Dear Leader"s New Tax Plan Leaked

Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program

US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration?

Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy

This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb’s blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester

White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras

Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world’s sexiest corpse

Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school

Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition

Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State

Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: ‘rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good’

Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as ‘undocumented sex partners’

Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested

Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead

Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending

Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances

Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons

Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago

Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new ‘Republicans For Democrats’ strategy aimed at losing elections

Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country

Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to ‘Traps’

White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out

New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman’s economic policies stolen

White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class

To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead

State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations

Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they’re just running forward

President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward

Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects

World ends; S&P soars

Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood

Meek inherit Earth, can’t afford estate taxes

Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway

Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013

Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama

As Santa’s workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of ‘naughty and nice’ list

Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves

Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium

Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future

Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs

Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion’s latter day prophet

Imam Rauf’s peaceful solution: ‘Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt’

Study: Obama’s threat to burn tax money in Washington ‘recruitment bonanza’ for Tea Parties

Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov’t raises retirement age to at least 814 years

Obama attends church service, worships self

Obama proposes national ‘Win The Future’ lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov’t spending

Historical revisionists: “Hey, you never know”

Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh

Israelis to Egyptian rioters: “don’t damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild”

Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness

Al Gore: It’s a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears

Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke

Obama’s teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights

Obama calls new taxes ‘spending reductions in tax code.’ Elsewhere rapists tout ‘consent reductions in sexual intercourse’

Obama’s teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter: “Too few words”

Obama’s Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov’t

Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost

Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity “Religion of Peace,” praises “moderate Christians,” promises to send one into space

Republicans block Obama’s $ 420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck

White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus

Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed

Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book “The Road to Smurfdom”

Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth’s atmosphere

Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people’s suffering: “When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?”

Obama regrets the US government didn’t provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college

Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill!

Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: ‘Come again soon!’

Obama to tornado victims: ‘We inherited this weather from the previous administration’

Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome

People’s Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies

Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, “only 1% allowed to reach Israel”

Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans

Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law

Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama’s bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond

Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics

Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof

Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels

Poll: Progressive slogan ‘We should be more like Europe’ most popular with members of American Nazi Party

Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend

May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above

Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel “50 Shades of Hay”

Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name

Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich

Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag

Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its “President for Life”

Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off

Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named “Fat And Furious”

Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed

White House: “Let them eat statistics”

Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama

I Own The World
Supercommissar Maksim
It’s Big Fur Hat
Blur-Brain
Terry Colon
The Fine Report
The Looking Spoon
Sad Hill News
Professor Kurgman
kathy blog
FAQster
AWOL Civilization
BestObamaFacts.com
Looking at the Left
Red Planet Cartoons
Julia Gorin
Brain Terminal
Death By 1000 Papercuts
Zombietime

The People’s Cube

Dear Leader"s New Tax Plan Leaked

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Disturbing Facts About State Lotteries: They Prey on the Poor and Trash the Economy, and Political Leaders Don"t Care (Hard Times USA)

The following article is part of AlterNet"s series on poverty, Hard Times USA.

State lotteries amount to a hidden tax on the poor. They eat up about 9 percent of take-home incomes from households making less than $ 13,000 a year. They siphon $ 50 billion a year away from local businesses—besides stores where they’re sold. And they are encouraged by state-sponsored ads suggesting everyone can win, win, win!

State lotteries, which once were illegal, now exist in most states. What many people don’t know about lotteries is that they prey on those who can least afford it; most people never win anything big; and 11 states raise more money from lotteries than from corporate taxes. Beyond the moral, mental health or religious debates over gambling, lotteries are another example of how society preys on the poor and the working-class.

Let’s look at why state lotteries do far more harm than good—especially at the bottom of the economic ladder.

1. Legalized gambling is almost everywhere.Legalized gambling is available in every state except for Utah and Hawaii. This includes state lotteries, which are in 42 states, Puerto Rico and Washington DC. Lotteries were illegal for most of the 20th century, but that changed in 1964 when New Hampshire—a state without an income tax—reinstituted a state lottery. The first lotteries predate the American Revolution, but those mostly privately run efforts were so corrupt they were completely prohibited by every state in 1894.

2. They suck billions out of the economy.In 2009, $ 50.4 billon was spent on state lottery tickets and video kiosks. The government pocketed $ 17.9 billion of this total in 2010, which breaks down to 30 percent in profits and 8 percent in administrative costs, including advertising. The rest went to prizes and commissions to stores selling the tickets. Many corner stores could not remain open without the income from lottery sales. 

3. They are a tax from anti-tax politicans. Tax-averse Democrats and Republicans have increasingly been relying on state lotteries to subsidize basic public programs like schools instead of raising taxes for that purpose. In 11 states—Delaware, West Virginia, Rhode Island, Oregon, South Dakota, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas and Washington—the lottery raised more per person than corporate income taxes. “The long-term shift in tax burdens from capital and corporations to individuals and their activities is perhaps best illustrated by the rise of state lotteries,” wrote tax expert David Cay Johnston, calling lotteries “the most heavily taxed consumer product in America.”

4. They hit the poorest the hardest. “Simply put, lotteries take the most from those who can least afford it,” wrote economist Richard Wolff. “Instead of taking those most able to pay (the principle of federal income tax in the U.S.), state leaders use lotteries to disguise a regressive tax that falls on the middle and even more on the poor.” A 2010 study found that households with take-home incomes of less than $ 13,000 spent on average $ 645 a year on lottery tickets, which is about 9 percent of their income. The reason people play lotteries varies, but it mixes hopes and dreams with desperation: poorer people see it as a slim chance to radically improve their standard of living.

5. Communities of color, less-educated spend the most. Numerous academic studies have found that non-whites spend much more on lotteries than whites, with one study putting the figure at $ 998 for African Americans and $ 210 for whites. Household with incomes under $ 25,000 spent an average of about $ 600 a year, while $ 100,000-plus earners spent about $ 300 year. People who never graduated from college spent the most, about $ 700 a year, while graduates spent under $ 200.

6. They redistribute money up the economic ladder. Most people buy tickets and win little or nothing. This is taking more money from the poor, working and lower middle-classes than from those most able to pay taxes. These billions also are diverted away from local businesses—with the exception of the stores where tickets are sold. “This is exacty the opposite of the kind of economic stimulus a depressed economy needs,” wrote economist Wolff.

7. They give the wrong message about solving poverty. Lotteries reinforce libertarian political messages, suggesting that everyone needs to take individual action in response to socirty’s inequities, even though the government has helped well-connected individuals, businesses and industries become rich for decades. This easy money for states diverts political debate away from society-wide analyses and solutions to what prevents people from moving up the economic ladder. Instead, it pushes individuals in marginal circumstances toward gambling as their hope for gain.

8. They amount to one of the highest investment tax rates. Another way to look at the social policy hypocrisy surrounding state lotteries is to skip the moral dimension—the religious objections to gambling, the mental health costs of gambling addition, the hidden state income tax—and just compare the tax rates on this form of investment with tax rates on other types of inventments, such as stocks. State lotteries impose a 38 percent tax rate on buying tickets, according to Johnston. No taxes are paid when a person buys a stock or bond, a more preferred investment vehicle for wealthier households. Moreover, the current federal tax rate for earnings from short-term investments—held less than a year—ranges from 10 to 35 percent.

9. Hypocritical when compared to state drug laws. One of the rationales for criminalizing drugs is that abuse leads to addiction, which harms individuals, families and society at large. But state-sponsored gambling also feeds addictive behavior—people who are addicted to gaming, including lotteries. “I work in a convenience store and the way some people are addicted to the lottery is downright sickening,” wrote toddpugz, responding to a DailyFinance.com report on the topic. “I see people every day who scrape together their last few pennies to play the lottery. Even worse are the ones who claim the lottery is ‘fixed’ but continue to play it on a daily basis. And let’s not forget those who actually ‘study’ past numbers thinking it will give them some insight into the next day’s numbers.”

10. Big winners often see their lives unravel. One of the surprises that comes with winning the lottery—for the rare few who win big—is how a fast infusion of money can wreck families, disrupt friendships and even invite violent crime, con-men, and targeting by jealous family members. Some winners spend all their winnings in no time. Others just use it to fuel more gambling binges.

Revenue-strapped state legislatures may see state lotteries as an easy way to bring in the hundreds of millions that they need for basic government services—schools, police, roads and social safety nets. But state lotteries have become an easy way to take from the least wealthy Americans and avoid the harder task of making everyone pay their fair share. State lotteries may be as old as America, but so is the country’s history of economic exploitation.  

Fri, 04/05/2013 – 16:36

 
AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed

Disturbing Facts About State Lotteries: They Prey on the Poor and Trash the Economy, and Political Leaders Don"t Care (Hard Times USA)

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Tweet

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Tweet

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Tweet

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Tweet

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Tweet

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Tweet

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Tweet

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Tweet

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Tweet

Black Leaders Discuss the Right to Keep and Bear Arms