The Wrongologist

What’s Wrong Today

Review these two
statements, the first by President Obama, the second by Indiana Governor Mitch
Daniels, who gave the GOP response last night after the State of The Union
address:

President
Barack Obama, SOTU Address, January
24, 2012:

“But in return, we need to change our
tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of Members of Congress, pay
our fair share of taxes. Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make
more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.
And my Republican friend Tom Coburn is right: Washington should stop
subsidizing millionaires. In fact, if you’re earning a million dollars a year,
you shouldn’t get special tax subsidies or deductions. On the other
hand, if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families,
your taxes shouldn’t go up. You’re the ones struggling with rising costs and
stagnant wages. You’re the ones who need relief.”

/snip/

“Now, you can call this
class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as
his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.”

Governor Mitch Daniels, GOP Response, January
24, 2012: 

“It’s absolutely so
that everyone should contribute to our national recovery, including of course
the most affluent among us. There are smart ways and dumb ways to do this: the
dumb way is to raise rates in a broken, grossly complex tax system, choking off
growth without bringing in the revenues we need to meet our debts. The
better course is to stop sending the wealthy benefits they do not need, and
stop providing them so many tax preferences that distort our economy and do
little or nothing to foster growth.”    

(Underlining in both statements by the Wrongologist)

Keep
both statements in mind as you process the various responses to the President’s
speech, particularly comments by the Republican presidential
candidates, Speaker Boehner and Leader Cantor.

Obama
and Daniels are essentially making the same point and suggest the same path forward.
Both identify the wealthiest Americans as an opportunity for a
correction/adjustment to our Federal tax policy. 

So
What’s Wrong?

Republicans
continually say that President Obama is using “class warfare” to
achieve a goal they call income redistribution. 

It
seems that Daniels is saying we should increase taxes on the 1%, i.e. the same
thing.

Are the statements different? 

Another example of hypocrisy by the Republicans…

and
it continues to be WRONG!

 

What’s Wrong Today:

MERS may not be a household
name, but it should be. MERS is the Mortgage
Electronic Registration System. It was created in 1995 as a privately held
venture of the mortgage banking industry. If you’ve bought a house or
refinanced in the last decade, there’s a good chance you signed a document at
closing that designates MERS as your new lender. Its founders
and Board of Directors includes executives from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, JP
Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and CitiBank.

The idea behind MERS was to
eliminate the physical transfer of loan notes and ownership information. Lenders
previously were required to physically register with county clerk offices every
time a mortgage loan was extended or re-sold. Instead, MERS provides an
“electronic registry” of mortgage notes where all such transfers were
recorded in a computer instead of on paper. So now, when investors of real estate notes purchase mortgage loans from people who want to sell, the transfer goes through
a computer on MERS instead of through physical paper.

Instead of the individual
banks or lenders registering with the counties each time a loan was sold or
re-sold, MERS would handle the initial registration and then become the
“nominal” note-holder. Then, each time the note was passed on, MERS
would record the transaction in its computer — but no matter who the actual owner of the note
was, MERS would remain the legally registered assignee of the note with the
county.

Without MERS, the mortgage bubble
would not have been physically possible. By using MERS, lenders/buyers of mortgages no longer
had to document their transactions with county clerks, or pay the courthouse
registration and processing fees. And MERS holds the liens on behalf of all the
players in the game.

So, What’s Wrong?

Well, it’s now the subject
of controversy and litigation. After the collapse of the housing market, MERS has
been under attack in courts across the country for two reasons:

1.   It turns out that it is unclear that
MERS actually has the right to foreclose on the mortgages it says it holds,
since the chain of title to many of those mortgages is not well-documented.  Beyond that, MERS had designated thousands of
people around the country to sign foreclosure documents on its behalf, the “Robo-signing”
we have heard so much about. In effect, MERS hadn’t accurately documented the
chain of ownership of the mortgage. Then it filed for foreclosure with more falsified
documents. Judges in state appellate and Federal bankruptcy courts in more than
a dozen jurisdictions have determined that MERS did not have the right to
foreclose on many of the mortgages it held.

2.   Several local governments argue that
MERS has enabled the mortgage industry to avoid paying millions of
dollars in recording fees. Rolling Stone reports that upwards of $200
billion or so in recording fees (so far) have been lost by county
governments. Here are the details: Counties typically charge a small fee for mortgage registration, roughly $30.
But with MERS, you don’t need to pay the fee every time there’s an ownership
transfer. Multiply that by 60+ million mortgages and you’re talking about
billions in lost fees for local governments.

Think about what’s
happened: In less than 20 years, we’ve switched from democracy in
real-property recording to oligarchy in real-property recording.
The county clerks who established the ownership of land, who oversaw the
records, were democratically elected stewards of those records.

Now, a corporation headquartered
outside Washington DC, owned by the mortgage industry with less than 50
employees, oversees the records for 60 million mortgages.

There is no court case supporting
the takeover, no statue from Congress or from state legislatures, it was
accomplished in a private corporate decision. The banks just did it.

The
big question is, if MERS controls the chain of title, where and what law
enables that?
Apparently, it is not found in state and local statutes, rules,
regulations, interpretations, or precedents that lawyers, officials and
citizens work with. Nope, today, “the code” is the computer code of the MERS
registration system itself, because the computer code controls the
chain of title.

It looks like we already
live in a libertarian paradise: If
MERS is the law for mortgages, then what about other State laws? If the law of the land is what the
banks have written in software and it is not controlled by the State — and it’s not, because with MERS, we know that “the banks just did it”
— then which State laws are next? And how should States regain control over their legal
processes?

MERS
is what a corporate kleptocracy is looks like.

And it is simply WRONG!

What’s Wrong Today:

The US Department of
Education reported
that the average cost of attending a 4 year For-Profit college surpassed costs at
both U.S. state and private nonprofit universities. Full-time students paid an
average of $30,900 annually at the For-Profit schools in the 2007-2008 academic
year, almost double the average of $15,600 paid at public universities. The
average cost of attending a private nonprofit college was $26,600, the study
said.

Consider graduation rates:  According to the Education Trust, among open-access institutions
that admit 100 percent of their applicants, the 6 year graduation rate is 36% at
private nonprofits, 31% at publics, and just 11% at For-Profits. Worse,
for those who graduate, the median debt associated with a bachelor’s degree
from a For-Profit college is $31,190,nearly twice what it is at a private,
nonprofit institution and almost four times greater than the average debt load
accumulated at a public university.

So,
What’s Wrong?

According
to reports, Mitt Romney really likes For-Profit
colleges. At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire last month, when asked
about the soaring cost of higher education, Romney said students should
consider For-Profit colleges like the
little-known Full Sail University in Florida.

A
week later in Iowa, Mr. Romney offered another endorsement for Full Sail, saying
that For-Profit institutions can “hold down the cost of education” and that
they help students get jobs without saddling them with excessive debt.

If
students look at the For-Profit option, Mr. Romney said, “you’re going to find
students saying: ‘You know what? That’s not a bad deal. I’m not willing to come
out of college with a hundred thousand dollars in debt.’ The alternative is to
say the government is going to pay for that.”

He
added: “I just like the fact that there’s competition. I like the fact that
institutions of higher learning will compete with one another, whether they’re
for-profit or not-for-profit.” (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Well
friends, what Romney really likes is finding another way to privatize
taxpayers’ funds.  Bloomberg reported For-Profit colleges
received about $30.2 billion dollars in revenue from government student loans and grants, called
Title IV funds, in the 2009-2010 school year, according to the Education
Department.

Nearly 25% of 1,890 For-Profit institutions
got from 80% to 90% their revenue in federal student aid in 2007 and 2008.

The Feds knew that there was an opportunity
for the For-Profits to abuse the system, so federal law requires they receive not
more than 90% of their revenues from federal student-aid programs. Well,
right now, eight For-Profit colleges are above the limit (including University of
Phoenix, Corinthian Colleges and Kaplan) and an additional 257 of them took in
nearly the legal limit, exceeding 85%, a report released in February
2011 by the Department of Education shows.

And there should be no surprise that Full
Sail’s chief executive, Bill Heavener, is a major Romney campaign donor and
co-chair of his funds raising team in Florida. Maybe it is no surprise
that Full Sail got $205.6M in federally
sourced revenue in 12 months ending 6/30/2010. 

The Pew Research
Center did a survey of students at For-Profit colleges. Among their key findings:

• One-quarter
  (24%) of 2008 bachelor’s degree graduates at For-Profit schools borrowed
  more than $40,000, compared with 5% of graduates at public institutions
  and 14% at not-for-profit schools.
• Graduates of For-Profit
  schools are demographically different from graduates in other sectors. Generally,
  For-Profit school graduates have lower incomes, and are older, more likely
  to be from minority groups, more likely to be female, more likely to be
  independent of their parents and more likely to have their own dependents.

The Wrongologist isn’t against for-profit
education,
his experience with DeVry graduates is excellent. The ability of a student to
work full-time and get a certification or a degree, possibly on-line, has value.

The questions are: 1). How is it that these
firms get such a high percentage of their revenue from the Feds? and 2). Why is
it that their programs generally cost more than the not-for-profits, even
though they do not incur the costs of those pesky buildings and
extra-curricular activities?

Finally, what is it with Mitt? Along with his Republican brothers, he wants to privatize public schools by taking tax
dollars and funneling them to for-profit grammar and high schools. They want to
privatize prisons, roads, parts of the military, social security and oh yeah,
medicare.

Privatize the taxpayers’ money. Tear down
the commons. Taxpayers take the risk, capitalists get the rewards.

Like TBTF banking, this is simply another
example of welfare-driven capitalism.

And
it is just as WRONG!

What’s Wrong Today:

Corporatocracy is not
as much word as it is a mind set. We work for the best corporations, (actually
we say that we are “with” our firms) and we get salary, stock,
bonuses and insulation.  What Insulation
you ask?

Directors’ and Officers’ insurance. We
are protected from paying a personal price for all but our most egregious acts.
We need all this protection because there is much second-guessing about the efforts
we make to maximize shareholder value. 

We have many enemies
and all are out to get us. A lot of them turn out to be our shareholders. Also,
there are those idiot regulators looking over our shoulders with their
Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm-Leach-Briley, Dodd-Frank, not to mention those pesky EPA
regulations.

In order to keep us financially
whole if we fall into the clutches of these lawyers, we get Directors’ and
Officers’ insurance coverage and other indemnifications detailed in our
contracts by our companies for both our acts and failures to act. This covers all
of the legal and other costs of defense if we come under the microscope of the
civil, regulatory, or in some cases, criminal processes.

So What’s Wrong?

CEO’s and other “C” level executives at the big firms can do most
anything they want, assuming they are senior enough, almost without penalty.

Penalties levied on
corporate miscreants, and the legal bills they rack up defending themselves, almost
never come out of their own pockets, since insurance policies and company
reserves wind up paying the bills.

This means that the shareholders wind up paying.

Let’s also lose the pretense that Boards of Directors are somehow in
control of their CEO’s. Large company boards are a collection of buddies, stooges,
retired generals, senile executives now put out to pasture, designated females
and minority members. They walk through monthly power lunches, attend board
committee meetings, then pocket stock and options in the chump change category and
in most cases, rubber stamp executive actions. They make a living by providing similar
service on multiple Boards, which makes them completely beholden to CEO favor.

Board management is more oxymoronic than responsible journalism.

When you think about it, our entire social fabric survives (barely) on
pretense covered up by magical thinking:

Recently, I watched CNBC’s circus of savants drool
over a pastured out former celebrity CEO whose credential seems to be having
presided over the collapse of one of our most well known industrial firms. She
delivered the predictable snipe at ‘uncertainty over government regulation’ as
an all purpose excuse for corporate non performance.

You
simply cannot make this shit up and produce anything more ridiculous or
grotesque than reality: Epic Corporate Fail followed by a career as a CNBC
guest “analyst”.

And what if you run a
company so far into the ground that the federal government has to take it over?
Not to worry: the taxpayers may even pay your legal bills. Consider Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac:

Since the two
companies collapsed into conservatorship in 2008, taxpayers have advanced about
$73 million to pay the legal bills of former executives who are fighting fraud
suits and investigations dating back to 2005.

No surprise, really.
A heads-we-win, tails-the-taxpayers(or shareholders)-lose model has a lot going for it, IF you
are one of the chosen executives at the top of these institutions.

A Radical Idea:

The “Do the Crime and do the Time” applies to low level
criminals or middle management, but it does not apply to F500 Execs or Wall
Street’s top guys, or to bank fraud.  Evidently,
in 2005 through 2007, Citibank just took the risk, defrauded billions and
estimated the fine would be minimal, which it was.

People at or near the top at Citibank decided to take the risk and
the country be damned. Shouldn’t these Fraudsters go to jail?

Wouldn’t it be edifying if the sentences for bank fraud were aligned
with the federal sentencing standard that applies when you are caught with marijuana?
As I understand it, there is a yardstick related to the value of marijuana you
are holding: Five years mandatory in federal prison for 100 plants worth
$100,000 or ten years in federal prison for 1000 plants worth $1 Million.

So, if Citibank stole $1 billion, it would mean 10,000 years in jail
for one or hopefully, more executives.

We need to stop this nonsense of immunity from prosecution of Wall
Street.

As Congress continues to underfund the budgets of the SEC, CFTC, and
the Dodd Frank law, trying to assure that there will not be enough
investigators to go after the bad guys, it is apparent we have a systemic
problem, namely Congress and specifically the Republicans.

Bob Dylan was right:

“Steal a dollar and they’ll call you a
criminal, steal a million and they’ll make you a king.”

 

What’s
Wrong Today:

Most of us have overdosed on New
Hampshire politics for the past few days, but the big story in the Granite State was not the primary. 

 

It was the vote last Wednesday by the
NH House (255-112) and the NH Senate (17-5) to
override Governor John Lynch’s July veto of H.B. 542, a law which allows
parents to demand alternative school curricula for anything in the approved
school curriculum that they find objectionable.

Under H.B. 542, the “Parental Conscience
Act”, NH parents can reject everything from methodology to the topics or
content of assigned readings in individual classes. It allows them to direct
their school district to provide their preferred system, or text, or belief for
their little John or Jane to study. 

So, What’s Wrong?

Though this may sound appealing at first
blush, the law is so broad that it makes public education essentially an a la
carte menu: HB 542 essentially forces a self-designed curriculum of
homeschooling into the public school system. Parents who object to use of
certain books or the teaching of certain ideas can in effect, make the school
system introduce home schooling in the public schools.

“Even though the law requires
the parent to pay the cost of the alternative, the school district will still
have to bear the burden of helping develop and approve the
alternative,” Gov. Lynch
noted in his statement on his veto last summer. “Classrooms will
be disrupted by students coming and going, and lacking shared knowledge.”

Think of the grand time parents can
have squabbling about the content of specific subjects like evolution or sex education and
anything else that challenges their religious or political worldview with
teachers.Think about them bitching about how the incremental costs were determined.

The bill arose out of a
“squabble” between a student and his parents
and his high school for making him read Barbara Ehrenreich’s
“Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America,” for his personal
finance course. 

The student’s father said: “We’ve
eliminated Christmas, we’ve eliminated all these things because we don’t want
to step on anyone’s toes but here we’re going to hand out this book? … This is
anti-God, anti-religion, it’s racial, I mean it crosses a wide spectrum of very
touchy and very insulting issues to most human beings and I think that even
with a parental consent it’s not enough. They need to boot that book out of
there.”

When the school refused to ban the
book, the family ultimately pulled their son out and are now homeschooling him.

And that’s only part of the wider
agenda of conservative legislators in New Hampshire. They are attempting to
systematically gut one of the oldest public school systems in the United
States. 

•  A
  failed bill last
  session would have let
  parents reduce their property taxes by taking their children out of the public
  school system; another would have lowered the age at which a child could
  legally drop out to 16 from 18. 

• Pending
  bills seek to pull New Hampshire out of Federal funding for schools and to give
  businesses tax credits for establishing scholarships at private schools.

• A
  truly bizarre bill seeks to amend the state constitution to permit the state to
  stop funding the public schools and shunt funds to religious schools. 

• On
  the curriculum level, check out HB
  1148, requiring that the teaching of evolution include “the theorists’
  political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of
  atheism.”  

There
will always be conflicts between parents and school districts over curriculum
and philosophy and quality of education. But these are attempts to create an
educational system where children simply will not be exposed to ideas that their
parents fear, or which challenge their thinking.

You can’t
make this stuff up. The point is that with the clown car called the NH
Legislature, apparently, you won’t have to. They are willing to do all the
heavy lifting for you.

This won’t
just stop the teaching of evolution. It will stop the students’ evolution.

These New Hampshire legislators are
simply WRONG!

What’s Wrong Today:

No
American wants to live in a  repressive, regimented society where police are free to do whatever they
wish in order to punish suspected law breakers. Also, we know that cruel and unusual
punishment is outlawed by our Constitution.

As of now, we still have some
rights left (speech, assembly) of those originally guaranteed by the US
Constitution before its recent shredding by GW Bush, Barack Obama and Congress.  Anyway, in our society,
punishment is left to the courts to determine and the penal system to
administer, and there are many examples where state and federal courts have
held just that.

But
now we are seeing a growing number of examples where police, mayors and
municipalities are limiting access for the press, for demonstrators as well as for ordinary
citizens, to public spaces:

• The
  Zucotti Park early
  morning rousting of the Occupy Wall Street protestors

• The
  arrest of a man photographing the arrest of an unrelated woman in Austin,
  TX

• The
  over-the-top pepper spray
  response by campus cops to peaceful protestors at UCAL-Davis

• The
  violent Oakland CA OWS rousting

• Seattle
  suing a citizen who sought copies of police dash cam videos

•  The
  6000
  tickets (and 1600 arrests) by New York City in 2011 of subway riders simply for putting their
  feet up on subway seats

All of these and many more
incidents, are justified by mayors and chiefs of police as being necessary to
maintain civil order.

So,
What’s Wrong?

Erosion
of rights accompanied by the use of excessive force is what’s wrong.

What
we all risk through indiscriminate use of rough tactics, pepper spray and LRADs
by police and the para-police (and the defense of these tactics by our public
officials), is losing our civil society altogether.

Should
we be surprised when a NY Times reporter is roughed up by the NYC police while
working a story? Maybe. At a New Year’s Eve demonstration at
Zuccotti Park,
a police captain began pushing Colin Moynihan, a reporter covering the protest
for The Times. After the reporter asked the captain to stop, another officer
threatened to yank away his police press pass. “That’s a boss; you do what a boss tells
you,”
the officer said, adding a little later, “You
got that credential you’re
wearing from us, and we can take it away from you.”

In November, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, ordered every precinct in NYC to
read a statement. Officers, the commissioner said, must “respect
the public’s
right to know about these events and the media’s right of access to report.”
Any officer who “unreasonably
interferes”
with reporters or blocks photographers will be subject to disciplinary actions.

Hasn’t
happened that way, not at Zucotti Park in mid-November, or elsewhere in New
York since November, or around the country where similar “rules”
apply.

When
challenged, New York’s police commissioner and mayor both shrug off complaints
and fight court orders. Bloomberg even argued that to let the press watch the
police retake Zuccotti Park would
violate the privacy of the protesters. “It wouldn’t
be fair,”
he said.

As
arguments go, this is ass-backwards, and it reflects a scary mindset that is
growing throughout the country.

And there is more to this hot
steaming pile of Wrong:

We are seeing flowering of a
fundamental constitutional issue that has been years in the making. City ordinances about city property
have had the effect of quasi-privatizing public space, with the municipal
corporation as the owner.  Public space
is not owned.  Public space is supposed to be
available to the public, with only limited conditions.  The very act of having to ask the officers of a municipal corporation
for permission to use public space underscores that cities have privatized
this part of the commons.

The Occupy Wall Street encampments
exposed another little secret about municipal ordinances. They were designed in part to harass
homeless people and encourage them to leave town. The alliance of middle class Occupy Wall
Street protesters and the homeless and the many issues THAT raises, is what
spawned some of the initial crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street encampments.

And about those laws: The origins of
these permits and ordinances were to suppress particular groups.  In the South in the 1960s, cities
facing civil rights demonstrations passed parade permit ordinances.  And recently, towns that did not
already have anti-camping ordinances rushed to pass them after an Occupy Wall
Street encampment
appeared.  

All of these ordinances are designed
by and to work for a certain segment of “citizens”. The system is
first and foremost about working for the upper middle class and higher. Those
“citizens” want the pols to keep them insulated from unpleasantness
and fear. The deal between law enforcement and these “citizens” is
very simple – do whatever is necessary to keep them from being directly
affected by the masses (except when they want to score some pot).  If city councils do that, the
“citizens” will write the check and not actually look too closely at
what’s happening in public spaces or in neighborhoods not like theirs.

When our laws are manipulated in order
to suppress a free press, or personal speech, it shows contempt for the entire idea of a free people or a
government of laws.

Peaceful protest is and must remain a protected
constitutional right.

The
Nazi’s took over Germany one intimidated citizen at a time. People averted
their gaze and meekly stood by as their Jewish neighbors were arrested by
Swastika-banded “police” and shipped to concentration camps.

I agree that today, we are a country with limited
repression. Nazism is not what we are witnessing, but it isn’t
necessarily a long slide down the slippery slope from here to there.

I am reminded of the infamous words
of Mayor
Daley in 1968 at time of the Chicago Democratic Convention demonstrations: “Gentlemen, let’s get this
straight. The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there
to preserve disorder.”

Wouldn’t that be WRONG?

What’s Wrong Today:

Everyone is encouraged by recent economic news, it seems that our economy continues to slowly improve, more jobs, more car sales, maybe more sales of existing homes (depending on whether you believe the data this time).

So, What’s Wrong?

Take a look at this chart:

Don’t know about you, but I think this chart shows that real wages are stagnant for the past 6 months, while if we look at the past 12 months, real wages are down by 1.8%.

Although we have been adding private sector jobs, the pay for these new workers does not match the average wages of the workers that preceded them. And in fact, these low wage new jobs are helping to drag the average down significantly.

So, many thanks to the job creators and the wonderful job they are doing.  The average Joe is not “recovering” despite the headlined “Economic Recovery”.

What’s
Wrong Today:

Hire a Vet? The overall unemployment rate among our 21 million veterans was 7.4% in November. That is lower than the national unemployment rate of 8.6%. Since 9/11, a wide array of government programs have been initiated to get veterans back to work:

• The Post-9/11 GI Bill, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2008 and against considerable opposition, including from Newt Gingrich 2.0. It helps veterans go back to school, paying for education and training for all veterans who served more than 90 days in the armed forces after September 11th 2001.

• President Obama created a Council on Veterans Employment in 2009, and the federal government hired over 70,000 veterans in both 2009 and 2010.

• On November 21st, Mr. Obama signed a bill offering tax credits to employers who hire unemployed or disabled veterans.

• Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, the vice-president’s wife and the stepmother of a soldier, recently launched a Hire Vets awareness campaign on behalf of veterans and military families.

• The Department of Labor offers an online employment service, as well as counseling for veterans at its 3,000 career centers.
  

So What’s Wrong?

The overall national numbers mask a terrible and growing problem: The unemployment rates for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan is 11.1%. For younger veterans between the ages of 18 and 24, it is 37.9%. So the Great American Depression Recession strikes much harder at these returning veterans. Since so many soldiers lack a college degree, the fact that this recession has been particularly hard on the less educated hits our returning veterans disproportionately, there needs to be more opportunity for veterans to get on their feet once they are back on American soil, this Denver staffing agencies jobs listing should be empty, and the vets should have jobs. Despite our government’s efforts, this trend is continuing even as the last American troops leave Iraq. All told, more than 1 million new veterans are expected to join the civilian labor force over the next four years. This alone will cause our national unemployment level to be persistently high throughout the next 4 years of the Obama administration, or that of his Republican opponent.

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/21541835

The top line numbers are also depressing: around 1.55 million US veterans are jobless, 1.4 million live below the poverty line, and one in every three homeless adult men in America is a veteran. This is a much bigger problem than many people think. Veterans deserve support after fighting for the country, so it’s important that these statistics begin to change. For many unemployed veterans, they can struggle to get back to everyday life which leaves them without a job. By not having an income, many veterans experience poverty quickly. This makes their lives even more difficult as they struggle to cope financially. If this happens, there are so many ways for veterans to get support. Perhaps these veterans could consider visiting https://www.gofundme.com/c/blog/financial-help-for-veterans. By doing that, more veterans can learn about the organizations that want to help them.

If demographics are destiny, these terrible numbers may not be surprising: More soldiers are male than female, and the US male jobless rate exceeds women’s. Also, joblessness
keeps unemployed veterans on VA health care as opposed to receiving it from a private insurance program offered through an employer, as many employed Americans do, which will keep our costs of veteran’s benefits higher than they might otherwise be.

The transition from military life to civilian is difficult. Soldiers often have trouble translating their military skills into marketable civilian ones. The simple act of writing a resume can scare a lot of returning soldiers, accustomed to being told where to go and what to do and now suddenly having to figure out, rather than being told, what prospective employers want.

Who
Cares?

In an
interview in The Economist, Major Jon Soltz, who spent the past year serving in Iraq advising the Iraqi army, went to the bank a couple of days after he returned home from active duty. He told the teller he no longer lived at the address on file, and had spent the last year in Iraq. “She asked me if I was there on vacation…People aren’t going to understand. People aren’t living it. It was a chosen war, and the country was never really engaged in it.”

Although more than 2 million soldiers served in Iraq and Afghanistan that adds up to less than 1% of all Americans. Many soldiers returned to find themselves among very few people in their towns or communities to have served.

We are quick to say, “Thank you for your service”. Returning veterans today are getting more honor and respect than they did during the Wrongologist’s service during the Vietnam era. While returning veterans seem to have our nation’s gratitude, gratitude alone has never paid a bill.

This is another emergent American failure:
We were quick to bail out the banks and AIG, etc. Now, it’s time to put some of our resources and attention to a better use. We need a national conversation about the enormity of what veterans face when they come back from war, separate from service and try to find a civilian job.

We
also need a plan.
Hopefully, the American public and our idiot politicians will act on behalf of veterans
when it comes to both the fiscal and political decisions that affect this group
of people to whom we owe so much.

To do
otherwise, would be WRONG!

What’s Wrong Today

The Gallup Poll just announced the results of an illuminating poll on US attitudes about what it takes to be rich. Gallup surveyed 1,012 adults over 18
living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. 53% of those surveyed
said that if they made $150,000 or less per year, they would consider
themselves rich. 30% said less than $100,000 would be enough, and fully 18% would consider themselves
rich if they made less than $60,000 a year. The poll has a 5%± margin
of error.

According to the U.S.
Census Bureau, the median annual household income in the United States is
roughly $50,000 per year. Gallup found those below that level say they would
need to earn $100,000 or more in annual income to be rich. Those at or above $50,000
report they would need to earn $200,000 a year to be rich. In their Survey, the
rich income level expands to $250,000 for those who make $75,000 or more in
annual household income.

Here is Gallup’s
question and the data:

So What’s Wrong?

There
is nothing wrong with the Gallup Survey. What we need to talk about is the misperception of who is
“rich” in the United States. Gallup’s results suggest most Americans
think they need quite a bit less than what the wealthiest 1% of Americans really
earn in order to consider themselves rich. Let’s remember that in 2009, (the last year for which we
have data) the income entry point for being in the top 1 percent was slightly less
than $344,000.

To most
Americans $344k is an unimaginable deal of money and the following remarkable study, (Norton & Ariely, 2010) proves
it: Their work reveals that Americans have no idea that
the wealth distribution (defined for them in terms of “net worth”) is
as concentrated as it is.

When shown
three pie charts representing possible wealth distributions, 90% of the  5,522 respondents – regardless of their
gender, age, income level, or party affiliation — thought that the American
wealth distribution most resembled one in which the top 20% has about 60% of
the wealth. (“Estimated” in the chart below).

In fact, the top 20% control about 85% of the wealth, with the top 1% controlling
nearly 34%. Even more striking, they did not come close on the amount
of wealth held by the bottom 40% of the population: the lowest two quintiles
hold just 0.3% of the wealth in the United States (not visible on the “Actual”
chart below).

People in
the Norton survey said that the “ideal” wealth distribution as a much
more equal distribution. They said that the ideal wealth distribution would be
one in which the top 20% owned between 30 and 40 percent of the privately held
wealth, which is a far cry from the 85 percent that the top 20% actually own.
They also said that the bottom 40% — that’s 130 million Americans — should
have between 25% and 30%, not the mere 8% to 10% they thought this group had,
and far more than the 0.3% they actually had.

The actual United States
wealth distribution plotted against the estimated and ideal distributions:

Congress has continually
debated additional taxes on the “rich” in the past few months, either as part
of a jobs plan or for deficit reduction. Additionally, the Occupy Wall Street
protests have focused attention on the wealthiest 1% of Americans and the fact
that they have disproportionally benefited in the past few years. To illustrate the disparity, The Economist ran the following:

(Right axis is
percent change in after-tax income since 1979. The middle 3 quintiles were
combined and shown as the 21^st to 80^th percentiles)

So, the question of
at what point someone becomes rich and misperceptions of where that point is, by the vast
majority of Americans may influence the debate more than we realize:

• Gallup’s
  findings are that most Americans would consider themselves rich if they made
  $150,000 per year.  

• Norton
  & Ariely shows that most of us have no idea what it takes to be rich in
  America.

A reasonable
conclusion is that the average person probably still believes that they have a
decent shot at getting there, so that maybe they should stand with John Boehner
and Mitch McConnell.

And that would be SO
WRONG.

“Everybody knows the game is fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
And everybody knows” 

Leonard Cohen

Too bad Cohen’s lyric is
untrue:  Very few of us really
know

What’s
Wrong Today

We know
many large multinationals pay no federal taxes, but did you know many of them don’t
pay State taxes either? Citizens for Tax Justice, (CTJ), has issued a new
report, Corporate Tax Dodging in the 50
States, 2008-2010. The Washington-based research group found that three
companies — Washington-based Pepco Holdings Inc. (POM), American Electric Power Co. (AEP) and DuPont Co. (DD)  — paid no state income tax in 2008, 2009 and
2010. These three companies were among 30 corporations listed as paying no
federal income tax in the same period in a study last month by Citizens
for Tax Justice, the institute’s sister organization.

CTJ’s study
profiled 265 consistently profitable Fortune 500 companies and found that 68 of
them (25%) paid no state corporate income tax in at least one of the last three
years and 20 of them averaged a tax rate of zero (or less) during the 2008-2010
period.

On
average, the 265 companies surveyed paid taxes at roughly half of the official
rate, costing states $42.7 billion in
revenue over the past three years, the study found.

Forty-four
states and the District of Columbia levy some form of
state corporate income tax. Ohio,
Nevada,
South
Dakota,
Texas, Wyoming and Washington don’t
have a tax. Overall, CTJ found corporations’ taxes were once 0.5% of State
Gross Product (a state’s equivalent of GDP) back in 1986. Now, corporate
taxes are only 0.28% of Gross State Product and the lowest contribution levels
since World War II.

One of the study
authors, Matthew Gardner, said regarding his findings: “these 265 corporations
raked in a combined $1.33 trillion in profits in the last three years, yet have
managed to shelter half or more of their profits from state taxes.”

This decline
in corporate tax receipts comes at a time when states are imposing layoffs and
slashing services to combat widening budget deficits. Overall, according
to Bloomberg, Gardner indicates that state-level revenue from corporate
taxes have been plummeting for the past 20 years, as tax-avoidance schemes have
become more sophisticated.  

So,
What’s Wrong?

Sorry, but we
live in a plutocracy run by a dumbocracy. This loss of
revenues does not come from corporate tax evasion, but from tax avoidance based
on sophisticated lobbying for changes to state law by corporate tax
departments.

So while the loss of revenue has something to do with corporate behavior,
it has much more to do with craven legislators in the individual
states, who buy into the threat that the job creators will take
their business elsewhere unless they get tax breaks. There are
many ways state
legislators have contributed to the tax receipts decline including voting for:

• Shifting
  corporate taxation from property and payroll to sales, which generally yields
  lower taxes

• The
  100% nowhere tax.
  What corporations lobbied for, and got, is a tax on sales only in a state instead of overall business
  activity, or property and payrolls in the state. All a corporation has to do to
  pay zero taxes is to have their production in that state and all actual sales,
  out of that state.

• The
  toys -r- us strategy,
  where corporations dump all of their trademarks, copyrights, patents, logos
  into a separate holding company that is then incorporated in a tax haven. Then,
  that newly incorporated holding company charges royalties to the other
  companies’ holdings to use their own logos and trademarks, copyrights and
  patents. This creates a massive tax-deductible business expense, charging
  yourself fees for using your own
  intellectual property. This is why corporations move various patents,
  copyrights and trademarks into special purpose vehicles, incorporated in the
  Caymans, Delaware and so on. 

But, how
can we ask our fine corporations to pay more in taxes? After
all, they are creating jobs for you and me. 

Sure they
do, and some of those jobs are in the US.

Sorry, but the data shows that it’s mostly jobs for
Mexican nationals, jobs for Chinese nationals, jobs for Indian nationals. 
In fact, our MNC’s are doing more to bolster the economies of India, China, and
Mexico right now than they are doing to help US middle class taxpayers. 

And you think that corporations
should contribute MORE to our economy?

That would just
be Wrong!