Corporate Welfare: Unearned Income- The Laziest in Society

[Antny]

Yeah, it's a pretty sad state of affairs for the world, great for American farmers.  We did the same thing to Ethiopia.  In fact, the US government subsidizes our farmers, and buys their grain, then ships it to Ethiopia for free;   meanwhile, the farmers in Ethiopia sit with barns full of grain that noone will buy.  Why should they, they get it free from US.  We can effectively suppress the global market, and subsidize our own farmers.  Brilliant.  Who gives a shit who we screw over in the process...we're the most powerful nation on the planet!!!

[Deborah]

Yes, but the pressing concern here for all farmers and consumers, here and abroad, is the control Monsanto and others have over our food supply.
They are tampering with genetics so that plants will not reproduce. That renders farmers dependent, not on nature, but Monsanto for seed every year.
And it's one thing to tamper with the seed and quit another to make laws requiring the use of such impotent seed.
It's an outrage further that it would be illegal- A FUCKING CRIME FOR GODS SAKE- to save and use heirloom seed. Won't be long until we have a black market for them.

plant variety protection (PVP)= protection for monsanto to monopolize on life forms
Sickos.

[Antigen]

http://www.jlhudsonseeds.net/USDAComment.htm

USDA Plans Severe Gardening Restrictions

Direct quotes from USDA Action Plan

"Clean list" - Everything not on government approved list banned.
Penalties - $1000 for home gardeners, up to $250,000 for nurseries.
Interstate movement of seeds - To be prohibited without permit and inspection.

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.
--Environment is a sculptor -- a painter.

[Antigen]

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.1 ... _tophead_6

The Mystery of the Coca Plant That Wouldn't Die
The war on Colombia's drug lords is losing ground to an herbicide-resistant supershrub. Is it a freak of nature - or a genetically modified secret weapon?
By Joshua DavisPage 1 of 5 next »

I've got 23 ziplock bags filled with coca leaves laid out on the rickety table in front of me. It's been seven hours since the leaves were picked, and they're already secreting the raw alkaloid that gives cocaine its kick. The smell is pungently woody, but that may just be the mold growing on the walls of this dingy hotel room in the southern Colombian jungle. Somewhere down the hall, a woman is moaning with increasing urgency. I've barricaded the door in case the paramilitaries arrive.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

--Thomas Carlyle

[Deborah]

You can go the the S.F. Chronicle to read the whole article if you like, but here are some excerpts TO MAKE YOU FEEL SO MUCH BETTER ABOUT PAYING YOUR TAXES.
 
Stroke the Rich
By David Cay Johnston
The San Francisco Chronicle
Monday 11 April 2004
IRS has become a subsidy system for super-wealthy Americans IRS winks at rich deadbeats.

"While millions of Americans in the last quarter-century debated about who shot J.R. and scurried for news about who would be Jennifer Lopez's next lover, Congress quietly passed tax laws that shift the tax burden from the 28,000 Americans in households with incomes of $8 million per year or more.

One 1985 law, promoted in the Senate as relieving middle class Americans, gave a huge tax break to corporate executives who make personal use of company jets. CEOs may now fly to vacations or Saturday golf outings in luxury for a penny a mile. Congress shifted the real cost of about $6 per mile to shareholders, who pay two-thirds, and to taxpayers who suffer the rest of the cost lost as a result of reduced corporate income taxes.

Since 1988, Congress has also cut in half the Internal Revenue Service's capacity to enforce tax laws, replacing it with extra effort to reduce audits of corporations and the rich. On March 30, Congress was told that 78 percent of known tax cheats in investment partnerships are not even asked to pay because there are not enough tax collectors to go after them. Congress and the Bush administration rejected the request by the IRS Oversight Board, a citizen panel Congress created, for extra money to pursue some of these tax cheats and stop about 1 percent of the $311 billion in estimated annual tax cheating. (That's Eric Cantor and George W. Bush, our congressman and our president--Brad)

While letting rich tax cheats run wild, Congress did finance a crackdown on the poor. The working poor, most of whom make less than $16,000, are eight times more likely to be audited than millionaire investors in partnerships.

The audits of low-income taxpayers found little cheating. Two-thirds of the poor get either their full refund or more than they sought.

These and other unseen changes in the tax system are major factors in profound economic changes that have caused so many in America to lurch from job to job, a fourth of which pay less than $8 an hour, while helping a very few grow very rich.

Because the news media focus on what politicians say about the tax system, rather than how it actually operates, few Americans realize that:

Corporate income tax laws reward companies that move jobs offshore, allowing them to earn untaxed profits as long as the money stays offshore.

Widespread cuts in health insurance and pensions for the rank-and- file are driven by a special law that lets top executives defer paying taxes for years, in a way that adds 35 percent to the cost of their bloated pay.

The 2001 Bush tax cuts included a stealth tax increase on the middle class and upper-middle class that will cost them a half trillion dollars in the first 10 years and, for 35 million families, wiping out part or all of their Bush tax cuts.

The stealth tax boost on people making $30,000 to $500,000 was explicitly used to make sure that the super rich would get their entire Bush tax cuts.

A California couple who make $75,000 to $100,000 and have two children face a 97 percent chance of losing part of their Bush tax cuts to this stealth tax increase and overall will lose 42 percent of their Bush tax cuts by next year.

If your child becomes seriously ill, Congress, under this same law, will raise your income taxes if you spend more than 7.5 percent of your income trying to keep your child alive.

Since 1983, under a plan devised by Alan Greenspan, Americans have paid $1.8 trillion more in Social Security taxes than have been paid out in benefits, money that is used to finance tax cuts for the super rich while robbing the middle class of their capacity to save.

A family earning $50,000 this year will have about $1,500 of its money funneled to the super rich because of the Greenspan plan.

Since 1993, the income tax burden on the 400 highest-income Americans has been cut 40 percent when measured the way that President Bush prefers, which is by counting how many pennies out of each dollar go to income taxes. In 1993 the top 400 paid 30 cents out of each dollar in federal income taxes. By the end of the Clinton administration in 2000 they were down to 22 cents. Under Bush, their burden is less than 18 cents. Everyone else felt their tax bite rise to 15 cents on the dollar from an average of 13 cents.
Over time, the impact of tax relief for the super rich and more taxes for everyone else is profound. The rich can save and invest more and more, increasing their incomes and political power over time through the magic of compound interest, while everyone else has less of their money to spend or save and millions of people are mired in debt.

While wage earners have every dollar of income reported to the government, the super rich control what the IRS knows about their incomes. But the rich are rarely audited anymore. Congress also gives them many perfectly legal devices to defer reporting income for years or decades. That means that the real incomes of the super rich are much larger than the IRS data show and their tax burden is even lighter.

IRS data, adjusted for inflation, show that the poor are really getting poorer and the super rich are getting fabulously richer, a trend enhanced by their falling tax burden. In 1970, the poorest third of Americans had more than 10 times as much income as the super rich, the top 1/100th of one percent. Back then the poor had more than 10 percent of all income and the super rich had one percent.

By 2000 the two groups were equal -- the 28,000 Americans at the top had as much income as the 96 million at the bottom. The poor's share of income fell by half while the super rich's share rose to more than 5 percent of all income.

Not only did the poorest third's share of income shrink, they actually had less money. The average 25-year-old man in 1970 made $2 per hour more, adjusted for inflation, than in 2000.

Over those three decades the bottom 99 percent of Americans had an average increase in total income of $2,710. That is an annual raise of less than $100 per year, the equivalent of a nickel an hour raise each year for 30 years. The super rich did fabulously better, their average incomes rising $20. 3 million to an average of $24 million each.

Plot these figures on a chart and the results astound. If the increase for 99 percent of Americans is a bar 1-inch high, the bar for the super rich soars heavenward 625 feet."


AND NOW, TAKE A LOOK AT WHAT THE MONEY GOES FOR! !

http://www.expertclick.com/NewsReleaseW ... fm?Action="ReleaseDetail&";ID=8694&NRWid=5367

[Anonymous]

oooohhhhhhweeeeee another cut and paste by DEB, thanks for the long  horses hit read hun!

[Deborah]

And yet another....

April 22, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Passing the Buck
By PAUL KRUGMAN
 
The United States  spends far more on health care
than other advanced countries. Yet we don't  appear to receive more medical services. And we have lower life-expectancy and  higher infant-mortality rates than countries that spend less than half as much  per person. How do we do it?
 
An important part of the answer is that much of our health care spending is devoted to passing the buck: trying to get someone else to pay the bills.

According to the World Health Organization, in the
United States administrative expenses eat up about 15 percent of the money paid in premiums to private health insurance companies, but only 4 percent of the budgets of public insurance programs, which consist mainly of Medicare and Medicaid. The numbers for both public and private insurance are similar in other countries - but  
because we rely much more heavily than anyone else
on private insurance, our total administrative costs are much higher.

According to the health organization, the higher
costs of private insurers are "mainly due to the extensive bureaucracy required to assess risk, rate premiums, design benefit packages and review, pay or refuse claims." Public insurance plans have far less bureaucracy because they don't try to screen out high-risk clients or charge them higher fees.

And the costs directly incurred by insurers are only half the story.  Doctors "must hire office personnel just to deal with the insurance companies,"  Dr. Atul Gawande, a practicing physician, wrote in The New Yorker. "A well-run  
office can get the insurer's rejection rate down
from 30 percent to, say, 15 percent. That's how a doctor makes money. ... It's a war with insurance, every step of the way."

Isn't competition supposed to make the private
sector more efficient than the public sector? Well, as the World Health Organization put it in a discussion of Western Europe, private insurers generally don't compete by delivering care  at lower cost. Instead, they "compete on the basis of risk selection" - that is,  by turning away people who are likely to have high medical bills and by refusing  or delaying any payment they can.

Yet the cost of providing medical care to those
denied private insurance doesn't go away. If individuals are poor, or if medical expenses impoverish them, they are covered by Medicaid. Otherwise, they pay out of pocket or rely on the charity of public hospitals.

So we've created a vast and hugely expensive
insurance bureaucracy that accomplishes nothing. The resources spent by private insurers don't reduce overall costs; they simply shift those costs to other people and institutions.  It's
perverse but true that this system, which insures
only 85 percent of the population, costs much more than we would pay for a system that covered  everyone.

And the costs go beyond wasted money.
 
First, in the U.S. system, medical costs act as a
tax on employment. For example, General Motors is losing money on every car it makes because of the burden of health care costs. As a result, it may be forced to lay off thousands of workers, or may even go out of business. Yet the insurance premiums saved by  firing workers are no saving at all to society as a whole: somebody still ends  up paying the bills.
 
Second, Americans without insurance eventually
receive medical care - but the operative word is "eventually." According to Kaiser Family Foundation data, the uninsured are about three times as likely as the insured to postpone
seeking  care, fail to get needed care, leave
prescriptions unfilled or skip recommended  treatment. And many end up disabled - or die - because of these delays.

Think about how crazy all of this is. At a rough
guess, between two million and three million Americans are employed by insurers and health care providers not to deliver health care, but to pass the buck for that care to someone else.  And the result of all their exertions is to make the nation poorer and sicker.

Why do we put up with such an expensive,
counterproductive health care system? Vested interests play an important role. But we also suffer from ideological blinders: decades of indoctrination in the virtues of market  competition and the evils of big government have left many Americans unable to  comprehend the idea that sometimes competition is the problem,
not the  solution.
 
In the next column in this series, I'll talk about
how ideology leads to "reforms" that make things worse.
 
E-mail: [email protected]_
(mailto:[email protected])

[Antigen]

You can't possibly believe that our current overly regulated insusrance system bears even a passing resemblance to a free market enterprise, can you?

What we have is very nearly a monopoly. In defending the AG's office in Raich v. AG (since changed to AG v Raich) the government goes so far as to state outright that, among their reasons for enforcing federal prohibition on non commercial intrastate gardening operations is that the people who benefit medically from the stuff would be depriving the (international, never mind interstate) pharmaceutical industry of sales.  :roll:

It (the Bible) is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
--Samuel Clemens "Mark Twain", American author and humorist