From now on, on days that I don’t feel like blogging, I plan to just steal content outright from Think Progress, adding little comments here and there to give the impression that I had a hand in it. Here’s my first installment.
Not only has the income gap widened, I Mark Maynard think, but the wealthiest Americans have also seen their tax rates drop by a whole fucking lot. According to EPI, between 1960 and 2004, “the average tax rate has fallen by about 14 percentage points (from 44.4% to 30.4%) for the top 1% of earners (those making more than $435,000 in 2007), while it has increased slightly (from 15.9% to 16.1%) for those in the middle 20%.” Additionally, in FY 2007, the nation’s largest corporations — with $250 million or more in assets — were audited at the “lowest level in the last 20 years,” which, I think you’ll all agree, is totally fucking ridiculous. At the same fucking time, audits of smaller corporations — with $50 million or less in assets — are climbing. The goddamned Bush administration has also been turning a blind eye toward federal contractors, who owe $8 billion in unpaid federal taxes. For example, KBR, which until last year was a subsidiary of Halliburton, has avoided paying more than $500 million “in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies” based in the Cayman Islands. The evil Bush administration has aided this tax dodging. One of KBR’s mother fucking shell companies was set up two months after Cheney became Halliburtion’s CEO in 1995. Congress is currently considering a bill “to bar federal agencies from awarding contracts to people or companies that have failed to pay their federal taxes.” Jesus! When are we Ypsilantians going to rise up?
