- Pennsylvania Among 'Terrible 10' Most Regressive Tax States
- February 4 Non-Partisan Training: HOW TO RUN FOR ELECTION BOARD IN 2013: HOW TO RUN FOR COMMITTEEPERSON IN 2014
- Republican Governors Opt-In to Medicaid Expansion
- The Reports of Unions' Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
- Ask Allyson Schwartz to run for Governor
- Mind the gap: Opting Out of Medicaid Expansion Leaves Low-income Families Behind
- Jan. 14 Workshop:HOW TO RUN FOR ELECTION BOARD IN 2013; HOW TO RUN FOR COMMITTEEPERSON IN 2014
- Seth Williams on Guns, Jasmine Rivera on School Closures @PFC Meetup Wednesday
- PA Revenue Strong Midway Through Year; Tax Cut Could Have Big Impact
- What to Make of the Fiscal Cliff Deal?
The Standard and Poor's Downgrade
Submitted by Thirdandstate.org on Tue, 08/09/2011 - 3:54pm.
A blog post from Mark Price, originally published on Third and State.
The economic news of the past two weeks has been decidedly grim.
On July 29, new data confirmed that the economy in the first half of 2011 grew much more slowly than necessary to bring down the unemployment rate.
A few days later, the bizarre debt-ceiling fight was resolved with agreement to cut nominal federal spending over the next two years. Economic forecasts prior to this deal put the U.S. unemployment rate at 8% at the end of 2012. Cuts to federal spending mean higher unemployment forecasts are on the way.
By the way, this morning the forecasters at Goldman Sachs increased their unemployment forecast for the end of 2012 to 9.25% — and that assumes Congress will agree to extend the current payroll tax credit before January.
Unless you are living off the grid, you couldn’t have escaped news that last week was brutal for the Stock Market. Then late in the day Friday, credit rating agency Standard and Poor's — after correcting a $2 trillion math error — decided to go ahead and downgrade the full faith and credit of the U.S. taxpayer from AAA to AA+.
So what should we do? To restore confidence in the United States' ability to pay its bills, Congress should take steps now to build a stronger economy, not weaken it as we did with the debt limit deal.
The chief problem in the world economy is both the U.S. and Europe have taken steps to slow rather than boost economic growth. This will have a major impact on the U.S.'s ability to pay down long-term debt.
Unless Congress takes immediate action to create jobs, we face the rising risk that the economy will continue to grow more slowly.
Is that decidedly grim enough for you?
And now, believe it or not, they're sending Toomey to the rescue
That's right, Pat Toomey has been appointed by Mitch McConnell to the "Super-Committee" that is supposed to come up with a long-range plan to reduce the deficit. That's the same Pat Toomey who co-founded the Club for Growth, one of the far right's most noisy advocates of cutting taxes no matter what. This is the same Pat Toomey who somehow, inexplicably, was elected to represent the great State of Pennsylvania in the US Senate in 2010. If Toomey gets his way, the only government "service" that will be left standing in the next budget will be whatever is needed for empire building. Programs that build or repair roads, bridges tunnels or other infrastructure, provide income for the unemployed, seniors, or the disabled, or in any other way pump money into the economy without bombing someone, will be on a fast road to repeal.
Obviously Toomey's appointment is bad news. But the little bit of good news is that we in Pennsylvania have a great opportunity to shadow this man whenever he comes out in public, and get him to own up to his ideas and the terrible consequences they would impose on everyone who is not a multi-millionaire. Today a coalition of groups acting under the banner of the American Dream Movement seized that opportunity by holding a rally at Senator Toomey's downtown Philly office. (You can see more about that, in the Newsworks story on the Toomey appointment here.) Hopefully, more and more of us will be stepping up to, and calling out, Senator Toomey in days to come.
There is only one solution
Slash spending in areas that society and the USA can do without and raise revenue.
Raising revenue means looking at not just common taxes, but excise taxes as well.
For clarification on what an excise is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excise_tax
The US taxpayer's burden of excise taxes, weighted by income level of the taxpayer:
Take a hard look in that period in 1987 where the top 1% of all taxpayers were suddenly paying higher excise taxes. Why is that? What can be done to change it so that higher income earners are paying more excise taxes?