one. As David Cay Johnston, among the nation's leading journalists when it comes to tax issues, conclude in the New York Times nine years ago:

Almost no working farmers do, according to data from an Internal Revenue Service analysis of 1999 returns that has not yet been published. Neil Harl, an Iowa State University economist whose tax advice has made him a household name among Midwest farmers, said he had searched far and wide but had never found a farm lost because of estate taxes. "It's a myth," he said. Even one of the leading advocates for repeal of estate taxes, the American Farm Bureau Federation, said it could not cite a single example of a farm lost because of estate taxes.

The future looks no different. In 2009, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimated that only 1 in 500 estates (0.24%) was impacted by the $3.5 million per person threshold and 45% tax rate House Democrats sought to continue. And last year, the Tax Policy Center quantified just how few family farms or small businesses are actually impacted by the estate tax proposals under consideration, including the $5 million exemption and 35% rate advocated by Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and now to be signed into law by President Obama:

We estimate that under the Obama proposal, 100 family farms and businesses would owe tax. (We define such estates as those where farm or business assets are valued at under $5 million and comprise the majority of estate assets.) The Lincoln-Kyl proposal would cut the number to 40. Even under current law, fewer than 2,700 family farms and businesses would owe tax.

But thanks to the new tax bill, one family-owned business - Walmart - could reap a multi-billion dollar bonanza.

Continue reading »

Just when I thought things couldn't get any more bizarre today, this gem crossed my Twitter stream, courtesy of Media Matters. Really, some folks ought to think before hitting the "tweet button." From the hatriot Neal Boortz, known as Talkmaster on Twitter, this little pair of gems:

Yes, it really DOES say that. Not content to leave that little bomb in the stream, he followed up with this:

While Media Matters was content to show this insanity with no further comment, I'm not. Small business is better off today than it was under Bush. This is fact. Their taxes are lower, they get an immediate tax credit for providing health benefits to their workers, and they finally get some parity with the big corporations.

Neal Boortz calls himself a libertarian, but he's really just a fool with a big mouth and a microphone.

I wonder if he's ever researched his company's past. If so, he'd know the founder of Cox Radio was Franklin D. Roosevelt's running mate in 1920. FDR would NOT approve, and I somehow believe Mr. Cox would not either.

It sounds like a really good idea. But really, this is bribery. And it wouldn't have been necessary to give them everything they want if Geithner and pals put reasonable conditions on the bank bailout in the first place:

The Obama administration is developing a major initiative to tackle the economic and political problem of unemployment by getting federal bailout funds into the hands of small businesses.

The proposal involves spinning off a new entity from the Troubled Assets Relief Program that could give banks access to the government money without restrictions, such as limits on executive pay, as long as they use it to make loans to small businesses. But officials are not yet certain whether carving the program out of TARP would be the best way to lure banks to participate in small-business lending, said sources familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plans were not final.

As an alternative, officials are prepared to ask Congress to modify TARP itself, easing the pay limits and other restrictions that would be imposed on small-business lenders taking the money, the sources said.

Since the summer, the administration has been facing an uncomfortable dynamic in the economy. The ranks of the jobless have been growing, while big financial firms that got taxpayer bailout money have been thriving. In response, officials have been trying to recast TARP as aid for Main Street rather than Wall Street.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told a congressional oversight panel Thursday that TARP would focus on aiding small-business lending, community banks and homeowners struggling to keep up with their mortgage payments, and he hinted at the new program.

Banks are "very reluctant to come and do business with the government and they're concerned that, if they come, they will be stigmatized and they will be subject to the risk of conditions in the future that might make it harder for them to run their businesses," Geithner told the TARP oversight panel. Solving that problem, he added, is "going to be something we cannot do on our own. It's going to require some help from Congress to help deal with those basic concerns."

Elizabeth Warren, who heads the oversight panel, chided Geithner for taking so long in setting up several other small-business lending initiatives, two of which were announced last spring.

"It's not news to anyone that small-business lending is important," she said. "Small businesses are closing every day. But Treasury has now announced three plans and clearly has not gotten the job done."

It just breaks my heart to read about these small businesses, foundation of their communities, cut to the bone or even closed:

MINERVA, Ohio -- Workers at Summitville Tiles Inc. gathered on the factory floor Wednesday morning to hear their boss -- using a bullhorn to pierce the cavernous space -- tell them he was laying off a third of the staff.

To pull through this crisis, owner David Johnson said, the company must "cut to the bone."

Huddled around half-century-old kilns for warmth, some workers masked their anxiety with nervous optimism. "I'll go back to hang drywall," said Dustin Bourne, a lanky 22-year-old, chatting with three high-school buddies. Of course, they all knew the truth: Mr. Bourne took a job here last year because drywall work had disappeared.

Rosanne Dangelo, a mother of two grown children, was stoic at the prospect of unemployment. "I'll get by," she said, then quipped, "I don't need the Internet."

The U.S. is losing jobs at a pace not seen since the 1940s. Monday alone, 65,000 fresh layoffs were announced at giants including Caterpillar and Home Depot.

But tiny firms like Summitville Tiles have an outsized role in employment. For the past decade, small businesses have created 60% to 80% of net new jobs. Small companies of 500 or fewer people employ more than half of the country's private-sector workers.

Many of these small companies are staffed with people who have spent their entire lives in one place, creating tight factory-floor communities, but also making it harder to land a new job.

"That woman's mother was my grandfather's secretary for years," said Mr. Johnson, the third generation of his family to head Summitville, pointing toward a worker packing boxes of tiles.

TPM Election Central: Ten senior Hess Corporation executives and/or members of the Hess family each gave $28,500 to the joint RNC-McCain fundraising committee, just days after McCain reversed himself to favor offshore drilling. Even a Hess office manager and her husband, an Amtrak employee, donated $28,000 apiece. Hess must be exceedingly kind to its staff.

POGO Blog: According to the Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of Inspector General, Blackwater may have improperly received numerous contracts set aside for small businesses.

Common Dreams: Indiscriminate civilian massacres by US military are nothing new.

EconoSpeak: What economists should be doing about climate change.

James Fallows: NYT lapse could cause big problems for a Beijing resident

They gave us a republic: The Nightowl Newswrap