August 24, 2012

Republican War on Seniors

Copy this to your Facebook. Tweet it. Share it with everyone you know. We don't have a lot of time to make this viral before the election.



I made this and wanted to use the Teabaggers attacks against them with the language.

August 21, 2012

Can someone explain to me what Julian Assange has been charged with in the US

That would cause anyone to extradite him to the US? Has anyone in the US asked to have him extradited here? I'm pretty sure if President Obama or the CIA wanted Assange quietly killed, it could be done the same way we took down Osama bin Laden.

I don't understand all this tizzy over the welfare of Assange.

August 19, 2012

Who are the job creators?

In this argument over taxation, the right wing often says that you shouldn't raise taxes on those earning $1 million or more a year because they are the "job creators" and it would be foolish to increase their taxes during tight economic times. But is this really the case? Let's check out some statistics and see what we find.

The IRS defines a small business as those corporations that file as "S Corporations"

http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/bustaxstats/article/0,,id=96405,00.html

Certain corporations elect to be treated as S corporations for Federal tax purposes. Electing to be treated as an S corporation allows income to flow through the corporation without being taxed until it is claimed as income by the shareholders. This avoids double taxation of corporate income. Here you will find data tables and SOI Bulletin articles concerning 1120S corporations.

S corporations continue to be the most prevalent type of corporation. For Tax Year 2003, about 61.9 percent of all corporations filed a Form 1120S. The total number of returns filed by S corporations for Tax Year 2003 increased 5.9 percent to nearly 3.3 million, from nearly 3.2 million reported in Tax Year 2002. S corporations became the most common corporate entity type in 1997.

So the IRS says that almost 62% of all corporations are small businesses. This would seem to confirm that a majority of jobs in America are created by small business, a point often made by President Obama and even quoted by most Republics. Because of their S Corporation status they are taxed on claimed income and not on total sales. That leads us to this graph (the most recent data I could find in this form):

http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/11/how-much-money-do-small-business-owners-make.html



This shows that the average small business makes between $29 thousand a year and $692 thousand a year in income (the part that is taxed) depending on the type of business. This clearly shows that the average small business makes far less than $1 million a year. This means that increasing taxes on those making $1 million will not really touch the average small business owner.

As a final note, Mitt Romney claims to have left Bain Capital in 1999 . If we accept him on his word (try to suspend disbelief for a moment here), then he has been living on dividend and investment income ever since. That means Mitt Romney hasn't created a single job in over a decade whereas President Obama has been creating jobs through signing legislation for nearly the last 4 years.