Al Gore calls for a global tax on carbon to fund a progressive income tax cut for people

This is cool.

As part of his Nobel acceptance speech, Al Gore said:

And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon -- with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution. This is by far the most effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis.

That's absolutely right. We should tax what we don't like -- carbon emissions -- and use the money to fund what we do like -- purchasing power for individuals.

And we should embrace a global government for the purpose of levying, collecting, enforcing and distributing this tax. Without one, it's hard to see how we effectively reduce global pollution that causes climate change.

Obama concert Friday at the Riv with Macy Gray, Jeff Tweedy, Stephan Jenkins, Jill Sobule, Cool Kids, The Changes, Canasta

This is a cool thing: there's a big concert tomorrow night at the Riviera for the Obama for President campaign. The headlines are in the headline (Macy Gray, Jeff Tweedy and lots of others).

Tickets aren't cheap ($50 to $500), but it's a fundraiser for the campaign that is successfully taking on the most entrenched Democratic political machine in the nation on a platform of progressive reform.

A million people donating $100 and 100 hours a year creates the world's most powerful force for justice.

The Obama campaign is getting closer every day.

Join the campaign.

If you want to buy tickets to the concert, you must do so here.

And while you're at it, tell one person you know (anyone will do) that you are going to vote for Barack Obama and ask them to consider doing so as well. Word-of-mouth is the most powerful political weapon on earth. Use it.

Establishment loves insurance companies -- ask the New York Times (and vote for Obama to stop it)

The problem with too many elected Democrats is that they start acting as if they are part of the establishment instead of shaking it up to make life better for most people.

This New York Times editorial titled "The High Cost of Health Care" is a great example of establishment thinking that infects way too many D.C. Dems.

The topic is timely: why do we spend so much money on health care industries and end up with a poor infant mortality rates, 50 million of us without any insurance coverage and more medical bankruptcies than any other form of financially destroying Americans?

The obvious answer is because of the parasitic insurance industry. They add no value. They just make health care more expensive by profiting from taking our premiums and rationing out care. They also drive doctors, hospitals and other providers crazy by drowning them in ridiculous paperwork and inflate the cost of care by paying for all those commercials and downtown skyscrapers.

But that's too irresponsible for the establishment. The establishment likes insurance companies. You're either a pitchfork-wielding populist of a dreamy out-of-touch liberal in their eyes for pointing out the cost-driving waste of the insurance industry.

Here's how the Times puts it:

Single Payer. Deep in their hearts, many liberals yearn for a single-payer
system, sometimes called Medicare-for-all, that would have the federal
government pay for all care and dictate prices. Such a system would let the
government offset the price-setting strength of the medical and pharmaceutical
industries, eliminate much of the waste due to a multiplicity of private
insurance plans, and greatly cut administrative costs.
But a single-payer system is no panacea for the cost problem — witness
Medicare’s own cost troubles — and the approach has limited political support.
Private insurers could presumably eliminate some of the waste through uniform
billing and payment procedures.

So rich! Only those romantic liberals with their yearning hearts want to cut out the middlemen entirely. Nothing pragmatic or responsible about that -- instead, with limited political support, it's a rather silly idea that remains buried deep inside, like world peace.

The easier way to read the paragraph is simply to say: we love insurance companies. We want to keep them in the center of how we finance health care because.....well, we won't address that point directly, since there isn't any compelling reason to structure the financing of health care around for-profit middleman industries.

One of the reasons why I support Senator Barack Obama is because he is not swayed by that establishment thinking. I think he is a very shrewd operator and believes that it's in our national interest to minimize the role of insurance companies in the financing of health care. The national Republican Party has fully embraced the insurance industry as part of their corporate-evangelical coalition, and always looks to expand the profits and reach of the industry (which comes directly at the expense of all of us). The trouble is when Democrats try to look responsible or centrist and accept the Republican strategy of embracing the establishment as part of the solution to our problems. That's the problem with Senator Hillary Clinton (at least, that has been her problem -- way too corporate).

Beware the establishment Democratic elected official. They are too quick to sell us out.

What if we had the 1979 distribution of income today?

Today's Wall Street Journal has a great line from former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. I'll quote the Journal's Capital column on page A2.

If the distribution of income in the U.S. today were the same as it was in 1979, and the U.S. had enjoyed the same growth, the bottom 80 percent would have about $670 billion more, or about $8000 per family a year. The top 1 percent would have about $670 billion less, or about $500,000 a family.

Wow.

The obvious remedy to this problem of a poor distribution of wealth is to increase taxes on the top 1 percent of families by about $500,000 (don't worry, they won't miss it and they can afford it) and cut taxes on the bottom 8 percent by $8,000 per year.

State and local appetitite for tax increases due to an outdated taxes

Why is it that the State, the transit agencies, the City of Chicago and the County of Cook are all looking for tax increases?

According to the Tribune story Behind the Great Tax Push, it's because they can get away with it. Typical anti-government line: they must not represent the people (who only want lower taxes) because they just got elected, so therefore, 'they' will try to shove an unwarranted tax increase down 'our' throats because they can't manage a government.

The real reason why our state and local governments are broke is because we're taxing the wrong things. We have a great tax for the 1950s economy, but in 2007, our taxes need to be modernized.

We use the sales tax to fund a big chunk of state and local government. In Illinois, we only tax goods, not services. That means if you buy a bowling ball you pay a sales tax but if you go bowling you don't. More and more of our economy is about selling services instead of goods, so the relatively few people still selling or buying goods end up with the bill while the increasing group of people selling or buying services gets a free ride.

The sales tax rate on goods has to keep rising to try to generate the same amount of money, since less and less economic activity flows through the sale of goods and we don't tax services.

There are 168 possible services that states tax. We tax 17 of them. Iowa taxes 94. The Federation of Tax Administrators in DC put out that data recently, and you can check it out yourself here.

You'd think the Trib would have included some of our local experts, like the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability (that put out a great report on Cook County's structural deficit, due partially to a sales tax that only covers goods), but I guess there wasn't room with the anti-government quotes like:

"There seems to be a general attitude to tax everything that you can," said Msall of the Civic Federation, a non-partisan government watchdog. "That's what these government officials think their role is, to oversee the expansion of government rather than the management of government."

Well, gee! I guess our 1950s tax system doesn't have anything to do with revenues shrinking every year. It's all about those Big Government Democrats instead who don't believe in management!

I hope the Trib and the rest of the media tell a more accurate story about our governments and our 1950s-era tax systems in the coming weeks to explain why more of our governments are not balancing their budgets.

And more importantly, I hope we can modernize our tax system with a sales tax on services as well as goods and a progressive income tax instead of a flat tax.

More voters in contested presidential states in February than in November

Did you know that, thanks to Tsunami Tuesday where 20 or so states will hold presidential primary elections on February 5th, there will be more Americans who live in a contested state for the primary election than there will be in November?

Remember, voters in most states are irrelevant in presidential elections. Either they are blue and thus uncontested like Illinois are red and thus uncontested like Texas. So, irrelevant.

But with 20 states on the same primary election day, almost half the country's voters are relevant.

A little sad that the standard for success is half the country's voters are relevant, but at least it's progress.

(And of course, I'm putting in a pitch for my client, the National Popular Vote, to make all voters relevant in November....)

Zorn gets the corporate loophole list, particularly for the LUST fund

Good news. Eric Zorn got the list of corporate loopholes that the Governor wants to close to generate revenue.

The list is here.

The list does not include fiscal notes, likely because no one has good estimates as to what they might generate, but Zorn wrote that they will come soon. I hope they come very soon to get a sense of the size and scope of these loopholes.

It looks like the Governor's office did a good job explaining each of the loopholes to close as well.

The list looks good to me. At first blush, I think we ought to close all of them. Here's a good example:

Repeal deduction for foreign and domestic dividends received by corporations--Corporations are allowed to deduct dividends received from other corporations, while individuals are required to include dividends as income and pay tax on dividends received. Corporations exploit this loophole to create foreign subsidiaries that return profits to the U.S. parent corporation in the form of dividends, which cannot be taxed under current Illinois law. For example, an Illinois manufacturer creates a subsidiary in Mexico to manufacture widgets and closes its Illinois widget manufacturing facility. The subsidiary returns its profits to the Illinois parent as a dividend. This deduction is encouraging companies to export jobs overseas.

Why should we give a tax break to ADM or John Deere to export jobs?

And, some people think that these corporate loopholes are boring. They obviously have never dealt with the LUST fund. Check it out (cue disco ball):

Repeal exemption for fuel transported to out of state destinations --By closing this loophole, fuel stored in Illinois will be taxed at the same rate, whether the ultimate destination of the fuel is in Illinois or in another state. Currently the state collects this tax for the LUST fund (Leaking Underground Storage Tax), but gives an exemption for that fuel which is sold in another state. Fuel stored in Illinois and exported to another state poses an environmental risk so the same tax should be charged. Further, the exemption gives a gasoline retailer in a border state at $.011 per gallon advantage over an Illinois retailer, if both buy fuel from the same Illinois distributor. In addition to ending the exemption, this proposal will actually reduce the tax rate from $.011 per gallon to $.010 per gallon, thus reducing the tax on fuel used in Illinois.

Oh yes. Tell me you're not hot and bothered by generating some more revenue for the LUST fund....

Anyway, all of these loophole closings look like smart policy moves to me. That being said, we need a much higher income tax in Illinois on high incomes and the Governor should drop his opposition to that move.

And, he ought to ask his allies in the General Assembly to file some bills that actually close these loopholes. I've worked on a few bills that would have closed some of them (SB 2122, introduced by Senator Martin Sandoval in last year's General Assembly would have returned to the three-factor income tax apportionment that would have generated in the neighborhood of $100M annually), and I have no idea why these loopholes haven't been filed yet. The sooner they get filed, the better.

Idea: get more election judges by letting them out of jury duty

We've got a problem: not enough election workers (called election judges in Illinois). Our elections are run essentially by volunteers and we have a lot of elections (four in a two-year cycle). Many election judges are senior citizens and they have to put in a 13 or 14 hour day. It's a challenge every election cycle to generate more volunteer election judges.

In a debate last week before the Los Angeles City Council on a motion to study instant runoff voting and several other reforms put together by rising star Eric Garcetti, President of the Council, Member Janice Hahn expressed a really interesting idea. (You can watch the debate here -- jump to Item #28 on the agenda).

She noted that election judges (called pollwatchers in California) are fulfilling their civic duty and serving the Republic. She also noted that lots of people would prefer not to serve in juries (they are hard to plan and many people get booted out of the jury pool). Council Member Hahn suggested that a great way to increase the number of election judges would be to release election judges from the jury pool, as serving on election day is as much a civic duty as serving on a jury of a defendants' peers.

I think it's a great idea and we ought to implement it in Illinois.

Live at YearlyKos with the presidentials (version 7)

Very funny moment. Edwards repeats that we need to swear off DC lobbyists money. Hillary gets asked directly whether she'd do the same. She smiled and said "John has certainly taken that position" and the audience laughs because it was such a ridiculous response. And she smiled as well because she seemed to know how ridiculous it was.

Obama then went on the attack to make it clear that the billion dollars the insurance industry spent on contributions had an influence. "I want to challenge the notion that lobbyists don't have disproportionate influence." "they aren't giving money for the public interest. They have an objective." Huge response.

Hillary defended lobbyists, many of who represent regular people like nurses and social workers or corporations who employ thousands of people. And, as a lobbyist representing progressive clients, I appreciate that. But, Barack's point that there's a lot we can do to clean up DC before public funding is implemented resonates.

Dodd: Our Constitution is at risk!

In the Obama White House, no one can lobby after serving. We need to stop the revolving door.

Clinton actually said we're safer because we are willing to take off our shoes before we go into airports. That's absurd.

Clinton then successfully attacks the unitary executive concept infecting our government and showing incompetence all over. But she then says we need a constitutional amendment to get public funding. She's just not a reformer.

Kucinich: Reminds us that 1 million innocents have been killed in Iraq and we need strength through peace.

Live at YearlyKos with the presidentials (version 6)

Barack: China is a competitor and as long as they are our banker and we are their debtors, we have less leverage. China is also manipulating their currency and closing their markets. In Africa and Latin America, the Chinese presence is as striking as the American absence. They are building roads and schools while we are obsessed with Iraq.

Dodd: Tragic sight of the adverTISEments (funky pronunciation) in DC newspapers asking for Arabic speakers after 911 to figure out what is going on. Wants a lot more global exchange.

Edwards: Pakistan is a problem. Unstable leader, nuclear power, anti-American population, Kashmir fight. Musharref said it would change everything if our kids had a public school education, USA should use soft power to educate 100M children. Opposed to 20B arms deal to Pakistan.

Richardson: Bush-Cheney policy to Musharref is one of appeasement. We won't force them to go after Al-Queda because it's domestically hard for him, We are so easy on him and we give him so much money. Richardson seems like he knows what's going on,

Interesting that

Barack: We need to change the political map together. We have got to expand the voter base. New people will let us go into Mississippi which is 40 percent black. Our rally in Atlanta had 20,000 people, 40 percent of whom were not registered to vote.

Hillary: We need to pay attention to the red parts of the blue states. Congratulates Howard Dean for the 50 state strategy.

Richardson: We need to push for same-day voter registration. (I like that!)