Walker raising taxes on poor, middle class, and students

Low and middle income people would lose tax credits worth about $49.4 million over two years, the new Legislative Fiscal Bureau report said.

Those affected most by Walker’s proposal would include low-income families who qualify for the earned income tax credit program, and low-income homeowners who receive tax rebates under the homestead tax credit.

In addition to eliminating these tax credits, Walker also has proposed a spate of new fee increases. The “bulk of the fee increases are for tuition at University of Wisconsin campuses, totaling more than $105 million over two years.”

To the extent the teabag candidates like Ryan and Walker actually attracted working class voters, it would be pretty much over now with their taxes. Thank goodness the Democrats in Wisconsin are not Center-Rightists like Mario Cuomo,Bill Clinton, and Barak Obama, so Wisc does have an alternative. Democrats lost in Wisconsin because of a free market fundamentalist, citizen united, funded jihad against Feingold. Also the national party did not run a candidate against Ryan despite his district being Democratic leaning.

Daily Kos: Tea party fizzle across the nation

Daily Kos: Tea party fizzle across the nation:

"Only 300 people (including a horde of Palmetto political operatives) attended the event in downtown Columbia, S.C. – which is a generous estimate in our book. That attendance figure – confirmed by other media outlets – amounts to less than one-tenth the size of multiple crowds that have gathered at the S.C. State House in recent years in support of parental choice.
It’s also roughly a tenth the size of the crowd that attended this same event in 2009.

Nevada:
The police estimate of 250 attendees in Carson City was far short of the record 2,000 who attended a similar, but much more rowdy rally in front of the Legislative Building on Tax Day in 2009.
In Las Vegas, police estimated the crowd at about 250 people. Two years ago, the Tax Day rally drew from 1,500 to 2,000 people at Sunset Park."

I wonder if all those baggers with the keep the governments hand off my social security signs, were just badly misinformed liberal seniors. They were scaremongered into joining from some sort robocall campaign. Now that Ryan has outed the true teabag agenda as being privatization of medicare and social security the audience has dried up.

Carmakers' next problem: Generation Y - Business - Autos - msnbc.com

By Allison Linn Senior writer

Meet Natalie McVeigh, the auto industry’s latest headache.

At 25 years old, McVeigh lives in Denver and has two good jobs, as a research analyst and an adjunct professor of philosophy. What she doesn’t have — or want — is a car.

A confluence of events — environmental worries, a preference for gadgets over wheels and the yearslong economic doldrums — is pushing some teens and twentysomethings to opt out of what has traditionally been considered an American rite of passage: Owning a car.

“There’s kind of almost every force working against the young driver right now,” said Karl Brauer, senior analyst and editor-at-large at Edmunds.com, an automotive research website.".........

They are probably just figuring out the cars are too expensive and will be yet another item that will put them into debt. Gadgets like ipads, ipods, and iphones, aren't nearly as budget busting. You can't use them when you're driving either.

British students raise hell over student fee hikes. Nick Clegg eats crow over broken promises.

This is wonderful news! Students in Britain held a 50,000 strong protest in front of Conservative and Liberal-Dem headquarters at the Millbank building. The protest were held to protest 300% fee hikes at the nations universities. It has turned into a riot, with student taking over the building and barn fires built. Anger was particularly strong toward Liberal-Dem Nick Clegg who campaigned heavily on college campuses promising not to raise such fees. The students are accusing him of being a Tory mole. From the Guardian.

The NUS president said the march was the biggest student demonstration in generations, telling protesters: "We're in the fight of our lives ... we face an unprecedented attack on our future before it has even begun.

"They're proposing barbaric cuts that would brutalise our colleges and universities."

This "miserable vision" would be resisted, he said, imploring students to take their protests to their constituencies and adding: "This is just the beginning ... the resistance begins here."

Protesters who attacked the Millbank building used their banners to light a bonfire in the outside forecourt. Police drafted in the Territorial Support Group riot squad.

Nick Clegg is out there speaking to the student, admitting he "had to break his promise," and now it looks like the kids will target liberal Dem mps(members of parliament). From the torygraph

Standing in for David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Question Time, he conceded that he had “not been able to deliver the policy that we held in opposition” after abandoning a pledge to scrap university fees altogether.

Instead, the Liberal Democrats last week signed up to Coalition plans to allow institutions to charge up to £9,000 a year.

Mr Clegg made his admission as student protesters outside Parliament waved placards accusing him of “conning” voters.

It's easy for the American media to ignore the French since they don't speak English, so apathetic and uneducated Americans often don't know protest is even an option in a democracy, or that it is something responsible citizens do. They don't and can't ingnore protests in England. This is being well covered on cnn, fox, and msnbc.

Granted they are naturally focusing on the violence, but it is likely the protests would be outright ignored if it weren't happening. The million person antiIraq marches were ignored by the media and the Labor Party. Boycotts and civil disobedience would be preferable but the anarchist property destruction is preferable to pathetic marching and chanting which the establishment does not pay attention to, since it doesn't cost the establishment anything.

Lets hope 500,000 more protesters turn out tomorrow and let's hope it spreads to the States.

Bloomberg: Stop Blaming The Chinese, America - Gothamist

Bloomberg: Stop Blaming The Chinese, America - Gothamist

“I think in America, we’ve got to stop blaming the Chinese and blaming everybody else and take a look at ourselves...There’s a country on the other side of the world that is taking their taxpayers’ dollars, and trying to sell subsidized things so we can buy them cheaper, and have better products, and we’re going to criticize that?"

He continued the tirade against his home country, accusing America of favoring uneducated and unworldly politicians. “If you look at the U.S., you look at who we’re electing to Congress, to the Senate—they can’t read,” he said. “I’ll bet you a bunch of these people don’t have passports. We’re about to start a trade war with China if we’re not careful here, only because nobody knows where China is.

He really doesn't see a problem with American workers competing with slave labor in China. He really doesn't see how this could harm the economy if our workers have to compete with low wage labor, and we end up losing our jobs and our industry. BTW, most Americans don't have passports, and if we have to race to the bottom with Chinese wage slaves we never will. Should they lose their right to vote and be assumed illiterate? This is the view of America's center-right political elites however, including Obama, and most of his administration.

Obama hasn't learned a thing.

Pete Rouse Plots Comeback for Obama Administration - NYTimes.com

He hired yet another advisor that loathes traditional democrats.

“If we’d had our druthers,” Mr. Rouse said, “starting out with a $787 billion spending program that people don’t think benefited them, that reinforced the idea of big-spending liberal, isn’t the option we would have chosen, but it was what was called for.”

Mr. Rouse, 64, avoids the public stage as much as Mr. Emanuel savored it. Despite his decades on Capitol Hill, where he was called the 101st senator, C-Span producers searching their archives found no interview he has given nor footage of any public event where he spoke. In his office, he displays none of the classic Washington vanity pictures of himself with famous politicians.

This isn't a messaging problem. This is a problem of governing philosophy! Obama and his people are ashamed to be democrats. He cares more about not looking like a real democrat than about the interests of the country. What a mistake we made in electing him. If he is so ashamed to govern as a democrat why didn't he become a republican? If the democrats don't primary him successfully, I'm voting independent, green, social democrat left in 2012, anything but for him.

Ralph Nader was right!

While it is true that our system has a winner take all voting system, which means the candidate with the most votes wins irrespective of whether they have even 50% of the vote, and it is true that by voting 3rd party the candidate you least like might win, it doesn’t mean you are not having any effect. You can still use your third party vote to purify the major party of a corrupt candidates, which can make a difference in the long run. Also if enough people vote for the third party it can replace one of the two major parties which is what happened in the 1850’s with the republicans replacing the whigs. Third parties can also win. Look at Jessie Ventura.

It is true that you can agitate to change the voting system, but you must go through politicians that were successful with the old way to get something new. Not a likely prospect in my view.

It is true that you can technically run primary challenges, and get some changes, but if those are so easy to run, why hasn’t anyone run them on a mass scale, that I believe is needed to get reall changes? In reality there are tremendous structural barriers to runnng any kind of primary fight, otherwise people would do more than talk and threaten them. This talk of running primaries has been happening for ten years, and nobody in the final analysis does them.

The people who voted Nader in 2000 may not have helped but they didn’t hurt anything either. The war probably would have happened either way. Lieberman was Al Gore’s pick for vp. Martin Peretz was Al Gore’s mentor. Many dlcers like Gore voted for the Iraq war resolution including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and John Edwards. Obama claimed he would have voted against the resolution, but Obama has claimed to be for, or against many things, that didn’t pan out in reality, because of his commitment to dlc policies. For instance, during the campaign, Obama claimed to be against mandates and excise taxes on cadillac plans. How did that work out in reality. He claimed to be against fisa but voted for it. He claimed to oppose corporate lobbying, and the revolving door, but hired a bunch of Goldman Sachs employees to serve him in his administration. He also claimed to be against the Iraq war, but never missed an opportunity to vote for war funding.

Nader voting changed nothing, in my view, but it did offer and opportunity to vote for someone who told the truth. I so wish I hadn’t bought the lesser evil bs and wasted my vote on Gore, than Kerry and now Obama. The democrats have mislead people for far too long. Obama proves Nader was completely correct, and those of us who sympathized with Nader literally wasted 8-9 years working our butts off for democrats who hates us, and think we are idiots.

While it is true that Lieberman is a leader of these bad dems, it is not true, that lessor dems like Coakley who take money from the insurance companies, and who support mandates bare no responsibility. By only targeting the big sharks, you let little sharks like her off the hook and they continue to vote for the wrong things. You partisans claim that not giving them a 60th seat will be permission to move to the right, but they are already moving to the right so it looks like the mere act of putting right leaning dems in office is permission enough. You claim we don’t vote for Coakley we wont’ have another shot at reform for a generation, yet we are suppose to believe you will come back and improve the bill later on? Come on! We aren’t self-defeating. We are beaten down by corruption! Beating us more won’t help!