Rick Perry: Standing Tall For The 1%

[sonias]

Campaign for America's Future 10/25/11
Rick Perry: Standing Tall For The 1%

Rick Perry’s Plan for the 1%

Today, Rick Perry released his "Cut, Balance and Grow" economic plan.

From his initial press release, this is clearly a plan designed for the wealthiest Americans.

Perry would eliminate the estate tax that applies only to the wealthiest multimillion dollar estates. He would offer a choice between a quasi-flat tax of 20% (with deductions for mortgages, charities and state and local taxes) or the current code, essentially providing upper income taxpayers with a choice on how best to get a massive tax break. If Warren Buffett wants to insure billionaires never pay lower tax rates than their secretaries, Perry wants to guarantee they will never pay higher rates.

He’d allow multinationals to return the trillion dollars in profits that they have closeted abroad at a 5% tax rate, a truly shameless corporate giveaway. He’d lower corporate taxes to 20% immediately, while “phasing out” corporate loopholes – good luck with that.

Then he would blow a hole in Social Security, providing young workers with a choice for private accounts. Since under the current plan, young workers pay for the benefits their parents’ generation receives, this would starve Social Security of significant income just when the boomers are retiring. He does not say how he would replace what is likely to be a trillion dollar shortfall over the next 30 years.

He's always been a sellout to the very rich. This is no different. He's simply calling it a tax cut, but really it continues to shift money from the middle class and poor to the very rich in our county.

:puke:

[sonias]

1. Rick Perry’s Flat Tax Plan: Not A Flat Tax

Talking Points Memo 10/26/11
Rick Perry’s Flat Tax Plan: Not A Flat Tax

It turns out Perry’s plan isn’t flat, doesn’t eliminate the current tax code, as many conservative elites claim to want, and would likely blow a huge hole in the federal budget.

Perry’s plan doesn’t scrap existing tax law altogether, but rather creates a new, parallel tax code that taxes individual and corporate income at 20 percent. Investment income would go untaxed. Every tax payer would have a choice between staying in the current system, or transferring over to the new one. But as Michael Linden, a tax expert at the liberal Center for American Progress, points out, the new, simpler, alternative code would constitute a tax increase for most Americans and a huge tax cut for wealthy Americans, creating incentives for a small well-to-do sliver of the country to make the switch, and for everyone else to stay put.

(snip)

“For most people who don’t have big capital gains and dividend income, they’re going to say in the current system,” Linden explained. “It’s not a flat tax.”

(snip)

“For very wealthy people who do have big capital gains and dividends — they’ll take the new one, but even that’s not really a flat tax. It’s 20 percent on ordinary income and zero percent on investment income.”

There’s another way to think about Perry’s vision, that helps explain why it would likely starve the government of revenue and either explode the deficit or require massive cuts in federal programs like Medicare, Medicaid and national defense.

Perry loves to talk about "class warfare" all the time, because at the heart of it he's leading the economic war for the rich. It is class warfare and the rich have been fighting it for centuries. They've learned to control the media and puppets like Perry to do their bidding. It's all about shifting more money to the rich and leaving more of the burden of the "social good" to the middle class and poor.

Man how I hate this slimy creep. :mad:

[sonias]

2. Perry plan simply gives wealthy new tax option

AAS Editorial 10/26/11
Perry plan simply gives wealthy new tax option

On Tuesday, Gov. Rick Perry boldly proposed to reform the tax system by giving everyone the option of staying with the current tax system.

Perry would like to tax personal income at a flat 20 percent rate, with a standard deduction of $12,500 per person and per dependent. Perry's plan, which is not a true flat tax, leaves in place deductions for mortgage interest, state taxes and charitable giving for families making less than $500,000 a year. It treats different income differently by taxing wages but eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits, dividends and capital gains.

Most notably, Perry's plan doesn't scrap the current tax code. You probably will have to work out your taxes twice to see whether Perry's 20 percent flat rate or the current rate you pay works best for you.

In other words, your taxes might vary. Generally, though, the more money you make, the more likely it is you'll want to switch to the flat rate. And if you're the wealthiest among us, well, this is the plan for you.

Same as it always was....

[sonias]

3. Rick Perry’s Not-Really-All-That-Flat Tax

Bloomberg Business Week 10/27/11
Rick Perry’s Not-Really-All-That-Flat Tax

The plan would simplify the code but come up far short on revenue

The 20 percent flat tax proposal Rick Perry unveiled on Oct. 25 scratches the Republican itch for a cleaner Internal Revenue Code stripped of special breaks, tiered rates, and endless complexity. It will also do something else, which Perry doesn’t highlight—deliver huge tax cuts to the rich and raise less revenue overall, making it much harder to achieve the already difficult task of balancing the federal budget.

Perry’s plan is a flashback to the signature issue of Steve Forbes, the wealthy magazine publisher who campaigned for President in 1996 and 2000. Perry has taken on Forbes as an adviser and even adopted his favorite trope, the notion that flat taxes are so simple they can be filed on a postcard. Forbes’s drive faltered after opponents criticized his 17 percent tax for shifting the burden to middle-income families and away from people like Forbes himself.

Why has the flat tax made a comeback after all these years? Blame Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who talked repeatedly about simplifying the tax code and then made it more complicated. Simplicity ranks high with voters, and Perry is trying to capitalize on that. “My plan does not trim around the edges,” he said at his South Carolina announcement. “Our tax system is like buying cars,” says Scott A. Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation, a Washington group that favors a simpler and more transparent tax code. “Everybody goes in and pays a different price, based on what they’re able to negotiate. And he’s offering the CarMax (KMX) version of taxation.”

Trouble is, many Americans view fairness very differently from the way flat-taxers do; they think the rich should pay a greater share of their income in taxes than the middle class does. And there are strong constituencies for each tax break in the current code. “The initial reaction for Forbes was positive, just like the initial reaction to Herman Cain is positive,” says Bill Archer, a former Republican representative from Texas who chaired the Ways and Means Committee from 1995 to 2001. “People are concerned about the complexities in the code and understandably and justifiably so. Then when the details began to surface, some of the glow leaves.”

:kick: