Quote of the Week….

Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’
Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’
Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’
But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?

And there comes a point when one must take a position that is
neither safe,
nor polite,
nor popular,
but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that
it is right. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

A sentiment I share with that great American. It’s one all Americans would do well to live by.

Do You Ever Wonder Why the Roads in Your Town are Turning into Gravel?

Wonder no more. It’s because ’some people’ are not paying their fair share of the cost of government. Otherwise known as taxes. I know this story has been in the corporatist press but I thought this post:

Based on IRS records, a recent GAO report indicates that many corporations claimed to owe $0 in U.S. taxes from 1998 – 2005: roughly 28%-53% of large foreign-controlled and 23%-38% of large U.S.-controlled corporations. [The GAO considers a "large" corporation one with at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in gross receipts.] 

From NoQuarter had a lot more detail and so link to it.

There is a growing opportunity for those of us who are economically literate, a tiny minority, to take back the high ground in the never ending debate about taxes, government and what should be done by same. The ‘conservative’ shills who’ve been preaching the Friedman Lunacy for decades are gob-smacked that the ‘trickle down’ theory has at last been proved to be the utter bullshit that it is. There is a desperate air of ‘now what do we do…’  as the third artificial bubble of ‘asset building’, housing, pops following  the dot.com bubble and ‘financialization’ coming from the morons such as Greenspan who’ve been ’supervising ‘ our economy. As Ol’ Shakespeare opined, ‘The truth will out…’ and now folks are waking up to the realization that while their real income has declined every year since Nixon under the Republican fantasy machine corporations and very wealthy individuals merely extract whatever amounts of cash they need from the U.S. Treasury, that’s us Homer, in the form of  taxes not paid.

This report points a finger at why you, yeah you Homer, ‘can’t’ have healthcare, good schools, well-maintained roads, safe food and on and on…. The next time some low-info fool tells you, ‘Oh, we can’t afford that…’ about some needed social program tell them the following:

‘Of course we can afford that. If corporations and the uber-rich would pay their fair share of taxes instead of bribing Congress to give them a free pass we’d’ have plenty of money to take care of the real, immediate needs of our society.’

And if they start bloviating tell them this:

‘Surely you are not advocating that some, particularly those best able to pay, should be excused from their social obligation to pay their fair share of the costs they helped create are you?’

More on how your are being screwed solely because you are NOT rich in future posts.