Our year-end round up of those lucky 1% who don’t pay taxes

As we gear up to bid a fond farewell to 2012, let’s look at the things that made the year so great for our billionaires. Starting with David Cray Johnson’s: The Fortunate 400

Six American families paid no federal income taxes in 2009 while making something on the order of $200 million each. This is one of many stunning revelations in new IRS data that deserves a thorough airing in this year’s election campaign.

and move on to the lowly 7000 millionaires that skipped out on their tax bill

 

The chart below from the Tax Policy Center shows the distribution of federal income taxes paid by income level in 2011.

It contains a number of interesting factoids, including the following:

• 7,000 people made more than $1 million but paid no income tax.
• 22,000 people made between $500,000 and $1 million but paid no income tax.
• 81,000 people made between $200,000 and $500,000 but paid no income tax.
• 381,000 people made between $100,000 and $200,000 but paid no income tax.

So that’s 491,000 Americans who made more than $100,000 a year who paid no income tax.

And finally, those magnificent chimeras: Corporations. Not quite business, not quite human, but all around better than you.

30 Major Corporations Paid No Income Taxes In The Last Three Years, While Making $160 Billion

CTJ looked at 280 companies, all of them members of the Fortune 500, and found that “while the federal corporate tax code ostensibly requires big corporations to pay a 35 percent corporate income tax rate, on average, the 280 corporations in our study paid only about half that amount.” And those who paid even half the statutory corporate tax rate paid far more than many of their competitors.

In fact, in the last three years, 78 corporations had at least one year where they paid no federal income tax at all, while 30 corporations paid not a dime over the entire three years. Those 30 corporations paid nothing, even though they made $160 billion in profits over that period

 

 

ContagionEx

Does the ailing world economy get you down? ContagionEx might be for you! Take a look at economic austerity and saving the world in a whole new light.

A Mark Fiore political animation.

The Quick and Easy Guide to: Living on Minimum Wage

Let’s lay out a budget for you so can see how simple it really is.

We’ll assume a single parent and child.

Now the sources for this guide were found on the fly, so if you can find more accurate numbers, have at. My time is valuable.

Let’s pretend you are lucky enough to work 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job. (Although we know this isn’t always the case. But, if you are a go-getter you can always get 2 or more jobs, right?)

This would have you working 160 hours per month at $7.25 per hour = $1160 Income.
(For the sake of simplicity we won’t even take out taxes, it’s the Billionaire Way. Which in reality would leave you with approximately $950.00 for the month)

Total Income: $1160

Expenditures:

Let’s pretend you live where the rents are the absolute lowest in the country… somewhere like Canton, OH or Spartanburg, SC

Rent = $638.00 (source: HUD via the We Party Patriots and Top 200 US Cities Rental Prices)

Which gets you something like this:
And the landscaping doesn’t even cost extra!

Lights = $95.66 (Source: Mother Earth News: Average Electric Bill)

Water = $51.00 (Source: LeakBird: Average Household Water Bill)

Food (on the Thrifty Plan) = $354.00 (Scource: USDA: Making a Food Plan, Cost of Food)

So your bare minimum, absolute basic necessities. No clothes, no personal products, no frills, no car, no transportation, no doctor’s visits, no dentist, no cable, no phone, no internet = $1138.66

Which leaves you with $22.00 per month to do all those things beyond the bare minimum.

And if you scrimp and save and work really, really hard and you don’t cause trouble and you don’t ask questions, then you too will be able to …. Oh, who am I kidding? Really we don’t care. As long as you keep working and buying we really don’t care.

Seriously… Shut up and go back to work.

Money, Power and Wall Street

Look! They are giving our Billionaires some much needed publicity. Four whole episodes of in-depth discussion.

Frontline: Money, Power and Wall Street

It is well deserved, gentlemen, long overdue and well deserved.

CheneyCare for the 1%

Aren’t you glad your tax dollars are being used for such a worthy cause?

Occupying the fairway in defense of golfing and other human rights.

From Mother Jones

Where is my drink goddammit?!

“I mean, we have a right to golf,” the 29-year-old community organizer proclaimed on Saturday. He was wearing a khaki suit and standing under the palms of Pleasanton, California’s Castlewood Country Club, where a dozen or so protesters had gathered near the 14th hole, next to a tent on which someone had written, “Save the 1%!” The group had come together to support Castlewood’s two-year lockout of its unionized cooks, dishwashers, and janitors—people who “are asking for so much,” Woiwode told me as another demonstrator sipped Perrier. “They are asking for health care and asking for their good jobs back. Why don’t they go out there and find other jobs?”

Pleasanton, a town of 70,000 southeast of Oakland, is fertile territory for a 1 percenter movement; the Census Bureau ranks it as the nation’s wealthiest mid-sized city. Located a short drive from the cute Main Street, the grounds of the Castlewood Country Club once surrounded a 53-room mansion inhabited by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the mother of the Gilded Age newspaper magnate. Porsches typically clog the club’s parking lot and weekend warriors zip past its fairway on carbon-fiber Kestrels. On this day, one of them slowed down just enough to shout a single word at the Save-the-1-Percenters: “Idiots!”

Whether the biker thought the protesters ridiculous or just not rich enough was hard to say. Instead of the club’s de rigueur golf shirts and yoga pants, members of the group sported a faded top hat, wrinkled knickers, and a full-length evening gown of questionable vintage. Woiwode’s suit seemed ill-tailored and his Dockers the knockoff kind, but he didn’t let that curb his enthusiasm. “The real idiots are the people who are talking about trying to spread the wealth around,” said Woiwode (who works for anti-poverty groups in Oakland when he’s not advocating for the rich). He clutched a handmade placard that read: “Can I pay you to hold this sign? (It’s heavy)”.

Wall St. Bonus Drop Means Trading Aspen for Discount Cereal

"Interesting, the gap between the rich and the poor is not as great as we thought."

Read it and weep:

Bloomberg.com reports

Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country’s top 1 percent by income, doesn’t cover his family’s private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square-foot Brooklyn duplex.

“I feel stuck,” Schiff said. “The New York that I wanted to have is still just beyond my reach.”
…

“People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress,” said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. “Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?”…

OH THE HUMANITY!

Business Insider: Obama Is About To Give A Huge Class Warfare Speech

From the Business Insider:

President Barack Obama will travel to Osawatomie, Kansas on Tuesday to emphasize the need for Americans to pay their “fair share.

Well now, it’s about time. Recognition by the government for our billionaires is long overdue. Long overdue

The One Percent Speak!

Ahhh… Our Master’s Voice

We Are The One Percent as transcribed by John Kenney of the New Yorker

Here is our manifesto, still very much a work in progress, as it’s cocktail hour and several of our protesters are out at the pool:

—All wealth should be shared equally among the wealthy.

—Eradicate poverty. (Note: Maybe a clearer way to say this would be “Eradicate the poor.” Need to discuss.)

—End business as usual. (Note: Several members like the sound of this, but they don’t know what it means. A suggestion has been made to add the word “hours” after “business.”)

—Implement a rule whereby the public cannot look at us and must keep a distance of at least twenty feet at all times.

Pepper?