With the blast of snow that's been rolling across much of the U.S. the last few days, it's easy to see how many Americans might think Mother Nature may have taken one too many sips of Nyquil in trying to fight off spring fever. The fact is, the calendar is correct and the current season in the U.S. is spring, which means it's time for events like prom and tax day - the latter of which is today.
Much like tax day, high school proms have rarely been drama-free, especially for the parents and grandparents of high-strung high schoolers. These days, prom isn't exactly a cheap event either, as Visa's annual prom spending survey has proven once again. This year's survey shows that the national spending average for prom is over $1000 on both the East and West Coasts - enough that you might just see a few parents panhandling for extra dollars for their kid's prom experience this year.
When you take a second look at the costs of prom around the nation this year, things may not be as bad they seem. The good news is that the national average amount parents and teens will spend has dropped 14%, the first time it has decreased in three years. That's a statistical fact that runs counter to both the claims of teenagers, and the claims of many fear mongers in the media today.
In a similar way, millions of Americans believe federal taxes in America are too high, as a Gallup poll confirmed on Monday. Much like the perception of prom costs, the facts about our American federal taxes don't exactly match with the opinions of most Americans - or the rhetoric they hear on cable "news" channels.
The CBO confirmed those facts this week noting that effective Federal tax rates - what Americans ACTUALLY pay, after all the deductions and credits are added up - are near historic lows. In fact, the historical trend for individual tax payers in America appears to be moving downward.
Further, the argument that those on the political right make - that poor people don't REALLY pay taxes - is in fact, antithetical to the facts. As Matthew Yglesias shows at Vox.com, when you look at the sources of Federal Tax Revenue, Payroll Tax and Personal Income tax - two of the biggest kinds of taxes the working poor in America pay - also happen to account for the overwhelming majority of federal revenue.
As Yglesias goes on to show, with help from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, only 14.4% of Americans pay neither income or payroll taxes. Most of those people - nearly 10% - are elderly, while most of the other 4.4% have annual incomes under $20,000.
As Paul Waldman noted at The American Prospect yesterday, there are even more reasons to cheer tax day today, including that U.S. federal tax rates are extremely low by international standards. There's also the fact that - compared to their income - Americans in every income bracket actually pay a share of taxes remarkably close to their income level. Which means that - at least on the federal level, Americans are not really overtaxed.
Meanwhile, amid all this good news about taxes, the CBO also recently noted that the federal deficit has continued to drop sharply - and the overall price of the health insurance expansion under the Affordable Care Act is actually going to cost $1.3 trillion dollars LESS than previously forecast. That mans Americans can put more of those tax dollars towards things our nation needs, like infrastructure investments, police, and fire personnel.
As Waldman also noted, those taxes pay for the things we all enjoy in society - including the salaries of the school teachers chaperoning prom, who will hopefully help that nearly $1000 become a short-term investment that returns good memories for a lifetime.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Monday, April 14, 2014
By The Skin Of Our Teeth
As we watched the news this weekend, spending time with our families, college sports, the beautiful cherry blossoms in our nation's capitol, and watching the Republicans launch their first super-committee to rake in the post-McCutcheon waves of campaign money that are certain to be rolling in, our staff members all kept coming back to the same thought: That most Americans today seem to have little idea of how tenuous our collective grasp is on the form of government we've lived under for slightly more than two centuries.
As Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as saying, Americans have a republic - a form of democracy - "if you can keep it." Thankfully, for most of the last two-hundred plus years, Americans have been able to keep it. As we and others have been warning for some time now, however, that form of government is in severe danger - especially after the U.S. Supreme Court's recent McCutcheon decision.
Last week, as all the living Presidents celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Obama also took the time to warn the nation that our right to vote is truly under attack - and he was not being hyperbolic.
From Hawaii to Maine, Alaska to Florida, the battles over campaign financing are running hot, and often not in the best interests of voters. Even in the heart of deep-red Nebraska, the effort of outside, so-called "dark money" groups to buy their way into deciding who you get to vote for has become extremely obvious.
While certain very wealthy candidates like Republican Pete Ricketts may try to claim ignorance of who is attacking his fellow Republican office-seekers, the fact remains right now the anonymous attack dogs of the wealthy are already trying to pick their pet politicians for 2014 and 2016.
Some Republicans keep trying to claim this money race is a bipartisan affair. However, as journalist Paul Blumenthal recently pointed out, there's simply nothing on the left that compares to the massive money machine on the right.
Still, as syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts noted recently, too many Americans are still politically asleep, their eyes glazed over, even as specific, wealthy individuals are trying to rig every part of the American political system - either directly or through millions of dollars in propaganda. It's happening at every level and in all political parties, giving voters no real choices - even in their party's primary elections - other than those the oligarchs have already picked.
There should be no surprise that Fox "News" and the current American media/propaganda landscape have a great deal to do with this current collective ignorance of Americans. However, the failures of our media landscape aren't solely to blame. In many ways, America has become more like a third-world nation over the last thirty-five years, through choices Americans have made themselves.
As Sean McElwee pointed out in Rolling Stone this month, massive economic inequality, collapsing infrastructure, and a criminal "justice" system that imprisons more of its people than almost any other nation in the world are hallmarks of this collapse. We've also got a gun violence problem worse than in any developed nation, as made obvious once again by the murders of three people over the weekend in Kansas City, in what appears to have been an attempted hate crime.
Right now, in places like Afghanistan and India, they're struggling to achieve or continue democratic republics. In the Ukraine, they drove their own oligarchs out, and now they're fighting against Russia to keep their democratic republic. Meanwhile, in America, we just can't seem to be bothered to even show up at the polls, let alone show up well-informed and actually educated.
As long as we allow court decisions like Citizens United and McCutcheon to stand, when it comes to your choices at the ballot box, you'll get the choices the oligarchs have paid for. And what folks like the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson are going to pay for is for pet politicians, who they have gripped firmly in the teeth of their political money.
As Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as saying, Americans have a republic - a form of democracy - "if you can keep it." Thankfully, for most of the last two-hundred plus years, Americans have been able to keep it. As we and others have been warning for some time now, however, that form of government is in severe danger - especially after the U.S. Supreme Court's recent McCutcheon decision.
Last week, as all the living Presidents celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Obama also took the time to warn the nation that our right to vote is truly under attack - and he was not being hyperbolic.
From Hawaii to Maine, Alaska to Florida, the battles over campaign financing are running hot, and often not in the best interests of voters. Even in the heart of deep-red Nebraska, the effort of outside, so-called "dark money" groups to buy their way into deciding who you get to vote for has become extremely obvious.
While certain very wealthy candidates like Republican Pete Ricketts may try to claim ignorance of who is attacking his fellow Republican office-seekers, the fact remains right now the anonymous attack dogs of the wealthy are already trying to pick their pet politicians for 2014 and 2016.
Some Republicans keep trying to claim this money race is a bipartisan affair. However, as journalist Paul Blumenthal recently pointed out, there's simply nothing on the left that compares to the massive money machine on the right.
Still, as syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts noted recently, too many Americans are still politically asleep, their eyes glazed over, even as specific, wealthy individuals are trying to rig every part of the American political system - either directly or through millions of dollars in propaganda. It's happening at every level and in all political parties, giving voters no real choices - even in their party's primary elections - other than those the oligarchs have already picked.
There should be no surprise that Fox "News" and the current American media/propaganda landscape have a great deal to do with this current collective ignorance of Americans. However, the failures of our media landscape aren't solely to blame. In many ways, America has become more like a third-world nation over the last thirty-five years, through choices Americans have made themselves.
As Sean McElwee pointed out in Rolling Stone this month, massive economic inequality, collapsing infrastructure, and a criminal "justice" system that imprisons more of its people than almost any other nation in the world are hallmarks of this collapse. We've also got a gun violence problem worse than in any developed nation, as made obvious once again by the murders of three people over the weekend in Kansas City, in what appears to have been an attempted hate crime.
Right now, in places like Afghanistan and India, they're struggling to achieve or continue democratic republics. In the Ukraine, they drove their own oligarchs out, and now they're fighting against Russia to keep their democratic republic. Meanwhile, in America, we just can't seem to be bothered to even show up at the polls, let alone show up well-informed and actually educated.
As long as we allow court decisions like Citizens United and McCutcheon to stand, when it comes to your choices at the ballot box, you'll get the choices the oligarchs have paid for. And what folks like the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson are going to pay for is for pet politicians, who they have gripped firmly in the teeth of their political money.
Friday, April 11, 2014
True Surprises
When news surprises people - including those we know in the media - their reactions never cease to amuse us, though we're rarely amazed these days at the things that seem to catch everyone else off-guard.
For example, yesterday, late in the afternoon, Kathleen Sebelius resigned her position as Secretary of Health and Human Services. While some media organizations are pretending to be surprised, there isn't anyone we know in the national political media who is truly astonished at that outcome. Sure, the Affordable Care act exceeded its target enrollment goals with millions more Americans now having health insurance. But the disastrous initial rollout all but guaranteed Ms. Sebelius would end up resigning, once the program was back on its feet.
In another less-than-surprising move, CBS announced yesterday that Stephen Colbert would be taking over for David Letterman, once the elder-statesman of "Late Night" retires next year. However, there have been rumors that Colbert might be the replacement for Letterman for some time, especially among those of us in the national media. So, again, not too surprising.
We're also not surprised, after the Supreme Court's stupid decision in the McCutcheon case, that multibillionaires like the Koch Brothers are now trying to buy political influence all the way down to the most local level. Frankly, you might think those wealthy Koch boys would get tired of all the slobber, the way most Republican politicians suck up to them. Apparently, their very expensive suits must also be quite absorbent.
What has quietly surprised us over the last couple of weeks is that all that money - while still a huge, negative influence - hasn't quite worked out the way rich right-wing groups had planned.
In Wisconsin, the Koch Brothers and other wealthy right-wingers, through front groups with names like "Operation Prosperity" spent massive amounts of money on small, local elections - and they lost big-time. This kind of event isn't just local to Wisconsin, though, and it isn't only on the local political level.
In Louisiana, Senator Mary Landrieu has had rich bullies like the Koch Brothers and others throwing many millions of dollars in negative propaganda at her all year. Yet, as even a Republican-leaning poll showed this week, Sen. Landrieu has a strong lead against all three of her Republican opponents.
Apparently, we Americans still don't like ultra-wealthy outsiders pouring out piles of their money to buy our local politicians. A growing number of Americans seem to be starting to wake up to the reality that the richest .01 percent of Americans are trying to buy the government away from the other 99.99 percent of us - and we're starting to get mad again.
That Americans still seem to have fight left in them, that we seem more willing to stand up for what's right than our modern entertainment options often lead us to believe about each other? That's a very positive surprise to us, one that mirrors the kind of social courage that President Johnson and the Democratic Party displayed when they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the other equal rights actions of the 1960s.
To us, it's also a sign that Americans may indeed finally be ready to stand up and fight for the rights and freedoms that the extremists in the Republican Party today seem so hell-bent on trying to steal away.
As LBJ himself once said, and as President Obama repeated yesterday, in a celebration for the Civil Rights Act at the LBJ Library, "What the hell's the presidency for if not to fight for causes you believe in?"
Indeed, Mr. President.
For example, yesterday, late in the afternoon, Kathleen Sebelius resigned her position as Secretary of Health and Human Services. While some media organizations are pretending to be surprised, there isn't anyone we know in the national political media who is truly astonished at that outcome. Sure, the Affordable Care act exceeded its target enrollment goals with millions more Americans now having health insurance. But the disastrous initial rollout all but guaranteed Ms. Sebelius would end up resigning, once the program was back on its feet.
In another less-than-surprising move, CBS announced yesterday that Stephen Colbert would be taking over for David Letterman, once the elder-statesman of "Late Night" retires next year. However, there have been rumors that Colbert might be the replacement for Letterman for some time, especially among those of us in the national media. So, again, not too surprising.
We're also not surprised, after the Supreme Court's stupid decision in the McCutcheon case, that multibillionaires like the Koch Brothers are now trying to buy political influence all the way down to the most local level. Frankly, you might think those wealthy Koch boys would get tired of all the slobber, the way most Republican politicians suck up to them. Apparently, their very expensive suits must also be quite absorbent.
What has quietly surprised us over the last couple of weeks is that all that money - while still a huge, negative influence - hasn't quite worked out the way rich right-wing groups had planned.
In Wisconsin, the Koch Brothers and other wealthy right-wingers, through front groups with names like "Operation Prosperity" spent massive amounts of money on small, local elections - and they lost big-time. This kind of event isn't just local to Wisconsin, though, and it isn't only on the local political level.
In Louisiana, Senator Mary Landrieu has had rich bullies like the Koch Brothers and others throwing many millions of dollars in negative propaganda at her all year. Yet, as even a Republican-leaning poll showed this week, Sen. Landrieu has a strong lead against all three of her Republican opponents.
Apparently, we Americans still don't like ultra-wealthy outsiders pouring out piles of their money to buy our local politicians. A growing number of Americans seem to be starting to wake up to the reality that the richest .01 percent of Americans are trying to buy the government away from the other 99.99 percent of us - and we're starting to get mad again.
That Americans still seem to have fight left in them, that we seem more willing to stand up for what's right than our modern entertainment options often lead us to believe about each other? That's a very positive surprise to us, one that mirrors the kind of social courage that President Johnson and the Democratic Party displayed when they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the other equal rights actions of the 1960s.
To us, it's also a sign that Americans may indeed finally be ready to stand up and fight for the rights and freedoms that the extremists in the Republican Party today seem so hell-bent on trying to steal away.
As LBJ himself once said, and as President Obama repeated yesterday, in a celebration for the Civil Rights Act at the LBJ Library, "What the hell's the presidency for if not to fight for causes you believe in?"
Indeed, Mr. President.
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