Bruce Barlett: Fiscal Match of the Century -- Coburn vs. Norquist

[Winehole23]

Fiscal Match of the Century: Coburn vs. Norquist

By BRUCE BARTLETT (http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Authors/B/Bruce-Bartlett.aspx), The Fiscal Times
March 25, 2011


There is an important behind the scenes debate going on among Republicans today on whether they really care about the budget deficit and tax reform, or whether they are just posturing. So far, the posturing faction is winning. But there may be hope.


Among the very few Republican members of Congress who is genuinely concerned about the deficit is Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. He understands the simple fact that the deficit is the difference between revenues and outlays. Therefore, the deficit may be increased by tax cuts and reduced by higher revenues.


Like the rest of his party, Coburn strongly supports spending cuts to deal with the deficit to the greatest extent possible. But at the end of the day, he understands that higher revenues will have to play a role. This has made Coburn a powerful enemy of Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR).


On February 17, The Wall Street Journal reported (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703961104576148762589469794.html) that Coburn was among the members of a small bipartisan group of senators who are willing to consider taxes as part of a deficit reduction package. Norquist immediately went after the three Republicans named in the article: Coburn, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, and Mike Crapo of Idaho. (The Democrats are Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Richard Durbin of Illinois, and Mark Warner of Virginia.)


The same day the Journal article appeared, Norquist fired off a letter (http://www.chambliss.senate.gov/public/?a=Files.Serve&File_id=7fa36ee1-50e6-48d0-b73d-310a03b1e076) to Chambliss, Coburn and Crapo, threatening them with retaliation for their apostasy:


I was disappointed this morning to read an article … in which you were implicated as parties to a bipartisan budget deal containing a net tax increase…. Needless to say, support for such a deal would most likely be a violation of your Taxpayer Protection Pledge. That pledge which you made to your constituents and the American people obligates you to “…oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar-for-dollar by further reducing tax rates.” I urge you to reject this so-called “deal” which is little more than a transparent attempt to hike taxes and put off the spending restraint the country clearly called for in the 2010 elections.






Chambliss, Coburn and Crapo immediately wrote back (http://www.chambliss.senate.gov/public/?a=Files.Serve&File_id=10d741eb-84fb-43e6-a6ca-c21fe7b2d836) to Norquist, rejecting his threat and the logic of his argument. They said there is a huge difference between a legislated tax increase and the natural rise in revenue that would accompany faster growth resulting from tax reform.


Unfortunately, Norquist has also effectively barred the tax reform door by insisting that every provision of the tax code that lowers revenues must be preserved lest it violate the tax pledge that virtually every Republican in Congress (http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2011/02/11/House-GOP-Haunted-by-Budget-Pledge.aspx) has signed. Toward this end, his organization has repeatedly insisted that explicitly temporary tax cuts must be extended forever. Last year, for example, ATR claimed that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on schedule, exactly as Republicans wrote the law, would constitute the “largest tax hike in history (http://www.atr.org/one-month-largest-tax-hikes-a5672).” Failure to support extension of the tax cuts would be deemed a violation of the pledge.


ATR even insisted that all the gimmicky business provisions, known as “extenders” because they were supposed to expire years ago, must also be renewed even though they “are horrible tax policy” in its own words. The stated rationale (http://www.atr.org/business-extenders-tax-dealbr-arent-earmarks-a5701) is that taxes must be prevented from going up on anyone, and that it is impossible for any tax cut to be considered an earmark no matter how narrowly focused the benefits.


Even though ATR claims to support comprehensive tax reform along the lines of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, in practice it has made it impossible for there to be any serious discussion of this topic. That is because a revenue-neutral tax reform, which broadens the tax base and lowers tax rates as the 1986 act did, will necessarily raise taxes for some people and businesses while lowering them for others. But ATR always treats the reforming provisions that would broaden the tax base as an impermissible violation of the tax pledge.


Sen. Coburn has expressed deep frustration with the de facto ATR position that every revenue-reducing provision of the tax code is off-limits and that the only thing that may be discussed is further tax cuts. On March 22, Coburn’s spokesman told The Hill (http://thehill.com/homenews/news/150921-gop-leaders-promise-conservatives-to-block-deficit-package-that-raises-taxes) that Coburn “strongly disagrees with ATR’s belief that every distortion and corporate welfare subsidy in the tax code, such as that for ethanol, is a ‘tax cut’ that needs to be preserved.”
Occasionally, Norquist is backed into a corner and forced to admit that he doesn’t really care about the deficit. He told the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein on March 9 (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/03/grover_norquist_the_goal_is_to.html), “The goal is to reduce the size and scope of government spending, not to focus on the deficit.”


When asked to explain how the size and scope of government is reduced by the tax pledge, Norquist fell back on a discredited doctrine called “starve the beast (http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2010/11/26/Bartlett-Starve-The-Beast.aspx),” which says that tax cuts somehow or other automatically reduce spending and that the only thing to talk about is spending.
Ronald Reagan often supported
large tax increases both as
governor of California and as president.
To my knowledge, Norquist has never addressed the obvious fact that spending as a share of GDP fell sharply after Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993 or that spending rose sharply as a share of GDP after George W. Bush cut taxes in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005. By Norquist’s logic, spending should have risen under Clinton and fallen under Bush.


In his interview with Klein, Norquist tried to argue that Republicans deserve all the credit for spending restraint under Clinton because they took control of Congress in 1994. But the truth is that the budget restraints enacted as part of the 1990 and 1993 budget deals (http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2010/06/25/A-Budget-Deal-That-Did-Reduce-the-Deficit.aspx) deserve almost all of the credit, especially PAYGO, which required that new spending be offset with spending cuts or tax increases. Yet ATR adamantly opposed reinstatement of PAYGO.



The idea that deficits don’t matter, that only spending matters, and that one can’t be a Republican and support even the most innocuous tax increase is a recent historical development. Ronald Reagan often supported large tax increases (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1766683) both as governor of California and as president. By the end of his presidency, he signed into law legislation that raised revenues by $133 billion ($370 billion today).


Nor is the idea that the American people oppose tax increases as politically popular as Republicans seem to believe. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpoll_03142011.html) found that 64 percent of people favor tax increases as part of a deficit reduction deal. And 71 percent think Republicans have not done enough to reduce the deficit by refusing to compromise.


The opposition of one Republican organization to any form of tax increase no matter how big the deficit gets wouldn’t matter much if it weren’t for the Tea Party (http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2011/03/18/GOP-Is-Blowing-It-by-Pandering-to-Tea-Party.aspx), which takes its marching orders on taxes from Norquist. And there is not a single Republican in Congress who isn’t frightened to death of a Tea Party challenger in the Republican primary next year. They know from the experience in 2010 that no incumbent Republican is safe, no matter how conservative their voting record, if they don’t kowtow sufficiently to the Tea Party. They also know that Tea Partiers would rather lose a seat to the Democrats than make the tiniest concession to their ideological dogma on hot-button issues such as health or taxes.
This reality has effectively given Norquist veto-power within the GOP on all tax issues. Like an ancient Roman emperor turning thumbs-up or thumbs-down in deciding whether a gladiator would live or die, he alone decides what is a violation of the tax pledge and what isn’t. And woe be to the Republican who gets Norquist’s thumbs-down because he or she is likely to suffer political death at the hands of the Tea Party.


This is why Sen. Coburn’s challenge to the Norquist/Tea Party orthodoxy is so important. As someone whose record of fiscal conservatism is unquestionable, he has the stature to stand up to them and not be intimidated. Our nation’s fiscal future may depend on whether he is successful or not.
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2011/03/25/Fiscal-Match-of-the-Century.aspx

[Winehole23]

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/grover-norquists-tax-pledge-rejected-republicans/story?id=17807568

[boutons_deux]

the deficit crisis is a 1%/VRWC/Repug HOAX!

Below typificies what is really going on:

CEO Council Demands Cuts To Poor, Elderly While Reaping Billions In Government Contracts, Tax Breaks

The corporate CEOs who have made a high-profile foray into deficit negotiations have themselves been substantially responsible for the size of the deficit they now want closed.

The companies represented by executives working with the Campaign To Fix The Debt have received trillions in federal war contracts, subsidies and bailouts, as well as specialized tax breaks and loopholes that virtually eliminate the companies' tax bills.

The CEOs are part of a campaign run by the Peter Peterson-backed Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which plans to spend at least $30 million pushing for a deficit reduction deal in the lame-duck session and beyond.

During the past few days, CEOs belonging to what the campaign calls its CEO Fiscal Leadership Council -- most visibly, Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein and Honeywell's David Cote -- have barnstormed the media, making the case that the only way to cut the deficit is to severely scale back social safety-net programs -- Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security -- which would disproportionately impact the poor and the elderly.

As part of their push, they are advocating a "territorial tax system" that would exempt their companies' foreign profits from taxation, netting them about $134 billion in tax savings, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies titled "The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks" -- money that could help pay off the federal budget deficit.

Yet the CEOs are not offering to forgo federal money or pay a higher tax rate, on their personal income or corporate profits. Instead, council recommendations include cutting "entitlement" programs, as well as what they call "low-priority spending."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/25/deficit-reduction-council-fiscal-cliff_n_2185585.html?utm_hp_ref=daily-brief?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=112612&utm_medium=email&utm_content=NewsEntry&utm_term=Daily%20Brief

[Winehole23]

you can try to derail, but no one listens to you

[boutons_deux]

you can try to derail, but no one listens to you

the Norquist bullshit pledge and the dickless Repugs who support it is part of the overall VRWC strategy to kill SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and support for Randian moochers like the poor, sick, disabled, young, vets, 47%.

you dick around with details without fitting them into the VRWC strategy to reverse the 1960s and the 1930s progressive advances.

[Winehole23]

you're fantasizing. there is no VRWC.

[LnGrrrR]

Grover Norquist is an ideological idiot, and I sincerely hope that Republicans who align themselves to his view suffer ever greater electoral defeat.

[Homeland Security]

I take the case of Tom Coburn to be instructive. His instincts are probably the furthest to the right in the U.S. Senate, except for maybe Jim DeMint. If you're looking for somebody to make an intellectually coherent case for conservative values that actually can get traction with the other side, he would be your guy. But in today's GOP, attempting to be intellectually consistent and attempting to get traction with the other side gets you branded as a moderate squish who should get primaried. What wins primaries is promising to lower taxes to zero, demonizing nonwhites, defending six-day creation, and espousing interesting theories about rape.

I would conclude that the 2012 GOP is not so much conservative as it just plain right-wing.

[boutons_deux]

you're fantasizing. there is no VRWC.

you're fucked, Oh Naive-One-Who-Won't-Connect-The-Dots.

[Wild Cobra]

Is boutons going off the sanity cliff?

[boutons_deux]

no, I'm the One-Eyed King in the Kingdom of the Blind

[Wild Cobra]

no, I'm the One-Eyed King in the Kingdom of the Blind
It would take the mentally blind to anoint you.

[boutons_deux]

Just another VRWC billionaire trying for decades to fuck over the poor, sick, old, disabled.

Fiscal Cliff Siren: Meet The Man Behind The Curtain

But its current prominence owes much to the decades-long lobbying of billionaire Peter G. Peterson and his private foundation.


"For over a quarter of a century, I've been railing relentlessly, and boring others — and sometimes even myself — over our long-term, unsustainable debts," Peterson said in typically self-deprecating remarks at a conference held last week in Washington.


While he was once U.S. commerce secretary, that was four decades ago under President Richard Nixon. Still, it was Peterson's money that helped create the Simpson-Bowles commission, which crafted one proposal combining tax hikes and spending cuts. And his is the money behind the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and its Fix the Debt campaign.

Think tanks from the Employment Policies Institute on the left to the Heritage Foundation on the right were at the conference last week talking about their proposed solutions, which are funded by Peterson Foundation grants.


Other groups Peterson has backed include The Concord Coalition, which he co-founded, and the grass-roots organizer AmericaSpeaks.


All in all, the Peterson Foundation has given out nearly $26 million over the past three years, almost all of it aimed at attacking the debt.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/11/19/165502686/fiscal-cliff-siren-meet-the-man-behind-the-curtain?sc=17&f=1006

$10Ms financing the VRWC propaganda groups.

[boutons_deux]

The 1%/VRWC relentlessly working, for decades, to fuck over the 99%

Grover Norquist's Budget Is Largely Financed by Just Two Billionaire-Backed Nonprofits (http://www.thenation.com/blog/171475/analysis-grover-norquists-budget-largely-financed-just-two-billionaire-backed-nonprofits)

But consider Norquist’s tax pledge and political power another way: that he’s just a proxy for the powerful interest groups that finance him. In the nineties, it was big tobacco (http://tobaccodocuments.org/pm/2065281658-1661.html) that used Norquist’s tax pledge as a cover to lobby lawmakers against cigarette taxes (Norquist still uses an e-mail system donated to him by Altria to send out Tea Party action alerts (http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/03/08/85551/afp-norquist-tobacco/) against tobacco taxes). Now, big PhRMA (http://www.republicreport.org/2012/video-grover-norquist-struggles-to-explain-taking-big-pharma-money-his-fannie-mae-lobbying-past/) and other industry groups (http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/06/16/247257/grover-norquist-ethanol-cherry/) provide grants to Norquist in exchange for his foundation’s endorsement on other giveaways, like a protectionist support against importing cheaper drugs from Canada and the classification of tax subsidies to refineries as “tax cuts” that must not be cut.

I took a look at the last available budget numbers (http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2010/521/403/2010-521403587-07b65925-9O.pdf) for Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist’s group. Though they do not reveal their donors, we can coble together much of Norquist’s donors using foundations and other nonprofits that donate money to him.

The disclosures show that only two billionaire-backed groups have provided over 66 percent of Norquist’s funding:

• The Center to Protect Patients Rights donated $4,189,000 to Americans for Tax Reform in 2010, 34 percent of the group’s budget that year.

• Crossroads GPS donated $4,000,000 to Americans for Tax Reform in 2010, 32.46 percent of the group’s budget that year.

The Center to Protect Patients Rights is the foundation (http://www.republicreport.org/2012/55million-koch-fronts/) used by the billionaire clique led by the Koch brothers to distribute grants to allied groups. In 2010, wealthy moguls like Steve Bechtel of Bechtel Corporation and Steve Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group met behind closed doors (http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/10/20/124642/beck-koch-chamber-meeting/) to help lend money to these types of efforts.

Crossroads GPS is the undisclosed group run by Karl Rove. The only known donors are folks like (http://truth-out.org/news/item/8455-oil-speculator-bank-rolls-latest-karl-rove-attack-ad) Paul Singer, the “vulture” hedge fund king who benefits enormously from tax strategies like the carried interest loophole. Norquist’s pledge largely benefits billionaires like Singer and Schwarzman, who pay almost nothing in payroll taxes and likely pay a lower rate than their secretaries.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/171475/analysis-grover-norquists-budget-largely-financed-just-two-billionaire-backed-nonprofits?rel=emailNation#

[boutons_deux]

CEO Council Demands Cuts To Poor, Elderly While Reaping Billions In Government Contracts, Tax Breaks

The corporate CEOs who have made a high-profile foray into deficit negotiations have themselves been substantially responsible for the size of the deficit they now want closed.

The companies represented by executives working with the Campaign To Fix The Debt have received trillions in federal war contracts, subsidies and bailouts, as well as specialized tax breaks and loopholes that virtually eliminate the companies' tax bills.

The CEOs are part of a campaign run by the Peter Peterson-backed Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which plans to spend at least $30 million pushing for a deficit reduction deal in the lame-duck session and beyond.

During the past few days, CEOs belonging to what the campaign calls its CEO Fiscal Leadership Council -- most visibly, Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein and Honeywell's David Cote -- have barnstormed the media, making the case that the only way to cut the deficit is to severely scale back social safety-net programs -- Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security -- which would disproportionately impact the poor and the elderly.

As part of their push, they are advocating a "territorial tax system" that would exempt their companies' foreign profits from taxation, netting them about $134 billion in tax savings, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies titled "The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks" -- money that could help pay off the federal budget deficit.

Yet the CEOs are not offering to forgo federal money or pay a higher tax rate, on their personal income or corporate profits. Instead, council recommendations include cutting "entitlement" programs, as well as what they call "low-priority spending."

Many of the companies recommending austerity would be out of business without the heavy federal support they get, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, which both received billions in direct bailout cash, plus billions more indirectly through AIG and other companies taxpayers rescued.

Just three of the companies -- GE, Boeing and Honeywell -- were handed nearly $28 billion last year in federal contracts alone. A spokesman for Campaign To Fix The Debt did not respond to an email from The Huffington Post over the weekend.

The CEO council recommends two major avenues that it claims will produce "at least $4 trillion of deficit reduction." The first is to "replace mindless, abrupt deficit reduction with thoughtful changes that reform the tax code and cut low-priority spending." The second is to "keep debt under control over the long-term by focusing on the long-term growth of entitlement programs."

CEOs are encouraged to present a Fix-The-Debt PowerPoint presentation to their "employee town hall [meetings and] company meetings." To further help get the word out, the campaign borrowed a page from the CEOs this fall who wrote letters encouraging their employees to vote for Mitt Romney, or face job cuts. This time, the CFD has created two templates for bosses to use at their companies.

But in the past week, in order to make their case to the millions of Americans who don't work for them, CEOs fanned out into television, to convince the rest of the country that slashing the social safety net is the only way to reduce the deficit.

In an interview aired Monday, Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein said Social Security "wasn't devised to be a system that supported you for a 30 year retirement after a 25-year career." The key to cutting Social Security, he said, was simply a matter of teaching people to expect less.

"You're going to have to do something, undoubtedly, to lower people's expectations of what they're going to get," Blankfein told CBS, "the entitlements, and what people think they're going to get, because you're not going to get it."

Blankfein and Goldman Sachs don't have to worry about lowering expectations. After receiving a $10 billion federal bailout in 2008, and paying it back a few years later, Goldman Sachs recently exceeded Wall Street analysts' expectations by announcing $8.4 billion in third quarter revenues for 2012. On the heels of a great year, Blankfein is expected to take home an even larger salary than he did in 2011, when he made $16.1 million.

To understand the importance of banking profits to the members of the deficit council, one need look no further than the two top-ranking members of the Campaign To Fix The Debt's steering committee, former New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg (R) and former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat. Gregg is currently employed as an international adviser to Goldman Sachs, while Rendell collects his paycheck from the boutique investment bank Greenhill & Co.

Following Blankfein's evening news appearance on Monday, Cote, the Honeywell CEO, sat down with the same network on Tuesday, and said essentially the same thing that Blankfein did.

Cote ranked 11th on a list compiled in a recent study conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies of executives who have saved the most from the Bush tax cuts. According to the IPS, Cote's taxable compensation for 2011 was a bit more than $55 million, and he did not pay about $2.5 million thanks to the Bush tax cuts.

After mentioning a few scary-sounding deficit statistics, he suggested the government raise revenue by ending individual tax credits and deductions, which he said amounted to a $1 trillion "giveaway" in 2011. It was clear, however, that Cote hadn't come on the show to talk about taxes.

"The big nut is going to have to be [cuts to] Medicare/Medicaid … especially with the baby boomer generation retiring. It's going to literally crush the system."

But while Cote strongly recommends cutting those benefits, when it comes to the tax obligations of corporations, he's clear about what he wants: a corporate tax rate of zero.

"From a fairness perspective, nobody would be able to stand [a zero tax rate on corporate profits]," but if the U.S. really wanted to create jobs, he said this spring, "we would have the lowest rate possible."

At Honeywell, Cote practices what he preaches. Between 2008-2010, the company avoided paying any taxes at all. Instead, the company got taxpayer-funded rebates of $34 million off of profits totaling nearly $5 billion.

Part of what makes the lobbying blitz around the fiscal cliff so complex for CEOs on the Fiscal Leadership Council is that many of them need more than just low tax rates. They also need Congress and the White House to maintain current defense spending levels so they can continue winning enormous contracts.

In 2011, $40 billion of taxpayer money was divided among just nine CFD member companies, led by defense giant Boeing, which raked in $22 billion in federal contracts alone, more than the other eight companies combined. For his efforts as CEO, Boeing's Jim McNerney took home nearly $23 million in compensation last year.

But even as McNerney lends his name to the deficit commission, his company has quietly begun laying off U.S. workers ahead of defense cuts that are expected to be part of a deficit reduction deal. The company denies that federal spending has anything to do with the job cuts, but defense industry analysts aren't convinced.

At least one faction of Boeing's workforce is thriving: Boeing lobbyists in Washington have made $12 million since January fighting proposed cuts to defense and aerospace projects.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/25/deficit-reduction-council-fiscal-cliff_n_2185585.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

[boutons_deux]

9 Greedy CEOs Trying to Shred the Safety Net While Pigging Out on Corporate Welfare

http://www.alternet.org/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/greedy_pig.jpg1. Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO, Goldman, Sachs & Co. Blankfein, infamous for describing his financial activities as “God’s work,” shared his attitude toward society with CBS news recently. He explained his keen desire to see Americans lowering their sights for the future. You really have to watch the interview [6]to get the full flavor of Blankfein’s smug assurance that predation can be sold as concern for the nation’s well-being. In addition to trotting out several myths about Social Security’s design and functions, including the bogus notion that retirement age must be raised [7], he gives a pithy summary of what life is going to be like for the 99 percent:

“You’re going to have to do something, undoubtedly, to lower people’s expectations of what they’re going to get, the entitlements, and what people think they’re going to get, because you’re not going to get it.”

Not if Lloyd Blankfein has anything to do with it. He calls it managing expectations. Here’s another word: theft.

Since the financial crash, Blankfein’s company, Goldman Sachs, has received tens of billions of dollars in what the Economic Policy Journal describes [8] as “direct and indirect succor from the Fed." In sharp contrast to average Americans, when Goldman needed help in the 2008 crisis, a friendly Federal Reserve let Goldman turn into a commercial bank almost overnight, so it could go to the Fed for help 24/7.

2. Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and CEO, General Electric Company. In 2011, President Obama welcomed outsourcing pioneer Jeffrey Immelt to his White House inner circle as chair of a newly created jobs council – a move that was a sharp slap in the face to American workers. Immelt returned the favor by dumping Obama in favor of Mitt Romney in the recent election.

Obviously, supporting disastrous financial deregulation, dodging taxes and helping to destroy American manufacturing has not satisfied Immelt. He’d like to add insult to injury by making sure that people who have been screwed by the reckless activities of short-sighted corporate titans like himself are left to starve in their golden years and go without medical care. And as for the poor, well, couldn’t they be just a little bit poorer? Immelt thinks that would be swell.

After the 2008 crash, the government gave a giant boost [9]to hard-pressed GE Capital, the company’s financing arm, through the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. GE has also helped itself to enormous taxpayer-funded subsidies, especially in green energy. And guess how much GE paid in taxes in 2010? Nothing. In fact, using what the New York Times describes [10] as its “innovative accounting practices,” it claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion!

3. Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase & Co. At a recent gathering of the Council on Foreign Relations, Jamie Dimon vented his feelings [11] about a number of things that peeve him, from a federal lawsuit brought against JPMorgan Chase to Obama’s failure to adopt the harmful and misguided Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, which, among other things, recommended reducing the tax rate for top earners. Dimon has claimed that his bank did not need the TARP funds bestowed on it by the federal government, but there is no question that today his bank borrows funds more cheaply than smaller banks because of the federal government’s implicit too-big-too-fail guarantee.

Dimon is deploying a familiar scare tactic [12]on the topic of the so-called fiscal cliff. He’s claiming that his company will be forced to cut down on hiring and so on if a budget plan is not tailored to enrich the wealthy. During a recent visit to India [13], he issued warnings to CNBC-TV18:

"I've spoken to CEOs who say, you know, absolutely, we are making decisions to protect ourselves from the ‘fiscal cliff’ and those are like investment decisions and hiring decisions.”

Maybe Dimon’s company would be better served figuring out what happened to the $6 billion that recently went up in smoke in the “London Whale” derivatives fiasco [14].

4. W. James McNerney, Jr., chairman, president and CEO, the Boeing Company. McNerney launched at Procter & Gamble, reached high altitude at GE and shot to the stratosphere by becoming head honcho at Boeing in 2005.

Boeing has been a long-time beneficiary of the government’s Export-Import Bank [15], which has financed sales of many of its planes. McNerney chairs President Obama's Export Council, where he works hard to arrange policies that benefit his company. He spent much of 2011 slugging it out with the National Labor Relations Board over moving assembly plants from Washington to South Carolina, a right-to-work state. That got settled, but now the profitable company is in a fight with engineers who don’t want their pensions chopped nearly in half. Boeing’s excuse? It wants to keep the engineers “competitive.” Union members have reported intimidation [16] from the company’s management as the dispute has intensified.

The Boeing boss is now crying “deficit” and asks for your retirement money. Pretty brassy, considering that the company paid not a single penny in taxes between 2008 and 2011. In fact, Citizens for Tax Justice calculates that Boeing actually got money back [17]from the U.S. government over the past decade, “paying a negative 6.5 percent tax rate, even though it was profitable every year from 2002 through 2011.”

5. David Cote, chairman and CEO, Honeywell International Inc. David Cote is a veteran of GE and also sits on the board of JPMorgan Chase, where he is one of three members of the risk committee that failed to prevent the disastrous $6 billion trading loss mentioned above. Cote has led Honeywell, one of the world’s largest industrial conglomerates, since 2002. Along with GE and Boeing, Honeywell shares the distinction of being a top corporate polluter [18].

Obama invited Cote to join the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission in 2010, where he worked hard to create a flawed plan meant to reward the rich and cut vital services for the 99 percent. Meantime, sales of mostly aerospace-related Honeywell products sold to the government make up about 12 percent of Honeywell’s total revenues [19].

Here’s the 2009 figure [20] for what Cote raked in as Honeywell’s CEO: $12,839,038. In response to the recession, Cote forced Honeywell's employees to take unpaid furloughs [21] of between two and five weeks during 2008 and 2009.

6. Glenn Britt, chairman and CEO, Time Warner Cable Inc. Maybe the head of one of the world’s largest media conglomerates is ticked off because his compensation dropped [22] from $17.4 million in 2010 to $16.4 million in 2011. Whatever it is, he is channeling his frustration by setting his sights on your wallet.

As a telecom giant, TWC is part of one of the most despised industries in America, and it’s no wonder. Whether it’s offering terrible customer service (Britt is devising a special “white glove” package for the affluent), leaving customers disconnected during Hurricane Sandy, or lobbying for laws that squash competition and lead to telecom oligopolies, Britt seems out to prove that his company can only succeed if the rest of the country suffers.

And with his Fix the Debt campaign, he’d like to make that suffering just a little more intense.

7. Reid Hoffman, cofounder and executive chairman, LinkedIn Corporation. Reid Hoffman brought us LinkedIn, possibly the most annoying social media network on Planet Earth. Why is it necessary to send scores of nagging emails to accept invitations to "link" to people you don’t even know? No one can say. But it sure is irritating. LinkedIn, along with his investments in companies like Facebook, has made Hoffman a billionaire. He’s ready to start giving – to the rich.

Hoffman hails himself as the champion of entrepreneurship. What he fails to mention is that entrepreneurship gets stifled when people don’t have a decent social safety net. You can’t take risks starting a new business if there’s nothing to fall back on. That’s why Norway is considered an entrepreneur’s heaven [23]: the social safety net is strong and there’s far less shoveling income toward the rich.

Fix the Debt proposals would shred the social safety net, increase income inequality and make entrepreneurship less attractive for Americans. Hoffman’s presence on this list means only one thing: he wants to make it harder for you to be an entrepreneur like him. He’s made his money. And now he’s bent on kicking the ladder out from under the rest of us.

8. Richard Anderson, CEO, Delta Air Lines, Inc. Historically, airlines have been recipients of enormous subsidies from the federal government; after 9/11, many of those subsidies increased [24].

Delta CEO Richard Anderson enjoyed a 10 percent raise in 2011, bringing his compensation to $8.9 million. Not bad for a year when the company's stock price fell by more than a third. [25] Delta employees didn’t fare so well as the boss. In 2010, Delta flight attendants lost their battle [26] to protect their pay and benefits. According to Labor Notes, Anderson was quite creative in his effort to crush the American dream of those hard-working folks:

“[Anderson] played up a culture clash between Northwest’s Northern base and Delta’s Southern workforce, attacking AFA [Association of Flight Attendants] in one company-called meeting for being ‘un-Christian’ and ‘immoral.’ A DVD of the meeting was sent to every flight attendant.”

As the head of an airline, Anderson knows that his business would not have been possible but for the taxpayer-funded research and development that led to the creation of passenger jets, along with enormous air mail subsidies. He returns the favor by screwing workers and attempting to pass austerity measures designed to stick it to working people whose tax dollars make his job possible.

9. Dave Barger, president and CEO of JetBlue Airways Corp. Sky’s the limit to Dave Barger’s fondness for right-wing politicians. And he’s quite proud of being the only major U.S.-based airline that’s “100% union free. [27]” Several grassroots attempts at unionization have failed in recent years, much to his delight.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/9-greedy-ceos-trying-shred-safety-net-while-pigging-out-corporate-welfare (http://www.alternet.org/economy/9-greedy-ceos-trying-shred-safety-net-while-pigging-out-corporate-welfare)

[boutons_deux]

CEOs Looking To ‘Fix The Debt’ By Cutting Social Security Sit On Huge Retirement Accounts

these CEOs have little cause for concern if government retirement assistance is cut, as they have millions of dollars squirreled away in their personal retirement accounts:

– The 71 Fix the Debt CEOs of public companies have average retirement assets of $9.1 million. Of these 71 CEOs, 54 participate in their company‘s retirement programs and have collective pension assets of $649 million, or more than $12 million per CEO — enough to generate a $65,873 pension check each month for life. In contrast, the average monthly Social Security check for retired workers is $1,237.

– A dozen of the Fix the Debt executives have more than $20 million in their individual company retirement accounts. If each of these CEOs converted their assets to an annuity when they turned 65, they would receive a monthly check for at least $110,000 for life.

Blankfein has nearly $12 million in retirement assets, while Bertolini has $1.5 million. Adding insult to injury, many of the CEOs calling for cuts to the social safety net are underfunding their workers’ retirement accounts:

Of the 71 publicly held Fix the Debt member companies, 41 provide employee pension funds for their workers. Of these, only two have sufficient assets in their pension funds to meet their expected obligations. The rest have underfunded their worker pension funds by $103 billion, or about $2.5 billion on average.

Since 1985, 84,000 pension plans have been eliminated. And now these CEOs are coming after the government programs upon which the elderly, and many others, depend.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/11/27/1245701/fix-the-debt-retirement-accounts/ (http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/11/27/1245701/fix-the-debt-retirement-accounts/)

[boutons_deux]

White House Rules Social Security Out Of ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Talks

According to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, Social Security should not be on the table during negotiations over the so-called “fiscal cliff,” the set of spending cuts and tax increases scheduled for the end of the year. Carney rightly noted that Social Security has nothing to do with today’s deficits:


White House spokesman Jay Carney said Monday that Social Security is one entitlement program that should be addressed on a “separate track.”


“We should address the drivers of the deficit and Social Security currently is not a driver of the deficit,” Carney told reporters today.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/11/27/1242081/white-house-rules-social-security-out-of-fiscal-cliff-talks/

[Wild Cobra]

TMB...

Too Much Boutons...

[boutons_deux]

TMB...

Too Much Boutons...

devastating comeback. Thanks for your support for destruction of SS, medicare, medicaid

[Wild Cobra]

devastating comeback. Thanks for your support for destruction of SS, medicare, medicaid
You have gone off the cliff. I'm not in favor of their destruction. I just wish idiots like you didn't have the voting right to elect the corrupt politicians putting us where we are. All this redistribution of wealth is destroying us. It has gone too far.

[boutons_deux]

"All this redistribution of wealth is destroying us"

yep, wealth confiscated from the 99% into pockets of the 1% is destroying USA's mythical land of opportunity.

[Wild Cobra]

"All this redistribution of wealth is destroying us"

yep, wealth confiscated from the 99% into pockets of the 1% is destroying USA's mythical land of opportunity.



It's not confiscated. You freely make them rich by demanding cheap goods for yourself made overseas. You refuse to accept the hard fact that corporations do what is best for them by the tax laws in place. Instead, you blame them for doing what is best for them.

I only ask that you hold yourself to the standard first, that you ask of them. Support tariffs and be willing to pay more for goods, or be a hypocrite and pay for the goods corporations contract to make elsewhere, putting our people out of work.

[boutons_deux]

It's not confiscated. You freely make them rich by demanding cheap goods for yourself made overseas. You refuse to accept the hard fact that corporations do what is best for them by the tax laws in place. Instead, you blame them for doing what is best for them.

I only ask that you hold yourself to the standard first, that you ask of them. Support tariffs and be willing to pay more for goods, or be a hypocrite and pay for the goods corporations contract to make elsewhere, putting our people out of work.

consumers don't "demanding cheap goods ... made overseas". where's your evidence for that?

the tax laws in place are there because the corps, doing what's best for themselves, paid/corrupted politicians and regulators to get those tax laws, NAFTA, and soon the incredibly destructive, powerful, secretive TPP.

the corps are GUILTY, not consumers.

As you said before, the jobs go overseas because American workers expect too high salary, too much job and environmental safety. With you, it's ALWAYS the individual at fault, NEVER the organization. the military really brainwashed you into a pile of shit for brains.

[TeyshaBlue]

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2011/03/25/Fiscal-Match-of-the-Century.aspx

I'm glad to see something resembling classical fiscal conservatism re-emerge from the death camps of the social right/ATR/Tea Party idiocy.

I've been waiting for awhile....