Admirable Billionaires

Readers of this blog know that I am often hard on the selfishness and self serving manipulations of the ultra rich in this country that control over half our countries wealth. This does not mean I am anti wealth. Jesus never said it was good to be poor, but he did point out the responsibilities of wealth, “from whom much is given much is required.”

There are many who have followed that moral dictum. Some after they screwed their competitors to get rich, i.e. Carnegies, Rockefellers, etc. with acts of philanthropy such as public libraries. But there are others who combine this but also see the responsibilities of wealth and respond appropriately. I mentioned in a previous article Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, the Lodges and the Kennedys using their money and power to work for those in need and the common good.

The poster boy for modern millionaires, without a doubt in my mind, is Warren Buffet. Buffet is well known for his challenge to fellow billionaires to give half their wealth to charity as he has. Bill and Melinda Gates notably have responded to that challenge and have done so. The Good News Network reports that 11 more billionaires have taken Buffet’s pledge. Now we have 92 families from ages 28 to 97 that have vowed to give away half the assets. They include:

BILL AND KAREN ACKMAN

PAUL G. ALLEN

LAURA AND JOHN ARNOLD

NICOLAS BERGGRUEN

MANOJ BHARGAVA

STEVE BING

ARTHUR M. BLANK

MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG

ELI AND EDYTHE BROAD

CHARLES R. BRONFMAN

EDGAR M. BRONFMAN

WARREN BUFFETT

JEAN AND STEVE CASE

LEE AND TOBY COOPERMAN

JOYCE AND BILL CUMMINGS

RAY AND BARBARA DALIO

JOHN PAUL DEJORIA

BARRY DILLER AND DIANE VON FURSTENBERG

ANN AND JOHN DOERR

GLENN AND EVA DUBIN

LARRY ELLISON

CHARLES F. FEENEY

TED FORSTMANN (D. 2011)

PHILLIP AND PATRICIA FROST

BILL AND MELINDA GATES

DAN AND JENNIFER GILBERT

DAVID AND BARBARA GREEN

JEFF AND MEI SZE GREENE

HAROLD AND SUE ANN HAMM

REED HASTINGS AND PATTY QUILLIN

LYDA HILL

BARRON HILTON

JON AND KAREN HUNTSMAN

CARL ICAHN

JOAN AND IRWIN JACOBS

GEORGE B. KAISER

VINOD AND NEERU KHOSLA

SIDNEY KIMMEL

RICH AND NANCY KINDER

ELAINE AND KEN LANGONE

GERRY AND MARGUERITE LENFEST

PETER B. LEWIS

LORRY I. LOKEY

GEORGE LUCAS

DUNCAN AND NANCY MACMILLAN

ALFRED E. MANN

JOE AND RIKA MANSUETO

BERNIE AND BILLI MARCUS

RED AND CHARLINE MCCOMBS

MICHAEL AND LORI MILKEN

GEORGE P. MITCHELL

THOMAS S. MONAGHAN

GORDON AND BETTY MOORE

TASHIA AND JOHN MORGRIDGE

MICHAEL MORITZ AND HARRIET HEYMAN

DUSTIN MOSKOVITZ AND CARI TUNA

ELON MUSK

JONATHAN M. NELSON

PIERRE AND PAM OMIDYAR

BERNARD AND BARBRO OSHER

RONALD O. PERELMAN

JORGE M. AND DARLENE PEREZ

PETER G. PETERSON

T. BOONE PICKENS

JULIAN H. ROBERTSON, JR.

DAVID ROCKEFELLER

EDWARD W. AND DEEDIE POTTER ROSE

DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN

JOHN AND GINGER SALL

HENRY AND SUSAN SAMUELI

HERB AND MARION SANDLER

DENNY SANFORD

VICKI AND ROGER SANT

LYNN SCHUSTERMAN

WALTER SCOTT, JR.

TOM AND CINDY SECUNDA

ANNETTE AND HAROLD SIMMONS

JIM AND MARILYN SIMONS

JEFF SKOLL

JOHN A. AND SUSAN SOBRATO, JOHN MICHAEL SOBRATO

MICHELE AND PATRICK SOON-SHIONG

TED AND VADA STANLEY

TOM STEYER AND KAT TAYLOR

JIM AND VIRGINIA STOWERS

CLAIRE AND LEONARD TOW

TED TURNER

ALBERT LEE UELTSCHI

DR. ROMESH AND KATHLEEN WADHWANI

SANFORD AND JOAN WEILL

SHELBY WHITE

CHARLES ZEGAR AND MERRYL SNOW ZEGAR

MARK ZUCKERBERG

To learn more about these folk you can go here.

Politics and Sports

It seems to me that there are an awful lot of folk who view political debate and sides just the way they look at support their favorite football, baseball, foosball, basketball, soccer, etc teams. Well maybe we’re not very excited about foosball. If we are Democrats then we have to cheer for the Democrats and if we are Republicans then we have to cheer for the Republicans. And then there are always those who just want to cheer for foosball teams, or rather a third party. Then there are also a lot who find their greatest joy in booing all the teams or parties.

Sports have their place, even though I am not a very avid sports enthusiast. On our trips when folk find out we’re from Wisconsin they frequently say, “Ah cheeseheads, and you must be Packer backers.” I usually mumble something like it being a state requirement, but if pushed I merely say I don’t really care. I really liked cheering for our grandchildren when they were in high school sports and found that very satisfying up to the point when either our side or our opponents started acting like total boneheads, swearing and generally acting obscene. It’s just a bloody game after all. College sports are okay, but I think they should just be paid minor leagues. Professional sports don’t do much for me. I feel sorry for so many of them who have short careers, lack the maturity to manage their money and live lives injured and poor. But I’m wandering afield of my point.

The point is there is a big difference between sports and politics. The world is relatively unaffected by the outcome of a game despite of the media coverage they receive. But politics affect everyone. You can learn a few basic things about a sport and follow it okay, but you really have to work to be a responsible and knowledgeable voting citizen.

Sports, while they require some smarts (I am amazied at the amount of data about sports a lot of folk carry around in their head), politics demand rigorous intellectual skill and effort (and folk seem woefully ignorant of political science, history and economics). If sports commentators make a bonehead statement, it really doesn’t shake up the world much, but political commentators, newscasters have a responsibility to help the public ‘be informed. Unfortunately today’s media seem to treat political events like sports events, money makers. You cannot rely upon the major or minor networks to leave their big business biases behind them.

Fortunately we have the internet and if you use it wisely you really can find out good information. On the other hand there is an ton of crap out there. You have to factcheck every source and sometimes that is difficult but it can be done.

Perhaps I should make this anology: we take baseball’s World Series seriously but we don’t take the world seriously.

Capital Gains Taxes

A good deal gets written about capital gains taxes, but an article by Kevin Drum writing for Mother Jones caught my eye, so I thought I’d share some of his insights plus a thought or two of my own.

He sees arguments for higher capital gains taxes as baroque in nature; interesting. Drum believes the common rationale for lower taxes on capital gains is that it provides impetus for growth; good deal right? It has in the past made our country and most European countries grow. So, it is good but with it he sees a caveat.  Capital gains are good more and more capital gains is not necessarily good. He believes, and I agree that there needs to be a balance between capital gains and labor income.

He recalls Ben Bernanke in 2005 warming of a savings glut. Too much money was coming to this country but not enough productive places to use it. As a result we developed the housing inflated prices, and strange Wall Street investments which all came plummeting down.

Drum sees the real problem as an investment drought, the other side of the savings glut. If the money had gone into productive work with the resulting labor income increase all would have been good. But when the imbalance takes place we have the mess we have.

So, do we need higher capital gains taxes? He believes it would definitely help. He thinks it may not of averted the crash but it might have lessened it.

I think Drum makes a very good case. It has definitely played a role in the redistribution of wealth over the last several decades. I would further argue that capital gains taxes should be progressive as income taxes should be. There are many retired folk currently harmed by low return on capital investments to maintain a retirement income they believed they were developing. On the other hand, that is not exactly the problem of the multimillionaires. They may see it as a nice game with who has the most wins, but the standard of living is hardly affected.

Just so you know

Click to see larger picture. From the NY Times.

Representative Democracy

A democracy, a republic, whatever we call our form of government, it is supposed to represent the people, all of the people. Now that is very difficult as we are such a diverse people. But in this presidential election who is representing who is pretty clear. Obama, gives all appearances of being a political leader who affirms that attempt to represent the people while providing presidential leadership and vision. I don’t agree with all that he does: I think he was flat wrong to engage in the Afghanistan war; I think he should have stuck by his guns on election reform even when he was raising more than his previous opponent, and I think he is too chummy with the usual power brokers; that seems to be a presidential hazard.

But Mitt Romney on the other hand seems to represent a very small portion of the country, the wealthy. He is one which is not a bad thing; so was Teddy Roosevelt and FDR and Kennedy, but they were proponents of the common folk and worked very hard to improve the lot of the middle class and protect the poor.

Romney is merely representative of his class. His tax cuts are for his class, at the expense of the middle and lower classes. He tells lies about those who are not in his classes i.e. the recent 47% debacle. He decries “entitlement programs” and coddling the poor for which he seems to possess no empathy.

So, Romney pays his 14% of his 13 million dollar income and protects his cronies.

Romney does not reflect representative democracy, but he seems to have pulled the wool over a lot of people’s eyes who he has no intention of representing. Romney is a real and present danger to democracy, our republic.

Stump Speeches

If you don’t want to travel around the country listening to the stump speeches of Obama or Romney, the New York Times and FactCheck.org have done it for you. Think of all the gas you save (was that a pun?)

For the New York Times try this: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/12/us/politics/stump-speech-analysis-obama-romney.html

For the FactCheck.org you can start here and then search for more: http://factcheck.org/2012/09/romneys-stump-speech/  This is on Romney but you can find those for Obama with their search engine.

Are There Really Any Questions about this Election?

I know the polls keep saying that the vote is close between Obama and Romney, but really? Others say that Romney is the most disliked candidate in history and is totally out of touch with the public.

Then there is the question of which Romney you are interested in: the Governor, the Olympic saver, the Bain executive, the initiator of government sponsored health care (or the opponent of government sponsored health care), the presidential candidate Romney who reminds me of the governor from the “Greatest Little Whore House in Texas” who loved to do a little sidestep… a couple of them seem fairly likeable, and others seem downright villains.

But then let’s take a look at his positions? Then the question becomes what on earth is his position aside from some ideological platitudes backed up by absolutely no specific details. Of course, you can find some economic details in his running mate, Ryan, which ought to send any sane economists running for the hills. But I think I can summarize them. Let’s see, there is the Austrian School of Economics which is rightly never heard of by most but is where the supply side economic folk stem, a.k.a. voodoo economics and trickle down economics. They did not work under Reagan, they did not work under Bush, and they just don’t work and have caused our current economic dilemmas, which we don’t seem to be able to remember. Their proponets even ignore their own ideas as they dump tons of money into defense, stupid wars, and other pet projects which created massive national debt. [Check with Elizabeth Warren for details.]

There is some good news. Martin Sullivan of tax.com reports that many of the GOP are likely to retreat on tax issues if Obama wins. Or simply put, they will be willing to sit down and talk about compromises and issues they way things used to work before all the extreme right wing intolerants got to Washington. In other words yet, they see that raising taxes on the super duper wealthy is not a bad idea after all. Besides, if they ever check with their constituents they would find that practically all of them support this type of economic sanity.

Bargaining at the table again sounds like a very good idea.

Now what is the upside if Romney gets elected? Hmmm, that seems reminiscent of my article, Mitt Romney’s Tax Plan as Revealed on Meet the Press. Oh, it wasn’t revealed, thus no article. But one can conjecture. The rich, the really rich will get more tax breaks and get even richer than they were when the crash of ’29 took place; more services will be cut from the national budget which will cost us more money because we don’t have a plan to deal with them aside from letting the die in the streets, the middle class will continue to decrease, we will have more working poor and poverty stricken folk, unions may become totally outlawed furthering the destruction of the middle class (but the duped self-righteous on these ideas will be able to continue to condemn folk as being more worthless than themselves), and we will have developed the world’s leading Oligarchy before we collapse. Perhaps the Supreme Court will declare that the only real people are corporations and the only ones entitled to a vote and we won’t have to worry about civic responsibilities and debate.

Ah well, my goodly wife and I just spend a delightful time in Alaska, a place of pristine beauty and total awesomeness. Me thinks it would be good for a lot of candidates and political pundits to just go with there and get a perspective on how small critters we are and gain a bit of humility. But then we also saw the dwindling glaciers which the anti-environmentalists continue to ignore. As one of the elite said at our dining table one evening, “The onboard speakers on environmental issues are only saying what they say because they are paid to do it. Besides, some glaciers are growing.” I replied, “Yes, 5% of them. Did I overstep myself?

Anyway, it is good to be back in the lower 48 and blogging away again.

The 47% Who Don't Pay Taxes

My friend Dr. Patrick O’Shea posted this on Facebook and I thought I would post it here.

I would also suggest reading the Washington Post article on the 5 myths about the 47%. They are:
1. Forty-seven percent of Americans don’t pay taxes. 2/3rds of those pay payroll taxes for Soc Sec etc. leaving the actual number at 28%; then take in sales taxes etc.
2. Members of the 47 percent will never pay federal income taxes. How about some seniors that paid in income taxes all their life but now don't?
3. Many high-income people game the system to pay no income tax. Tax Policy Center estimate, for example, that households with cash incomes of $200,000 or more account for less than 0.1 percent of the 47 percent.
4. The 47 percent vote Democratic. There is no data for this. Elderly voters tend to vote Republican; don't ask me why.
5. Tax increases are the only way to bring more of these households onto the tax rolls. Of course you can just reduce benefits ala the Bush years, or as the article points out: Indeed, projections show that the share of households paying no federal income tax will decline by more than one-fifth in the coming decade because of economic growth and inflation. That drop would be faster and steeper with a stronger, prolonged recovery, which would give more Americans the pleasure of paying federal income taxes.

For the whole story go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the-47-percent/2012/09/21/57dc7bbe-0341-11e2-8102-ebee9c66e190_story.html

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Patrick's material:

Here Are The 47% Of The Population Who Don't Pay Federal Income Tax

Joe Weisenthal | Sep. 17, 2012, 8:33 PM | 72,549 | 102

Mitt Romney's latest campaign setback is a leaked video that shows him slagging the 47 percent of the population who, he says, will always vote for Barack Obama, because they want everything for free from the government.

The 47 percent number presumably refers to the percent of the population who don't pay Federal Income Taxes, which of course is just one kind of tax.

From the Tax Policy Center, these three pie charts show who those people are.

Kevin Roose at NYMag puts the data into words:

But back to the 47 percent. There are two primary ways to pay no (or negative) federal income taxes. The first is to be poor, and the second is to be elderly. In 2011, of the 18.1 percent of American households who paid no federal tax (meaning, no federal income or payroll tax), more than half were elderly, and most of the other half were non-elderly people making below $20,000 a year. The other sliver, roughly one in 20 non-payers, were people who made more than $20,000 in household income.

The reason being poor helps is because, with a combination of tax credits (like the earned income credit and the child credit) and deductions, many people earning under $20,000 a year can zero out their overall rate. The primary reason being elderly helps is that Social Security benefits aren't taxed as income, so if all (or most) of your income comes from your monthly Social Security check, your taxable income is marginal or non-existent.

So there you have it. The poor and elderly.

Meanwhile, Jim Antle at the conservative site The Daily Caller makes another salient point: The elimination of taxes on the very poor has been GOP policy starting with Reagan, and continuing through Bush:

When Ronald Reagan signed into law the Tax Reform Act of 1986, he boasted, “Millions of the working poor will be dropped from the tax rolls altogether, and families will get a long-overdue break with lower rates and an almost doubled personal exemption.”

Both the initial Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and indexing income taxes to inflation in 1985 had a similar effect.

In the 1990s, the Republican-controlled Gingrich Congress passed a $500 per child tax credit that also wiped out the income tax liability of many low- to moderate-income households.

“Fully 93 percent of the tax relief in our bill goes to taxpayers with annual incomes under $100,000, 76 percent goes to taxpayers with incomes under $75,000,” then-House Ways and Means Committe Chairman Bill Archer, a Texas Republican, said at the time. “If ever there was a tax plan for America’s forgotten middle class, this is it.”

Now read How 35,000 Of America's Wealthiest Households Got Off Tax-Free >

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/mitt-romneys-47-who-are-dependent-on-the-government-2012-9#ixzz27CzgQXrX

Mitt Romney's Tax Plan as Revealed on Meet the Press

The 1% Court

Bush vs. Gore 2000 ~ the court elects a president.

Citizens vs FEC 2010 ~ Corporations are people.

Arizona’s Free Enterprise Clubs Freedom PAC vs. Bennett ~ The conservative majority concluded that the availability of increased public funding deterred speech because it discouraged candidates from spending more than the publicly funded candidate.

WALMART V. DUKES (2011) ~ The Court held unanimously that an employment discrimination suit against Walmart could not be brought as a class action on behalf of 1.6 million women across the country.

AT&T MOBILITY, LLC V. CONCEPCION(2011) ~ bilked by a misleading ad that said cases had to be settled by arbitration (illegal in California State Law) overturned by the Court saying Federal law had precedent. What your cell phone contract. Or, corporations can escape the responsibilities.

JANUS CAPITAL GROUP, INC. V. FIRST DERIVATIVE TRADERS (2011) ~ a Janus investment fund mislead its buyers but got away with it.

ASHCROFT V. IQBAL (2009) ~ five conservative Justices rejected decades of precedent to rewrite the requirements for pleading a case, jeopardizing the ability of individuals to challenge the conduct of the government, employers and others in court. Prior to the decision, in order to launch a lawsuit, plaintiffs were required only to present a short and plain description of their claims that provided fair notice to the defendant. Now the Court shifted the burden to the plaintiff to produce sufficient facts to make the claim plausible and judges were given broad discretion to dismiss cases that failed this standard.

NATIONAL FEDERATION OF INDEPENDENT BUSINESS V. SIBELIUS(2012) ~ The Court upheld most provisions of the Affordable Care Act, but five conservative Justices planted the seeds of new restrictions on the ability of Congress to address major social needs. This position is a radical break with seventy-five years of precedent giving Congress broad power through the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The position of the conservatives threatens to curtail the ability of Congress to enact legislation in areas ranging from civil rights to social welfare.

See Bill Moyers blog

Simple vs Complex Tax Systems

James Kwak has a recent article on tax systems. A complex system is based on the world being complex therefore the tax system should be complex, thus the 8,000 pages of the Dodd-Frank Act. But the question is who has the time to wade through 8,000 pages of tax regulations? Those who have the resources to do so: big banks, big businesses etc. Plus the field is constantly changing along with the data these regulations are based upon.

This seems like a good argument for simpler tax systems to me, and that does not mean simplistic, just simpler. The more you make the more you should pay in taxes. It is absolutely ridiculous that rich folk like Romney end up paying a lesser tax rate than middle class folk. Heavens, when I was working I paid twice what he did percentage wise. Any tax incentives should be for the middle and lower classes not the wealthy.

Obama’s plan of increasing taxes for those making over a quarter of million a year is simple and sane and just. Romney thinks the middle class makes a quarter of a million per year; he is just out of touch. My complaint is, as it usually is of Obama’s plan, is that in tried to work with others he gives too much away. Tax rates ought to go back to the levels of the Reagan era (I’d prefer Eisenhower’s.)