Nonsense, “Newspeak,” and Neo-conservative Nitwit-ism as News ”Analysis.”

It occurs to me that Rush Limbaugh has come to personify the United States vis a vis the world. That explains a great deal, doesn't it?

“Only The Rich Pay Taxes,” The Rush Limbaugh Webpage bellows. “Top 50% of Wage Earners Pay 96.03% of Income Taxes!” A recent (November 14, 2007) Walter Williams column in the local paper, “Congressional and Leftist Lies,” pontificates: “In 2005, the top one percent of income earners, those with an annual adjusted gross income of $365,000 and higher, paid 39 per cent of all federal income taxes; in 1999, they paid 36 percent.”

Williams then goes on to state as fact that the top five percent of income earners, those with incomes of $145,000 and higher, paid 60% of all federal taxes. When he has listed a series of similar asseverations concerning years past, he goes even further to say, “When all of the dependents of these income producing households are counted, there are roughly 122 million Americans – 44 percent of the U.S. population - who are outside the federal income tax system.” There’s more, but that’s the jist of this monument to mendacity and sneaky dissimulation.

Of course, one always has to give the benefit of the doubt – the “stupid or crooked” doubt – but Limbaugh and Williams aren’t stupid. They know damned good and well what the truth is. They lie because they’re paid to lie, or because they don’t dare tell the truth. That “little old letter” that “can take a person’s life” - to quote poet Langston Hughes - the one from IRS, carries with it the threat of losing everything. It happened to me, remember?

“Federal writers” like Walter Williams know that the poor pay taxes whether they earn enough to pay income taxes or not. If they drive, ride public transport, read library books, send their kids to school, eat, drink, or recreate, they pay. They pay sales taxes – and most of them, at that – business and occupation taxes, and property taxes. They pay taxes if they rent a place to stay, because rents – like dozens of other things the like, increase in order to cover the costs of property taxes. Each and every time the government cynically requires a corporation to pay a tax, the tax is passed to the wage earner and the wage earning poor. The poor even have pay taxes on public assistance.

Even more outrageous in its cynical deceitfulness is the fact that like those traffic fines I mention here in a minute, everyone, regardless of income, pays the same sales tax. When Bill Gates buys rations for his cat, the same cat food the poor have to eat, both the multi-billionaire and the low-income wage earner pay the same sales tax on it. Low-income people spend most or all of their income paying for necessities like that cat food, so they spend a larger percentage of their income paying taxes than people with more money. In point of ugly fact, someone whose income is in the lowest twenty percent – $29,000 or less a year - pays as much as 38% of his income in taxes. That same person, were he in the top one percent of the nation’s wage-earners – something like $365,000 a year (according to Williams) - pays one percent of his income in taxes.

Economists like to call this sort of thing a "regressive" tax system. Your damned right, it’s regressive – the money eventually all goes back to the corporate rich.

Why aren’t taxes putting enough money in the federal and state budgets? Unless you’re a lying crook or a brain-dead idiot, one guess will do. The corporate rich in government spend like drunken sailors; they spend – meaning pay it to the corporations who own them - in order to make themselves and their corporate owners rich. The kind of mental midget who believes the rich pay taxes might also believe a sweat shop owner, or the guy who profits immensely from child labor, is a humanitarian who is in business solely in order to provide employment opportunities.

He’d believe that oil companies now making multiples of previous profits will raise their employees’ salaries proportionately. He’d believe that each time MacDonald’s profits climb, and the value of their stock climbs, employees get a proportionate wage hike. Christ – glass more transparent than corporate capitalism would be glass more transparent than air!

I’m reminded of something basketball great (and he really was; still the best basketball player I ever saw) Bill Russell once said. “It’s not welfare for little black kids that’s costing you, it’s welfare for the corporate fat cat who gets paid millions to grow nothing, produce nothing, and do nothing.”

Yeah, Bill - while the wage earner poor have to pay taxes on everything they buy or own, the corporate rich are paid to buy and own. Oil companies having, for instance, received in the last several decades alone something like seventy billion in what’s called – they always have some slick, “what-the-hell-does-that-mean,” expression, don’t they – “oil depletion allowances,” the people money the came from – that’s the wage earner again, in case you missed it – are now paying through the teeth for gasoline (which is taxed to high heaven – taxes the rich don’t pay).

Whereas any other investor to the tune of seventy million dollars would be reaping the rewards of return on his money now that the companies he invested in are making literally hundreds of billions, the U.S. wage earner gets absolutely nothing in return for his Brobdingnagian investment but demands for more money – price at the pump and taxes.

Think that one’s bad? I used the word “cynical” a minute ago. Want to see what I mean – an object lesson in the Operation MOCKINGBIRD, rhetorical sucker punch? Try this (a paraphrase of a recent letter from Texas Congressman Ron Paul): Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel unveiled the other day a tax plan that Republicans estimate would raise taxes by 3.5 trillion dollars over ten years. Democrats questioned the math.

Next, Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee release a report on the supposed total costs of the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, including "hidden costs" – that, in case you’re as comatose as the typical U.S. citizen, is a tax in the form of interest on the money that means “borrowing” – that means printing cash money in order to hand it to their corporate buddies - and “long term healthcare” for vets. What a wonderful, euphemistic, way to say “tax;” who could refuse to pay a tax for the benefit of our wage earner soldiers?!

The bill for that also comes to three, point five trillion. Republicans are, Ron Paul points out again, of course, questioning the math on this item.

Aha! If 3.5 trillion is, indeed (if you believe that’ll do it, you should definitely consider hay for a diet, because you’re a jackass) the cost of this military bunglement, it means $11,500 for every man, woman and child in this country. And as Ron Paul correctly observes, for the typical family of four that means $46,000 dollars – just for this goddamned war.

And WHO is going to pay that? Not the corporate rich, that’s for damned sure. In fact, the money is going to be paid TO the corporate rich. We’re going to be taxed for it, and it’s the corporate rich who are going to GET it.

On top of that, the three, point five trillion dollar tax increase will not only be born by the wage earners in the form of taxes, if the Heritage Foundation is right it will mean something like twenty-two hundred jobs lost in Congressman Paul’s district alone, seventy thousand jobs across Texas, and even more people unable to pay for health insurance nationwide.

“Cynical?” All that tax money is supposed to benefit the poor, don’t forget. The government is going to do the low-income wage earner and the poor a big favor by taking his money in order to give it back to him – that’s those “usual closing costs,” “handling fees,” and “miscellaneous charges.” Paying taxes to this government is like sending money to one of those crooked charities that spring up after every natural disaster. How dumb can we get?!

The truth about the “graduated income tax,” so-called, is that it’s graduated, all right. The fact is that actual taxes paid decrease as income grows higher. By the time one reaches millionaire status, the only way he can be made to pay taxes is by way of his being too stupid to seek all the means provided him by the corrupt system. The corporate system created by his corporate rich brethren.

Rush Limbaugh, of course, is a famous political liar, a “federal writer” (originally, the term was “CIA writer,” meaning persons hired and trained by the Central Intelligence Agency for Operation MOCKINGBIRD in order to co-opt and control the public’s news, information, and entertainment industries by planting therein slanted and “spun” literature, journalism, and the like) propagandist paid to deliver White House and industrial military complex Newspeak.

Williams identifies himself in his columns as another. Anyone unable to detect his parrot-like recitations of corporately owned government’s Newspeak line would also fail to notice a bull in his bathroom

Anyway, were you to accept Williams’ assertions here, together with U.S. Department of Labor data that says seventy percent of all wage earners in the U.S. earn less than $50,000, you have to believe we’re all plebian leeches sucking off the largesse of the patrician rich.

But then you start checking, some of those numbers, and matters become – for a life-long skeptic, a kid who first started in that vein while still in high school, anyway – very interesting. First, what’s this “wage earner” stuff?! We jumped from “wage earner” up there to “income earners” – and in one sentence. When you know the political extremists – right or left – like I do, that’s enough to warrant a jaundiced view, and get you started checking facts.

And, ooooooooooh – the numbers! For instance, even IRS says twelve percent of those wonderful people who supposedly pay 96.03% of all the taxes the government collects, paid no tax – that’s nothing, nada, zip, bupkis – at all. Two hundred thousand, no tax. Think about that. While you’re thinking, think about why, if twelve percent of their number could get away with paying nothing, anybody in that tax bracket paid anything.

Ask yourself, too – parenthetically; it’s not actually a tax question – why it is that the rich are allowed to pay the same fine for speeding or the like as someone, say, living on social security. When you’ve thought a little about who it is that has formulated a system of fines and penalties wherein they themselves pay virtually nothing while their low-income brethren pay amounts requiring real, often severe, personal sacrifice, ask yourself why the same people who have arranged anything so inequitable would also arrange for a tax system wherein they paid most of the taxes.

When you’ve done that and still believe the rich pay taxes, you might do well to change your diet; to hay – you’re a jackass.

But back to the fun numbers. Of the approximately $1,200,000,000,000 IRS collects yearly of late, the corporate tax payer supposedly pays $380,000,000,000. “Wage earners” – this time the terminology is that used by both the Department of Labor and the IRS (gee, who can argue with honest, honorable people like that?) – supposedly pay $865,380,000,000. $814,819,000,000 of that is supposedly (Dept of Labor and IRS, again) from “payroll and employment with-holding.” And we have the word of societal seers like Limbaugh and Williams that the rich (that’s “the top fifty percent” who “pay 96.03 percent”) of the nation’s total income taxes.

Ninety-six, point zero three of $1,200,000,000,000 is $1,152,400,000,000. The Department of Labor and those benevolent and brilliant souls at IRS tell us that there are just 2,079,983 of those “wage earners” with incomes over $200,000. Since twelve percent of them supposedly paid no tax, that leaves 1,830,385 stuck with the check – which is $629,590 apiece. Each. Every individual. Every mother’s child.

Ahem! Sumpin’s haywire, here. And I’ll bet that comes as a big surprise, too – bein’s how we’re talking about things we’re told by the knights of the nation’s news and information media, that is. The free press, after all, would never lie to us. Why, the fourth estate is the bedrock of democracy. For them to lie would be the societal and national equivalent of the individual’s senses and thought processes going haywire.

Yeah, sure.

Now, D.O.L. says the median income in the U.S. was $43,318. With the minimum wage in the U.S. $5.15/hour ($5.85 as of July, 2007), $10,300/year roughly, we have $10,300 + X/2 = $43,318 to see what the top of the “wage earners” might earn. That’s $76,336!

Hmmmmm, again.

But the honorable brotherhood of newsmen would never tell us anything but Gospel truth, and the folks at D.O.L. also say 75,609,000 folks live on wages or salaries, too. 2,073,983 of them make more than $200,000 a year – remember? So, 73,535,017 of these folks make less than $200,000. If that “median” income is the statistical middle between 200,000 and 10,300 (it is), we have 200,000 + 10,300/2 = 105,150

We also have another of those “Hmmmmms.” “Stupid or evil,” Opa used to say – “dumb or a liar.”

Let’s go fetch that $865,380,000,000 that’s supposed to be the nation’s non-corporate tax revenue, see what it can tell us about these “wage earners.” $865,380,000,000/75,609,000 = $114,450 each. That’s an average, remember . . .
Yup – another “Hmmmmm!” Remember that “top fifty percent?” Well the “top” would mean half of those 75,609,000 souls the government says live on wages – 37,805,500. They, according to Mr. Limbaugh – who, being a knight of the fourth estate, also - would never lie to us – paid 96.03 percent of that $865,380,000,000 “non-corporate” tax revenue. That would be $831,020,000,000, and since 37,805,700 “rich” paid that each of the hard-working rich paid $21,981(!).

Did I say “Hmmmmmmm?” Do I have to say again that nothing adds up?

Well it IS federal, you know – Washington? The U.S. Congress? You expect anything to add up? These are the same guys who swear they thought when we marched into Baghdad that the Iraqi people would welcome us with carpets of strewn roses. The same intelligence geniuses who knew there were weapons of mass destruction (hell, we didn’t then even have a good definition of the expression), in Iraq, too – and the same tactical geniuses who knew exactly how to win the war.

Hell, they even thought they had: “mission accomplished” – remember? You expect anything these morons figure and calculate to add up? Have some more hay.

While you’re chewing, take, for instance (don’t you wish you could?) that $380,000,000,000 U.S. corporations supposedly paid. Ask yourself right off the bat why the corporations, who live entirely off the taxpayers in the first place, should pay only $380,000,000,000/$1,200,000,000,000 = 32% of the nation’s tax bill.

Think again about why a Bill Gates or Warren Buffet would pay the same fine for speeding as would I.

Next, having considered as a “for instance” that structure of traffic fines again, see if you can still tell yourself that U.S. corporations pay any taxes at all. If the nation’s legal system right down to traffic court is rigged to favor the rich outrageously, why would the tax system be any different? See if you can think of a way, under present tax law to make a corporation – the rich always incorporate, you know - pay taxes. How do you stop XYZ Corporation – an oil company, for instance - from handing any tax he pays back to those who must buy his product?

Who do you think actually pays the corporations’ taxes?

While you’re “seeing,” see if you can think of a way to make a corporation share in the tax that is inflation due federal spending. You realize, of course, that it’s the corporations who get most of the goods and services the government buys with the national debt, don’t you? Ask yourself why it is, that with a war going on and families of working class citizens across the nation contributing their sons and daughters to the war effort, the corporations contribute absolutely nothing from which they don’t reap huge – obscenely so - profits. If our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen can be asked to contribute their limbs and lives, why shouldn’t the military industrial complex and their stockholders?

Want to talk about those “equal under the law” traffic fines, again?

There are approximately 105 million households in the U.S. – using census data, that’s 282 million of the 300 million who are known to be here (illegal aliens amount to another 20 million). Of the 105 million households, 25% are single member households while the remaining 75% have two or more members. Those between the ages 18 and 65 make up the bulk of the population (61%), and there are 78 million - 26% - who are under 18, and 39 million – 13% - who are over 65.

Five percent – 15 million – earn more than $100,000/year. Getting confused?

That’s exactly what people like Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Williams are paid to do; and god help them, should they quit and begin telling the truth. Four percent of U.S. citizens have accumulated a million dollars net worth; you get one guess concerning how that happened. Remind yourself that only 30 percent of U.S. citizens make more than $50,000 per year.

The IRS and Department of Labor – even “federal writers” like Limbaugh and Williams – tell us that the “average taxable income” of the millionaires is $131,000.

WHAT? They make $1,000,000, but only $131.000 is taxable? If you’re puzzled, stop chewing that hay a minute and think about a tax code comprised of 65,000 pages, written in language impossible to interpret meaningfully by anyone. If any writing ever represented a fair meaning of the term incomprehensible, the U.S. Tax Code is it. Year after year, for decades, the best accountants and tax preparers in the nation – including the IRS itself – have not been able to interpret uniformly its inconsistent, nonsensical, and convolute language and diction. At one point several years ago, a tax return with exactly the same information on it was sent to seventeen different offices of the IRS. The nations’ Internal Revenue Service computed seventeen different amounts of tax due.

Seventeen identical returns, seventeen distinctly different “taxes due” computed.

Why would that be? It is clearly and indisputably a fact that under our system of law no law incapable of uniform interpretation is constitutional, a doctrine of law that has been affirmed and re-affirmed almost countless times. Neither is any contract incapable of uniform interpretation – “meeting of the minds” – enforceable at law.

Why would the tax law of any nation – much less, this one – be incomprehensible? Shall we talk about the traffic fines again?

Any law made incomprehensible by its maker leaves the one who wrote it (or the one who enforces it; voila – the same people!) being the only one capable of saying what the law is. Why, in a nation where a multi-billionaire pays the same fine for traffic violation as someone working for minimum wage, would that be? Cui Bono? Who would have the wherewithal to provide for such a thing? Who would have so much influence in the halls of government?

Who pays the taxes? Taxes make government rich – who in the hell has always paid for that?