In case you haven’t been following the race, Ed Martin, former chief of staff to the execrable Blunt Administration, is running against incumbent Russ Carnahan in Missouri’s Third Congressional District. Ed Martin was with the Tea Party set from the beginning and has generally associated himself with the worst of their looniness.

Yesterday, I noticed one of Martin’s tweets where he alleged Carnahan tries to avoid paying taxes on a boat by docking it in Illinois. Clicking back through the link to Martin’s website, Martin expands the charge to a long diatribe against authorities misusing their power for personal and political gain. Now, let’s set aside whether there is actually any issue with Carnahan. Martin is not the most reliable person in the world – he was still reciting the lie about “death panels” as recently as last Saturday – and at worst, Carnahan can’t be accused here of using any special privilege of his office.

It’s curious that Martin would get so worked up about officials abusing their power. I mean, this is the guy that cost the state of Missouri millions of dollars in legal fees over his own abuse of power that got him fired as chief of staff. This is a guy who actually used his official government job to seek out and obtain a free hunting permit.

   From: Martin, Ed

   To: John Hoskins

   Sent: 9/6/2007 8:43 PM

   Subject:

   John

   Does the chief of staff get a dove hunting permit as part of his position? I am hoping to go on Monday next.

   Ed Martin

   (573) 751-5261

Let’s be clear. It’s Ed Martin who not only thinks that having a position of of power means the law does not apply to him, that he gets special privileges not accorded to the rest of us in direct contravention of the law – he’s actually acted on these impulses throughout his career. Just remember, any time Martin points his finger, he’s got 4 fingers pointing back at himself.

Section 105.452

   Prohibited acts by elected and appointed public officials and employees.

   105.452. 1. No elected or appointed official or employee of the state or any political subdivision thereof shall:

   (1) Act or refrain from acting in any capacity in which he is lawfully empowered to act as such an official or employee by reason of any payment, offer to pay, promise to pay, or receipt of anything of actual pecuniary value paid or payable, or received or receivable, to himself or any third person, including any gift or campaign contribution, made or received in relationship to or as a condition of the performance of an official act, other than compensation to be paid by the state or political subdivision;

Well, not quite everyone else.

Teabaggers appear to believe that the Obama Administration has raised their taxes (hat tip to Yellow Dog at They gave us a republic…).

CBS News/NY Times Poll:

THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT [pdf]

February 5-10th, 2010

….Tea Party identifiers are more likely to believe President Obama has already raised taxes this past year. Most Americans think the President has kept them the same.

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION HAS ALREADY…

Raised taxes

All – 24%

Tea Partiers – 44%

Lowered taxes

All – 12%

Tea Partiers – 2%

Kept taxes same

All – 53%

Tea Partiers – 46%

….This poll was conducted among a random sample of 1084 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone February 5-10, 2010. Phone numbers were dialed from random digit dial samples of both standard land-line and cell phones. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The error for subgroups is higher….

[emphasis added, formatting adjusted]

Here’s the reality, via Citizens for Tax Justice:

President Obama Cut Taxes for 99% of Working Families in Missouri in 2009 [pdf]

President Obama Cut Taxes for 99% of Working Families in Missouri in 2009 The 2009 federal income taxes that come due on April 15 have been cut for nearly all working Americans, including Americans at all income levels, by the Recovery Act signed by President Obama last year. No legislation enacted during the Obama administration increased taxes for 2009….

There are some very interesting tables in the report.

So, why are all those teabaggers angry that Obama raised their taxes? Just asking.

Conservatives are really hyped up right now, in advance of Tax Day, on a tiny little statistic, taking it out of context, and blowing it all out of proportion to try to make the case that the United States has turned into a welfare state where nearly half of all Americans don’t pay any taxes, they just leach off the rest of us.

This is…what is the word I am looking for here…it’s on the tip of my tongue……oh yes, I have it now…bullshit.

It is Faux Newspeak used to describe the same poor people that “Ronaldus Maximus” called welfare queens and who the Wall Street Journal refered to as “lucky duckies”.

Back then, Farhad Manjoo at Salon did a wonderful takedown of the assholes at the Journal who wrote that drivel, and reminded his readers that the poor actually pay a much higher percentage of their income in taxes when the sum totals are added up – they just don’t pay much, if any federal income tax. Those two qualifiers are mighty important.

Forty-seven percent.

That’s the portion of American households that owe no income tax for 2009. The number is up from 38 percent in 2007, and it has become a popular talking point on cable television and talk radio. With Tax Day coming on Thursday, 47 percent has become shorthand for the notion that the wealthy face a much higher tax burden than they once did while growing numbers of Americans are effectively on the dole.

Neither one of those ideas is true. They rely on a cleverly selective reading of the facts. So does the 47 percent number.

Given that taxes are likely to be one of the big political issues of the next few years – and maybe the biggest one – it’s worth understanding who really pays what in taxes. Once you do, you can get a sense for our country’s fiscal options. How, in other words, will we be able to close the huge looming gap between the taxes we are scheduled to pay and the services we are scheduled to receive?

The answer is that tax rates almost certainly have to rise more on the affluent than on other groups. Over the last 30 years, rates have fallen more for the wealthy, and especially the very wealthy, than for any other group. At the same time, their incomes have soared, and the incomes of most workers have grown only moderately faster than inflation.

So a much greater share of income is now concentrated at the top of distribution, while each dollar there is taxed less than it once was.

Given that taxes are likely to be one of the big political issues of the next few years – and maybe the biggest one – it’s worth understanding who really pays what in taxes. Once you do, you can get a sense for our country’s fiscal options. How, in other words, will we be able to close the huge looming gap between the taxes we are scheduled to pay and the services we are scheduled to receive?

The answer is that tax rates almost certainly have to rise more on the affluent than on other groups. Over the last 30 years, rates have fallen more for the wealthy, and especially the very wealthy, than for any other group. At the same time, their incomes have soared, and the incomes of most workers have grown only moderately faster than inflation.

So a much greater share of income is now concentrated at the top of distribution, while each dollar there is taxed less than it once was. It’s true that raising taxes on the rich alone can’t come close to solving the long-term budget problem. The deficit is simply too big. But if taxes are not increased for the wealthy, the country will be left with two options.

It will have to raise taxes even more than it otherwise would on everybody else. Or it will have to find deep cuts in Medicare, Social Security, military spending and the other large (generally popular) federal programs.

All the attention being showered on “47 percent” is ultimately a distraction from that reality.

If you want to know the actual percentage of people who pay no federal taxes whatsoever, it is about ten percent, not forty-seven percent. Ten. T-E-N, one-zero, ten. So don’t get suckered into believing the rhetoric and spin. After years and years and years of coddling the rich at the expense of the rest of us, the folks who do the work and make the economy work for the corpulent bastards, got a break.

The stimulus packages that saved us from economic oblivion provided…wait for it…tax credits that offset the tax liability for many middle and working class Americans this year.

Yes, in other words the republicans are now whining about tax cuts. This time it is not that they want more of them, but that the wrong people got them the last time around. If their rich cronies aren’t the ones helped, it doesn’t count, apparently.

In a press release I just got from Robin Carnahan’s campaign, Carnahan teed off on the idea of a national sales tax that Obama advisor Paul Volcker recently floated.

I swear I’m not on the Robin Carnahan beat now, since my recent posts have dealt with her and her opponent, but this strikes me as an interesting move. Carnahan gets to distance herself from Obama, who isn’t as popular in Missouri as in other places, and at the same time, she’s right on the merits.

Just to go over what Paul Volcker proposed, he claimed that the US should look into a value added tax, commonly known as a VAT, which many other countries use as a source of governmental revenue, in order to balance the US federal budget. A VAT is similar to a sales tax, but it taxes the value added at each stage of the chain of production. In theory, it’s a lot easier to collect VAT than a sales tax because each seller has an incentive to collect their portion of the tax and send it to the government, whereas with a sales tax, the seller might not verify that the purchaser is not the end user.

Regardless, passing a VAT would essentially be a national sales tax, a tax on consumption, a tax increase on all Americans which would fall hardest on middle and low income Americans. Given that the deficits have grown largely due to Bush’s tax cuts throughout his two terms, which mainly benefited the wealthiest Americans, raising taxes on the poor to offset the deficit doesn’t stand to reason.

The full press release is below the fold.  

Robin Carnahan Rejects National Sales Tax Proposal

Carnahan calls tax hike on middle class families “outrageous”

St. Louis, MO – Today Robin Carnahan issued the following statement rejecting the suggestion made by one of President Obama’s economic advisors that Congress should consider imposing a national sales tax in order to raise revenue.

“Folks in Washington and Wall Street bankers may think the recession is over, but here in Missouri, middle class families are hurting more than ever and a tax hike is the last thing they need.

“I support tax cuts for middle class families while Congressman Blunt has opposed tax relief for families and small businesses – and instead spent the past 13 years bailing out big Wall Street banks and lavishing subsidies on big oil companies and multinational corporations.

“I believe we must do everything we can to reduce the deficit, but it’s outrageous to consider raising taxes on middle class families while Washington politicians continue to pass wasteful pork barrel spending projects and giveaways to big banks and oil companies.”

Congressman Blunt’s Record of Sticking it to the Middle Class Includes:

·         Accepting $10,000 checks from Wall Street to bail them out of financial reform efforts that end too-big-to-fail [Kansas City Star, March 19, 2010]

·         Voting to raise his own pay 12 times [Thomas.loc.gov]

·         Opposing a payroll tax holiday for businesses that hire workers [Vote 90, 3/4/10; Vote 182, 3/24/10]

·         Opposing exempting small businesses from capital gains taxes [Vote 90, 3/4/10; Vote 182, 3/24/10]

·         Opposing quadrupling the deduction for small business start-up costs [Vote 90, 3/4/10; Vote 182, 3/24/10]

·         Opposing allowing small businesses to write off new equipment purchases more quickly [Vote 90, 3/4/10; Vote 182, 3/24/10]

What do Claire McCaskill and Kit Bond have in common? They were both part of the 61 member majority in the Senate that voted down the SAFE Banking Act (S.AMDT.3733).  This proposed amendment to Senator Dodd’s financial regulatory legislation (S. 3217) was intended to guarantee that there would be no more too-big-to-fail bank catastrophes in our future – a good thing, right?  

According to the Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), a consortium of 250 organizations concerned with financial regulatory reform, the Safe Banking Act would have imposed size limits that would have given:

… the largest banks three years to transform themselves into leaner, more sustainable institutions – while maximizing shareholder value and without sacrificing any of the economies of scale. Importantly, a hard cap will also prevent new financial services firms from growing too large in the future.

Michael Tomasky notes that this amendment “was considered by liberal activists and economists to be the element that would add real teeth”  to Dodd’s reform package.

I will be very interested to learn just why McCasKill joined with 27 Senate Democrats and all but three Republicans to defeat this legislation. Wasn’t it Claire “Carry Nation” McCaskill who postured for the cameras just a week or so ago, waving a metaphorical hatchet at the malefactors who head up the too-big-to-fail Goldmann Sachs?  If the financiers’ bad behavior gets her so riled up, why did she vote against making it just that much more difficult for these greedy clowns and the rest of their wall street pals to make our economy go crash again?  How can she scold the big bankers and financiers and then turn around and help them to a great big victory?

Maybe McCaskill had good reasons – but I want to hear something other than hemming, hawing and the usual temporizing before I am convinced. Until then, I am afraid that Tomasky might be correct about what the behavior of timid centrists like McCaskill means:

This vote should demonstrate to liberals that the conditions for rapid change just don’t exist in this country and that part of the task is to create those conditions

Looks like the MDP is really going to be bringing it to Roy Blunt on his Washington ties.

Here’s a teaser video from their new website, TheVeryWorstOfWashington.com:

…I briefly watched the video without sound earlier today but just got the chance to watch it with sound. Wow, that is a really bad voice over.

With all due respect to Fired Up Missouri, I don’t really care so much if Roy Blunt flip flopped on pre-existing conditions. Or rather, I do care that he changed his position, in that he changed his position to that I find deplorable and stated it in the crassest way possible. I mean, under Roy Blunt’s criteria, women who can’t get insurance after getting breast cancer have only themselves to blame.

My sister has a rare autoimmune disorder and, luckily, good insurance. She also has a good job. But if she should ever decide to move because she meets the right guy, or if God forbid the job ceased to exist, she’d have a really hard time getting affordable coverage again. Another friend of mine has a similar chronic disease, and is stuck in a crappy job because she can’t afford to lose the coverage that she’s got. Another person I know had to have a minor operation. Her doctor counseled that she wait to get the operation until she went to Europe that year so that the condition wouldn’t get recorded in her medical file and be a reason to deny insurance coverage later on in life.

In Roy Blunt’s view, these are all people who should suck it up, because it’s their fault. I’d love for him to flip flop once again back to his original(?) position that insurance companies should cover everyone.

…I’ll just add that the problem that I presented in each of my examples is now non-existent, because the Affordable Health Care Act eliminates it. Insurance companies will have to stop denying people coverage.