j_b

Doesn't he wobble as if he was about to lose his balance a couple of times? It looks like out of control knucklehead climbing to me.

Next time one of the sycophants for corporatism invokes official corporate tax rates, think about effective tax rate: General Electric: King of the Tax Dodgers by Chuck Collins Congressional Republicans are about to cut the Tsunami Warning System from the National Weather Service budget. But if General Electric paid their fair share of taxes, we could reverse this and billions in additional budget cuts. GE — best known for its light bulbs, refrigerators — and lately, its nuclear reactors — is one of the country's biggest tax dodgers. Recent filings show that in 2010, General Electric reported global profits of $14.2 billion, claiming $5.1 billion from U.S. operations. How much did it pay in U.S. corporate taxes? Zero. Actually, less than zero. We taxpayers paid G.E. $3.2 billion. As David Kocieniewski reports in The New York Times, G.E. "has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than most multinational companies." According to Citizens for Tax Justice, between 2006 and 2010, General Electric reported $26.3 billion in pretax profits to its shareholders but paid no U.S. taxes. In fact, they received $4.2 billion in refunds from Uncle Sam for an effective tax rate of negative 15.8 percent over these five years. General Electric accomplishes this feat by using is political muscle in Congress and lobbying for special tax treatment and corporate welfare. It also aggressively moves is profits to offshore tax havens including Bermuda, Singapore, and Luxembourg. While several divisions of GE have struggled over the last decade, GE's accountants think of themselves as a profit center. The company¹s 975-member tax division includes many former Treasury and IRS officials who never a met a loophole they didn¹t love. [...] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/25

Sorry, but Democrats and assorted 'liberals' have no time campaigning to put revenue increases on the ballot in 2011 given their total commitment to cutting the budget. Austerity is inevitable since nobody is campaigning for anything else [/snark]

indeed, our village idiot eventually reverts to the monosyllabic state.

tax increases on the wealthy and doing away with unnecessary tax cuts for corporations on the ballot in 2011 is the "Grecian Formula"? I don't see the connection.

here comes the drivel from the service thug

which part of my argument exactly are you having trouble with or is it that the mere invocation of hand waving should be enough to dismiss all the facts put forward and that you still have to address?

wtf? can you cite Jim saying there would be tax increases? no, you can't because he refused to acknowledge it had to be part of the solution TODAY. YOU can't fucking read! Spare me your useless parsing. And no! I am not driving off anybody who is against austerity. Only those who plan on having people pay for the crisis engineered by regressives and their corporate cronies. As for those who plan on accommodating the looters once again, I am glad they now understand their routine isn't going unnoticed by everybody.

Despite all of the bluster about "expertise" and "cutting the budget is the only solution" from the usual suspects, here is what the experts at Washington State Budget and Policy Center have to say: Governor's Budget Proposal: Not a Prescription for Progress the Governor’s budget would result in unacceptably painful and economically-damaging cuts to many core public systems needed to sustain our economic recovery. [..] Not only do the proposed cuts damage our public structures – our education system, health care infrastructure, and public safety – they literally change the role of state government. If the Governor’s budget becomes law, it will spell the end of the state’s role in supporting a healthy and prosperous society. [..] It would be a mistake for lawmakers to read the passage of Initiatives 1053 and 1107 last November as a mandate for a damaging, cuts-only budget in the coming biennium. Given the depth of the economic crisis two-thirds of legislators ought to agree on a sensible package of revenue enhancements that would offset the worst of the proposed cuts. Failing that, a simple majority of legislators should allow voters to decide on such a package by adding a referendum measure to the 2011 November ballot. http://budgetandpolicy.org/reports/governors-budget-proposal-not-a-prescription-for-progress

"debating with Bill" is contradictio in terminis

cut the bull Bill, an anti-tax zealot like yourself has no cred in this debate.

Nothing but no remedial arithmetic crash course would do any good to a blithering idiot like yourself.

I'm not sure what exactly this means? 'rhetorical sausage making' amounts to making little packages out of a whole, then pretending the sausage had nothing to do with the whole. It's an artifice that has little to do with reality despite the skill of the sausage maker.

Budget arithmetic involves spending AND revenue. Nothing less. Pushing the notion that one can address a structural fiscal crisis designed to bankrupt the state by the 'starve the beast' proponents solely by cutting spending is severely misguided, at the very least.

Claiming that austerity is the only choice amounts to enabling regressive tactics of starving the beast. Your choice!

No! without social contract there is no state and the social contract is in part defined by the constitution. For example: "It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex." Washington state constitution

....Crickets.... Bullshit. Jim has been told many times there is no solution at the local level despite his rhetorical saussage making.

Your employer can cut his expenses until he goes out of business if he wants to, but the state cannot go out of business. The state has to provide services; it's not up to the choice of regressives and their Democratic enablers.

Pretending that cutting spending will solve the budget shortfall is no more being a realist than sticking one's head in the sand.

as if any expertise were required to see there is nothing progressive about your "there is no alternative to austerity" shtick. Don't flatter yourself.

So why do they ignore the fact that "Washington has is a structural revenue deficit that no amount of downsizing, streamlining, or resetting can fix"?

Despite Right-Wing Rhetoric, Our State's Budget Problems Are Caused by Falling Tax Revenue It isn't the spending side of the equation that's knocked our state budget out of whack, but the other way around. State government has been steadily shrinking over most of the past 15 years, and dramatically so during the past several. In fact, what Washington has is a structural revenue deficit that no amount of downsizing, streamlining, or resetting can fix. Not even an economic recovery can reverse this trend. As the chart above clearly illustrates, state general fund revenues as a share of the overall state economy have been steadily shrinking for the past decade and a half, falling from 6.9 percent of personal income in 1995 all the way down to 4.7 percent today, according to the Washington State Economic and Revenue Forecast Council. That means the typical Washington household's state tax "burden" has shrunk by an average of 30 percent. As the anti-taxers gleefully point out, both state spending and full-time employees grew during much of this period. But they refuse to accept the fact that spending didn't grow nearly as fast as the overall economy, the measure that most closely tracks growth in demand for government services and investment. In other words, the state's relative ability to provide basic services has slowly diminished. Then, as our nation plunged into recession, so did consumer spending, and that's when the shit really hit the fan. Between 2008 and 2010, general fund revenue collapsed from $15.7 billion to $13.6 billion, resulting in massive layoffs and spending cutbacks. But even during the worst of the recession, both our economy and our population continued to grow, accelerating a decade-long trend of declining per capita revenues, which plummeted from $2,217 in 2006 to $1,827 in 2010. What for years had been a gradual decline in the state's ability to meet the needs of its citizens has now become a full-scale retreat. "This is a revenue crisis, pure and simple," says Washington State Budget & Policy Center executive director Remy Trupin. "Washingtonians have stopped spending money—thereby reducing tax revenue—due to the meltdown on Wall Street that led to the Great Recession. To suggest otherwise is to literally blame the victim." Even a robust economic recovery won't turn things around if the long-term structural problems persist. According to the latest state Department of Revenue data, Washington relies on the sales tax for over 52 percent of general fund revenues—more than nearly any other state—a tax that has been shrinking as a percentage of the economy for at least the past half-century. For example: In 1959, the sale of goods and services subject to Washington's tax accounted for 32 percent of total consumer spending. By 2000, this number had dropped to less than 26 percent. For decades, state lawmakers responded by periodically raising the sales tax rate. But the last such hike was back in 1983. Meanwhile, lawmakers have rewarded businesses by passing over $1.6 billion a year in new tax breaks since 1995 alone, only further exacerbating Washington's long-term structural revenue deficit.

I don't need any expertise to see that most everyone with expertise doesn't believe it to be constitutional, which explains why regressives have been trying to push though a constitutional amendment.

"No bill shall become a law unless on its final passage the vote be taken by yeas and nays, the names of the members voting for and against the same be entered on the journal of each house, and a majority of the members elected to each house be recorded thereon as voting in its favor." Moreover, a simple majority cannot decide that a super majority is needed to make rules.