Tuesday, October 27, 2015

TV ad praising North Carolina leaders for tax reductions - News-Talk 1110 WBT

 

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- A conservative group is running a television ad praising Gov. Pat McCrory and legislators who passed more tax cuts in this year's state budget.

American for Prosperity said Monday the group is airing commercials over the next three weeks in the state's six major TV markets.

The ad highlights $2.2 billion in net tax revenue reductions projected over the next five years, largely through individual and corporate income tax changes. The standard deduction is also higher for individual income tax filers.

"People all across North Carolina are smiling a little more. Why? Because Gov. McCrory and the General Assembly cut income taxes again," the ad's narrator says, adding the lower taxes also help with job creation: "North Carolina is on the right track."

The group's North Carolina Director Donald Bryson would not provide the cost for the ads except to say it's in six figures. The ad began airing Sunday.

The state budget also expanded the sales tax to cover more services. Bryson says elected officials produced an overall net tax cut.

The ad comes as McCrory, a Republican, is likely to soon begin his 2016 re-election campaign. At least two Democrats -- Attorney General Roy Cooper and Durham lawyer Ken Spaulding -- want to unseat him.

American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC favoring Democratic candidates, said the state budget signed by McCrory could have spent more on public education, but Republicans chose instead to cut taxes that benefit the wealthiest the most. Americans for Prosperity is backed by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

"The only people smiling are the millionaires and billionaires like the Koch brothers who are benefiting from the tax cuts at the expense of public schools," American Bridge said in a release.

TV ad praising North Carolina leaders for tax reductions - News-Talk 1110 WBT

How and Why the Freedom Caucus Killed 350 American Jobs

Thom Hartmann

Just twenty-two months ago, the Waukesha, Wisconsin General Electric factory was flourishing. It was churning out gas engines on the regular and putting hundreds of American machinists to work.

In fact, the factory was doing do so well that President Obama came to town to praise it as an example of how American manufacturing was finally bouncing back after the Great Recession. But then in September of this year, GE suddenly announced that it was closing the Waukesha facility and moving its 350 jobs across the border to Canada. That’s right, Canada!

Which raises the question: Why would a proud American company like GE move one of its most famous factories, one that the President publicly praised, to, you know, Canada?

The answer to that question is actually pretty easy.

GE moved its factory Canada because Republicans killed the Export-Import bank. Formed in 1934 to help finance and subsidize American trade abroad, the Export-Import bank was, for most of its history, pretty uncontroversial. And for good reason too. Since it gave money to foreign companies to help them buy American products, the Bank helped support hundreds of thousands of good American jobs.

And since the money that it gave out came in the form of loans, so those countries had to pay us interest to buy our manufactured goods, it also made a $1 billion profit for Treasury Department. So, help make American companies more competitive abroad, support jobs at home, and make money for the government — sounds like a win-win for everyone involved, right?

Not according to the Tea Party.

This year hard-right Tea Party members of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives successfully blocked the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, on the grounds that it was “corporate welfare” and “crony capitalism.” And so, on July 1 of this year, the 81-year-old bank’s charter expired, leaving its future in limbo. This left the United States pretty much alone in the developed world as a country without a functioning export bank, so companies started moving their American factories to countries that do have export-import banks.

One of those companies was General Electric, which decided to move that Waukesha, Wisconsin factory to Canada because Canada, like most developed countries, has an Export-Import Bank-like institution. If this whole saga were a murder mystery, the Tea Party or House Freedom Caucus would be the guilty villain.

It let the Export-Import Bank expire, and, in doing so, killed the Waukesha, Wisconsin GE factory and its 350 jobs. But like all good murder mysteries, the story of who killed the Waukesha, Wisconsin GE factory has a twist. And that twist is the fact is the fact that the Tea Party and House Freedom Caucus were apparently acting as hit men for a much bigger interested party: the Koch brothers.

How do we know this? Well, for one, we now know, thanks to Politico, that the House Freedom Caucus is pretty much wholly owned by the Kochs.

The two leading donors to the so-called Freedom Caucus are Koch Industries itself and the Club for Growth, a major Koch-affiliated group, so anything the House Freedom Caucus does will, presumably, in some way or another, benefit the Koch brothers and their fossil fuel empire.

So that’s the Koch connection, but what’s the motive?

Why did the Kochs apparently order the House Freedom Caucus to kill the Export-Import Bank? Could it be because the bank cuts into the domestic fossil fuel industry's — which presumably includes Koch Industries — bottom line?

As The New York Times reported over the weekend, two scholars from the Koch-backed Mercatus Center recently put out a study that looked at the largest buyers of exports supported by Export-Import Bank financing and found that the top 10 were all either foreign oil companies or airlines. The [Koch-funded] authors singled out the subsidies to foreign oil companies: “The federal government,” the report said, “doubly disadvantages U.S. energy firms — through Washington’s excessive regulation and Ex-Im Bank subsidies to U.S. firms’ foreign competitors.” In other words, the Export-Import bank makes rival fossil fuel companies like Shell and BP more profitable than Koch Industries. So there you have it, Sherlock.

It looks like the Kochs had the House Freedom Caucus take out the Export-Import Bank to slightly increase the profitability or competitiveness of their own fossil fuel empire, American jobs be damned.

Another neat little trick courtesy of the Koch-Freedom Caucus is shutting down the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which supports parks, beaches, bike paths, playgrounds, and all sorts of other public areas. It turns out that the Land and Water Conservation fund — as Timothy Egan points out in the New York Times — is funded by a very tiny tax on oil pumped out of the ground from public lands. It's how domestic oil companies pay us all for their ability to extract oil from public lands we all own.

And, surprise, Republican congressman Rob Bishop — who has the oil and gas industry as his largest contributor according to Open Secrets — has pretty much singlehandedly killed the fund. No more tiny tax on fossil fuel dynasties in America.

If you want to know what the Koch-Freedom Caucus cartel is up to next, just ask what would be of greatest benefit to the Koch Brothers and their company. And, if the reporting in the New York Times and other outlets is true, just for clarity, shouldn't we be calling it the "Koch Caucus"? Or at least, the “Koch's Freedom Caucus”?

It's high time to bring some sunlight to the activities of those Republicans in congress who are largely owned by, and serving on a daily basis, billionaires and their businesses, instead of average working Americans.

How and Why the Freedom Caucus Killed 350 American Jobs

How Scott Walker and the Kochs Are Making Wisconsin Corruption-Friendly

 

Now that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has abandoned his presidential bid, he and a network of powerful conservative allies with close ties to the Koch Brothers are exacting what critics say is blatant political vengeance on his in-state critics, by targeting the laws that have effectively deterred or punished political corruption.

Last week, Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled Assembly passed three bills that together would completely gut existing campaign-finance laws, blunt prosecutors’ ability to investigate political corruption, and turn the state’s elections and ethics board into a partisan-controlled paper tiger. Two of the bills are now before the Republican-controlled Senate, while the third has already been signed by Walker.

Good-government advocates can’t seem to overstate the impact these bills could have on a state that’s long been a beacon of government transparency and strong campaign-finance laws. “I think the implications, long-term, could be even more horrendous than [Act 10—the bill that gutted state workers’ collective bargaining rights],” says Peter Barca, a long-time Wisconsin politician and current Democratic state assembly member, calling the past week the worst he’s experienced in any legislative body.

Advocates for open government fear the changes may be too “inside baseball” to rouse public anger—at least until scandals beset state government. “It’s a recipe for political corruption. Even worse, the public won’t know about it,” says Brendan Fischer, general counsel at the Center for Media and Democracy. “There’s unlimited opportunities for corruption as a result for these bills and limited opportunities for the public to keep tabs.”

“It’s very strategic and very shrewd,” says Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin. “Ever since Act 10, there’s been this synergy between the Koch Brothers and Americans for Prosperity with the legislative Republicans and Scott Walker. It’s part of the broader agenda—one they know is an agenda that doesn’t resonate with any people’s lives. They want to get away with it quickly.”

The legislative push is an attempt by Republicans to codify a controversial Wisconsin State Supreme Court decision, which involved an investigation into Scott Walker’s 2012 campaign to oppose an effort to recall him.

The legislative push is an attempt by Republicans to codify a controversial Wisconsin State Supreme Court decision, which involved an investigation into Scott Walker’s 2012 campaign to oppose an effort to recall him. The ongoing investigation into allegations of illegal coordination between Walker’s 2012 campaign and outside conservative advocacy groups was abruptly halted this July—at the apogee of Walker’s presidential campaign—by the court. The justices ruled not only that the instances of coordination were legal, but also that all evidence in the case was to be destroyed. It’s worth noting that justices who signed on to the decision were elected with millions in spending from the same outside groups that were at the heart of the case. Court critics had demanded that at least two conservative justices who had received campaign support from groups like the Wisconsin Club for Growth (suspected of illegal coordination with Walker) recuse themselves. They didn’t—and voted to stop the investigation.

So what exactly is in these pieces of legislation? While they are three separate laws, together they could create a less accountable, less transparent, and more corruptible state government.

Breaking Up a “Gold Standard”

Unlike the Federal Elections Commission and many state agencies, Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board (GAB) is a nonpartisan body made up of six appointed retired judges charged with enforcing the state’s ethics, lobbying, campaign-finance, and election law.

The board was formed in 2007 with bipartisan support after nine Wisconsin legislators and staffers—Democrat and Republican alike—were found guilty of using taxpayer funds for political campaigns. The state assembly speaker was sentenced to 15 months in prison.

In election law circles, the system is held up as a gold standard for ensuring integrity in the political process—especially because of the independent funding mechanism for corruption investigations, which works as a firewall from political agendas.

Critics think Republicans are targeting the GAB partly because it authorized the probing form of investigation known as “John Doe” into Walker and his staffers. Republicans—echoed by a succession of conservative editorials from The Wall Street Journal—have sought to cast the board as a partner to the prosecutors who went on a “political witch hunt” of Republicans. They contended that the investigation was based on a false interpretation of campaign coordination law.

The bill to repeal the GAB would replace the retired judges with partisan appointees, create separate entities for ethics and elections, and give the legislature the authority to cut off investigative funding if it sees fit.

Republican Assembly Member Joe Sanfelippo penned an op-ed last month saying that the GAB should operate more like the FEC. “If it works for the Federal Election Commission, there’s no reason it won’t for Wisconsin as well,” he wrote. The problem is that it doesn’t work for the FEC. The commission’s chairperson has said that due to crippling partisan gridlock (by law, it has three Democratic and three Republican commissioners), the FEC can’t enforce federal campaign-finance laws. As the Campaign Legal Center’s Larry Noble told the Wisconsin State Journal, "It's like setting up a disaster-relief agency and saying you're going to use the FEMA handling of Hurricane Katrina as your model."

According to Common Cause’s Heck, some Republican state senators who helped implement the GAB back in 2007 and who are still in office are reportedly pushing to allow retired judges to stay on the board. Their numbers are small, however, and it remains to be seen if they will be enough to force an amendment.

Welcoming Unlimited Dark Money

In one of the most expansive deregulations of existing campaign-finance law, the state assembly also passed a bill Wednesday that guts existing regulations, ushers in an even larger windfall of dark money than Citizens United, and removes certain campaign coordination rules that previously served as a firewall between candidate and super-PAC campaigns.

The bill would create a loophole for political groups to skirt traditional disclosure regulations of “express advocacy,” so long as more than 50 percent of total spending doesn’t go to such activity. Experts say that the loophole, which would be one of the most lax in the country, would allow groups to flood the airwaves with un-attributable attack ads. And with this bill, campaigns and “issue advocacy” groups are free to work together.

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As Fischer explains, under the bill the Assembly passed, a campaign could set up a shadow campaign committee that could take donations from corporations, foreigners, and those trying to avoid public scrutiny without having to disclose who is contributing. All the while, the official campaign and shadow group could legally coordinate on campaign strategy.

Additionally, the bill removes the requirement that direct contributors to candidates specify their employer, which helps illuminate which industries are supporting which politicians. Unlimited contributions to political parties and legislative leaders would be allowed, as well.

John Doe No More

Rather than using a grand jury system, since statehood, Wisconsin has used a “John Doe” investigation process, which allows prosecutors to covertly investigate wrongdoing by questioning unnamed suspects before a judge.  The process was used to bring down politicians for corruption back in 2006, as well as for the campaign coordination investigation into Scott Walker. “John Doe” has been in Republicans’ political crosshairs since the Walker investigation and they have long been working to portray it as purely a means for partisan attacks—despite the fact that Republican prosecutors were leading the investigation into Walker’s campaign. 

This bill has passed both the assembly and senate and was signed into law by Walker on Friday, effectively ending “John Doe” political corruption investigations in the state.

Taken together, these three bills mark a wholesale dismantling of good-government policies, likely turning Wisconsin into a political Wild West. If all are enacted, outside groups would be able to dump untraceable money into elections. The campaign-finance laws that remain on the books would be lightly enforced, if at all, as the new agencies become mired in FEC-style partisan gridlock. The ability to effectively investigate instances of corruption would be curtailed—with the legislature vested with the power to cut off the funding for such investigations.

The Koch Connection

The spate of anti-reform legislation comes at a moment of electoral peril for the state’s Republican Party. “Walker has never been weaker and the fractures between the two (Republican-controlled) houses are more pronounced than ever,” says Common Cause’s Jay Heck. “This is sort of a last attempt to tie all the factions together.”

Walker’s lackluster candidacy for president appears to have hurt his support back home. A recent survey puts his disapproval rating at 60 percent, 10 percentage points higher than when he pushed through Act 10 in 2011. But, as last week’s legislative victories showed, he can still rely on the Republican legislature and his loyal band of conservative groups to offer up support—particularly when that support gives the GOP’s big-money backers more sway in state elections.

Indeed, those big-money backers are the prime movers of these measures. As the Center for Media and Democracy’s Fischer has thoroughly documented, these government “deforms” are central to the agenda of the Koch Brothers and their deeply entrenched Wisconsin political infrastructure. The only group that was lobbying in support of the disintegration of the state’s Government Accountability Board was the brothers’ Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which also spent $10 million in support of Scott Walker during his recall election.

Similarly, the sole lobbying proponent of the push for new campaign-finance deregulation is Wisconsin Right to Life, which is run by a former AFP state operative. In a statement to the Prospect, the group said “We are glad the Wisconsin State Legislature is addressing the fact that Chp. 11, our state's current campaign finance law, is unconstitutional as it stands."

Along with AFP, Wisconsin Family Action, a group that seeks to advance “Judeo-Christian values in Wisconsin by strengthening, preserving and promoting marriage, family, life and liberty,” and was implicated in the recent John Doe investigation, lobbied to do away with that very prosecution tool. Intertwined with these organizations is the Wisconsin Alliance for Reform, a recently formed group that has been running radio spots backing the legislation, and has clear ties to AFP, ALEC, and prominent conservative state politicians.

Political Blowback?

Will this brazen agenda of political “deform” lead to the kind of public pushback that arose in opposition to Act 10?  Deregulating campaign finance and breaking up the GAB are hardly policy priorities for the average Wisconsin voter. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence to show that Wisconsinites—and Americans more broadly—want to get money out of politics. In Wisconsin, 61 cities and counties, representing 42 percent of state residents, have passed resolutions in support of overturning Citizens United. Across the country, 84 percent of Americans think money has too much influence in politics and 75 percent believe there needs to be fundamental changes to the campaign-finance system.

Good-government advocates were heartened a few weeks ago, when there was substantial public rancor after Scott Walker and State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos attempted to include a last-minute provision in the budget bill that would have gutted the state’s open records law.

“A lot of work needs to be done to educate voters about what [this new legislation] actually does,” says Fischer. “There’s a lot of misinformation coming from supporters. But as the public grows more aware about what this bill actually does in promoting secrecy, they will grow outraged.”

However, there’s little opportunity to challenge these laws. Experts don’t see much room to stage a legal challenge in the courts and a ballot measure to repeal the laws would first have to be approved by the legislature. Both the state’s 2010 redistricting and the impending flow of more secret money make a Democratic takeover of either chamber in 2016 highly unlikely.

Strategically, this legislation works to help entrench Republican power in a competitive state, and will likely leave state Democrats looking beyond the next redistricting, rather than to 2016, for a new political opening.

How Scott Walker and the Kochs Are Making Wisconsin Corruption-Friendly

My View: Illinois OK when right tax info is compared - Opinion - Rockford Register Star - Rockford, IL

 

By Elizabeth Austin

Posted Oct. 26, 2015 at 5:11 PM

Which state has the highest taxes in the Midwest? Not Illinois, that’s for sure.
The Illinois Policy Institute is claiming otherwise, citing “recent research.” But that research was actually based on tax collections from fiscal 2013, when the state's income tax rate was 5 percent. Today — in fiscal 2016, more than two years later — the state income tax rate has dropped to 3.75 percent. So if you look at tax collections in the first six months of this year, under the new rate, Illinois’ state taxes collections come out to $1,597 a person — more than $60 lower than Wisconsin’s $1,661. That’s just a fact.
But beyond that basic inaccuracy, that letter simply ignored some fundamental facts about state taxes, the first being that comparing state tax burdens is like trying to compare apples and mashed potatoes.
Take Indiana. Their income tax rate is a flat 3.3 percent, which looks pretty good next to Illinois, right? But in Indiana, almost every county imposes its own income tax, which can range up to almost 3 percent, for a total income tax rate of 6.3 percent. That’s a whopping 68 percent higher than Illinois!
And while it’s true that people in Illinois pay more in income taxes per person than people in Missouri, there’s a very good reason for that: We make more money. The average per-capita income in Illinois is $29,666 — above the national average and substantially higher than the Missouri per-capita income of $25,649. So if you want to move to Missouri and pay less, remember that’s because you’re likely to make less.
Then there’s the huge issue of comparing Illinois’ regressive flat income tax rate with our neighboring states’ progressive rates. In Wisconsin, people in the highest income bracket pay a top rate of 7.65 percent. Iowans pay almost 9 percent on taxable income over $68,000. And people in Minnesota pay a hefty 9.85 percent on taxable income of $154,951 and above.
Here’s the real point: When you start cherry-picking statistics on state tax rates, you can prove just about anything you want. The real task is figuring out the best, fairest way for a state government to raise the revenue necessary to pay for the services that its people demand. And you can’t develop smart, effective tax policy based on a misleading, simplistic and out-of-date chart.

But if you could, I’d choose one from the Tax Foundation (that same place that Illinois Policy Institute cited) that ranked the combined state and local tax burden in every state. Illinois comes in at No. 13 — compared with Wisconsin, which had the fifth-highest tax burden in the nation.

 

Elizabeth Austin is vice president for policy and communications for Innovation Illinois, a nonpartisan left-leaning organization dedicated to advancing well-researched, progressive policies in Illinois.

 

My View: Illinois OK when right tax info is compared - Opinion - Rockford Register Star - Rockford, IL

Rauner says union-opposed reforms 'critical' to budget deal - Wandtv.com, NewsCenter17, StormCenter17, Central Illinois News-

 

ROCK ISLAND, Ill. (AP) - Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner says he doesn't expect a budget agreement to come out of a planned meeting next month with legislative leaders.

The Rock Island Argus reports (http://bit.ly/1XuKxVs) that during a visit Monday to Rock Island, the Republican is insisting he won't agree to a budget deal unless it includes reforms from his "turnaround agenda."

Rauner and the Democrats have been at odds over a budget which should have taken effect July 1. The first-year governor wants changes to the business and political climates, such as tighter workers' compensation rules and term limits for officeholders. Democratic leaders have said they want a balanced approach that includes cutbacks in spending.

The governor has said he would circulate an agenda for a Nov. 18 meeting.

Both Republican leaders said they'll be there. Spokesmen said Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton were willing to attend.

Information from: The Rock Island Argus, http://www.qconline.com/index.shtml

Rauner says union-opposed reforms 'critical' to budget deal - Wandtv.com, NewsCenter17, StormCenter17, Central Illinois News-