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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (46473)	6/20/2013 3:01:48 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 85487

Koan doesn't converse with us, he just rants

To: Road Walker who wrote (46473)	6/20/2013 5:24:31 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Respond to of 85487

You don't find it odd that dems are the pawns of big business? CBO says immigration bill aids investors, not wage earners 1:01 AM 06/20/2013 Neil Munro White House Correspondent The Senate’s pending immigration bill would boost investors’ and owners’ share of the economy for at least twenty years, and shrink some Americans’ wages and salaries for at least 10 years, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.” The higher rate of return would also push up the interest rates paid by American taxpayers for the federal government’s $17 trillion debt, the report says. The threat of lost wages has spurred opposition from populist conservatives, including Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, and from left-wing politicians, such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Populist conservatives who oppose the immigration bill, and some progressives who back the bill, also have long bemoaned the declining percentage of new wealth earned via blue-collar wages and professionals’ salaries. President Barack Obama strongly backs the immigration rewrite, but has complained about the trend. “In all countries around the world, you’re seeing growing inequality, and so we have to find ways to make sure that ladders of opportunity exist for those at the bottom, and that profits and increased productivity all does not just benefit those at the top,” Obama told a German audience in Berlin. Last September, those worries were buttressed by a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, which showed that labor’s share of income has dropped by roughly 10 points since the early 2000s. In turn, the share of income earned via capital has increased by the same percentage. The federal Bureau of Economic Affairs estimates that labor’s share fell from roughly 67 percent to 58.2 percent. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the share fell from 75 percent in 1979 to 67 percent in 2007. The result of this economic shift is that economic inequality widened, according to the authors of the reserve’s report, Margaret Jacobson and Filippo Occhino. But once the economy recovers, the widening gap “will be reversed as the recovery continues … [and] the labor share will pick up and converge to its long-run trend value,” says the September report. The pending bill will roughly double the inflow of immigrants over the next 20 years to roughly 46 million, or about 1 immigrant for every 7 Americans. At least 85 percent of the immigrants will be low-skilled, and will not pay enough in taxes to cover the cost of routine government benefits, said Robert Rector, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation. “It is very difficult to imagine that those households could pay enough in taxes to pay for their benefits,” he told reporters Wednesday. Read more: dailycaller.com

To: Road Walker who wrote (46473)	6/22/2013 11:36:08 AM
From: Brumar89	1 Recommendation Recommended By Thehammer Respond to of 85487

20 Reasons I Detest The Government John Hawkins \| Jun 22, 2013 1) Our own government chides those of us who pay taxes for being greedy because we don't want to give the politicians even more of our money to do things we don't want done at any price. 2) Increasingly, every bill that is proposed in D.C. seems to be crafted with the hope that at least 51% of the American people are ignorant or not paying attention to what the legislation actually does. 3) When there's a slip-up and members of Congress and their staff are * gasp * expected to follow the same laws as the rest of us on something like Obamacare, they immediately start looking for a way out. 4) Having an unelected bureaucrat decide that your property is a "swampland" because it rained yesterday or that you didn't follow some arcane legislation can lead to your spending years of your life dealing with an army of government regulators in court and costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees; yet the bureaucrats pay no price at all for being wrong. 5) IRS employees like Lois Lerner can take the 5th Amendment when they're asked to testify about breaking the law to go after American citizens, but we're not allowed to take the 5th Amendment when the IRS demands information from us. 6) Who in the government was held responsible and punished for Fast and Furious? Benghazi? The subprime crisis caused by the government? Wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on Solyndra? Detroit going bankrupt? The IRS scandal? Giving someone as unstable as Bradley Manning access to classified data? How about allowing eight of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers to be registered to vote? The correct answer: nobody, which is exactly the problem. 7) The average government employee makes more than the people who are paying his salary. 8) If the economy goes bad, you may have to tighten your belt, but our government NEVER thinks it should have to cut back on its spending. 9) Inconvenient campaign promises by politicians are treated as almost entirely unrelated to what they do while governing. 10) There's so much stagecraft and deliberate deception in D.C. that it's impossible for the average person to understand what's going on without having someone who understands politics explaining it to him. 11) CBO scores on legislation are treated as legitimate and meaningful despite the fact that the rules have been rigged in such a way that the CBO ALMOST ALWAYS DRAMATICALLY UNDERESTIMATES the cost of government programs. 12) When Congress is in session, you won't find a more corrupt or dishonest group of human beings all gathered in any one place outside of a prison. 13) Our Congress REGULARLY votes on pork-laden bills written in legalese that NO ONE has actually read cover to cover. 14) We have so many laws and regulations that almost every American is breaking the law somehow on a daily basis. 15) When the Republican Party and Democrat Party collaborate in a bipartisan manner, it's almost always to screw the American people in order to help some influential or deep-pocketed special interest group. 16) Our politicians in D.C. are just as corrupt as those South American politicians we laugh at for taking bribes. The only difference is our politicians are smarter about it. A bribe is illegal, but giving their relative an incredibly highly paid job or slipping an earmark into a bill that will end up helping their investments to thrive is considered par for the course in D.C. 17) Our overbearing politicians and bureaucrats feel entitled to tell you how to run almost every aspect of your life. They think they know better than you what health care you should have, where your kids should be allowed to go to school, what you should be able to do with your own property, what TV, toilet or shower head you should be allowed to buy, what light bulb you should have and even what size of soda you should be able to drink. 18) The priority scale for most politicians goes campaign contributors, special interest groups, political bosses, lobbyists and then if they're in a competitive district, their constituents. Very few politicians in D.C. ever seem to give a thought to what's good for the country. 19) Almost every bill that passes is sold with lies that later turn out not to be true; yet the bills aren't repealed and the politicians who deceived the American people are rarely held accountable. 20) We have government employees whom we put into office, whose salaries we pay, telling US what to do and acting as if we work for them. townhall.com

To: Road Walker who wrote (46473)	6/22/2013 11:40:35 AM
From: Brumar89	1 Recommendation Recommended By Paul Smith Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

IRS sent refunds to 23,994 undocumented immigrants at same address Can anyone be so incompetent? Or is it intentional? Sounds like criminal schemes to steal from the federal government WITH IRS complicity. June 22, 2013 by Michael Dorstewitz 11 Comments The Internal Revenue Service sent 23,994 tax refunds to a single Atlanta address for a total of $46,378,040 in 2011 — and each of the refunds averaging over $1,900 went to undocumented immigrants, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Although that single Atlanta address was perhaps the most egregious example, it was by no means the only one. As it turns out, “four of the top ten addresses to which the IRS sent thousands of tax refunds to ‘unauthorized’ aliens were in Atlanta,” as reported by CNS News. Nor is the problem limited to Atlanta or even Georgia. Similar examples can be found all over the country. Here in South Florida, the IRS sent 1,972 refunds to “unauthorized” recipients totaling $2,256,302, all going to a single address in Palm Beach Gardens. Other cities hard hit with thousands of refunds going to a single address include Oxnard, Calif., Raleigh, N.C., Phoenix, Ariz., San Jose, Calif. and Alvin, Calif. In each case, millions in improper IRS refunds were sent to one residence. The problem began in 1996, when the IRS began issuing Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers to undocumented immigrants who are “not authorized to work in the United States.” Three years later, the Treasury Inspector General reported the problem with this practice. “The IRS issues Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) to undocumented aliens to improve nonresident alien compliance with tax laws. This IRS practice seems counter-productive to the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s (INS) mission to identify undocumented aliens and prevent unlawful alien entry,” TIGTA warned in that long-ago report. But the practice continues, and the problem persists. Two IRS employees eventually went to a member of Congress “alleging that IRS management was requiring employees to assign Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITIN) even when the applications were fraudulent,” according to the Inspector General’s 2012 audit. All-in-all, the Inspector General found “154 addresses around the country that appeared on 1,000 or more ITIN applications made to the IRS” CNS reported. CNS’s Terence Jeffrey continued: Perhaps the most remarkable act of the IRS was this: It assigned 6,411 ITINs to unauthorized aliens presumably using a single address in Morganton, North Carolina. According to the 2010 Census, there were only 16,681 people in Morganton. In the age of computers, this would be something easily nipped in the bud — if the IRS wanted it nipped. Also, the $70 million in employee bonuses the IRS is demanding suddenly seems like small potatoes compared to this. But most of all, I keep thinking that in 2014, this same agency, the IRS, is going to be running the Affordable Care Act. If they can’t competently handle their own business, how can we expect them to administer Obamacare? bizpacreview.com