Kirkland perhaps you would care to explain...

[Kirkland Laing]

Also your "motherjones" article is just as if not more biased than my use of The Tax Foundation as a source. Sure you can claim it's "an independent nonprofit whose roots lie in a commitment to social justice implemented through first rate investigative reporting."

But just take a close look at who runs it: Monika Bauerlein, Clara Jeffery, Adam Hochschild, Steve Sielberstein, Janet Shenk, Anita Roddick, Meredith Spear....show me a conservative....and I'm even using the small c just to help you out

Show me an article written by any conservative on any economic or financial subject in the last thirty years which stands up to history or a cursory examination of the claims made in it. There are tons of these organisations funded bty conservative billionaires and they produce thousands of articles, but they're all nothing but a joke. You can't point to any single policy tidea they've had which has ever worked, everything they've advocated has been a total disaster. Here's a perfect example, this article has been emailing its way around recently :


This article appeared in The Business on March 21, 2007.


Listen up, Gordon Brown and George Osborne. Iceland has joined a growing list of nations that have sharply cut their corporate tax rates and adopted flat-rate individual income taxes, with hugely positive consequences on economic performance. With the expiration of a surtax last year, individuals now pay a flat rate of 22.75% of their taxable income to the central government.........


Iceland also granted independence to its central bank to create a stable monetary policy, and it has privatised numerous businesses.
All these reforms have helped Iceland climb from 26th to ninth in the "Economic Freedom of the World" rankings since 1990. According to the World Bank, Iceland is now one of the world's richest nations, ranking in the top 10 using either of two different methodologies. Unemployment in Iceland is almost non-existent, dropping to less than 2% in 2006, according to the International Monetary Fund............




Iceland's flat tax rate remains high. Other reforms, particularly the low corporate rate and the 10% tax on capital income, are more dramatic. From a political perspective, however, the Iceland reform is remarkable. It is the first time a western nation chooses no longer to impose discriminatory tax rates on successful taxpayers.
Tax reform and economic liberalisation have helped Iceland prosper. Let's hope that other industrial nations – and especially Brown and Osborne – will learn from Iceland's success.





Iceland Comes in From the Cold With Flat Tax Revolution




Conservative fre market policies are an historical footnote Lyle. They've bankrupted every major economy. The US government is terrified to admit all its banks are insolvent and that they're going to have to be nationalised. Britain, where laissez faire in the financial sector is even less than America is looking increasingly like Iceland. Europe, which ended regualtion of its banking system is in massive trouble too. European banks are all owed trillions by Eastern European countries, countries who embraced free market economics and are now basket cases. British banks are owed fortunes by Asian countries guilty of the same thing. At some point this year there's going to be a major credit default event and phase two of the current crisis is going to begin and it's all because governments ended regulation of the banks and let the market take care of the global economic system. Now we're going to pay the price of that. For you to advocate more of the same policies that got us here is stunning.

[Kirkland Laing]

The Obama administration's plan to fix the banking system was unveiled last week. At first glance it looks like a continuation of the Bush plan, which was to give trillions of dollars to insolvent banks to prevent them officially going bust. This plan requires American taxpayers to pay an ever-increasing part of their earnings as tribute to the government for the next few decades so that the government can then hand it out in corporate welfare to slightly more legitimate versions of Bernie Madoff. It won't fix the problem and will make the crisis much worse in the long run, delay the recovery etc. But it's in the interests of the people currently running the banks and their shareholders.

The one ray of sunshine in last week's announcements was that banks are going to be "stress tested" by banking inspectors to see if they're insolvent and if they're found to be so this would open the door to the only effective way to deal with the banking crisis, nationalising the banks.

Any bank happy that it's solvent has no worries about being stress tested. After being tested and found to be on a sound financial footing it would see its share price rise, new business come to it etc. A bank that knows it's bust would want to avoid any inspection of its books, as then the guys running the bank get sacked, the shareholders wiped out and the bank taken over by the government. So guess how the banks are reacting :

Wall Street is to lobby the Obama administration to relax its plans for stringent reviews of banks’ financial health and capital injections that could leave the government as a large shareholder in many of those institutions.
People close to the situation say financial groups were frustrated by the administration’s decision not to hold detailed talks with the industry before last week’s release of its $2,000bn (£1,390bn) financial rescue plan.
Administration officials said the announcement was always intended to be a framework rather than a final plan and stressed that input would be sought from industry “stakeholders” as details were fleshed out. “We’re going to get opinions from across the industry ... to help shape the final plan,” said one official.


FT.com / Companies / Banks - Wall St eyes influence over rescue plan


The outcome of this is going to decide a lot of the economic situation over the next couple of decades. Hopefully the Obama administration will have the balls to stand up to these guys and do the right thing. Where's Jimmy Carter when you need him?


In other news, Switzerland has taken the lead from Britain in the competition to see who can become the next Iceland first. Switzerland is a bywordfor banking prudence and security for investors but the full horrors of their banks' balance sheets are now being revealed. When the gnomes of Switzerland have fucked things up you know that you're in a serious crisis.

[El Kabong]

You keep praising Jimmy damn Carter and what did he accomplish Stagflation, the misery index, foreign relations impotence, and the malaise speech.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IlRVy7oZ58


....whatever happened to "voting for HOPE over fear"?


My article had facts and data in it too but noooo we must not look at that

[Kirkland Laing]

You keep praising Jimmy damn Carter and what did he accomplish Stagflation, the misery index, foreign relations impotence, and the malaise speech.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IlRVy7oZ58


....whatever happened to "voting for HOPE over fear"?


My article had facts and data in it too but noooo we must not look at that

Carter inherited double digit inflation and unemployment from Ford who had been too weak to take the tough decisions necessary to deal with them. Carter did it at the cost of his reelection. Obama faces a similar decision now and you'd better hope he's as strong as Caret was.

Exactly what are these facts you speak of? The whole point of your link was to claim that the US has the highest levels of corporation tax in the world, but that's bs*, so where are these facts you speak of?


*According to tge GAO, CBO etc. the US has the lowest rate in the developed world :

Today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a study on taxes paid by corporations. In what Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-ND) mildly called "a shocking indictment of the current tax system," the GAO found that about two-thirds of corporations operating in the US did not pay taxes annually from 1998 to 2005.
Now most corporations in America are start-ups or small, mom and pop operations that have adopted a corporate form to lower their tax rates. And a greater percentage of large corporations do pay some taxes. But in 2005, with corporate profits reaching new heights as a percentage of national income, the GAO found that over one-fourth -- 28% of large corporations paid no taxes. (It defined large corporations as those with assets of at least $250 million dollars or gross receipts of at least $50 million dollars.) They can tell you how to make $50 million dollars and not pay taxes.
Not surprisingly, the income collected from corporations has been declining as a percentage of GDP, with the burden transferred to your income and payroll taxes. According to a study by the Treasury Department, from 2000-2006, an average of 2.2% of GDP was collected in corporate taxes. This compares to an average of 3.4% in other industrial countries. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that, under current law, corporate revenues will decline to 1.9% of GDP by 2017, the lowest rate in the industrialised world.

.............................................

And George W Bush cut corporation taxes twice during his presidency, one of those cuts was $140 billion. And that was when $140 billion was a lot of money. Yet the economy created les than two million jobs between 2000-2008. Clinton raised corporate taxes and created 23 million jobs in his eight years. If cutting corporate taxes creates jobs where's your evidence for it?

[El Kabong]

Well buddy all I can say is that you had better start gathering info on Obama because if he's anything like Carter then he's going to really struggle with the support of the people.

BOBBY JINDAL 2012!!!

[killersheep]

Well buddy all I can say is that you had better start gathering info on Obama because if he's anything like Carter then he's going to really struggle with the support of the people.

BOBBY JINDAL 2012!!!

Do you want Jindal because he wants higher income taxes or because he wants the Patriot Act to be permanent?

[El Kabong]

Well there are a number of reasons, #1 He isn't sure if he wants to take the stimulus bill money....unlike most greedy governors who are chomping at the bit to get "their" money #2 When the Supreme Court said they couldn't put child molesters to death Jindal said ok and signed a bill into law that has castration as a punishment of child molesting #3 He did his job correctly when Hurricane Gustav came through

Bobby Jindal on the Issues

Those are his stances

...I personally would rather he lighten up in some areas (abortion, amendment for defining marraige, drugs) but all in all I like what he has done so far.

I'm not pro-abortion or pro-drugs or pro-gay marraige....but I think the individual states should handle those issues