taking on a fair share of the burden

Particularly, one may hope, the burden being presently generated by the necessary restorative cash infusions directed by Treasury and the Fed.

Having had their incompetent, greedy asses bailed out, may we please be spared the bleating when the rentiers are asked to help retire the resulting debt.

Why aren't they talking to you on NPR today, Professor Reich? "National Pinko Radio" is outdoing Fox News itself in promoting the distortions and silliness of the teabaggers.

Of course the comments about Obama and taxes are absurd. The whole "tea party" thing is absurd.

Look, if McCain had won and done exactly the same things that Obama has done, would any of this "tea party" stuff be happening? Of course not. Would Fox be talking about McCain's tax increases? Of course not.

No, this protest is simply about the most basest members of the Republican party expressing their frustration at having been thrown out of power by a sizable majority of the American electorate. And more than a few of them are also upset that the President isn't white. Everything else is just an excuse.

I too think the rich don't pay enough taxes. Reich is right. It's easy to confirm on the IRS web site which breaks down taxes collected and percentage of AGI. To a great extent it is due to the reduction of max tax rate on dividends and cap gains to 15%. You can actually see the declines in their tables.

In a hurry, this was the first place to post.
This teabaggersday dump is only some of the slime leeking from the mis-guided tanker filled with sewage everyone wanted to sink! Problem now is the sucker ran up onto land and is leeking everywhere.
You see the addicts running towards the leeking sewage with their tounges hanging led by sewage lovers handjob and newtered.
Media still owned by these guys folks.
Bring on frikin franken.
Let the real show start.
Truth anyone?

Thank you, Mr. Reich. This is a fine blog entry that takes each point and holds it up to the light of reality. I really do appreciate seeing a good piece of critical reasoning and hope others will stop and think for a change after reading your piece. The knee-jerk, blah blah rhetoric responses based on lies are really very irritating. Again, a sincere thank you!

my all time favorite quote is from the father of Bill Gates:

TAXES ARE THE RENT YOU PAY TO LIVE IN AMERICA!

As usual, it's a tall order for us in the ether to ignore Dr. Reich's obvious pun. (Ahem.)

Professor, you are correct on so many points. May I add to your laundry list the obvious absurdity of the cry against "taxation without representation" and the baseless comparisons of the issues in 1773 vs. today.

My only real criticism of your approach in this case, sir, is the obvious disconnect between your intellectual response to what was in my view a visceral, anti-intellectual expression of political hostility. The intellectual power of the teabaggers was on full display during a CNN reporter's exchange with a placard-holding marcher, who, when pressed on why he was referring to Obama as a fascist and socialist and yet could neither explain why that were so nor provide his definition of fascism, became hostile and threatening to the reporter.
Long live right-wing demagoguery!

There are moral reasons to oppose paying taxes under our current system of allocating those funds. When someone blithely advises you that a huge percentage of your taxes go to the military, that's a moral reason to protest your taxes right there. The military is a tool for killing people and breaking shit, rarely a moral course of action or an ethical place to spend money largely collected by threat of force in the first place.

Much of our military expenditure over the past six years or so has gone into unnecessary campaigns of terror against, for the most part, darker skinned people outside our tribe who have never done anything to us. We've gone over and killed lots of them, maimed lots more, blown up a great big heaping pile of their stuff, and just for funzies, we've tortured, raped, and humiliated quite a few of them too. Men, women, and children. Your tax dollars at work. Aren't you proud to be an American?

All of this is a legitimate reason to oppose paying taxes, or, at least, to oppose the way your so called elected representatives allocate your taxes. If all across America hundreds of thousands rose up on April 15 to say "DON'T USE MY TAXES TO KILL WOMEN AND KIDS", I'd respect those people... hell, I'd be out there marching with them. And if someone wants to get together a grass roots tax revolt movement to stop paying taxes until we get our asses back out of places we have no moral right to be in, I'll sign up for that, too.

But the people involved in the ongoing tea parties put together by the contemporary conservative movement have no such motivation. They're not even coherent. They can't come up with an actual message, because here's what they're really protesting -- they lost an election. They can't understand it. They lost an election, and now there's a black guy/liberal/socialist/fascist/Not A Republican And Nobody We Want To Drink A Beer With currently in the White House, and they can't stand it, and somebody they're inclined to listen to told them this was what they should do about it.

They're protesting the fact that despite their blatant electoral frauds in 2000 and 2004, their takeover of the DOJ, their stacking the Supreme Court with conservative justices, and their spectacularly successful efforts to get a complete chokehold on most of the wealth and political power in the richest nation on Earth, they still lost the last two elections, and the people who are running the government right now aren't listening to these lunatics any more.

That won't look real good on a protest sign or a t-shirt, though, so they tell themselves this is about taxes.

I reject Mr. Reich's basic argument that began this piece, "The United States has the lowest taxes of all developed nations."

I don't live in all developed nations. I live in the United States. When I don't get to take home and spend 50% of my income then my taxes are too high. President Obama is raising my tax rate, I'm in the top bracket. California just raised my sales tax, my license plate tax, and my income tax. I'm seeing my interest deduction disappear. The list is endless.

If I wanted to live in the rest of the developed world I would. I don't. I want to live in the United States where the individual citizens has the right to succeed or FAIL based on their own merits, and the government, Federal-State-Local, had limits put on what they could take with taxes and what they could spend. At this point I would settle for 50% of my paycheck. Sales tax takes 9.75% right of the top. Federal income tax, state income tax, social security, medicare, disability, etc. etc. etc. mean I'm already below my 50% requirement, and Mr. Reich tells me my taxes are low. I'm just livid over such an outlandish claim.

Jeez. . . leave it to Reich to open with a "short" joke.

That said, this a very reasoned argument, and will fall on deaf ears in the teabagger* ommunity. They insist they already know what the truth is, so if you point out they are wrong you are an unpatriotic commie trying to destroy America, and it's a danger for them to listen to you.

*We have to keep using the term "teabagger", they started it, let's use it to their chagrin.

Yeah, no. For what the average citizen gets out of it-- their taxes should be lower.

Really, there's only one interesting thing about the tea party uproar--and that's the way it fixates on everything but what most of the public is mad about: having to bail out the criminal class that's been busy systematically screwing them over financially in every other sense too.

That doesn't mean it won't work for our little right wing populists. (It always has before).

Wingnut lament: "Woe is us, we're being relegated to the dustbin of History, whatever can we do?"

Gingrich: "Eureka, lets have a tea bag revolution!"

Wingnuts: "Yeah, that'll do it, it will get us right back on top!"

Robert Third Reich is the designated Liberal Nazi for smearing and marginalizing resistance to Obama's communist fringe movement. History records that a previous Nazi, Hitler, used Reich's tactics to marginalize and brutalize any resistance to his reign of terror. What we have here is another pathetic series of lies, half-truths, and more lies designed to convince sub-moronic stooge Demo-commie-crats that they are on the right track (to oblivion).

The commies on the coast are gonna be toast.

Make America a better place - stop paying taxes!

for Robert Reich to label everyone in America who opposes high taxes and wasteful government spending as Kooks and Demagogues simply shows he is completely out of touch with average Americans who are trying to pay bills - he insults the integrity of millions of Americans who work hard everyday to provide for their families - Robert Reich is a despicable idiot

Bluemeanie--You are one super smart Shortie(Robert R.'s term,not mine) Of course
48% of the people said tax was about right. After all, 40% do not pay tax so why would they say otherwise. More genuine proof of the near total dumbing down of America!

Idealogues with weak positionsare forced to resort to twisting statistics. So it is with Robert Reich. For example, it is a fact that the Bush tax cuts were greater for the middle class as a percent of their taxes than they were for higher income people. But Reich distorts this by talking about after-tax income. Consider someone making $50,000 who pays taxes of $5,000 and then gets a 10% tax cut of $500. Their after-tax income rises 1.1% from $45,000 to $45,500. Now consider someone making $1,000,000 who pays 30% in taxes, or $300,000, and only gets a 6% tax cut, or $18,000. That person sees her after-tax income rise from $700,000 to $718,000, or 2.6%. So tell me, Mr. Reich, why is that unfair or even relevant? The fact is, as you well know, the middle income taxpayers got a great percent of their taxes cut than did higher income folks. Take your twisted version to the extreme: if someone making $1,000,000 were to be in a 100% bracket and then received a tax cut of $1, you would shout to the denizens that this vile individual just received an increase in after-tax income that is an infinite percentage. Sir, you are spinning populist baloney that does nothing but spur class warfare. Not to mention, of course, your crude characterization of the many hard-working citizens who voiced their honest discontent yesterday with runaway government spending.

As someone who has read one of your books and quoted you in a business plan, I find this piece a bit duplicitous. It's not nearly so much about taxes as it is about rampant spending, spending without time allowed to read the bill, much less discuss, debate, weigh alternatives, consider expert opinion...

Take TARP. All but $35B of $700B has been expended. Where? Journalists are having to file under the Freedom of Information Act to find out. And yet, lending, which this enormous expenditure was supposed to rapidly free up, steadily shrinks... down 24% at this point. A big part of a trillion dollars has vanished like hot water on a grill. Who is accountable?

The calculation is that each of my three college-age sons will pay $1,140,000 in taxes over their lifetimes just to cover interest payments on Congress' spending over the last six months. That's a big hit. And nobody in the Admin is saying we've had enough spending already. Just the opposite. And that's just for the interest, before a single govt salary or bridge or submarine is paid for or debt retired.

When you and I were kids, Mr Reich, 1 person in 19 worked in non-military govt at any level. Now the number is 1 in 6. Govt has far outstripped all other segments of the economy in growth. Because govt salaries are paid from taxes, 5 people work to earn the pay of the sixth, including their tax payments. Because Social Security is a ponzi scheme and not real investment, those 5 people also have to pay for another couple of retirees.

There is no room to grow government bigger still, yet you persist. If anyone is demagoguing here, it is you.

Wow Tanner, you conservatives certainly don't win points for originality. Every time the matter of the economy comes up, on cue like a wind-up toy, you cart out the "Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae brought down the economy" line and conveniently ignore the other 10,000 some-odd factors that were involved in this collapse.

And how do you expect to have your dogma on "individual responsibility" taken seriously when you apologize and excuse away the greed of financial professionals and consumers because of "incentives put in place by our government." Your pigheadedness is only exceeded by your hypocrisy.

Go get Macroeconomics for Dummies and try to learn something.

So MMfA, rather than charge class warfare, which is the pot calling the kettle black as the left routinely does it - why not answer Stuart Varney's question " Is it "fair" for government to take "half" of money earned by those who "succeed" and give it to others because they make less money?" And the rest of his comments. They are damn good.
appetite suppressants

An friend from law school, now a partner in one of Washington's wealthiest law firms, explained to me one day over lunch spoke to me on how Auto transporting had his car delivered on time for his conference. He mentioned how much of a great company they are, and also how he and his partners use tax rules to create offsetting taxable gains and losses, then allocate the gains to the firm's foreign partners who don't pay taxes in the United States. They keep all of their losses here and shelter their income abroad.