Why is the USDA paying for people to get high speed internet?

[francoHFW]

We have crap internet everywhere in comparison to many other rich countries. Crappy roads crappy Bridges crappy railroads crappy middle class crappy working class. The rich doing great though.

Why is that? The rich don't drive on those crappy roads, crappy bridges, use crappy railroads or have crappy internet?

If this is such a crappy country, why don't you GTF out of it and live in one of these other wonderful places you keep telling us about?

Because I am an American and I can't. It's a ridiculous thing to say anyway I'm more of an American than you are with your deep state FBI phony scandals conspiracy nut jobs. The GOP is a lying disgrace and so are its doups.

What the channel HGTV. You see Americans moving overseas all the time. Why can't you do it? Can't figure out how?

They usually are married to a citizen or they are rich or grandfathered in as Italians or they are online making money-that last one is a new one. I owned a bar in Spain inherited and still couldn't do anything 25 years ago. The EU is gigantic pain -you can only stay three months in the whole area. Before the EU you could stay three months in each country....

Right, and that's why they are flooded with immigrants today; so to the point the French police are afraid to go into certain sections of their own country.

Actually those are mainly refugees from Iraq Afghanistan and Syria from Wars the gop started, and from sub-Saharan Africa who are still in the corrupt GOP 2008 World depression. While you are bitching about them not paying enough in NATO funds, which by the way they basically do.

 

[sealybobo]

So if 87% is not enough, what percentage should they be paying?

We should be making more. They shouldn't be making so much that the are paying so much. But they want it both ways. They want to make all the money and not pay any taxes.

What percent do you think is right?

Not just Amazon: 60 big companies paid $0 in taxes under Trump law

How These Fortune 500 Companies (Legally) Paid $0 In Taxes Last Year

Do you think zero is too little? Of course you don't. You'll say they pay plenty of other taxes and you'll say they employ people. That alone should make corporations pay no taxes.

What you don't understand is this shifts the tax burden more onto you.

Here is a great example. We just gave the corporations and rich big tax breaks right? So now we have to fix the roads. Who's going to pay? You and me are

SUNDAY EDITION | Kentucky lawmakers eye gas tax hike for road work

Even though it's their corporate trucks tearing up our roads the most.

But, that all ignores the individuals working for that company. They all have huge tax margins, and have no ability to reduce their tax burden as low as a corporation can. It all comes out in the wash when individuals are taxed.

.

We’ve been moving more and more towards doing it the gop way since Reagan. How has the middle class done in those decades? How have the rich done? So it’s not working itself out. It’s increased the wealth gap and made us poorer. Wealth distribution. Class warfare. And we’re losing.

Reagan had nothing to do with it. That's an old leftist wives tale.

Pure ignorance. Reagan raised public University tuition as much as he could as governor started the whole thing. Continued under his administration and since except under Clinton and Obama, but they were pretty weak, blocked by Republican Congress...

This is what we were saying in 2007

Roll Back the Reagan Tax Cuts

Our bridges are falling apart (among other things), and its Ronald Reagan's fault.

After the Republican Great Depression, FDR put this nation back to work, in part by raising taxes on income above $3 to $4 million a year (in today's dollars) to 91 percent, and corporate taxes to over 50% of profits. The revenue from those income taxes built dams, roads, bridges, sewers, water systems, schools, hospitals, train stations, railways, an interstate highway system, and airports. It educated a generation returning from World War II. It acted as a cap on the rare but occasional obsessively greedy person taking so much out of the economy that it impoverished the rest of us.

Through the 1950s, though, more and more loopholes for the rich were built into the tax code, so much so that JFK observed in his second debate with Richard Nixon that dropping the top tax rate to 70% but tightening up the loopholes would actually be a tax increase.

JFK pushed through that tax increase to take us back toward FDR/Truman/Eisenhower revenue levels, and we continued to build infrastructure in the US, and even put men on the moon. Health care and college were cheap and widely available. Working people could raise a family and have security in their old age. Every billion dollars (a half-week in Iraq) invested in infrastructure in America created 47,000 good-paying jobs as Americans built America.

But the rich fought back, and won big-time in 1980 when Reagan, until then the fringe "Voodoo economics" candidate who was heading into the election trailing far behind Jimmy Carter, was swept into the White House on a wave of public concern of the Iranians taking US hostages. Reagan promptly cut income taxes on the very rich from 70% down to 27%. Corporate tax rates were also cut so severely that they went from representing over 33% of total federal tax receipts in 1951 to less than 9% in 1983 (they're still in that neighborhood, the lowest in the industrialized world).

The result was devastating. Our government was suddenly so badly awash in red ink that Reagan doubled the tax paid only by people earning less than $40,000/year (FICA), and then began borrowing from the huge surplus this new tax was accumulating in the Social Security Trust Fund. Even with that, Reagan had to borrow more money in his 8 years than the sum total of all presidents from George Washington to Jimmy Carter combined.

In addition to badly throwing the nation into debt, Reagan's tax cut blew out the ceiling on the accumulation of wealth, leading to a new Gilded Age and the rise of a generation of super-wealthy that hadn't been seen since the Robber Baron era of the 1890s or the Roaring 20s.

And, most tragically, Reagan's tax cuts caused America to stop investing in infrastructure.
We even stopped investing in the intellectual infrastructure of this nation: college education. A degree that a student in the 1970s could have paid for by working as a waitress at a Howard Johnson's restaurant (what my wife did in the late 60s - I did so working as a near-minimum-wage DJ) now means incurring massive and life-altering debt for all but the very wealthy. Reagan, who as governor ended free tuition at the University of California, put into place the foundations for the explosion in college tuition we see today.

When Reagan dropped the top income tax rate from over 70% down to under 30%, all hell broke loose. With the legal and social restraint to unlimited selfishness removed, "the good of the nation" was replaced by "greed is good" as the primary paradigm.

In the years since then, mind-boggling wealth has risen among fewer than 20,000 people in America (the top 0.01 percent of wage-earners), but their influence has been tremendous. They finance "conservative" think tanks (think Joseph Coors and the Heritage Foundation), change public opinion (Walton heirs funding a covert effort to change the "estate tax" to the "death tax"), lobby congress and the president (who calls the "haves and the have-more's" his "base"), and work to strip down public institutions.

The middle class is being replaced by the working poor. American infrastructure built with tax revenues during the 1934-1981 is now crumbling and disintegrating. Hospitals and highways and power and water systems have been corporatized. People are dying.

And Bush, followed closely in Reagan's footsteps, is making things worse.
The debate about whether or not to roll Bush's tax cuts back to Clinton's modest mid-30% rates is absurd. It's time to roll back the horribly failed experiment of the Reagan tax cuts. And use that money to pay down Reagan's debt and rebuild this nation.