Smiley Faced Proto-Fascist Fox's Neil Cavuto Falsely Claims Tax Deal Would Increase Government Spending By $4 Trillion

Smiley Faced Proto-Fascist Fox's Neil Cavuto Falsely Claims Tax Deal Would Increase Government Spending By $4 Trillion

Fox News' Neil Cavuto claimed that the recent deal to avoid ending tax cuts for all Americans adds "4 trillion in new spending." But the $4 trillion estimate is not new spending; rather, it's lost revenue in comparison to what would have been collected if all the Bush tax cuts expired.

Discussing the January 1 tax deal on Your World, Cavuto claimed that the deal expands government spending "to the tune of $4 trillion over the next ten years."

An on-screen graphic also claimed the deal would add $4 trillion in spending over ten years:


But the $4 trillion estimate, which was published by the Congressional Budget Office, is lost revenue in comparison to what would have been collected if all the Bush tax cuts expired. Politico reported that the CBO's estimates "attribute most of the cost to lost revenues or payments on refundable tax credits." The Hill also pointed out that nearly all of the deficit increase would be due to an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts:
    The Senate deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff" will add roughly $4 trillion to the deficit when compared to current law, according to new numbers from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

    [...]

    The extension of lower tax rates for the bulk of the nation's taxpayers and the addition of a patch to the Alternative Minimum Tax would add roughly $3.6 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, the CBO said. Other individual, business and energy tax extenders would add another $76 billion. The extension of unemployment benefits would cost roughly $30 billion, and the so-called "doc fix" would tally another $25 billion through fiscal 2022.

In addition, according to Politico, "CBO begins its analysis from its March current law baseline that assumes all of Bush-era tax cuts would expire at New Year's Day, and therefore gives no deficit-reduction credit for the fact that the deal begins to raise rates for the wealthiest Americans." Politico continued:

    Yet since last spring the CBO itself has warned that if nothing were done, the so-called "fiscal cliff" combination of tax increases and automatic spending cuts could throw the country back into recession. In the same way, critics would argue that the deficit estimates now don't give enough credit to the improved economic growth that could result from the tax cuts.

 Neil Cavuto has been playiing the look at me I'm a nice harmless guy who would never lie game for years. he is a conman in a two-thousand dollar suit who gives America the shaft everyday with a constant stream of lies and spin. Neil is not an American, he is a Puppet of international radical Rupert Murdoch.

Thanks To Gerrymandering, Democrats Would Need To Win The Popular Vote By Over 7 Percent To Take Back The House

Why Republicans Don’t Care What the Nation Thinks About Morality and Fiscal Cliff

Why Republicans Don’t Care What the Nation Thinks About Morality and Fiscal Cliff

Are House Republicans – now summoned back to Washington by Speaker John Boehner — about to succumb to public pressure and save the nation from the fiscal cliff?

Don’t bet on it.

Even if Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell cooperates by not mounting a filibuster and allows the Senate to pass a bill extending the Bush tax cuts to the first $250,000 of everyone’s income, Boehner may not bring it to the House floor.

On a Thursday conference call with House Republicans he assured conservatives he was “not interested” in allowing such a vote if most House Republicans would reject the bill, according to a source on the call.

Democrats are confident that even if the nation technically goes over the cliff January 1, Boehner will bring such a bill to the floor soon after January 3 — once House Republicans have re-elected him Speaker – and it will get passed.

But this assumes Boehner and the GOP will be any more swayed by public opinion than they are now.

Public opinion is already running strongly in favor of President Obama and the Democrats, and against the GOP. In the latest CNN/ORC poll, 48 percent say they’ll blame Republicans if no deal is reached while 37 percent blame Obama. Confidence in congressional Republicans is hovering at about 30 percent; Obama is enjoying the confidence of 46 percent. And over half of all Americans think the GOP is too extreme.

Yet Republicans haven’t budged. The fact is, they may not care a hoot about the opinions of most Americans.

That’s because the national party is in disarray. Boehner isn’t worried about a challenge to his leadership; no challenger has emerged. The real issue is neither he nor anyone else is in charge of the GOP. Romney’s loss, along with the erosion of their majority in the House and Democratic gains in the Senate, has left a vacuum at the top.

House Republicans don’t run nationally. They run only in their own districts — which, because of gerrymandering, are growing even more purely Republican. Their major concern is being reelected in 2014, and their biggest potential obstacle in their way is a primary challenge from the right.

The combination of a weakened national party and more intense competition in primaries is making the Republican Party relatively impervious to national opinion.

This poses a large strategic problem for the Democrats. It could be an even bigger problem for the nation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. www.robertreich.org.

 Conservatism has always run on spitefulness and what is good for the wacky plastic patriots that run the conservative movement, not what is best for the USA.

Tell Radical Republicans No Deal - 8 Deficit Reducers That Are More Ethical—And More Effective—Than the 'Chained CPI'

8 Deficit Reducers That Are More Ethical—And More Effective—Than the 'Chained CPI'

News reports say the President’s proposed deal includes the “chained CPI,” which would impose drastic Social Security cuts and tax hikes for everybody but the wealthy. And HHouse Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says that “Democrats will stick with the President," even as he capitulates to GOP tax proposals.

They should both think again.

The “chained CPI” is being offered as part of a “deficit reduction” deal, even though Social Security is forbidden from contributing to the deficit. Even if you accepted this unreasoned act, it remains morally unacceptable to reduce spending on the backs of the elderly, women, the poor, veterans, disabled Americans, and the poor.

It’s even more unethical to do it when other options available could save much more money, And it’s even worse when we see who isn’t “sharing in the sacrifice” – a list that includes hedge fund managers, Wall Street gamblers, billionaires, drug companies, defense contractors, and tax-dodging corporations.

Independent estimates say that the “chained CPI” will slash Social Security benefits by $122 billion over the next ten years. Here are eight solutions that will save more money—and really will reduce the deficit—without compromising either our ethics or our sense of fairness:

1. Close multiple loopholes in the capital gains law: $174.2 billion. (1.42x)

Lawmakers could save nearly one and a half times as much money as they’ll get from stripping seniors, the disabled, veterans, and children of their benefits—1.42 times as much, to be precise—by closing capital gains loopholes.

They include the “carried interest” loophole, which taxes hedge fund managers’ service fees at the low “investors’” rate; the ‘blended rate,’ which taxes some quick derivatives trades as if they were long-term investments; the ability to ‘gift’ capital gains to avoid taxation; a dodge for bartering capital gains; and the ability to ‘defer’ gains to future years.

A more aggressive approach—eliminating the capital gains altogether—ould yield more than $900 billion in savings, but that might affect middle-class families and seniors. By using the “chained CPI,” America’s seniors, vets, and disabled are taking a hit so that hedge fund managers can keep their loopholes.

(Source: Calculations based on figures cited by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.)

2. Refuse to compromise on the President’s $250,000 figure for increased taxation: $183 billion (1.5x)

The President’s initial tax plan—the one he and his party ran on, the one that voters endorsed—called for letting the Bush tax cuts expire for income above $250,000. That would bring in an estimated $366 billion in added revenue over the next ten years. Now, say reports, he and the Republicans will agree on a figure that’s “somewhere in the middle.”

If true, the deal’s deficit reduction impact will be reduced by $183 billion. That’s one and a half times as much as the “chained CPI” will take from seniors, the disabled, veterans, and their dependents. They’ll pay—so that people earning $250,000 and up don’t have to.

(Source: CBPP estimate, divided in half.)

3. Reduce the budget for US overseas military bases by 20 percent: $200 billion. (1.6x)

The United States maintains 702 military ‘installations’ in 63 foreign countries (it has 4,471 bases altogether), according to the Defense Department’s annual budget statement.

These figures don’t include bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’re talking about our military presence in nations like Germany, South Korea, and Japan. While the total cost of these bases is kept secret, the best analysis I’ve seen estimates their ten-year cost at approximately $1 trillion.

A twenty percent cut in that budget is extremely modest under the circumstances, and would save 1.6 times as much as the “chained CPI” cut.

(Sources: US Defense Department; David Vine via Juan Cole and Tom Engelhardt.)

4. Allow the government to negotiate with drug companies: $220 billion. (1.8x)

Current law specifically forbids the government from using its negotiating power to obtain lower rates for Medicare prescriptions—even though much of the research behind the drugs involved was performed at government expense.

If we allow the government to negotiate with drug companies, that will save an estimated $220 billion. That’s 1.8 times as much money as the “chained CPI”—and it comes from the drug companies, not vulnerable Americans.

(Source: Outterson and Kesselheim, Health Affairs.)

5. Enact DoD-friendly cuts to military budget: $519 billion. (4.25x)

A defense think tank conducted an exercise to help the military prepare for the possibility of forced spending cuts under sequestration (the so-called “fiscal cliff”). It convened what it called “a series of strategic choices exercises,” using “experts from across the defense community,” in order to decide how best to cut $519 billion from defense spending cuts over ten years.

The participants were not peaceniks—most were in the defense community, while some were Congressional staffers—and the think tank’s staffed by ex-military and military-friendly consultants. Nevertheless, they were able to come up with options that seemed acceptable by balancing short-term readiness with long-term preparation.

It was a surprisingly smart exercise—and it sounds like a very good way to build consensus around defense cuts (even though that was not its intent). A project leader described the exercise as “listening to the future,” while the report itself said that “Failing to recognize and make strategic choices is effectively a form of self-sequestration.”

We can listen to our future selves, since we’ll all need Social Security some day, and say: Make these cuts. That’s better than “self-sequestering” by letting politicians cut Social Security.

(Source: “Strategic Choices: Navigating Austerity,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments)

6. Enact Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s ‘Fairness in Taxation Act’ for very high earners: $872.5 billion. (7.15x)

In 2011 Rep. Jan Schakowsky introduced the “Fairness in Taxation Act,” which would have created additional tax brackets for very high earners. As Rep. Schakowsky noted at the time, today’s tax structure “fails to distinguish the merely ‘well-off’ from the ‘super-duper rich.’”

The bill adds the following tax brackets:

• $1-10 million: 45%

• $10-20 million: 46%

• $20-100 million: 47%

• $100 million to $1 billion: 48%

• $1 billion and over: 49%

It also taxes capital gains and dividend income as ordinary income for those taxpayers with income over $1 million.

The very wealthy would still be paying much less than they paid under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, when the top rate was 91 percent. For that matter, these rates are lower than those we had under most American Presidents of the last century.

This bill brings in more than seven times the “chained CPI” savings by asking the ultra-rich to pay their fair share, instead of targeting seniors and other Americans in need.

(Sources: Rep. Jan Schakowsky; Economic Policy Institute.)

7. Eliminate corporate tax loopholes: $1.24 trillion (10x)

A 2007 Treasury Department report (prepared under President Bush) concluded that “corporate tax preferences”—that is, loopholes—resulted in lost revenue of $1,241,000,000,000 over a ten-year period.

That number looks pretty good—especially when it’s stacked up against the “chained CPI” figure of $122 billion.

If we can’t afford to honor our commitment to America’s veterans and their families, or to our seniors, or to the disabled, we sure can’t afford these corporate tax loopholes – excuse me, I meant “preferences."

(Source: United States Department of the Treasury background paper.)

8. Create a financial transactions tax for high-volume Wall Street trading: $1.8 trillion (14.75x)

And here’s our grand prize winner: A financial transaction tax like the one they’ve imposed in the United Kingdom. The UK tax rate is tiny—0.25 percent of each transaction, levied on both parties—but the overall impact is substantial.

Not only would this tax bring in substantial revenue, it would also discourage the massive volume of ultra-high-speed computer-driven transactions that have turned the stock market into both an imperceptible ‘black box’ and a real-time mega-casino operating in nanoseconds.

‘Algorithmic trading’ and other forms of Wall Street speculation don’t build economic value or encourage wise investment. Instead they’re used to drive the kinds of speculation that’s driving out smarter investments – and brought our economy to its knees in 2008.

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates that a UK-style tax would bring in $1.8 trillion over ten years. It could also lead to healthier investment—and potentially might even help prevent another crash. More than 200 economists signed a letter supporting the concept of a financial transaction tax.

So the choice is clear: Tax the folks who ruined the economy, and protect the rest of us in the process, or ask seniors, etc. to sacrifice needed benefits. Guess which one they’re leaning toward right now?

(Source: Dean Baker, “The Deficit-Reducing Potential of a Financial Speculation Tax“)

Conclusion These figures don’t even include the tax hike that the “chained CPI” will impose on all but the highest levels of income. But even without those numbers, the public already hates the idea. Confirming our interpretation of polling data yesterday, a new Washington Post poll shows that 60 percent of the people polled found the idea “unacceptable” and only 34 percent found it acceptable.

Imagine how they’ll feel when they learn that’s it coming anyway – and that it’s being used to protect hedge fund managers, Wall Street tycoons, Big Pharma, military contractors, and tax-evading corporations?

Democrats should not “stick with the President” on this one—and the President should not stick with this proposal.

President Obama is being nice. He is offering up things that Republicans should like if they were serious and genuinely concerned about the debt. Conservatives are not concerned. They are happy to let middle-class families eat dust. The president should let the wacky cult of conservatism hang by it's own petard, the debt they created with no plan to pay it back except giving seniors, vets, and children the shaft.

Why is America Hating Wacko John Lott all over the media being asked for serious input on gun laws?

SCOTUS Case on Patenting Human Genes Will Likely inflict "Devastating Harm on the American People"

SCOTUS Case on Patenting Human Genes Will Likely inflict "Devastating Harm on the American People"

(Editor’s Note: Last week, the Supreme Court decided to hear an intellectual property case where it will decide [3] whether human genes can be patented. The case started several years ago when the Public Patent Foundation filed a lawsuit with the ACLU challenging some patents that concerned genes affecting breast cancer and ovarian cancer. Daniel Ravicher is one of the lead attorneys on the case. He was interviewed by Steven Rosenfeld for AlterNet radio.)

Steven Rosenfeld: Daniel, first, congratulations for having the Supreme Court take the case.  Were you surprised?    

Daniel Ravicher: Well, thank you for having me on and thanks for the congratulations. No, we weren’t surprised that the Supreme Court agreed to hear our case because the lower court had come to such an incorrect decision. In fact, the lower court decision was a split decision amongst three judges. That was even further proof that the lower court decision was not correct.

SR: As your brief says the key central question is, ‘Can genes be patented?’ When you get into the brief, you have some really interesting language, where you talk about the laws of nature versus what I would call the products of man. Talk about that distinction.

DR: Well, the Constitution gives Congress the power to grant patents to inventors in order to promote progress. The theory is that if we grant patents to people who come up with an invention that will incentivize people to create these inventions.

It’s always been understood that if you were to grant patents on things that God gave us, the laws of nature, E=mc2, or natural phenomenon, like gold or water, that would be too much power given to the patent holder. They then can use that patent to exclude other people from making or using the covered thing. So there’s a line between that, what God gave us, that cannot be patented and that, what humans make. Now of course, everything a human makes comes from what God gave us, right? Humans don’t create materials out of thin air. They change what’s been given to us.  So there has to be enough of a change from what we were given by God to what we’ve actually created with human ingenuity.

SR: Now in this case, you have a company, a biotech firm that has isolated two genes that are used to identify whether a woman is likely to have breast cancer or ovarian cancer. In your brief, you discuss not only how they’ve sought patents for these but in the application and use of these, they’ve actually prevented other researchers from studying these genes. They’ve prevented women from getting second opinions based on other tests that cannot be developed that are tied to using these genes. Talk about why that is, first of all, a constitutional violation and why it’s just so offensive. 

DR: Let’s remember that these patents were granted by our federal government. Some bureaucrat in the Washington DC area decided that it was smart to give one company the exclusive control over the patented thing and eliminate every other American’s right to do that thing. In this case, the patent holder claims to have been the first entity to realize that if you have certain mutations in a couple of different places along your genetic code in every cell of your body, then you’ve got an increased risk of breast or ovarian cancer.

The vast, vast majority of breast cancer is not genetically caused. It’s through environmental and behavioral decisions of the woman or man. Men can also get breast cancer. But there is a small percentage of people who can get breast cancer because they received genetic mutations from one of their parents. In fact, that type of breast cancer is generally much more aggressive and begins much earlier in life. So this is critical information, and because there’s no exception from patent infringement for fair use, unlike in copyright law and trademark law where we do have exceptions for fair use or the exercise of constitutional rights, there’s no constitutional exception in the patent laws.  Any making or using of the patented thing is infringement.

We represent women, real women, who have a family history of breast and ovarian cancer that led their doctors to tell them that they should have their genes looked at. It’s almost as simple today as having your temperature taken by a thermometer. To do it, you actually have to withdraw blood from the patient, and you just run it through a machine, and the machine prints out the answers for you. It’s not very difficult at all. In the near future, most patients will likely have their entire genome mapped so that they can understand what diseases they’re at risk for.

The patent holder, in this case, wasn’t letting anyone else do that or offer that service, even to poor women who couldn’t afford their test, because they were making super-competitive profits.  They were charging ten times as much, if not more, to do the test than it actually cost to do. They had no sympathies if a woman wasn’t capable of affording it. As you mentioned, they wouldn’t let women even who paid them to take the test, if they wanted to get a second opinion from a different lab, from a different person doing the analysis, the patent holder wouldn’t let them do that. Women had to make very life-altering decisions about prophylactic surgeries, to either undergo or not undergo, based on just this one company’s opinion about their genetic code. We have proof that they had given patients both false negatives and false positives in the past, which is not necessarily because they’re bad guys, it’s just because in all things medical there can be mistakes and errors. That’s why we need second opinions. It’s because of their aggressive use of these patents to impede on women’s rights, that’s why we took the case. 

SR: I’ve read, in some of the business press, like ‘corporate counsel’ columns, that the patent bar was baffled that there would be a civil liberties argument here. Indeed, in your brief, you say that there are First Amendment violations, and I think there’s also Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.  What are those constitutional infringements?   

DR: The Article 1, Section 8 issue is that granting these patents violates the Constitution in that they don’t promote progress. They actually deter progress by granting a monopoly over a fact of nature to one entity. The First Amendment breaches come in because these patents can be used to impede the speech between doctors and their patients. It also impedes upon thought, because these patents are so broad that if you merely recognize that someone does or does not have an alteration in one of these genes and then correlate that to the risk or lack of risk for early-onset aggressive breast and ovarian cancer, you’ve infringed their patent just by having that thought. So the government is now granting patents, making it illegal to think certain thoughts, to think about science, to think about knowledge, and that impedes upon the First Amendment.

SR: It’s like a prior restraint in a sense? 

DR: The government acts… A lot of people try to say, ‘Well, this is a private company.’ The government is an actor here that is granting… Every Tuesday there are 4,500 things you’re no longer allowed to do, because the patent office granted 4,500 patents every Tuesday. There is insufficient checks and balances to ensure that when they do that, it is justified. They have a financial conflict of interest. The patent office makes 10 times as much money when it grants a patent as opposed to when it denies it. So there are all sorts of problems with our patent system, which have caused it to create real serious negative harms to the public, like in our case.  

SR: I’m wondering how much this case is indicative of larger trends? Whether it’s problems with the patent system itself, as you were just discussing, or since we’re in this ascendant biotech era, how many other applications are out there? I wonder, for example, if you really can distinguish between patenting human genes or Monsanto doing seed stock? I know you’ve been involved in that litigation.

DR: Unfortunately, I hope I’m wrong, but I think this is just the first of many instances where our patent system is going to be causing devastating harm to the American people. Because, to date, most American people don’t realize how the patent system negatively affects them. If they know anything at all, they think patents are rewards for garage inventors. But that’s not at all the case. The patent system is an excuse for corporate welfare, where the government intervenes in free-markets and freedom and gives control to corporations. It’s in some ways, I’ve called it ‘outsourced fascism.’ There’s no adequate control. Our patent office is complete rubber stamp that gives corporate America anything it wants so it can raise prices and reduce availability.

We go and talk about alternative fuels. You know who’s got the most patents on alternative fuels? The oil companies. Why? Because they want to keep those technologies from being developed and brought to the marketplace.

That a corporation would even consider wanting, or the courts consider granting a patent on genes is a result of the decadent, purely profit driven culture of conservative Republican thinking. Money and profits are the only morality. Other considerations are just excess baggage to the conservative concept of values.

10 Things Republicans Don't Want The Nation to Know About the Fiscal Cliff