The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Employee

Re: The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Emplo

liblady said:

um.....do you know what an effective tax rate is?

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I sure do. Think you can show me in the tax code where the effective rate is reduced by deductions and write-offs, or did you read that in an op-ed?

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apdst said:

I sure do. Think you can show me in the tax code where the effective rate is reduced by deductions and write-offs, or did you read that in an op-ed?

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Do you think there are instructions in the tax code on how to bypass them, or how to buy a Governors campaign and get millions in local tax breaks as a result? Before unions it was very common place for whole towns and states to be bought off and run for corporate interest. Without unions to stop them, that is what we will return to.

Wake up and smell the corruption.

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I sure do love the whole "i'm getting screwed, so everyone else should get screwed too. It's only fair" meme they've managed to install in the Foxis minds. I guess that's easier to swallow than the "your guys have been lying to your face while f*cking you in the ass" truth. Turn the middle class against itself. Divide and conquer. Sun Tsu, "The Art of War". Oldest trick in the book, accomplished with the latest in propaganda techniques. You conservatives are aware that parroting this nonsense makes you look like a buncha lickspittle dogs, right?

Re: The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Emplo

apdst said:

Your link is entitled, "Corporate Welfare", then talks about taxes. I'm purdy sure that they no less about the tax code than you do, which ain't sayin' much.

.

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I would be very happy to look any any factual information you would wish to presnt here to show that the factual information provided in the article is INCORRECT. I bet lots of people here would welocme your data.

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Catawba said:

Do you think there are instructions in the tax code on how to bypass them, or how to buy a Governors campaign and get millions in local tax breaks as a result? Before unions it was very common place for whole towns and states to be bought off and run for corporate interest. Without unions to stop them, that is what we will return to.

Wake up and smell the corruption.

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Surely there's a formula used to reduce the effective rate with deductions and write-offs. Right?

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haymarket said:

I would be very happy to look any any factual information you would wish to presnt here to show that the factual information provided in the article is INCORRECT. I bet lots of people here would welocme your data.

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I think it would better that you show me, in the tax code, where tax rates actually go down, because of deductions and write-offs. It's your claim, not mine; it's not for me to back it up. That's your job.

Re: The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Emplo

apdst said:

I think it would better that you show me, in the tax code, where tax rates actually go down, because of deductions and write-offs. It's your claim, not mine; it's not for me to back it up. That's your job.

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You have been shown.
You have been taught.
You have been educated.
You have had the information presented to you.
You have had the facts handed to you.
You have had the data given to you.

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Re: The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Emplo

hazlnut said:

$78,000 is the second highest salary in the U.S. -- Where'd you get that winner?




I get it, you're one of the people who don't like to pay taxes. I guess the hundred of public services that benefit you, directly or indirectly, every single day all just magically happen.

So, please tell name one privately owned business that makes no use of public services--including roads, streets, police, fire... Is their home office on the moon?

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Second highest salaries on average among teachers in the United States.

And you're blowing it out of proportion and putting words in my mouth. Where did I say I didn't support taxes for public services such as roads, bridges etc. I have no problem with support a local police force, or firefighters, who help could be to my benefit anyday. However, me paying a majority of a teachers pension is not the direction I want my tax money going to. Afterall, how much of their tax money goes toward private pensions? Oh wait...

Re: The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Emplo

haymarket said:

You have been shown.
You have been taught.
You have been educated.
You have had the information presented to you.
You have had the facts handed to you.
You have had the data given to you.

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

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You posted an oped, that complains about corporate welfare, dude! :lamo

Re: The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Emplo

Libspeak alert....

NOBODY can count "saved" jobs...and please don't go quoting Bama Speak.

liblady said:

right, who saved thousands of jobs?

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Catawba said:

Wake up and smell the corruption.

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we did

tuesday

GAO report identifies billions of dollars in government waste | syracuse.com

no less than the g-a-o told us, you wanna argue with THEM?

a full HALF TRILLION DOLLARS

no abstraction, that---a HALF TRILLION DOLLARS

we're dying of debt---housing is fractured, the fed has invested TWO POINT SEVEN TRILLION in pure junk---UNDIVERSIFIED

bowles simpson recommends drastic hits to social security and the president punts, his bogus and doa budget proposes brazenly to RAISE our record deficit a full THIRTY PERCENT over awful '11, his outyear projections are absurd with forever-near-zero interest rates, no less than the nyt reports that service on the debt---MERE INTEREST ALONE---will soon approach ONE TRILLION DOLLARS per year

fannie and fred could cost another HALF TRIL

MEDICAID is already NOW at the STATE level a CRISIS

our president---today---on all things economic---is beyond irrelevant, he's not even trying

when's the last time you heard him trumpeting his new win-the-future, his innovation and competitiveness

and how boldly was he braying it

this guy is DONE

he needs a RADICAL political sea change to begin to MATTER even a little

he has been the most woebegone leader mature americans can remember

his union support, by the way, politically speaking, structurally speaking, is about to take a CRIPPLE

membership, dues, affection...

ie, clout

that's not spin, solons

it's observation, it's what's really going on---and to a violent degree---outside the debate-filled cloister of your endless but closed thoughts

housing, property taxes, the TWO POINT FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS owed by only our PUBLIC unions at the STATE level only

public pensions alone, as none can deny, are unsustainable

deal with it

or not

either way, stay up

Re: The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Emplo

what's going on in the eu?

Re: The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Emplo

Khayembii Communique said:

Pulitzer Prize winning tax reporter, David Cay Johnston, has written a brilliant piece for tax.com exposing the truth about who really pays for the pension and benefits for public employees in Wisconsin.

Gov. Scott Walker says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to “contribute more” to their pension and health insurance plans. Accepting Gov. Walker’ s assertions as fact, and failing to check, creates the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not. Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin’ s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

Via tax.com

How can this be possible?

Full Story

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So PROPERTY taxes are NOT real!?!?? :shock:

This is utter CRAP. :roll:

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haymarket said:

Here is why. The Governor of our state just delivered his budget message and he is cuting back revenue sharing funds by over $300 milion dollars. One big reason: the revenue sharing monies and other federal programs to his state have been cut in Washington. If Washington has more money, states get more money in revenue sharing... then cities and towns get more money.

One big reason the feds have less is major corporations not paying the actual rates that apply to them.

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And of course that lost of revenue, at the federal level has nothing to do with unemployment numbers, or with profits being down in many of the companies these last two years ? Nor is any of the state income lose due to the housing crash, and loss of jobs?

Also consider this, how much did your state get from the stimulus bill last year? All that did was to defer lasts years shortfall to this year. With our federal government 15 trillion dollars in debt, I don't think we should even consider giving even more to the states if or when we pull out of this, the feds need to work on paying down our debt, NOT seeing how they can spend more money.

Now onto your corporate tax, you have a valid point, most corporations don't pay anything near the going rate of 35% that the US imposes. Those loopholes as you like to call them ( they are perfectly legal deductions tho) are there to compensate for us having the highest corporate tax rate in the world. ( China is in the process of reducing theirs to 15%) With out those loop holes, we would stand even less of a chance of attracting business to the US.

Now in a way I agree with you, I don't like those loop holes, and if there was a proposal to close them all, and reduce our rates to say 15% I would be all for that.

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More new polls out showing voters don't support Walker's attempt to end collective bargaining for public servants, including one by the conservative Rasmussen Reports:

"A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Wisconsin voters shows that just 39% favor weakening collective bargaining rights and 52% are opposed."

Wisconsin Poll: Support for Budget Cutting, Not for Weakening Collective Bargaining Rights - Rasmussen Reports™

Re: The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Emplo

DontDoIt said:

You don't see corporations crying on the news when they receive increased coroprate taxes do you?


Indeed they have, to what I've read the teacher seem to agree to everything proposed except Governor Walker's stand on collective bargaining. Teachers will accept the 12% increase, but would just end up bargaining for the difference to make it up, which is probably why they don't like the new proposed ban on collective bargaining.

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No, because they have their paid lobbyists in congress to do their crying for them. And, besides, there are so many loopholes in the tax law that many corporations don't pay a cent anyways.

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DontDoIt said:

You state that this Republican Governor is after all the unions just to "bust them" because he is incorporating them into the budget cuts, which in this day is particularly rare for the public sector. It's constantly happening in the private sector, you know the I just tax the rich and corporations more, but when corporations and rich do see tax hikes, which makes profits fall, you don't see them protesting and making headline news now do you? The corporate tax was just raised in Illinois to help cut the deficit, and they didn't throw a fit did they, and you don't see any in here say that democrats are trying to "bust" corporations, which in a sense democrats are doing in the same sense that "republicans are trying to bust unions," am I correct?

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I believe the "busting" refers to Walker's determination to elimate some of the collective bargaining rights. If any state government is interfering with private businesses' rights to negotiate with suppliers and the likes, let us know and we'll agree with you. In the meantime, raising tax is not even close to the same thing as the employees already agreed to Walker's fiscal position.

FYI, I remember businesses making noise for the government to interfer when they can't compete with the Chinese, so don't say that the private sector doesn't "whine and cry"

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Nevergolfpar said:

EXACTLY MY POINT!!!! Corporate tax contributions will continue to decrease until such time as corporate tax rates start to fall. In an over-taxed society multi-national corporations will continue to shelter income until such time as TAX RATES ARE REDUCED TO MORE COMPETITIVE LEVELS WITH OTHER COUNTRIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It is just more advantageous to pay foreign taxes than taxes in the United States.

Until liberals like yourself understand this basic lesson in human behavior (corporations are run by humans) you will fail achieve the tax revenues you crave.

Should Obama be successful in closing these so call 'tax loopholes', (they are not tax loopholes but that is what he calls them) then two things will happen. 1) corporations will pass the tax on to the consumer, weakening the middle class even further 2) they will continue to go offshore in their hiring. Either way the middle class will suffer and guys like you will continue to spew forth your 'tax the rich' filth.

BTW: If you want to stop the US economy from turning into a 'third world country' the only savior is to tax corporations AND INDIVIDUALS less, not more.

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Third world - like poor road and sanitation system, limited water distribution and electricity system, ineffectual health and food safety inspection at work places or resturants - because the governments cannot provide adequately for all these services? Not to mention corrupt police and judicial system because most third world average state wages is not adequate to support the households?

And how do you explain the fact that Demark has one highest income tax rate in the world and yet enjoy one of the highest quality of life in the world?

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Nevergolfpar said:

If you privatized roads, streets, police, fire and everything else not only would things run a hell of a lot cheaper, but the roads would be smoother, the streets cleaner, the police would catch more criminals, and the fire department would take less time to respond to an emergency.

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That's one of the stupidest things I've ever read here. I've personally seen first hand people whose house is burning having to negotiate with fire fighters. Not a good bargaining position. And ambulances fighting over people in car accidents to take to their hopsitals. You would think it's good for the crash victims but the hospitals are almost always dodgy. You should visit those third world countries you talked about and actually live there for a year or two to enjoy all these wonderful privately runned services.

While I can't intellectually give you an answer to your question, I can respond with another question you can't answer...name me one governmental agency that does not use the services of some privately held company? Name just one...you can't do it either.

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Your point is what? That the government don't have to pay those private companies as you want the private companies to not pay the government for the services they enjoy?

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I do have another observation here. We should not be pinning this all on the teachers, when it was the banksters that got us into this mess. Several more banks have closed their doors temporarily this year. They are now back open, after getting more bailout money from the government. I don't hear anybody saying that we should lower the salaries of the banksters. After all, if they are taking government money, then they are no longer operating according to the principle of free markets, and deserve to take less. But there is, of course, the Bankster Union, which is the cozy club of wealthy people who plunder this nation, while the teachers are forced to pay the consequences for their actions.

One more observation - Give the teachers too many pay cuts, then ditch digging will look like a better career, and Wisconsin will end up with the kind of literacy rate that you see in Mississippi, because most of the teachers will be digging ditches instead of teaching.

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The Barbarian said:

This is the difference between a liberal and a conservative, while you see the tax cuts as the cause of our collapsed economy, I see it as just as much a spending problem. Even in the best of times ( the Clinton years) our nation debt still rose every year, that was with a deep defense spending cuts, and at the time the largest tax increase in our history, and robbing our SS fund to boot. Yet with all this, we still seen our nation debt rise over 1.5 trillion dollars.

Now that reality has caught up with us, liberal see the whole thing as a tax problem, and want to find someone to blame, and will blame anything other then our unrestrained spending for the last 30 or 40 years.

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Can you show the bold part? If there was a surplus, by extension the debt must have been reduced.

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To Haymarket regarding corporate tax liability : Amortization of capital expenditures, capital improvements, and green energy solutions.

These three things are heavily written into the tax codes for corporations. These three things are also increasingly called for when you tighten regulations on things like emissions, cleaner energy (read: solar panels), and having to remodel factories for new technologies.

So it shouldnt come as a suprise that the corporations like Boeing, oil pipelines, aerospace, and GE have lower tax liability, they are putting out a lot of capital outlay to stay competitve. In the case of GE they are particularly chummy with the current administration and are embarking on a lot of green energy projects that are partially subsidized as well as having generous write off opportunities.

In the case of companies like Apple and Microsoft, their primary capital is ideas, they dont retool their production as often as say Caterpillar or GM might.

Regarding the public sector unions, how much is the unfunded liability of the benefits package? That tells you how much taxpayers are putting in on top of regular salaries. THAT is the figure that we need to know and should be discussing---the difference between what the teachers put in and what is scheduled to be recieved.

I dont see anyone looking at this but Im betting the administrative overhead and paychecks for same are quite high as well in Wisconsin. If you want to cut somewhere, cut administrator paychecks and budgets, but you will hit more waste than you think with that tactic.

Anywho, resume entrenched positions.

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apdst said:

This is bunk. The percentage of taxation on profits doesn't decrease. :rofl

Ya'll really need to stop reading this propaganda.

I love Leftists scream about, "loopholes", too. Where are those loopholes? Better question, what are they. I want some of that, too.

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Do you understand how corporate taxes work? The big "loophole" in corporate taxes is corporations literally have two sets of books: 1. Tax books, which takes the most extreme position on accelerating deductions (including aggressive depreciation, expensing of assets at purchase), stalling revenue recognition (including use foreign international sales corporations and domestic international sales corporations aka FISC and DISC) and the ability to allocate large elements of costs, particularly cost of goods sold between states and between countries to get the most favored tax benefit, and 2. Book books, which slow expenses and accelerate income, thus showing the most favorable profit position that can be created, and of course are used for the financial reports given to shareholders.

The two sets of books are literally reconciled in the financial statements in a liability account called Deferred Tax Liability (which is the mythical tax that would be paid on the book profits, but is deferred to the end of time by continuing to create new tax losses). The footnotes to the financial statements include quite a few book/tax reconciliations. You should read some (the financial report of any public company will have this). They are really quite fascinating. Of course, the sophistication on how this is done provides very, very good income for accountants and lawyers, not to mention the Big Four accounting firms. They are all paid quite handsomely to ensure that Pepsi, Exxon-Mobil, GE, etc, never pay any tax. Meanwhile, small businesses do not have such luxuries and pay most of the corporate taxes.

So, corporations have incredible tools at their disposal (including tax accountants and tax attorneys) to shelter income. Of course, the better the accountant/lawyer base, the lower the effective tax rate on corporate income. Corporate effective tax rates have been falling for years, though the marginal rate has been constant. I will post a table later as soon as I can extract it from its source document.

This is just another example of the bifurcation of our economy.

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The Barbarian said:

This is the difference between a liberal and a conservative, while you see the tax cuts as the cause of our collapsed economy, I see it as just as much a spending problem. Even in the best of times ( the Clinton years) our nation debt still rose every year, that was with a deep defense spending cuts, and at the time the largest tax increase in our history, and robbing our SS fund to boot. Yet with all this, we still seen our nation debt rise over 1.5 trillion dollars.

Now that reality has caught up with us, liberal see the whole thing as a tax problem, and want to find someone to blame, and will blame anything other then our unrestrained spending for the last 30 or 40 years.

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Our national debt rose each year during the Clinton years only if you count total debt, which includes the debt to the social security trust fund (as opposed to debt to public, which is what the government actually owes other than itself, actually fell during the final Clinton years). Even if you want to call it total debt, then the debt increase was very slow during the Clinton years, in fact, it fell as a function of GDP (see chart below).

If you want to talk about total debt, then you can't say that we robbed social security as it was the debt to social security that rose (the flip side being the social security had investments in US treasuries and was intact). Please be consistent in your argument.

Total debt, in and of itself, isn't the issue. Its the capacity to handle the debt that is the issue. This capacity is measured as debt to GDP. Debt is going to go up with income, just as you mature in your career, you are likely to make more money and buy a bigger house with a bigger mortgage.... but hopefully your overall financial health improves as that new mortgage mortgage payment comes at a time when you have higher income and more personal equity.... again, the measure is your ability to handle the debt.

BTW... you are either confusing debt with deficit or missed a decimal place as the debt is closer to 15.0T and the deficit (the amount projected to be added to the debt each year) about $1.5T.... and thank you for suggesting that a tax increase helped to slow the debt increase you speak about during the Clinton years...

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nonpareil said:

That's one of the stupidest things I've ever read here. I've personally seen first hand people whose house is burning having to negotiate with fire fighters. Not a good bargaining position. And ambulances fighting over people in car accidents to take to their hopsitals. You would think it's good for the crash victims but the hospitals are almost always dodgy. You should visit those third world countries you talked about and actually live there for a year or two to enjoy all these wonderful privately runned services.




Your point is what? That the government don't have to pay those private companies as you want the private companies to not pay the government for the services they enjoy?

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How do you make the leap from my argument of privatization to the quality of life in third world countries? Name me one thing that the government does better than the private sector? Allow a for profit company to run some of these services I mentioned (without burdensome regulations) and every single service would be much better and cheaper.

Also spare me the hollow rhetoric about the third world countries as well. I own a home in the Philippines (Cavite SW of Manila) and have experience dealing with the hospital in metro Manila (MCM to be exact). The service I received was far superior to anything I have experienced in this country (though I admit the hospital was not as modern as in this country--but close). So when you start comparing privately run companies, like hospitals in third world countries to their American counterparts you best be careful. After all, how does it make you side look when a PRIVATE hospital in a third world country like the Philippines is every bit as good as our highly regulated hospitals in a modern country like our own? Should our hospitals not be light years better with all of their regulation and government involvement?

When we fail to beat third world countries in quality of health care, what do you attribute that to?