I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
As State Geologist Peter A. Scholle writes, a “doom and gloom” scenario for our area is not warranted, if we have the desire to make certain changes. Scholle acknowledges that “increasing population, increasing development, and climate change will all add to the stress on natural ecosystems” and increasing sources of pollution.
Is it fair to say that large swaths of the Republican Party are in a nosedive, reduced to championing homophobia, torture, race-baiting, bullying the poor, pampering the selfish rich and wrecking public life by opposing the 16th Amendment?
That’s probably not fair, but what smells decayed most commonly is.
The GOP cause is suffering from acute political entropy. Their energies have bottomed out. Their ideas are stale and out of touch. Democrats have bounded out of their entropic stupors, but their time to slump and bottom out will come again in the course of time. Now, however, is now. And so-called conservatives can’t even make their old warhorse of tax hate
work for them.
Imagine having to defend corporations and wealthy individuals from dodging taxes, some say up to a $1 trillion worth over ten years, in offshore accounts. Imagine having to oppose canceling tax incentives for companies who ship jobs overseas, giving them, instead, to companies who create jobs in the United States.
What a terrible pickle to be in. But that’s what happens when your ideology is more important to you than the goodwill and well being of your fellow citizens.
Nobody actually likes taxes. But nobody likes tax cheats either, even if their cheating is legal. Republican tax hatred has combined with an adoration of plutocracy to create a world in which modest income people pay their taxes and rich “corporate persons” and various and sundry mogels are legally allowed to evade their fair share of the tax burden.
Home folks and small businesses worry about IRS audits, the fat cats worry about having “safe” havens for their millions and billions. But doesn’t everyone know this already? Of course they do. And why hasn’t it mattered until now? I think it’s called democracy. Tax dodgers and job exporters lost a landslide election. But everyone knows that too.
So what is it with tax hate? I think it is a classic public relations ploy to find something simple, a three letter word, to turn into a scapegoat for every ill suffered by anyone.
Taxing is not the public theft of private funds. It is asking the people and businesses, and “corporate persons,” who make money using the public environment to pay for it.
The income tax basically does three kinds of things. First, it provides for the common defense. Second, it creates a physical, regulatory, judicial and educational infrastructure that allows businesses and individuals to function. Third, it is used to create an equitable, humane society that protects, in the most basic way, the civil liberties that keep us and our constitution from social upheaval and collapse.
The income tax is not some liberal/Democratic plot. It is authorized in two ways by the U.S. Constitution. First in Article I, Section 8, which empowers Congress to levy “taxes, duties, imposts and excises” that are uniform throughout the states. Second, it is authorized by the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1913. It gives Congress “power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
The income tax has tended to be “progressive,” in the sense that the more you have, the higher marginal rate you pay.
At the moment, tax rates go from 10 percent for the working poor to 35 percent for the super rich, if they can’t find a loophole to get out of paying them. Ten percent of someone making $8,350 a year is a devastating slice out of one’s budget, compromising health and sustenance. Thirty five percent out of say $372,951 a year or more, still leaves the taxpayer with nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year.
During WWII the lowest tax bracket was 23 percent and the highest was 94 percent, according to the IRS. The Reagan Revolution lowered the brackets in 1982 to 1986 from 14 percent and 70 percent to 12 percent and 50 percent. This is the root of the failed theory of trickle down economics.
Little or nothing trickled down from the people and companies who got a whopping 20 percent reduction in their taxes to those who got a measly 2 percent cut. And those who had to pay 50% often found ways of paying nothing. And the upper bracket rich still complain bitterly about paying anything.
It was an outrage then. It’s an outrage today.
Companies who ship jobs overseas and sequester profits off shore not only fail to pay for America’s physical, regulatory and educational infrastructure, they make vast profits from using the often dilapidated roads and power grids, as well as from the lax or missing environmental standards, of poorer countries and their nearly slave labor work force.
When corporate and individual tax dodgers make money in this country, they fail to pay their fair share in supporting all the services that state and federal government provide them, services that range from roads and bridges, and police and judicial protection, to public schools, libraries, museums, air traffic control, weather monitoring, and water delivery, and the thousands of others services we all take for granted.
I’ve never understood how one could lobby for the 2nd Amendment and lobby against the 16th Amendment on grounds that one is a protection against government and the other is an imposition of government.
The right to bear arms does have a grounding in the implied revolutionary nature of the U.S. Constitution and its motivational pathfinder, the Declaration of Independence, which declares unresponsive and oppressive governments to be a personal danger to everyone.
But the 16th Amendment is also a protection against the very reasons most destabilizing revolutions arise in the first place — gross economic injustice and inequality. Without the income tax, and the social security tax, the United States would be vulnerable to ever increasing, ever more widespread and justifiable social unrest.
Tax haters think the general public is made up of gullible fools who can be sold on tax inequality as easily as they can be sold a box cereal. And as long as ideological entropy hadn’t taken hold the Republican Party, the hard sell was hard to resist.
But those days are over.
The torture issue is so essential and graspable that a highly visible public discussion of American values and ideals would result from the prosecution of members of the Bush administration. People who occupy the White House must be clear that their power is limited to the rule of law, not to the limits of legal trickery that allows presidents to evade the law.
As someone who lives in an overwhelmingly rural state, averaging some 12 people per square mile, I’m interested in rural development. So I’ll be watching closely how fast the Obama administration moves on its plans.
As one old time prison official told me about a month before the most violent prison riot in America took place at the New Mexico State Penitentiary in February l980, “when all prisoners have to do is sit around and think up ways to get into trouble, you’re sitting on a power keg.”
Has the Western United States dramatically outgrown its water capacity? That’s the real question and there’s good reason to believe it has. As long as this drought lasts, and it could well go on for decades and decades, every city in the West has to ask itself what its realistic, sustainable population size actually is.
Radioactive storage is not just about the actual site, of course. It’s about turning one’s state into a transportation ground zero. All the reassurances aside, that never sits well with any city along the route.
If politics and the economy are getting your goat a little more than usual these days, you’re not alone. The election of President Obama and Democratic majorities in both the U.S. House and Senate certainly transformed the power balance in the country in a direction I favor. But when it comes to making plans for the future, for doing any long-range thinking, that’s about all that’s changed.
How did we get ourselves into such a mess? There’s only one obvious, if incomplete, answer: the failed myth of inevitable growth — not quality growth of income and infrastructure, but fantasy growth of sprawl based on fantasy water, a soon-to-be-stolen resource.
President Obama has reversed the field on anti-scientific perfectionism. And not a moment too soon. While stem cell research, nuclear waste storage, and global warming are hot topics with the media, other evidence-based issues -– like water and drought in the West -– are far too important to be caught in fruitless public relations arguments over the validity of science.
So much for Christian charity, and the live-and-let-live wisdom that’s implied in the First Amendment of the Constitution. What happened last week to a community of loving couples is simply unconscionable. This is why religion should be totally separated from governmental action, as the nation’s founders thought right and proper.
This year there’s a good chance Mount Taylor, one of New Mexico’s most imposing and mysterious mountains, will be returned to the spiritual care of the pueblos of Acoma, Laguna, and Zuni; the Hopi Tribe and the Navajo Nation; and, by extension, the rest of New Mexico’s Native American community. And that’s as it should be.
Embracing Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, Albuquerque could become a new kind of city, a city that acts as a model for other parched western metropoli, and it would be more competitive economically.
Every corporate tax break and loop hole, every tax incentive, every highway, bridge, and airport, every infusion of economic diplomacy abroad, every local incentive to business, puts the lie to the idea of the virtue of small government. Incentives, job creation through public investment, and bailouts are all the products of government intervention.
President Obama told the nation on inauguration day that it wasn’t the size of government that mattered, it was whether programs worked or not. And he said as much for his own agenda. Will the American people have the unvarnished information they need to make clear decisions about what’s working and what is not? At first blush, it seems they will.
We’ve had to hold our noses and move through the poison gas of hate speech politics for eight long years with so much venom spilled that you’d think we were on the verge of a civil war. And now, despite all the darkness of those eight seemingly endless years, we see a break in the smog of history, a clear moment in which civility, innovation, social responsibility and economic justice might just have a chance to arise anew.
Some of my progressive brethren have been giving President-elect Obama the dickens for weeks now. But I have a short list of Obama indicators that I believe will give me some sense of how that rebirth is really going, and if he does well on all of these fronts, that will indicate to me he’s moving in the right direction, no matter what the prevailing opinion might be.
As the mayoral election of 2009 approaches in the midst of the gravest economic crisis of last 75 years, I’m wondering if we’ll hear candidates parrot the old line about “inevitable” material growth, or if they’ll really start to explore steady state sustainability.
It’s New Year’s Eve. And of all strange things, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Russians are having some fun poking their little noses into America’s national life. One of their scholars is even predicting our downfall, a splintering of our union next year in civil war.
But Albuquerque and New Mexico needs to do some old fashioned, grassroots, bottom up planning. When Forbes magazine last week ranked Albuquerque fifth in the nation in requests for Obama’s New Deal economic stimulus package, it was news to most folks in the state. Five days later, the Journal, in a solid copyrighted piece by Dan McKay ran a list of the proposed projects that Forbes said would cost $2.3 billion and create an estimated 5,181 jobs.
