Want to know what the teabaggers should really be crying about?

By John Amato @ Crooks & Liars

The idiot brigade is lining up to get on FOX News to call President Obama a fascist while the CEO's that have destroyed their companies still rake in the cash. Stop watching Beck and Hannity and read the news, people!

Your Daily Digby:

Want to know what your CEO made last year? The Executive Paywatch site offers three user-friendly ways to find out. And if you want to have a little fun at the CEO’s expense, play the “Boot The CEO” game and kick the money out of the greedy CEO’s hands.

Their arrogance knows no bounds:

In 2008, despite the worst economic meltdown in over 75 years, U.S. chief executives continued to take home over 300 times more pay than their workers. That’s a gap ten times wider than the gap between top execs and workers that existed just a generation ago.

Corporate boards of directors seem determined to keep this massive gap intact. Most corporations are refusing to make even symbolic gestures toward more common-sense executive compensation.

Remember last fall’s firestorm over executive jets? In 2008, over half America’s big corporations — 104 of the 200 the Wall Street Journal tracked — continued to foot the bill for the personal air travel of their top executives, only three fewer than the year before.

CEOs have to report the personal air travel subsidies they get, along with whatever other perks they receive, as taxable income. Over a third of America’s biggest corporations last year actually gave their executives extra money to pay the taxes on all this perk income.

The dollars devoted to this tax reimbursing — or “grossing up,” as power suits refer to the process — averaged $16,400 last year. That sum might not sound like much, given the millions CEOs take home overall, but, in 2008, average American workers had to labor five months to make $16,400.

The Wall Street Journal doesn’t include perks like free air travel and tax gross-ups in its $7.6 million figure for 2008 CEO “direct compensation.” The New York Times $8.4 million total does.

Neither paper’s pay totals for 2008 include the gains CEOs registered last year cashing out the stock options they collected in previous years. These cashouts generated some staggering personal paydays.

Occidental Petroleum’s Ray Irani, for instance, took home $49.9 million in “total direct compensation,” according to the Wall Street Journal figures. But he gained another $215.9 million in 2008 from options and other long-term “incentives” that Occidental had stuffed in his personal portfolio before last year.

Corporate boards have essentially created what amounts to a perpetual motion pay machine that year in and year out gins up millions in executive compensation, no matter what may be happening economically in the real world.

In “good” times, with revenues and profits up, boards hand executives stock awards and cash bonuses as rewards for their fine “performance.” In hard times, boards keep the stock awards coming — as an incentive to stick around and perform better in the future.

And thus continues the delusion that the wealthy are the most productive members of society which requires that they be allowed to dictate the terms by which the burden of their failure and mismanagement is borne by others.
The corporate aristocrats are working hard to keep the rubes focused on the big, bad gummint because if they ever realize just how thoroughly they've been scammed by these Masters of the Universe, who knows what might happen?

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Count the Double Entendres in Teabaggin Piece

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Teabagging Causes Dain Bramage

Happy

Tax Day

One out of more than 1000 benefits gay couples can't have, even in states that allow marriage equality: Filing Joint Tax Returns

Legally married Americans have a choice whether to file jointly or separately. Gay couples in America do not have that choice.

Here are just a few benefits gay couples lose by not having their relationships recognized as marriages:

The main advantages to filing a joint return are:

• The total tax liability of you and your spouse will usually be lower if you file jointly than if you file separately
• Less cost and time to complete one joint return
• Largest standard deduction, which is a dollar amount that reduces the amount of income subject to tax if you are not claiming itemized deductions
• A married person who files a joint return is allowed to contribute to an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) even if that person does not work
• Certain credits and adjustments, such as the child and dependent care credit, adoption expense credit, Hope and Lifetime Learning credit and deduction for qualified educational loan interest, are generally not available if you are married but choose to file separate returns (married filing separately status), but they are available if you file a joint return with your spouse.

The main disadvantages to filing a joint return are:

• Signing a joint return obligates you to accept full responsibility for the information contained in your tax return as well as for any errors and omissions, so that means you may be held individually responsible for the taxes, penalties and interest that result from your joint tax return
• Your refund could be withheld by the IRS to pay your spouse's financial obligations, such as unpaid child support or student loan default
• You are less likely to be able to deduct unreimbursed medical expenses, for example, the expenses not covered by your insurance plan
• You are less likely to be able to deduct your miscellaneous itemized deductions.

The prudent choice whether to file separately or jointly>>>just another one of those "special rights" the homosexual agenda is trying to get.

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The Right’s Twisted Blame Game

By Joe Conason writing in New York Observer

As Barack Obama’s economic advisers confront choices that vary from bad to worse in their mission to revive the financial sector and the broader economy, it is worth remembering that those choices were in essence inherited by the president, who is still new to his office.

Listening to his critics, especially on the right, it would be easy to believe that the president is personally responsible for ballooning deficits, gigantic bailouts, ridiculous bonuses, nationalized institutions and careening markets. It would be easy to believe but it’s entirely false—and merely the latest episode in an old political con game that is all too typical of Washington. Ever since Election Day 2008, the usual suspects have been hard at work, deflecting responsibility from the Bush administration (and the Republicans in Congress) for the catastrophic effects of conservative policy enacted during the past eight years.

Within days after Obama’s victory, as stock prices fell, radio host and ideological commissar Rush Limbaugh exclaimed that we were already in the “Obama recession.” In fact, the economy had been shrinking for nearly a year by then, and the market was responding to bad economic news rather than the election result. But facts are inconvenient for propaganda—especially when politicians and pundits are seeking to escape blame for policies that have failed. Among the boldest perpetrators of this con game over the past few decades is Limbaugh, who shares with his fellow Republicans a peculiar method of timing the blame for economic woe. When he was flacking for the first President Bush back in 1992, he wrote: “The worst economic period in the last 50 years was under Jimmy Carter, which led to the 1981-82 recession, a recession more punishing than the current one.”

But of course the president during the 1982 recession was not named Carter; that president was the sainted Ronald Reagan. In January 1981, Reagan took the oath, and within his first three months had rammed through a budget that contained his historic “supply-side” tax cuts. Reagan budget director David Stockman had created computer simulations supposedly showing that those tax cuts would result in 5 percent growth in gross domestic product during the following year. Years later, when simulation failed to materialize as reality, Stockman referred cynically to that prediction as the “rosy scenario”—and admitted that it was essentially a fraud. Contrary to the rosy scenario, 1982 was the worst year since the Great Depression, with negative growth of 2.2 percent.

According to conservative theory, the mere announcement of massive tax cuts for the rich by a Republican president ought to have stimulated euphoria in the markets and rapid growth. And according to that same theory, as explicated by Limbaugh, the prospect of a Democratic president with a progressive agenda was what drove the markets down last autumn. But there is a double standard at work here.

When a Democrat is elected president, he is responsible for economic contraction even if he will not be inaugurated for three months. When a Republican is actually president, he need not be held responsible, even well after he takes office. If that strikes you as inconsistent, then you are beginning to notice how blatant deception passes for conservative ideology. But the deception is even worse than it appears at first glance. The same Republicans in Congress and on the radio who lionize the late Reagan now complain bitterly about the tax increases on the wealthy in President Obama’s budget. What they never mention is that their conservative idol, faced with the recession that they blamed on his predecessor, likewise raised taxes during an economic slump. Terrified by the looming deficits that resulted from the supply-side tax cuts, the Reagan administration rolled back many of the cuts just a year after they had passed—instituting what then amounted to the largest tax increase in American history. Those tax hikes took back about a third of the cuts legislated in 1981.

But that historic tax increase is never mentioned when Republican legislators invoke Reagan—and they still love to blame Carter for their hero’s recession. So even as critics roast President Obama and his treasury secretary, honesty requires that they acknowledge that the problems faced by Obama and Timothy Geithner are not of their making. Obama has held office only since Jan. 20—and if held to the Reagan standard, he deserves at least a year to begin correcting the Bush recession.

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Obama's Modest Tax Policy

If Obama's tax plan is approved, a family making $500,000 a year would see its annual tax bill rise to nearly $132,000 from about $120,000, a 10 percent increase, said Clint Stretch, managing principal of tax policy at Deloitte Tax.

Over the past three decades, these families have seen their incomes double and triple while the rest of the country stagnated. Now Obama proposes to increase their tax bill by $12,000 — not even enough to get them back to the rates they were paying when Ronald Reagan left office. This is a very, very modest nod toward fiscal fair play, very much in keeping with Obama's modest optics. You'd have to drink several pitchers of Rush Limbaugh's Kool-Aid to think this counts as soaking the rich.

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