By Kevin Stoda, write-in and online candidate for USA Senate
Last week, I reported to you that in an interview on DN, entitled "Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession" that CEOs that fire the most people get the best pay and bonuses in America
In my article, I re-stated the quote from an interview on DN: "[T]he CEOs of the fifty corporations responsible for the biggest layoffs were paid an average $12 million--42 percent more than the average pay for the Standard & Poor's 500" in 2009.
Now, according to Democracy Now {DN}, "There's a battle looming in Washington over the future of tax cuts for the wealthy. The cuts enacted by President Bush are set to expire at the end of the year. Republicans, led by House Minority Leader John Boehner, have called for extending the $700 billion in tax breaks for the rich. But President Obama strongly criticized the GOP and emphasized his opposition to extending the tax cuts."
AMERICA, this is one of the top 2 or 3 issues in the election campaigns of 2010. I encourage you all to put pressure on Congressmen to tax the wealthy hoarders of America and jump-start the economy. (We can't lose--unless we let the hoarders blow any recovery chances in 2011-2012.)
I am not simply talking about tax-cuts to those Americans earning $250,000 or less. I am talking about getting an appropriate progressive tax--as needed for a great economy in the short and mid-term.
TAXING THE CEOs and HOARDERS OF AMERICA
DN spoke on Thursday with the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, David Cay Johnston who makes it clear that taxing the wealthy investors who are not spending money but hoarding their capital savings and earnings, is the appropriate thing to do in order to get the economy rolling.
Johnston is the author of a book, FREE LUNCH, on "how the wealthiest Aemricans enrich themselves" at our "government's expense".
http://www.freelunchthebook.com/
All these issues and changes are until now only quietly being discussed. Get loud America!
Johnston noted in his DN, i.e. when he was talking about making the tax-rates more sensible and appropriate for the needs of our day age, that in the USA today "we have a large number of people in this country now who are making multimillion-dollar annual incomes, and we're not talking about a higher tax rate on them. We're starting actually at a very low level. And the very highest-paid workers in the history of the world, hedge fund managers, at least twenty-five of whom made a billion dollars last year, pay a current tax rate of zero. The news media keeps saying 15 percent. They pay the 15 percent, when they cash out, which could be decades from now. None of that is on the table."
Until they cash out, these CEOs and other large corporate players and bankers pay nothing on their earnings--not even the supposed 15%.
WHAT WILL THE LOOPHOLES BE AND ARE THEY GOOD?
Juan Gonzalez of DN asked, "Now, what about the President's proposal this week to extend basically tax breaks to small business as a means of attempting to further stimulate the economy?"
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