New Taxes Won’t Turn Millionaires into Fleeing Tax Refugees
Any time the idea that the very wealthiest among us ought to pony up their fair share is raised, Republican lawmakers issue dire warnings. ”If—heaven forbid—millionaires are asked to pay a little more in taxes, they will flee like flocks of migratory birds looking for a warmer welcome elsewhere. Their vast wealth forever lost.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) used that shaky rationale when he vetoed a small increase on taxes for millionaires in each of the past two years. In March, he told the state legislature:
Ladies and gentlemen, if you tax them, they will leave.
But a new study shows Christie and others are wrong.
“Tax Flight Is a Myth” from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) finds:
Compelling evidence shows that this claim is false. The effects of tax increases on migration are, at most, small—so small that states that raise income taxes on the most affluent households can be assured of a substantial net gain in revenue.
Republican ‘Path to Prosperity’ Just Another Dead End
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The Republican budget plan unveiled yesterday privatizes Medicare, cuts corporate taxes and taxes for the wealthy, cuts Medicaid funding and repeals health care reform. Says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka:
Just as Republican governors and state legislators are assaulting the rights of working Americans under the guise of budget crises…Republican leaders in Congress are using the federal budget to further their own political agendas. Their credo is that tax giveaways to the super rich and Wall Street should be paid for on the backs of working people.
The budget plan offered by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and dubbed The Path to Prosperity, is nothing but “a standard wish-list of right-wing policies,” says Economic Policy Institute (EPI) Research and Policy Director John Irons.
This budget is not a serious attempt to govern, but a warming over of long-dead economic proposals.
Republican Senators Kill Jobs Program
Senate Republicans turned their backs on workers one more time before they left town for the Nov. 2 elections when they refused to allow a vote to keep alive a jobs program that has created nearly a quarter of million jobs. Many of those jobs were in some of the communities hardest hit by the nation’s unemployment crisis.
The program was a small part of the economic recovery package known as the TANF Emergency Fund and it directly subsidized jobs in government, nonprofit organizations and small businesses for unemployed workers.
On Tuesday, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.)—with the backing of Republican leaders—used Senate rules to block an extension of the TANF fund. The program expired today and the layoffs are beginning.
According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), the program subsidized jobs in 37 states for nearly
250,000 otherwise unemployed parents and youth—helping families, businesses, and communities across America weather the recession…. The fund has been a “win-win-win,” helping unemployed families find work, businesses expand capacity in a difficult economic environment, and local economies cope with the recession. Read the rest of this entry »
Obama Housing Plan ‘Aims Straight at the Heartland’
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As many as 9 million homeowners who are facing foreclosure or struggling with skyrocketing monthly mortgage payments could save their homes under the terms of a home rescue plan President Obama unveiled yesterday.
When the Bush economy began to tank more than a year ago with banks failing and jobs vanishing, foreclosure signs and abandoned houses began sprouting in working and middle class and even up-scale neighborhoods around the nation. The AFL-CIO first called for a homeowners’ lifeline in late 2007. But the Bush administration preferred to bailout Wall Street instead of throwing a lifeline to Main Street. Says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney:
The swift action by the Obama administration to address the housing crisis is a welcome and refreshing change.
For more than a year, the Bush administration ignored calls from the AFL-CIO and others to address a coming foreclosure tsunami. Tragically, in the months that followed, the deepening housing debacle turned millions of families’ lives upside down and strengthened its chokehold on our economy
