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| Archives Letters Archive Opinion: George W. Bush Archive Erosion of Civil Liberties Archive Letters Archive Tax Cuts Archives Dividends Tax Cuts (Molly Ivins) According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, the effect of eliminating dividend taxation is that the average benefit for those making less than $10,000 would be $6, and average benefit for those making more than $1 million would be $45,098. Quick, high-schoolers, let's practice up for the those SATs by figuring out by what percentage $45,098 is bigger than $6. Bush also wants to accelerate the income-tax cuts slated for 2006.
Look at this folly. The top 5 percent of taxpayers would get 70
percent of the benefits on that one. The bottom 80 percent would
get 6.5 percent of the benefits. Ditto with accelerating the 2004
tax cuts: 64.4 percent to the top 5 percent of taxpayers; 7.7 percent
to the bottom 80 percent. Contrary to the paranoid fantasists on The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, populists are not motivated by some burning resentment of the rich -- we don't spend our lives in an envious funk that someone else is better off than we are. "No skin off my nose" is the general attitude, with others coming in at "Lucky them" or "Good for them." The problem is that the rich are screwing up our democracy. Less than 0.1 percent of the U.S. population gave 83 percent of all itemized campaign contributions for the 2002 elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. According to the Houston Chronicle, just 48 wealthy Texas families provided more than half the campaign funds for the major Republican state candidates this fall. How dumb do you have to be not to be able to connect the dots here?
Law, policy and regulation are consistently shaped to favor therich
over the rest of us, and that, dammit, is not fair, it is not right,
it is not the country we want and for which we are asked to sacrifice.
It's also unlikely to have the kind of immediate effect that worried
economy-watchers are clamoring for. By the White House's own calculation
only about $98 billion of the tax cut will be provided during the
first 16 months -- so it's disingenuous, critics say, to call the
cut a short-term "stimulus" package. The cut is also permanent;
it will lead to a long-term drop in national revenue, one that liberal
economists say will cause disastrous budget effects in the future.
He predicts the new Bush tax cuts will usher in another such debt-ridden era a decade from now. "The Bush administration is now laying in store a policy that will ensure we'll be entering a period of higher social costs for healthcare and social security with a continued high deficit and a substantially higher amount of debt. That's unconscionable in my view. When they couple their ideas with highly naive ideas of politics, that's when supply-siders go astray." (Village Voice) - Almost half of the projected benefits from President Bush's plan to scrap taxes on dividends would go to the one percent of the population whose incomes top $1 million. The scheme has been promoted as beneficial to the elderly, but in fact, only six percent of the elderly with incomes under $50,000 get anything out of it. These figures come from a briefing Monday by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank. Further, taxpayers who earn $35,000 or less come away with $27 more a year. The 80 percent of the households making less than $73,000 a year would get less than 10 percent of the new tax breaks. Bush's Stimulus : Right time/ wrong ideas Minneapolis Star Tribune - Announcing a $674 billion stimulus package in Chicago, President Bush said he wants to stimulate the economy, spur business investment and help the average citizen. But the centerpiece of his plan -- eliminating the individual income tax on stock dividends -- would do none of these three things, and it is astonishing that the White House expects voters to believe otherwise. Economists generally agree that the ailing economy needs a booster shot and that a stimulus plan should follow three principles. It should take effect quickly, stop when the economy is healthy again and serve some socially useful purpose. The White House dividend proposal -- which represents more than half of Bush's overall package -- flunks all three tests. Investors wouldn't see their savings until 2004. It would create a permanent drain on federal revenues, which Washington can ill afford now that chronic budget deficits are back. As for its social purpose -- ending the double taxation of corporate dividends -- this is the right goal but the wrong technique. The tax break for dividends, when it is affordable, should come at the corporate level -- so that dividends get equal tax treatment with corporate debt payments -- not at the individual level, where it would favor dividend income over earned income and interest income. As for helping the average citizen, about 85 percent of taxable stocks and mutual funds are held by the top 10 percent of households, so eliminating the tax on dividends will do very little for the typical taxpayer. If lawmakers want a quick, temporary economic stimulus, they should adopt portions of the Democratic plan -- a one-time $300 tax rebate to every taxpayer and $31 billion of fiscal aid to the cash-strapped states -- or other pieces of the Bush package, such as an extension of unemployment benefits and an expansion of the tax credit for families with children. The White House must be betting that Americans will embrace a tax cut, any tax cut, at a time of economic anxiety. But voters are smarter than that, and members of Congress should be as well. Racist Republicans Archives Lott Often Opposed Measures Identified With Civil Rights By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM In his 30 years in Congress, 16 in the House and the last 14 in the Senate, Trent Lott has voted consistently against measures that could be identified as civil rights legislation, and often he was one of a small number of lawmakers to vote that way. A review of his voting record shows, for example, that Mr. Lott,
a Mississippi Republican, opposed extension of the Voting Rights
Act, expansion of fair-housing laws, establishment of the Martin
Luther King Jr. holiday and payment of lawyers' fees to people who
bring successful civil rights suits. Over the years, he favored measures to outlaw busing for school desegregation, to extend a design patent owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and to eliminate affirmative action in federal contracts. In 1975, at the beginning of his second term in the House, Mr. Lott voted against a seven-year extension of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights law meant to prevent racial discrimination in elections. The House voted, 341 to 70, to extend the law. In 1981, he voted against another extension, which was approved, 389 to 24. In 1976, he opposed allowing judges to award payments covering lawyers' fees to plaintiffs who brought successful civil rights suits. The measure passed by a vote of 262 to 108. In 1980 and 1988, he voted against legislation to allow the government to impose administrative penalties against people who practiced racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. In 1983, he voted against making Dr. King's birthday a holiday. The House passed the bill, 338 to 90. In the Senate, Mr. Lott supported measures in 1995 and 1998 that, had they been enacted, would have prohibited affirmative action programs in federal contracts like grants for highway construction. In 2000, he opposed a measure that made it easier for the federal
government to investigate and prosecute hate crimes. Trent Lott Op/Ed Mpls Star-Tribune During the fall campaign, not a few Minnesotans expressed the view that while Norm Coleman seemed a pretty good guy, they couldn't stand Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., who would again become Senate majority leader if the Republicans took control. Well, Lott has just given a whole lot of Americans another reason to regret his presence in Washington, D.C. The setting was the Dirksen Senate Office Building last Thursday. The event was a 100th birthday and retirement party for Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C. Lott took the floor and said, "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." Say what? Thurmond in 1948 was running as the nominee of the Dixiecrats, a racist renegade party organized for one purpose only: to oppose the effort to secure civil rights for black Americans. During the campaign, Thurmond declared that, "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches." The party's platform said, "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race." In Lott's Mississippi, a sample ballot printed by the Democrats warned voters to, "Remember, a vote for (Harry S) Truman electors is a direct order to our congressmen and senators from Mississippi to vote for passage of Truman's so-called civil-rights program in the next Congress. This means the vicious . . . anti-poll tax, anti-lynching and anti-segregation proposals will become the law of the land and our way of life in the South will be gone forever." There's only one way to interpret Lott's statement: The United States would be better off if the civil rights movement -- one of the nation's crowning political and humanitarian achievements of the 20th century -- had never happened. And this man is scheduled to become the leader of the U.S. Senate in just a few weeks? Jonah Goldberg, of National Review On-line, said, for example, that Lott's remarks "were incandescently idiotic according to any criteria. On the facts, Lott's comments were dumb. Morally they were indefensible. Politically, they served to confirm the suspicions of millions of blacks and liberal whites about what is in the hearts of conservatives and Republicans. . . ." That's Not All, Folks Washington Post 12/12/02 And, there appears to be even more to the controversy. Three years ago, the Senate took the bold step of condemning - in a 97-0 vote -- the racist and anti-Semitic comments of former high-ranking Nation of Islam leader Khallid Abdul Muhammad. Soon after that vote, civil rights leader Julian Bond began pressuring the Senate to comment on similar statements by the Council of Conservative Citizens -- (http://www.cofcc.org/) a group which promotes the preservation of the white race and whose Web site at the time featured an article warning that the nation was turning into a "slimy brown mass of glop." Washington Post reporter Kevin Merida went straight to the top to ask Lott why the Senate would not call a vote to condemn the CCC, a modern-day version of the so-called white citizen councils that fought federal efforts to end segregation during the civil rights era. Lott hemmed and hawed and declared impatiently of the Senate's lack of action on the CCC: "No, that doesn't seem hypocritical to me." But, Lott had been associating with the CCC for years, addressing its board, welcoming its leaders to Washington and taking photos with its members. When Lott claimed to not know what the group stood for, his own uncle--a director of the group--contradicted him. Whatever the case, Lott knew enough about the CCC that he was pictured in one of its 1992 newsletters addressing the group's national board and telling it: "The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy." In fact, Lott is featured prominently on the CCC's home page today, being praised for calling "for the Army to PROTECT U.S. Borders against the Illegal Alien Invasion." (Under the FAQ section of the Web site, the group asserts that it "stands against the tide of nonwhite, Third World immigrants swamping this country.") And going back to 1984, Lott, speaking to the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Biloxi, Miss., said: "The spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform." © 2002 Washington Post Newsweek Interactive Bush and Oil Archives By PETE YOST (AP) Dec. 10, 2002 A federal judge rebuffed congressional efforts to learn about meetings that industry executives and lobbyists had with the task force while it formulated the Bush administration's energy plan. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., called it "a convoluted decision by a Republican judge that gives Bush and Cheney near total immunity from scrutiny." Bates was appointed last year by President Bush. The Cheney energy plan, issued in the spring of 2001, called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants. Aside from a few details the Bush administration revealed amid the collapse of Enron Corp., the White House has refused to identify with whom the Cheney task force met. Enron representatives met six times with the vice president or his aides. Enron has been George W. Bush's biggest campaign donor over the years. Democratic Reps. Waxman and John Dingell of Michigan first requested information more than a year and a half ago about which industry executives and lobbyists the Cheney task force was meeting with. On Monday, Joe Lieberman said the vice president's task force was making important decisions about national energy policy that the public has a right to know about. "What are they hiding?" asked Lieberman. "Unless Hussein, reminiscent of a Super Bowl soda ad starring Ozzy Osborne's family, suddenly unzips his skin to reveal he is actually Bin Laden, we are likely to march to war with the support of an "international coalition" that amounts to a fig leaf named Tony Blair and a motley collection of nations one can buy on EBay." (New York Times op-ed) Bush, Iraq and Sister Souljah By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN 12/08/02 New York Times I am worried. And you should be, too. I am not against war in Iraq, if need be, but I am against going to war without preparing the ground in America, in the region and in the world at large to deal with the blowback any U.S. invasion will produce. But I see few signs that President Bush is making those preparations. The Bush team's whole approach was best summed up by a friend of mine: "We're at war — let's party." We're at war — let's not ask the American people to do anything hard. This can't go on. We are at war. We are at war with a cruel, militant Islam, led by Al Qaeda, we are at war with a rising tide of global anti-Americanism, and we will probably soon be at war to disarm Iraq. There is no way we are going to win such a multidimensional conflict without sacrifices and radically new thinking. For me, the question is whether President Bush, having amassed all this political capital by effectively responding to 9/11, is going to spend any of it — is going to ask Americans to do things that are really hard to win these wars over the long haul. Does Mr. Bush have a Sister Souljah speech in him? If not, if he is just going to rely on the Pentagon to fight this war — and on Karl Rove to exploit it — then we will reap nothing but tears. What would the president tell the American people if he were preparing them for this multidimensional war? He would tell the American people that this war could cost over a trillion dollars, and no one should think that we're going to be able to use Iraqi oil to pay for it. It will be paid for by our Treasury — and that means not just changing the faces of the Bush economic team but also re-examining the surplus-squandering tax cuts at the center of the Bush fiscal policy. He would tell the American people that he is embarking on a Manhattan project to increase fuel efficiency and slash the cost of alternative energy sources to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Yes, it will take time, but gradually it will make us more secure as a nation, it will shrink the price of oil — which is the best way to trigger political change in places like Saudi Arabia — and it will provide the alternative to Kyoto that Mr. Bush promised the world but never delivered. He would tell the American people that we can no longer afford our selfish system of farm subsidies and textile protectionism. It is a system that tells developing nations they must open their borders to what we make, but we won't give them full access to our markets for what they make: farm goods and garments. If nations like Pakistan continue to live in poverty, if their people can only afford religious schools that teach only the Koran, then we will continue to live in fear. If our national security interests lie in their development, and their development requires access to our markets, we need to open our markets and live what we preach. He would tell the Palestinians that the U.S. intends to cut off all assistance and diplomatic contacts until they get rid of their corrupt tyrant, Yasir Arafat, because no peace is possible with him. He would tell Ariel Sharon that unless he halts all settlement building — now — the U.S. will start cutting off Israel's economic aid. And he would tell both that he intends to put the Clinton peace plan back on the table as his plan. He would also tell all Arabs that America has one purpose in Iraq, once it is disarmed of dangerous weapons: to help Iraqis implement the U.N. Arab Human Development Report, which states that the failing Arab world can only catch up if it embraces freedom, modern education and women's empowerment. Finally, he would tell Karl Rove to take a leave of absence until September 2004 so that nothing the president does in this war will be perceived as being done for political gain. Friends, we are on the edge of a transforming moment for America in the world. If President Bush uses his enormous mandate to prepare for war — in a way that really deals with our political and economic vulnerabilities, increases our own staying power and convinces the world that we have a positive vision and are responsible global citizens — there is a decent chance we can win at a reasonable cost. But if Mr. Bush simply uses his mandate to drive a hard-right agenda and indulge in more feel-good politics, the world will become an increasingly dangerous place for every American — no matter what war we fight, no matter what war we win. Erosion of Civil Liberties Archive Total Information Awareness Minneapolis Star-Tribune The most hair-raising news du jour is about Total Information Awareness, a giant government computer spy system being set up to spy on Americans and run by none other than John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame. Total Information Awareness will provide intelligence agencies and law enforcement with instant access to information from e-mail, telephone records, credit cards, banking transactions and travel records, all without a search warrant. It will, said Poindexter, "break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and government databases. The just-passed Homeland Security Bill undermines the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies can do with personal information. And can we trust the government to keep all this information solely for the task of tracking terrorists? Funny you should ask. The Wall Street Journal reports this week that shortly after Sept. 11, the FBI circulated the names of hundreds of people it wanted to question to scores of corporations around the country, sharing the list with car rental companies, banks, travel firms, casinos, truckers, chemical companies and power plants. A year later, the list has taken on a life of its own, with multiplying -- and error-filled -- versions being passed around like bootleg music. Some companies fed a version of the list into their databases and now use it to screen job applicants and customers. The list included people who were not suspects at all, just people the FBI wanted to talk to because they might have had some information. But, the Journal reports, a Venezuelan bank's security officer sent the list, headed "suspected terrorists sent by the FBI," to a website, and it spread from there. (here) NY Times Joel Winston, associate director for financial practices at the Federal Trade Commission said, "What most consumers care about is not an abstract concept but actual injury. They care about unwarranted intrusions like telemarketing, to someone stealing your identity, to someone using your credit information improperly." Still, the essential paradox in the post-Sept. 11 era is that people seem willing to accept government intrusions but not commercial ones, even though the government's power is enormous and often wielded in secret, while consumers retain substantial control over their commercial information. In the commercial arena, "you can always opt out," said Jane Kirtley, a professor of law and media ethics at the University of Minnesota. "In the commercial private sector we really do have a certain amount of choice. In terms of government surveillance, we really do not." She added: "The private sector can't garnish your wages, can't take your child away, can't arrest you. The government can do all those things." (here) NY Times Magazine ...this is the project, led by John Poindexter, the architect of Iran-contra, that could collect every bit of information available in cyberspace about every American--telephone, medical, school, travel and credit-card records, all the email ever sent--and link it up with tools for biometric analysis, like facial and optical imaging and gait recognition. Think, for a moment, of all the mistaken, or partly true, or used-to-be-true, or just personal information about you that could be "mined" from some database or other, and imagine for a moment the potential uses and abuses. (full article here) Personal Information Goes Public Minneapolis Star-Tribune Of all the Orwellian offices that have been created in the name of protecting us, this little project, (Total Information Awareness) buried in the Department of Defense, is the most chilling. According to the project's director, John Poindexter of Iran-Contra infamy, this project allows the government to collect a mountain of information on each of us. Credit-card transactions, phone records, medical records, magazine subscriptions, travel data and much more will go into a centralized database without the government needing to bother getting a court order to gather the information. Mike Hatch, Minnesota's Attorney General, told of a speech he gave to a group of lawyers and law professors about how intrusive government could become. "I started out by asking, 'Please raise your hand if you've had a yeast infection, an abortion, if you were adopted, if you were an illegitimate child, if you've been treated for any sort of mental illness.' There was a gasp in the room. They were looking at me and you could see them thinking, 'What a fool to ask questions like that in a public place.' " The point he was making, of course, is that even the most private information may be available to Poindexter's office, which is in its formative stages at the outer edges of the Defense Department. "For myself, " said Hatch, "I thank God that not every phone call I made or received 40 years ago is in some government file and I don't even know what those might be. But if my kids want to test limits, get information about some political group or something, they could be stuck with it [on their government record] for the rest of their lives." U.S. Seeks to Curb Indian Lawsuits WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to limit lawsuits filed by American Indian tribes contending the Interior Department failed to protect tribal resources. In one suit, the Navajo Nation alleges a former Interior secretary colluded with a coal company to deny the tribe tens of millions of dollars in royalties from coal mined from Navajo land. Appeals courts said the government was liable for damages as high
as $600 million in the Navajo case. That could be redefined by the current cases, said David Getches, a professor specializing in Indian law at the University of Colorado. Getches said Indian tribes prevail in the current Supreme Court about one-fifth of the time, less than any other group. Senate Democrats Lose Bids to Add Funds to Spending bill Jan. 17, 2003 WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Senate Republicans thwarted Democratic efforts Thursday to add money for homeland security to a $390 billion spending bill. Republicans united to block a Democratic bid to add another $6 billion to a measure for school districts serving poor communities and loans for low-income college students. "He turned his back on his own country when he turned down"
extra domestic security spending last year, said Sen. Robert Byrd,
D-W.Va., who led the fight for extra funds. "Let something
happen, and then see what the polls show, then let the questions
be asked." Environmental Decline Archives Alaska's Tongass Forest Denied Wilderness Protection Washington Post The Bush administration, in a closely watched conservation decision, ruled that it will not give wilderness protection to millions of acres of Alaska's Tongass National Forest. Environmental groups said the decision could open more than a million acres of old-growth forest to logging, particularly if the administration or federal courts reverse the Clinton administration's restrictions on forest road building. The Tongass contains nearly 30 percent of the world's unlogged coastal temperate rain forest. (here) To Save the Forest, The Trees Must Go Some trees to be cut are much larger than current forest regulations would allow: in some cases, up to 34 inches in diameter, or almost nine feet in girth. The Forest Service referred to the logging euphemistically as "managment-caused changes in vegetation." Some environmental advocates see this proposal as science on the model of Japanese whalers, who take their harpoons to sea in what they call a research project--one that happens to put whale meat on the menus of pricey restaurants in Tokyo. "I think this is quickly going to spiral into a device for getting around other restrictions on forest practices, under the guise of scientific analysis," said Don Erman, emeritus professor of forestry at the University of California at Davis. (here) Last Year Second Hottest On Record St. Paul Pioneer Press Nine of the 10 hottest years since record-keeping began in 1880 have occurred since 1990, and the past six years rank among the eight warmest on record, according to the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. President Bush says global warming is real, but withdrew from a global treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 7 percent below 1990 levels, saying it would hurt the U.S. economy. In the next few weeks, his administration is expected to announce a voluntary program to reduce greenhouse gases. |