Why the 45% pay no taxes?

I Just read this article about how long it would take for a worker to earn CEO pay at McDonalds.

Want to work a few hours.... The staggering number of people employed at these retailers, the 1978-2011 under 6% increase in income... Man, no wonder we are moving so fast to the 2nd world and the government is in debt.  Where do taxes come from?  Workers...  They get paid lousy wages and many pay no taxes as they qualify for exemptions for earning so little pay.  As Romney said 45% of Americans don't pay income taxes, but they sure pay sales taxes and Social Security and Medicare etc... But that is beside the point.

Why was the national discussion prior to the election focused on them not paying taxes and not on what their measly salaries are?  Could Obama have rephrased that statement about 45% of Americans "taking" from the system instead of paying into it.  I think he could have.

What is most notable about the article is the list of retail employers at the bottom and the average wages they pay.  According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14.4 million people were employed in the U.S. Retail Industry as of April, 2010.  So that is 14.4 million people who don't make enough money qualify for Federal Taxes, esp if as the article states, they are supporting families.
 
No wonder Romney lost. The stupid bammas that voted for him all across the south, where the average salary is even lower and to complain about it means loosing your job and being blacklisted by all the other employers in your town, seem to think that somehow a private equity chief would have made their life better...

What an ignorant country.  Someone should set up some charts of the 40% High School drop out rates in the same areas where retail employment is the only income these people can achieve and see where the correlations are.  Ignorance, breeds ignorance and the more of this you have, the happier the capitalists are to take them in and re-create the surf economy, lobby the idiots that sign off on legislation in our government and take their profits and replicate their model overseas.

Nothing changes.

DeMint to "De Mint"

So it has been some time since I have written anything here... From an economic perspective, we are in a sad state with the Central Bank continuing to print hundreds of billions of dollars to "be the market" as it will in mortgages and pretty much supplant any normal market functioning from recovering.  I think several banks are still technically insolvent.  Based on a Bloomberg article yesterday, Citi still has $171 Billion in "unwanted" assets that if sold at market would essentially wipe out their current reserves.

So the saga economically goes on and there is nothing new to add to that argument.

However I love this story about Senator DeMint going to the Heritage Foundation (where they "Mint" legislation in Washington)
First read here.



Yea, I have long said the power in Washington had been the think tanks not the government who routinely rubber stamps legislation written by the think tanks without doing much more then reading cliff notes prepared by their staff so they can BS their way through debates or Sunday morning talks show.. 

This power influences all levels and the think tanks are the revolving door of officials who are ousted in elections from time to time.  They sit in their perches from the think tanks and routinely influence what happens in legislation and the administration. The think tanks hire the brightest out of elite universities to understand what is going on in the country while elected politicians and their financial backer appointees "play house" in their positions with little capability to do their jobs. 


I often argued the strong right wing support for the Iraq invasion was all orchestrated from the conservative think tanks and it was those same bunch of conservatives that fed all the rosy information about how the Iraqi people would celebrate our triumphant defeat of their little dictator there... We all know how that went.

Anyway, it is quite unusual for a sitting elected leader of the most powerful body in the US with several years left on his term to leave and head to a think tank, but I guess after a while the "theater" of BS that is politics in Washington becomes to much for just about anyone who may really want to accomplish anything in the US government.  I don't know much about Mr. DeMint but I imagine he is actually a smart guy who just could not put up with a US legislature that better resembles a pre WWI Polish stalemate.