From TruthDig
By Marie Cocco

When the next president takes office six months from now, it will be both too late and too early to do anything very substantial about the economy.

Too late, because the mortgage, banking and energy crises have been so long in the making and their tentacles reach in so many directions that their stranglehold on Americans’ well-being may have only begun to be felt. The first real chance for the new president to make a seismic shift in economic direction isn’t apt to be in 2009. It’s more likely to be in 2010.

That is when the Bush tax cuts—essentially, the only economic policy the current president has deliberately put in place during his two terms in office—are set to expire. And that is when future President John McCain or future President Barack Obama must decide if he is going to be a caretaker of conventional wisdom or a creative leader who at last breaks the psychology of using tax policy as a substitute for a broader, bolder economic plan.

Using taxes as the centerpiece of—or as a substitute for—a more comprehensive economic policy is the idea that has dominated Washington since the rise of Reaganism nearly three decades ago. McCain at first seemed to have shaken it off when he initially opposed the Bush cuts as too costly and misguided. But then he reverted to me-too-ism in order to please conservative Republicans whose support he needed to grasp his party’s nomination.

Obama has shown a milder orthodoxy, but it is orthodox nonetheless. As Bill Clinton did, he would use the tax code to encourage endeavors he finds worthy, whether it’s getting more low- and middle-income people who do not itemize their taxes to be able to deduct their mortgage interest or helping students attend college. He embraces tax cuts for everyone he considers to be middle class, but generally defines the middle as those who make up to $250,000.

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From Salon
By Justin Jouvenal

As gas and food prices soar and job losses mount, John McCain launched a new effort this week to reassure Americans that he has a plan to bring back economic growth. McCain spoke at a town-hall event in Denver Monday and will travel to the swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania on Wednesday and Michigan and Wisconsin on Thursday and Friday to spread his economic message.

The economy has vaulted past Iraq and terrorism as the most pressing concern on voters’ minds this election season, and both McCain and Barack Obama are trying to show they feel voters’ pain. McCain has called for help for those facing mortgage foreclosures and has pledged to balance the federal budget by 2013. But the centerpiece of his economic plan is a tax-cut proposal more sweeping than anything envisioned by George W. Bush.

“The choice in this election is stark and simple,” McCain said at the Denver town hall. “Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won’t. I will cut them where I can.”

But according to a respected, independent group of tax-policy experts, McCain’s plan would balloon the deficit and provide a windfall to the wealthy while affording only nominal relief to middle-class taxpayers. McCain has moved toward the Republican base on a handful of issues this campaign season, but his tax plan might actually shift the erstwhile deficit hawk to the right of the current president.

Read more Radical Tax Plan

From KATU

Relax it and tax it.

That’s the motto behind a new cannabis initiative that would allow Oregon’s state-controlled liquor stores to legally sell marijuana to adults.

Initiative backers said their plan would send 90 percent of the proceeds from the state’s sale of marijuana to Oregon’s General Fund, which could lower Oregonians’ state tax burden.

Smaller percentages would go to funding drug abuse education and treatment programs.

The initiative would also legalize the growing of hemp, a non-drug variant of cannabis that can be used to make industrial-strength fibers and bio-fuels.

Supporters claim that allowing cannabis cultivation and sales through state liquor stores would add $300 million in combined tax revenues and savings to Oregon’s budget.

Paul Stanford of the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act said the measure would also put a dent in illegal dealing of the weed.

“We want to take marijuana out of the hands of children and substance abusers, who control the market today, and put it in the hands of the state’s liquor control commission and the age limit of 21 will be strictly enforced,” Stanford said at a press briefing.

Read more Tax It

From The Guardian UK
By Michael Tomasky

It’s economy week, as both candidates will travel around touting their economic plans. Barack Obama starts in North Carolina, and John McCain in Colorado.

We’ve been talking a lot about flip-flops in the past week, some of them real, most of them imaginary. But I’ve been astonished at how few people have mentioned the obvious mother of all flip-flops in this campaign so far – John McCain’s embrace of the Bush administration tax cuts.

In 2001, McCain was one of just two Republican senators to vote against the tax cuts. “I think it still devotes too much of it to the wealthiest Americans,” he said at the time. And now? Well of course big tax cuts are the anchor of his economic plan. But what tells us more about the man is where and how he indicated the change.

It was last December at a sit-down with the Wall Street Journal editorial board when McCain first made unequivocally clear that as president, he would fight to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent (some are set to expire in 2010). Boy, now that’s courage. Remember the story of the French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, who saw a crowd marching through Paris and reportedly said: “There go my people, I must find out where they are going so I can lead them”? Thus, McCain to Paul Gigot: Tell me where to go, master, and I will lead you there!

This week, McCain will travel the country explaining why these tax cuts – which so disproportionately are doing exactly what the 2001 McCain said they would, benefiting the very wealthiest Americans to the tune of nearly a half-trillion dollars - have to be made permanent. This is not a nip or a tuck or a refinement. This is a blatant and complete reneging on past principle.

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From Der Spiegel
By Chris Farrell

McCain’s tax cuts would help those with very high incomes; Obama would offer breaks to low- and middle-income earners and increase the burden on the rich.

Hardly anyone disagrees with this statement: The nation’s tax system is a mess. The US tax code is riddled with far too many deductions, credits, exemptions, exclusions, phase-ins, and phase-outs. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman noted half a century ago that constant changes in the tax code discourage long-term planning by households and businesses. He was right, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats and Republicans from tinkering with taxes ever since the income tax was imposed in 1913.

Perhaps it’s the safest forecast in politics and economics that history will repeat itself when it comes to the tax code. It’s going to get even more complex next year, since both John McCain and Barack Obama are proposing major tax initiatives.

For instance, among his proposals, McCain wants to make the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent (with the exception of the estate tax repeal), phase in a two-thirds increase in the dependent exemption, and offer a voluntary alternative tax with two rates and a larger standard deduction and exemption.

Essential Difference

Obama is more aggressive in the number of his proposed tax plans. They range from creating income-related subsidies for health insurance to refundable “Making Work Pay” credits and “Universal Mortgage” credits. He’ll increase the maximum capital-gains tax to 25 percent. He will keep some of the 2001 and 2003 tax laws, such as the child-credit expansions and the 10 percent, 15 percent, 25 percent, and 28 percent income rates.

Read more Contrasting Proposals

From The Washington Post
By Ruth Marcus

By the time Congress finishes the latest “emergency” war spending bill, a mere seven years into the emergency, the cost of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will have exceeded $860 billion. For the first time in American history, every penny of that amount will have been borrowed. For the first time, billions more will have been borrowed to finance tax cuts in the midst of war.

Confronting the debt amassed during the Revolutionary War, George Washington was determined to pay it off, warning against “ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.” Confronting the enormous costs about to be piled up in Iraq, George Bush determined to press for new tax cuts — not just “little bitty tax relief,” as he put it, but hundreds of billions more.

“This contrast — between an active war effort on one hand and substantial tax cuts on the other — has no precedent in American history,” three tax historians explain in “War and Taxes,” a new book from the Urban Institute. Rather, since the War of 1812, “special taxes have supported every major military conflict in our nation’s history.”

As Steven Bank, Kirk Stark and Joseph Thorndike show, presidents and lawmakers have not always been eager to impose taxes to pay war costs. But historically, Republicans and Democrats alike ultimately acknowledged the necessity — fiscal and moral — of shared sacrifice. “I think the boys in Korea would appreciate it more if we in this country were to pay our own way instead of leaving it for them to pay when they get back,” said House Speaker Sam Rayburn.

Read more Debt

From Common Dreams
By Larry Beinhart

The Great Republican Disaster, from Reagan to Bush the Lesser, has been the Time of the Unreal. (Yes, people possessed by the unreal are very much like the undead. They’re mindless, lethal, they infect others, they’re very hard to stop, and their existence is a complete surprise to people who live in the real world.)Those forces of darkness derive their power from their Great Myths.

No matter how powerful a myth is, if it is essentially false, reality has certain methods fighting back. It uses Failure, If failure fails, it moves on, through Fiasco, to Disaster.

Recently there have been signs of hope.

Yes. Hope means Obama. He speaks of reality, whether it’s about race or a gas tax holiday.

Lo and behold, people actually have heard, listened, and agreed.

Let us seize the time and create New Truths, based on Reality, to replace the Old Myths based on Bullshit.

Old Myth: 9/11 was an Act of War.
New Truth: 9/11 was a Criminal Act.

Osama bin Laden was not a head of state or an agent of a state. He was a religion crazed gangster with a relatively small gang. His acts were crimes.

To elevate them to acts of war was to elevate him.

Worse, it created the wrong response. So wrong that he’s still out there. Proof that you can commit a mass murder against the United States and get away with it.

Only when we redefine it, will we be able to figure out a sane response to replace the current insanity.

Read more New Truths

From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

Double standards are endemic in American journalism. But Cindy McCain, wife of the Republican presidential candidate, displayed poor taste in flaunting her family’s special immunity from press scrutiny. Declaring on NBC’s Today that she would “never” release her income tax returns even if she becomes first lady, the Arizona beer heiress showed no concern that she and her husband will have to meet the same tests as other would-be White House occupants—ever.

Unfortunately, the arrogance of Mrs. McCain is probably well founded.

While her personal net worth is estimated somewhere north of $50 million, she can surely rely upon the discretion of right-wing media organizations and commentators, which so far have given her and her husband a free pass on the income tax question. In contrast to their unrelenting demands for absolutely complete disclosure by Bill and Hillary Clinton over alleged or suspected conflicts of interest, the so-called conservative media have remained mum about Mrs. McCain.

That silence similarly contrasts with the hell raised four years ago over Teresa Heinz Kerry’s reluctance to reveal her tax returns alongside those of her spouse, the Democratic presidential nominee and senator, John Kerry. Back then The Weekly Standard ran a smirking headline calling her Mr. Kerry’s “sugar mommy” for a column that salivated over the “lavish lifestyle” and “vacation homes” to which her tax returns would draw attention. The Standard editors didn’t even pretend to any substantive concern. They just wanted to play the politics of envy and elitism.

But the National Review’s editors cited weightier reasons for curiosity, including the very size of the Heinz Kerry holdings and the use of her money to finance her husband’s presidential campaign, “at least in its bleaker moments,” as well as the “potential … for conflicts (or the perception of conflicts) of interest.” So did The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial that said the Kerrys would be “the richest couple ever to live in the White House.

Read more Double Standard

From The LA Times
By Erica Sackin

Recession got you down? Not to worry. Any day now, everyone who filed a tax return and earned less than $75,000 last year can look forward to some extra cash. The Bush administration put the first recession-special tax rebate checks in the mail, just in time to save our failing economy.

Or not. Food and gasoline prices are on the rise. Home prices are crashing. Our economy has been shedding jobs consistently since January. Not surprisingly, the Federal Reserve came out with a study last week showing that personal debt — that is, not including mortgages — rose a sharp $15.3 billion in March, hitting an all-time high of $2.6 trillion.

Given all this, Bush’s rebate consolation prize isn’t doing much to console me or, I doubt, anyone else of my generation. I’m a gainfully employed 27-year-old, and I use my credit card to buy food because I only have $12 in my bank account. I fear getting sick — not because I don’t have insurance but because I couldn’t afford the co-pays and deductible. It’s hard for me to see how an extra $300 or $600 is really going to be, as Bush promised, “a shot in the arm to keep a fundamentally strong economy healthy.”

Someone please tell me, are these rebates going to do anything more than help us pay off our credit card bills?

Americans 25 to 34 carry more debt than any other generation in history. According to the public policy research institute Demos, college graduates leave school with about $20,000 in student loans. We also have more credit card debt: $4,358 on average, 47% higher than young people in 1989. Our job security is way down too, with an increasing number of us being hired for “temp” jobs instead of as full-time employees. Whatever the bosses call it — “perma-lancer,” “independent contractor” — it translates the same: long hours with no benefits and no severance when they let you go.

Read more Gen Red

From The Huffington Post
By Jared Bernstein

I hold in my hand one of the most important pieces of paper in America: Table T08-0071, an analysis of candidate John McCain’s tax plan.

OK, it’s not really in my hand because I’m typing, but I’m looking at it carefully, and you should too. It is a table constructed by the Tax Policy Center’s steely-eyed tax analysts, and it reveals nothing less than McCain’s secret plan to diminish the US government beyond recognition. If he gets his way, conservatives will finally be able to say they’ve achieved the goal set out by Grover Norquist: to get government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

The numbers in the table show the revenue loss to the Federal government from McCain’s proposed tax cuts. In the far right corner is the 10-year total: -$5.7 trillion.

People deride the Republican candidate as “McSame,” implying a continuation of Bushonomics as well as the president’s foreign policy. But from the perspective of domestic policy, it’s much worse. Sure, McCain extends the Bush tax cuts but that’s the least of it. At $1.7 trillion they amount to less than a third of the damage.

Note also that the big ticket tax cuts-eliminating the alternative minimum tax and lowering the corporate tax-both follow on another Bush tradition of exacerbating market-driven (i.e., pre-tax) inequalities by cutting high-end taxes the most.

As I stresshere , McCain’s plans to pay for these tax cuts amount to filling a crater with a teaspoon of sand. Earmarks won’t get you there, so he’ll have to go after discretionary spending. In fact, he’s already suggesting a freeze in such spending, excluding defense, of course. Sound inoffensive until you consider that we’re talking about kids’ health care, education, child care, training for displaced workers, environmental and labor protections, and dozens more programs that lots of people actually need and care about.

Read more McCain