The Republican party has managed to paint itself into a corner with its adamant stand against an increase in the marginal rates for the top 2% of income earners, even though that was the signature issue that Barack Obama campaigned on and won, and polls show consistent and considerable support for it. The party is now faced with finding ways to get around what is clearly a weak position and various proposals are circulating that would supposedly raise the same amount of revenue as a marginal tax rate increase and provide them with a face-saving compromise. [Read more…]

One of the extraordinary but little remarked comments that Mitt Romney made during the second debate was when, asked specifically what deductions he would eliminate in order to pay for his tax cuts (that would cost $5 trillion over ten years), he again avoided being specific but said: [Read more…]

Chrystia Freeland is an excellent reporter who has been chronicling the rise of the global oligarchy and whose articles I have linked to several times in my posts on the workings of the oligarchy. (See here, here, here, and here.) [Read more…]

During the campaign and the debates, whenever the Romney-Ryan camp has been repeatedly told that there is no way that they can find ways to balance the budget if they give an across-the-board cut in the marginal tax rates by 20%, unless they raise taxes on the middle class in other ways, such as eliminating the deductions that benefit that group more. They have countered that six studies have shown that it can be done. [Read more…]

We have heard charges from the Romney-Ryan camp that the Obama administration will cut the defense budget while the Obama camp has countered that their opponents are proposing a $2 trillion increase without saying how they will pay for it. [Read more…]

The released secret recording of Mitt Romney’s remarks to a small group of wealthy supporters provides a revealing look at the mindset of such people. They really do think of themselves as a morally superior class and that those who are poor or struggling as worthless. Matt Taibbi argues that having such delusions is the only way that they can justify to themselves the current state of affairs in which they are engaged in “massive fraud and theft” to benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of us. [Read more…]

The internet started buzzing yesterday with the news that someone had broken into the Franklin, Tennessee office of the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and obtained copies of Mitt Romney’s past tax returns for an unspecified number of years. They claim to have made digital copies of them and mailed flash drives containing encrypted versions to various organizations, saying that if they do not receive $1 million by September 28, they will release the public key that will enable people to unencrypt the files and read the documents. [Read more…]

Australian mining tycoon Gina Rinehart, reportedly the world’s richest woman, has some advice for all those whining poors. [Read more…]