What the defenders of the super rich feared

[Guns Guns Guns]

Last Thursday, the New York State legislature voted to raise taxes on high-earners after Governor Andrew Cuomo reversed his longstanding opposition to such a move.

Cuomo cited a large budget gap in explaining his about-face, but that gap is hardly new.

What is: taxing the top 1 percent is far easier now than it was a few months ago.

Next year will see the biggest tax fights in a decade.

The Bush tax cuts are set to expire at the end of 2012.

In addition, both parties want to reform the tax code – an overhaul that would trigger a struggle over the generous loopholes that now favor corporations and rich individuals.

Taxes will also be on the agenda in California next year, where various efforts are afoot to raise taxes by ballot initiative.

One plan, favored by Governor Jerry Brown, would raise $6 billion through a surcharge on the state’s top 1 percent.

There’s reason for tax reform, elsewhere, as well.

In many states, the top 1 percent enjoy a light tax burden.

Meanwhile working- and middle-class households are being slammed.

In Texas, for example, the bottom 20 percent of households paid 12.2 percent of their income in state and local taxes in 2007 while the top 1 percent paid just 3.3 percent.

Other states, like Florida and Tennessee, have even more regressive tax systems.

A cashier in Miami making $23,000 a year literally pays five times more in taxes as a percentage of her income than someone who earns $2 million a year.

Polls show very strong public support for raising taxes on the rich...


http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/12/13/occupy-the-tax-code/


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[RockX]

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As for how to balance the federal budget, more now favor cutting government services as the best means to bring federal spending into balance. Sixty percent think lawmakers should focus on budget cuts over tax increases. That figure had been as low as 53 percent in August, during the showdown over raising the country's debt limit.


The biggest shift on that question has come from independents. In the August poll, 37 percent said lawmakers should focus on increasing taxes and 42 percent said cutting services. Now, that divide stands at 28 percent for raising taxes and 59 percent for cutting services.

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http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2102519,00.html

 

[Guns Guns Guns]

As for how to balance the federal budget, more now favor cutting government services as the best means to bring federal spending into balance. Sixty percent think lawmakers should focus on budget cuts over tax increases. That figure had been as low as 53 percent in August, during the showdown over raising the country's debt limit.
The biggest shift on that question has come from independents. In the August poll, 37 percent said lawmakers should focus on increasing taxes and 42 percent said cutting services. Now, that divide stands at 28 percent for raising taxes and 59 percent for cutting services.

What Failias "forgot" to include in his excerpt:

Most Americans want Congress to vote to continue the payroll tax reduction, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll that comes as Democrats and Republicans wrestle over whether to extend the cut through 2012.It's the latest instance in which lawmakers on Capitol Hill have allowed partisan sniping to hold up a measure to put in place a policy that most Americans support, like ending the Bush tax cuts, cap and trade, and a surcharge on millionaires.


http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2102519,00.html#ixzz1gdrrcMqP

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