Loyal opposition would care about facts

The Republicans are interested only in their own power. Yet another faux scandal, this time the IRS's so-called targeting of teabaggers, has crumbled:

Terms including "Israel," ''Progressive" and "Occupy" were used by agency workers to help pick groups for closer examination, according to an internal IRS document obtained by The Associated Press.

It was obvious from the beginning that the IRS personnel in Cincinnati were using search terms - the way anyone facing a large backlog of work would - to screen for high-priority work. If you don't do this, you're not getting the right work done. You're treating every task as equal in priority and equally likely to pay off. In short, you're an idiot piece-worker.

Republicans should have known this before going after scalps. Instead, they contrived exposure of only the part of the story that fit their apocalyptic victimology. I have no evidence whether they knew and deceived us or whether they simply didn't ask. Those are the two options, and either is unforgivable for the House Oversight Committee and its chair, Darrell Issa (R-police record).

It's long past time we acknowledged that their opposition to Barack Obama goes well beyond honorable, time-honored loyal opposition. They are not loyal to Americans, only to their extremist supporters.

Private equity, public inequity

Why does it matter that Gabriel Gomez (R-private equity) took a $280,000 tax deduction on the facade of his home? Don't we all try to squeeze every last dime off our tax bills? Isn't that the good ole American way?

No, and here's why.

The Town of Cohasset values Gomez's property at a little more than $2,000,000. (Go here and search for parcel 27-094.  It's actually not his any more, as he sold it for $1 to his wife in 2008.) This value matches up with Zillow's current estimate, which makes Zillow's 2005 estimate of value credible. Zillow has tended to inflate the market anyway, which would work to Gomez's advantage.

Taking Zillow's 2005 number of $2.3 million, Gomez's tax deduction was over 12% of the total value of his property, pretty extreme. It gets worse when you realize he's valuing the appearance of the facade only, not the twelve bedrooms or the five bathrooms or the land.

Then, it turns out, as the Boston Globe reports, that Gomez's alteration of the facade was already restricted by a town bylaw and thus not his to donate.

One specialist in conservation easement law, Scott Knott, a tax partner in The Ferraro Law Firm in Washington, D.C., said that if easements mandated by local laws are already in place, homeowners have nothing to claim as a tax deduction.

“The key is the valuation of the easement and if there is already a restriction on the property, the value is not diminished by the easement,’’ said Knott. “The value of any easement that has the same restriction already in place is zero.’’

If you want to go all Fifth Amendment on me, you're too late to make the town's bylaw a taking. Gomez bought the house in 2004, well after the establishment of the Cohasset historical district in 1996. So Gomez bought the property with restrictions already on it, and those restrictions necessarily would have figured in the price he paid for it. (Of course, living in a historic district generally raises property values instead of lowering them.)

OK, Gomez's spokesman said, but now he can't sue for relief if the Cohasset Historical Commission won't let him make a change. Except, he can still seek relief in court.

Like Ann Romney's tax deductible horse hobby, this is an outrage of sharp abuse of the tax code. No legitimate public purpose is served by it, just the enriching of the already wealthy out of the public treasury.

This is who Gabriel Gomez became by descending into private equity. Don't the plutocrats already have enough people in Congress - especially in the Senate - whose avowed purpose is to help the wealthy grab even more of the nation's income?

We in Massachusetts took a brave step forward in electing Elizabeth Warren. Gabriel Gomez would work to destroy every single thing that Warren is accomplishing in Washington.

We simply must reject Gomez's candidacy and elect Ed Markey.

Compare your tax bill

We simply cannot have a healthy economy when nearly all the rewards flow to the few.

Then, too, there's the immorality of a society that privileges greed above all else.

Consistent Republican agenda

The Republican Party favors this above all else: Increasing income inequality.

This is John Kasich's proposal for Ohio - and he's supposed to be one of the reasonable Republicans!

The GOP is about making nearly everyone poorer while they make the rich richer.

Any questions?

The wealthy and their corporations whip middle class wingnuts into a frenzy of claims that America is disappearing into a dim socialist future, yet:

The capital gains rate has been steadily eroded since President Ronald Reagan taxed such income equal to wages in the 1980s, and the result has been rising income inequality. A January 2012 study found that low capital gains rates were the biggest driver of American income inequality, which now rivals the levels seen in countries like Ivory Coast and Pakistan. In 2010, the capital gains preference helped the richest 1 percent capture 93 percent of all income gains.

In fact, we're disappearing into a dim plutocratic future, in which life for all but the very top is never secure from privation.

There is no visible limit to the greed of the wealthy to slurp up an ever-larger share of the national economy. They don't earn it. They simply have so much already that they can take what they want.

Don't do stupid shit

We can't afford this now, and we never should have afforded it.

Since 1979, nearly a dozen hurricanes and large storms have rolled in and knocked down houses, chewed up sewers and water pipes and hurled sand onto the roads.

Yet time and again, checks from Washington have allowed the town to put itself back together.

Across the nation, tens of billions of tax dollars have been spent on subsidizing coastal reconstruction in the aftermath of storms, usually with little consideration of whether it actually makes sense to keep rebuilding in disaster-prone areas.

As the New York Times discovered, Dauphin Island, Alabama, is a spit of sand with real estate under water in the fine tradition of land speculators and fraud:

Dauphin Island is not stable enough to sustain much plant growth, much less homes that aren't houseboats moored to the sand. American taxpayers should not subsidize rebuilding this as if we were King Canute and, worse, unable to learn anything from experience.

Pretty simple: Don't build on barrier beaches unless you can afford to have your property washed away.

And we should learn that Zillow fabulously overstates property values.

Update (11/24): A path less travelled...

[A]t 3 a.m. the next morning, the idea of moving the town woke me up from a sound sleep. I got dressed, went to my office and hammered out a counter-proposal to the Corps: Let us spend the $3.5 million to move the town’s flood prone buildings to higher ground. We’d never ask for federal disaster assistance again.

The Village Board endorsed the idea, but the Corps declined. It was not in the business of moving people; it was in the business of building things and naming them after members of Congress.

A calculus like this also pertains to New York City, which will either need vast billions of dollars to create a polder or relocation of low-lying assets or the profligate waste of clean-up and repair funds again and again.

Too subtle for the fools

The Colbert Report
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Where have political reporters been? Colbert asks (most of) my question: If Mitt Rmoney's tax plan is really revenue neutral for the 1% because it closes their loopholes, what difference does it make?

The rest of my question: How does it stimulate the economy?

Outsource your thinking to me

What Mitt Rmoney wants you to trust him about:

See full-size at BartCop.

Problem is, Mitt's not trustworthy about anything other than lower taxes for the rich - and lately, he's trying to claim he's not trustworthy about that, his single previously inviolate political principle.

Republicans on Mitt

There's only one thing that Mitt Rmoney has been dead solid consistent on: Rich people should pay lower taxes.

Old media won't tell you this

(h/t MoveOn)

Throw him an anchor

Bullshit coming and going

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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The honest truth is that Mitt Rmoney's latest blithering gaffe is exactly what the Republican base voters believe. No matter how many times you show them that federal taxes don't begin and end with the income tax, that our federal tax system is not very progressive, that almost everyone with a good job pays taxes, that members of the 1% of the 1% (the 0.01%) often pay a far lower rate than anyone but the very poor, even the middle class hard-working white guy pulling down a median income around $50,000 a year thinks he's one of the makers and that other guy is a manipulative taker. I've tried to expose this bullshit, to little avail. Even though Rmoney claims this middle class guy needs another $150,000 a year to join the middle class at all...

I think this comes from the shriveled greedy coal-black hearts of the right wingers. They aren't motivated by anything but money, and they don't have any generosity of spirit (outside very narrow tribal boundaries) nor any ability to evaluate a picture larger than their own wallet, so they assume no one could possibly be a Democrat or a liberal without being paid off. They can't believe a member of the 5% like me could possibly believe the country is better off as a whole with a fairer distribution of taxation, income, and wealth. (Note to moron trolls: fair does not mean equal.)

So Republicans will wonder what all the fuss is about, because they lack basic human sympathy. They've got theirs, devil take the hindmost.

Right, he'll tax our patience

More liberal bias

Arithmetic.

[D]oes Romney think we’re stupid? Hey, he also thinks we’ll buy into his promises to slash taxes by $5 trillion but make up the revenue by closing unspecified loopholes in a way that doesn’t raise taxes on the middle class – which turns out to be arithmetically impossible. So the answer is, yes, he thinks we’re stupid.

Too boring for Republicans to make it add up.

More Teapublican ignoramuses

You don't have to look far:

Take a look around key committees of the House and you’ll find a governing body stocked with crackpots whose views on major issues are as removed from reality as Missouri’s Representative Todd Akin’s take on the sperm-killing powers of a woman who’s been raped.

The GOP has embraced stupidity in order to lower taxes for the very wealthy. That's why Mitt Rmoney and Paul Ryan are perfect nominees.

Who are the takers?

A fundamental belief of today's wealthy corporate Republicans is that they are deserving and no one else is.

They can take, take, take from the commonweal:

[Mitt] Romney, ignoring the fact that he has echoed this same sentiment on multiple occasions, organized 24 “We Did Build This” events in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Nevada. At each event, local business owners are speaking about their self-sufficiency in running a business and how government is hindering their growth.

But, like the New Hampshire business owner showcased in Romney’s attack ad on the issue, many of these business owners have received significant support from the government, a ThinkProgress analysis finds.

But no one else deserves this sort of help. They're all slackers who can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

These Republicans can't even grasp their own selfish double-standard. They invented the Internet, dammit, not the government, not that fat Al Gore guy who tried to steal credit.

It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government. It's also important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market. As the contrast between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in this challenge. Those who do—not the government—deserve the credit for making it happen.

Hard to imagine anyone more thoroughly missing the point without trying to, but then he was editorializing for the Wall Street Journal. Until it's monetized, it doesn't exist. What a strange epistemological idea!

Republicans believe that whoever exploits a resource, infrastructure, an externality, or the gullibility of the public should get all the rewards and the credit.

Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown (R-whatever you need Mitch) shows the problem in more plebeian terms. He had a rough childhood, abandoned by his father, and his mother spend time on welfare, which Scott made her eligible for. Now, however, Brown has money, success, and the gift of forgetfulness. He wants to deny any such help to people like him. I guess they're just not handsome enough to deserve it.

Where I grew up, we called this gittin' above your raisin', and it was a mortal sin for a politician.

Nowadays, though, merely driving a gimmicky pick-up truck and wearing a barn coat every election season is enough to remain a regular guy, never mind that you spend you entire career ardently defending the self-proclaimed right of the wealthy to be taxed and regulated at very low historical rates.

Who feels entitled? Who takes without giving back? Who votes out of selfishness?

Not the middle class, that's for sure.

Update: The wealthy not only don't want to pay, they want to get refunds that make their tax rate negative.

Follow the R-money

There is only one issue on which Mitt R-money has a consistent position: lower taxes for himself.

But even on tax transparency - as with everything else - Mitt has taken multiple contradictory positions:

[Emmett] Hayes had filed his taxes separately from O'Brien – and Fehrnstrom, then Romney's deputy campaign manager, demanded that O'Brien come clean about her husband's financial ties to Enron.

Fehrnstrom made the demand even as Romney was refusing to release his own returns.

That drew accusations of hypocrisy from editorial boards, but Fehrnstrom defended the campaign's posture, saying that O'Brien was trying to hide important information from voters by declining to reveal her husband's returns, while Romney was simply acting on principle.

R-money? Principled?

Only the me principle.

That's no double standard

Obamacare wasn't a tax a couple of days ago, but now it's a tax.

Fortunately, Mitt Rmoney realized that Obamacare could be a tax at the same time Romneycare isn't because the Supreme Court has only ruled that Obamacare is a tax.

“The Supreme Court is the highest court in the nation, and it said that it’s a tax, so it’s a tax,” Mr. Romney told CBS News. “They have spoken. There’s no way around that.”

Since it hasn't ruled on Romneycare, Rmoney can call it anything he wants. Win!

You think I'm kidding.

Furthermore, Rmoney has enough super PAC money to overrule the appearance that he signed universal healthcare (now anathema to Teapublicans) that included an individual mandate (socialistical attack on the freedom to die free from a strong case of freedom) and is paid for in part by a penalty just exactly like Obamacare's so-called tax (SSSSH!  Look over there!).

GOP priority couldn't be more obvious

It sure as hell isn't the deficit:

The tax reform plan that House Republicans have advanced would sharply cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and could leave middle-class households facing much larger tax bills, according to a new analysis set to be released Wednesday.

If the Teapublicans came right out and admitted that they want whatever benefits the wealthy and the huge corporations they own, would that be enough to dope slap the teabagger base off its stupid self-abuse?

Of course not.

(h/t ThinkProgress)

Inanimatronic economics

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.