Tax Mitt Like A Teacher!

I did some math after looking at this informational photo:

-25% of $21,600,000=$5,400,000
-13.9% of $21,600,000=$3,002,400

==>Mitt’s total tax dodging savings=$2,397,600

-25% of $40,000=$10,000
-13.9% of $$40,000=$5,560

==>if teachers paid taxes like Mitt their total tax savings=$4,440

I believe that Americans OTHER than the Koch’s, the Walton’s, and the Romney’s would like to see the disparity flipped, tax the wealthy a 25% tax rate like the teacher and tax the teacher 13.9%. There is a tiny but powerful fraction of people who have a greed driven interest in keeping the taxes low on the very rich: Under Romney’s 1st proposed tax plan each of the Koch Brothers alone would net at least $8.7 billion from just one part of the plan, the more recently proposed plan gives an additional tax cut to the wealthiest Americans while the poorest 20% will suffer a tax increase. And Mitt is the Rep front runner. Dem’s, anything?
Bueller? Bueller?……
Oh yeah, Dem’s like SuperPac money too, duh!

What if we taxed teachers (and other non-billionaires) the same as Mitt-13.9%, and taxed the 1% like teachers-25%?.

-The answer is that there would be a lot more tax revenues to pay for things like equal opportunity for quality education for everyone living in America, no matter what your zip code, immigration status, or ability to pay for private school:
“Ever wonder why private schools have Grandparents Day and public schools don’t?”
“The most obvious discrepancy between public and private schools comes down to cold, hard cash.”

What if we taxed teachers the same rate as Mitt and taxed ‘the 1%’ like teachers?.

-The answer is that there would be a lot more tax revenues to pay for things like equal access to quality healthcare no matter your job/insurance/bank account status.

All the other countries in this graphic have universal government funded healthcare. The photo has pertinent info about healthcare outcomes, but it also speaks to access; in France, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany everyone has access because healthcare is universal.

What if we taxed teachers the same rate as Mitt and taxed ‘the 1%’ like teachers?

-The answer is we would have $2,397,600 more dollars from Mitt Romney and he is just ONE mega-rich person who doesn’t even come close to making it on the Fortune 400.

How much money would be available year after year if the Koch’s, Walton’s, and other billionaires were taxed like the teacher in the photo? Or better yet, according to the ‘Buffet Rule’? (Under the Buffet Rule anyone making more than $1million/year would be taxed at a 30% tax rate.)

-For example:
Six members of the Walton family have as much money as the entire bottom 30% of Americans combined, or in other words, 6 people have more money than 90,000,000 people.
(90,000,000 is 30% of 300,000,000. The total population of America is slightly over 300 million people, so I rounded down to 300 million for simplicity)
“Collectively the Waltons….are worth a combined total of $102.7 billion (as of 2012). They are robbing the American people of the billions of dollars they’ve escaped paying in taxes over the years that’s helped them buy** (not earn) their wealth. “…only 1.6% of all Americans receives an inheritance larger than $100,000. If this this is the case, why in the world do politicians worry so much about the tax impact of this?”
I believe the Romney’s, the Koch’s, the Walton’s, and all their friends in the elite and ultra-exclusive 1% club have the answer for that important question:
Their ‘good ole boys club’ (see photo just below for some club members) believes in and actively perpetuates what is “good for the few at the expense of the many”

Right now the hype is that the mega-wealthy need and deserve lower taxes because they are ‘job creators’. I would not believe the hype.

What the mega-wealthy need is an uneducated class of poor working people with no hope or opportunity, no mobility away from poverty, so they can continue their capitalist reign that depends on slavery of some sort to survive. Modern day slavery is not happening on the plantations, it’s happening every time a person is forced to take a minimum wage (or less) job because they lack proper education/opportunity to achieve anything better.

What happens with a minimum wage job is that the worker generates wealth, much more wealth than is needed to pay their wages, so already a disparity has been created. The minimum wage worker is working to not even be able to afford a two bedroom apt anywhere in this country working a 40hr work week while her/his employer is getting richer and richer off the difference between wealth generated by the worker and wage paid to the worker, i.e. ‘wage slavery’:

“Wage slavery refers to a situation of quasi-voluntary slavery where a person’s livelihood depends on wages, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It is a negatively connoted term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor, and to highlight similarities between owning and employing a person.”

“19th century female workers in Lowell, Massachusetts arguably were the first inspiration for the wider labor movement to use the term “wage slave””

I would imagine this is difficult for some to hear, not many like to think of themselves as slaves, but most Americans are slaves to their jobs in one way or another, if it’s not for the paycheck to pay inflated prices on everything from milk to rent, then it’s for the healthcare that is only affordable/available through adequate employment. Think about your own situation:
-How many times have you gone to work sick because you didn’t have any sick time and couldn’t afford to miss work?
-How many times have you made a healthcare decision based on finances 1st and what was actually medically indicated 2nd?
It’s pretty easy to think up instances where we’ve all gone to work sick or sent our kids to school sick because we could not afford to miss work to take an unpaid sick day; examples of finances guiding a health/medical decision may not be as obvious because we make them all the time everyday in small or large ways:

-housing, the only affordable place to live is also heavily polluted (by a corporation(s))
-housing, the only affordable place to live is also very unsafe
-food, not buying organic or healthy foods b/c ‘junk food’ is more affordable
-food, not buying food at all b/c shelter or electricity took precedence
-work, choosing to work full-time instead of part-time in order to be insured
-work, choosing not to retire due to medical or housing costs
-work, moms&dads returning to work too soon after the birth of their children
-work, going to work when we are injured/in pain/sick
-healthcare, not employing alternative therapies such as acupuncture/chiropractic care
-healthcare, not going to the dentist regularly because of lack of dental insurance
-healthcare, not getting routine health screening exams like mammograms and colonoscopies
-healthcare, not getting that little nagging pain checked out till it becomes raging pain
-healthcare, choosing between paying for your prescriptions or paying rent
-healthcare, not getting your eyes checked when you are having trouble seeing while driving at night
-healthcare, choosing not to have a baby because it is so expensive without insurance out of pocket
-healthcare, or choosing to take the risk of having your baby at home because of lack of insurance and the astronomical cost of delivering a baby in the hospital.

The above list is not at all comprehensive, but covers enough to illustrate my point that Americans make decisions everyday related to their finances vs their health.
Do you think the CEO of Cigna is forced to make these same decisions or can even begin to comprehend what it’s like to be denied access to necessary medical care?

The CEO of Cigna made $19 million or $52,054/day in 2011, I am fairly certain he did not make that money providing compassionate healthcare to his subscribers. According to Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Seblius, “we pay 2 1/2 times what anybody else pays in the world and our care outcomes are like we’re in a developing country.”

Six members of the Walton family have as much money as the entire bottom 30% of Americans combined. They use this massive wealth to lobby for lower taxes, hence why the rest of our taxes are so high, 6 people have the same amount of money as 90,000,000 BUT THEY DON’T WANT TO PAY TAXES, I guess because they are special?

“Wal-mart employs more people than any other company in the United States outside of the Federal government, yet the majority of its employees with children live below the poverty line.”

“We have 37 million Americans on food stamps and many wait till midnight on the last day of the month so checks can clear to buy groceries at Wal-Mart.”

What I am getting at here with the Cigna CEO and the Wal-Mart Waltons is that the income and wealth disparity in America is completely manufactured by them and necessary to keep a class of people who have systematically been denied access to basic things like quality education and healthcare that could be provided for everyone living in America if we just taxed the mega-rich the same as a teacher.

One time a friend treated me to a fancy expensive dinner, she was clearly a bit shocked when the bill came, she asked me “is there a certain point when the bill is so expensive that you don’t have to pay 15% tip anymore?”. I think that many super rich people think they no longer deserve to pay a 25% tax rate for the same reason my friend didn’t want to pay 15% tip on our large dinner bill: it’s a lot of money and they are greedy. Mitt can afford to pay 25% of his income in taxes and my friend could afford to pay 15% of our dinner bill in tip, they just don’t want to share the wealth, plain and simple. Mitt would still be very wealthy if he paid taxes equal to the teacher’s tax rate, even with a 25% tax rate he still makes $16,200,000 in one year.

What I am getting at is that rich people can still exist as far as I am concerned, but they are certainly neither more special nor more deserving than a teacher when it comes to a tax break. It is actually quite insane and cruel for our tax legislators to think that a teacher could live with any kind of deserved dignity on only 75% of a $40,000/year paycheck, therefore I propose that all teachers get Mitt’s 13.9% tax rate and all ‘1%-ers’ are mandated to pay a minimum 25% income tax rate, they are encouraged to pay more, we all know they can afford to!

What can be done in the face of such greed to convince the Romney’s, Koch’s, and Walton’s to pay 25% (or more)?
==>the next 6 things will be my answer:

1) one more bit of math:
-approx. population of the United States=300,000,000
-99% of 300,000,000=297,000,000
-1% of 300,000,000=3,000,000.
-297,000,000 vs 3,000,000
-to make the numbers relatable because most of us do not deal in millions, remove the 6 zeros leaving: 297 vs 3.

2) uniting as we the powerful people against economic injustices and oppression:

3) **Ending corporations/mega-rich individuals sponsoring politics as usual:

4) Letting love & compassion rule:

5) Realizing that:

6) And:

7) We should collectively demand:

May Day according to Mollie

Thats me in the left of the photo, I voted to go on strike 4 times during my 2 years working for at Summit hospital, a Sutter Health Affiliate who I will say right here cares more about profit than patient/nurse safety/happiness.
It is thanks to the collective efforts of California nurses that there is a state mandated 5:1 patient to nurse ratio, it is not because the administrators gave us that out of the goodness of their generous and compassionate hearts. No, the hospital administrators are much more concerned about things like locking us out of our jobs for a week as a punitive action meant to intimidate us into not going on strike. If we voted for a one day strike that really meant we were voting for a week without pay, because of the lockout we would be penalized with for our disobedient behavior, bad nurses for trying to make things better for our patients!
Of note, the man under the "safe staffing saves lives" sign is not a nurse, he works in Respiratory Therapy but he went on strike with us in solidarity because he knows that an injury to one is the concern of all. Also of note, 4,500 nurses have announced a strike against Sutter on May 1st to end the corporate greed that Sutter operates with and to improve nurse & patient safety and well-being.

May Day, or May 1st, is International Workers Day. It’s a day for workers around the world to stand in unity and celebrate their strength. There will be a global General Strike on May 1st bringing the collective demands of the workers of the world to the 1%. It’s “A day w/out the 99%”. As with any strike, the more who participate in the General Strike, the louder, clearer, and more powerful the message of our collective demands will be to the ruling class, aka the 1%.

May Day Demands:

Workers deserve to have equal opportunities to access the wealth they create. This is really really huge, think about it. Workers should have equal opportunity to access the wealth they create.

Workers should be free from discrimination and harassment for immigration status, race, and sexual/gender identities, and incarceration history.

Why incarceration history?:

I add incarceration to the usual list of anti-discrimination demands related to the workplace. Imagine for a moment trying to get a job if you had to tell EVERY SINGLE potential employer that you have a criminal record. You are immediately judged as a “bad and untrustworthy person”. We spend disproportionate more $$$ on prisons than we do on education, if our prison system is so great, worthy of being funded at 6 times the rate of education, then people should come out of prison rehabilitated and better off than if they had gone to college before becoming incarcerated. I am going to quote Fareed Zakaria here: “In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons, versus $5.7 billion on higher education. Since 1980, California has built one college campus; it’s built 21 prisons. The state spends $8,667 per student per year. It spends about $50,000 per inmate per year”. With that kind of spending on prisons we should have people who come out of prison ready to work and be contributing members of society, we should not have a revolving door of recidivism where more African Americans are behind bars today than were enslaved in 1850. http://www.newjimcrow.com/

May Day History:

Back in 1886 some shit went down (serious worker solidarity surrounding the amount of hours worked in a day–and as a result, serious police repression) and workers won the right to an 8hr day, due to their collective actions.

Link w/a brief history of May Day in 1886:

http://occupiedoaktrib.org/2012/04/20/a-brief-history-of-may-day/

How To Observe May Day:

No Work! No School! No Banking! No Chores! No Business As Usual!

There are solidarity actions (strikes, rallies, marches, walkouts, sit-ins, peace-outs, shutdowns) all over the world happening on May 1st.

One way to observe May Day is to make a statement to your boss by not going to work on May 1st, this is a numbers game, the more workers who act in solidarity the stronger the message to the bosses of the world that workers deserve dignity, respect, and freedom from discrimination.

The easiest way to not go to work is to be honest with your boss about why you are not working on May 1st, educate your boss about May Day, encourage your boss to act in solidarity as well and close for the day if possible. If honesty is not the best policy, then call in sick. How can your boss prove that you are not sick? (don’t post awesome May Day marching photos on Facebook/Twitter if you are worried about retribution from your boss).

I realize that there are those of us, like my sister, who is a Kaiser nurse who’s union is not striking on May Day, and who cannot in good conscience cannot call in sick. For those of you in that situation, I suggest that you can still act in solidarity by helping to spread the word between now and Tues. May 1st.

This link has a comprehensive list of cities who have some type of May Day activity planned:

http://www.occupywallst.org/article/may-day/

The Significance of May Day:

May Day is a day to honor the Workers of the world, aka the producers of wealth. May Day is celebrated in over 80 countries as a national holiday. The contribution of the worker to society as a whole needs to be celebrated, but obviously American capitalism can’t have a national holiday celebrating the worker and putting funny ideas in workers’ heads like you deserve to be treated w/dignity and respect & you deserve a living wage & you deserve equal access to healthcare & you deserve equal access to the wealth you create, etc….

In 2006 immigrant workers rejuvenated May Day in the US by taking to the streets in massive numbers showing Americans what a day without an immigrant looks like.

This year, 2012 will see Occupy, Labor, and Immigrant rights groups join together and collectively demand that the worker be treated with dignity and respect. And since so many factors go into treating a worker with dignity and respect, just about everyone can have a “pony in this race”, whether or not you care about healthcare, workplace safety, immigration rights, LGBT rights, the environment, our broken injustice system, education, a living wage, etc…

May Day Is About Compassion and Solidarity:

“An Injury To One Is The Concern Of All!”~May Day slogan

If workers (and those supportive of workers rights) ALL unite together globally on one day to ensure that the 1% hear our voices, regardless of if we paid a lobbyist to carry our voice to them or not, we would be heard, there is definite strength in numbers, that is what solidarity is about.

My Parting Thoughts:

“Power Concedes Nothing Without A Demand. It Never Did And It Never Will.”~Frederick Douglass, a man who escaped slavery, turned great American abolitionist; he was also a writer, orator, statesman, and social reformer. THEY didn’t like him for the same reason THEY didn’t like MLK; he gave African Americans, former slaves, knowledge (and hope). Everyone knows knowledge=power.

**But wait, if knowledge=power and everyone knows that, then why are we spending such a disproportionate amount on prisons vs education in this country?**