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Hey, Sweetheart, Can You Spare Your Uncle Sam a Dime?
BROOKLYN — The Tea Party Republicans who’ve taken over the budget process in Washington — as well as Trenton, Madison, Indianapolis and Columbus — need a refresher course in Willie Sutton.
Asked why he robbed banks, Willie said: “That’s where the money is.”
At times, Republicans obey Sutton’s Law religiously. When they’re running for office, they don’t go, for example, to the local Planned Parenthood clinic and ask pregnant 14-year-old girls to underwrite $2 million in TV attack ads against Democrats. They go where the money is: Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers, the insurance, pharmaceutical, oil, coal, gas and chemical lobbies. They tap the Chamber of Commerce. They ask their friends in Saudi Arabia. And just like Willie Sutton, they hit up the banks — Citigroup, Bank of America, Amex, Visa, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs.
But give these shmucks an actual government to run, and they suddenly seem to think that the secret to deficit reduction is Sutton’s Paradox: “Go where the poverty is.”
Head Start. Pell grants. Cancer screening. Home heating. Disabled veterans. Unemployed nurse’s aids. Shake down the riffraff, take away their milk money, pile all that chump change together and pretty soon you’ll get the economy humming. At least, this is what bohunks like John Boehner and Rand Paul seem to think.
Me? I still think Willie was a better economist.
Actually, I don’t think this is the year for deficit cuts at all. But even in that area I have a few ideas neither the Tea Party nor kick-me-hard Barack have mentioned.
First of all — and not just because its name sounds like something dreamed up by Joe Goebbels and Leni Reifenstahl during a lost weekend in Baden Baden — the Dept. of Homeland Security (DeHoSe) was never a good idea. It has aged badly.
By now, 9/11 is history. Not only haven’t we caught Osama bin Laden, we know for sure that DeHoSe isn’t up to the job. At the least, by breaking up this misbegotten Cabinet travesty, we can torch one costly layer of administrative deadwood. As we do, we’ll probably uncover several redundant or pointless bureaus that can be summarily erased from existence, never to rubberstamp a requisition again. Best of all, by killing DeHoSe, we reduce, by thousands, the number of Keystone G-men channeling Jack Bauer, entrapping one another, and rifling Aunt Milly’s luggage in their relentless quest for diabolical Islamofascists wielding explosive Nikes and squirting anthrax shampoo.
Next, legalize marijuana.
We all know that, ten, twenty, thirty years from now, weed’s gonna be legal. But we need money right now! So, legalize now — and give the cannabis concession to Big Tobacco, because those guys really know how to sell this stuff. (Think of menthol maryjane!) Make dope-dealers buy licenses and limit sales to adults (with big, lucrative fines for violations). Collect cannabis taxes by the joint, ounce, pound, kilo and bale. Collect more taxes on rolling paper, roach clips, pipes, bongs, Che Guevara t-shirts! Encourage domestic hemp farming by hitting imported weed with a fat tariff.
And open the prisons. We’re spending $29,000 a year for every doper, Deadhead and dealer we’ve put behind bars. The U.S. has the largest jail population on earth because we lock people up for getting stoned. Everybody must get out! On what we save just from freeing drug offenders, we could spend billions on rehab resorts, drug treatment, halfway houses, parole officers, etc. — and still decimate the deficit.
Not to mention the income from the Grass Tax!
OK, next. Anybody with a memory (or, if they’ve seen “The Sting”) knows about what used to be called the “numbers racket.” It was an elegantly simple lottery, run by the Mob, in which people placed penny-ante bets on a three-number combination. Each bet was a pittance but the daily handle was enough to keep your neighborhood hoods flush with Cadillacs, silk suits, diamond stick-pins and nights at the Stork Club.
“Playing the numbers” died when states decided to climb off their moral high-horse and grab a piece of the action, with state lotteries and Indian casinos. Proceeds from all this sin were supposed to do good — fund education, create surpluses and cut taxes.
So, where’d all the money go? The odds are supposed to favor the house, but somehow every state in the country came up craps. Now, they’re all hip-deep in IOU’s.
I’m not saying we should give up and close down the games. Just take them away from politicians. Put in a few calls — to the Crips, the Latin Kings, the last vestiges of the Gotti family, the estate of Bugsy Siegel, whoever — and offer them dibs on state gambling. Put the contract out for bids, hire the Mob that makes the best offer, and then look the other way ‘til the end of the year and it’s time to split the pot.
OK, one other idea.
The Government Accounting Office recently reminded us that half the corporations in America pay no taxes at all. Zero. Bupkes. Exxon-Mobil, for example, in 2009, made $42.5 billion in profit, paid nothing on that and got a $1.1 billion refund from the IRS. Also not paying — not a cent — in recent years: Boeing, Bank of America, General Electric, Wells Fargo, Citigroup… I could go on, but my gorge is rising.
The President’s deficit commission talks about simplifying the tax code and eliminating loopholes, so that some of these dodged taxes — amounting to more than $100 billion a year — can be recovered.
Fuggedaboutit. As fast as tax laws can be revised, Big Business’s tax lawyers will devise new scams for stiffing the waiter. They always have. The solution is to not even try taxing corporate income, or profits or assets or anything else even remotely financial.
Instead, make the tax lawyers a tax liability. For every dollar billed to, say, Google, by its tax lawyers, the IRS would then bill Google $2. Or maybe $3. Better yet: $20. The more tax lawyers a company hires, the more taxes it pays. And down goes the deficit!
Eventually, some company might figure it out. Finally, it might fire the damn lawyers, fill out its 1040 like everybody else — and pay its fair share.
Just kidding.
In the meantime, we’re still in the hole. Maybe there’s a 14-year-old pregnant girl out there who’ll lend Uncle Sam a couple bucks ‘til the first of the month?
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15 Comments so far
Show AllKilling DeHoSe, legalizing pot, releasing non-violent drug offenders, all good. But getting the politician/oligarchy Mafia to tax itself is useless and they get ALL the gambling profits from the Wall Street Casino anyway.
Here are some other ideas:
http://www.planet-thanet.fsnet.co.uk/groups/wdd/09-09%281%29.pdf
"legalizing" and taxing weed is not the answer.
it needs to be de-criminalized and unregulated.
each should be able to grow their own.
You beat me to the punch!
How can they tax it if you grow your own? Can they tax tomatoes you grow?
I'm not sure of the proposed laws, but if marijuana were legalized, couldn't people grow their own, just as they can legally make their own beer and wine?
1. Dissolve the monstrosity of DeHoSe...
Sure. I'm in full agreement. It always smacked me as something the Nazis would have come up with.... And if you consider the Bush Crime Family, and the Institutionalized Crime Syndicate (Rethuglicons) and modern day Nazis like I do, well there you go. It should go the way of the Dodos.
2. Legalize pot...
Sounds like a good plan, right? Uh.. no. Does this sound like a good deal for those who prefer to light up a fine, organic, artisan-quality spliff when they get the inkling?:
"give the cannabis concession to Big Tobacco, because those guys really know how to sell this stuff. (Think of menthol maryjane!)"
"Make dope-dealers buy licenses and limit sales to adults (with big, lucrative fines for violations). "
Nauseating and horrifying. This is the exact nightmare scenario that led me to vote *staunchly against* prop 19 in CA's last elections. And as far as the 'big fines' for small dealers selling to teens, sorry, but pot isn't even all that harmful to minors, unlike cigarettes and alcohol.
"Collect cannabis taxes by the joint, ounce, pound, kilo and bale. Collect more taxes on rolling paper, roach clips, pipes, bongs, Che Guevara t-shirts!"
Sounds like you really care about the above... Yeah, commodify your high!! Go corporate weed... that'll really be a boon for culture and American prosperity!
Wrong.
1. Legalize and heavily promote HEMP as a crop for fiber, fuel, and food.
2. Decriminalize entheogens and other non-addictive consciousness altering drugs, and regulate 'medicinally' the selling/regulating of drugs such as amphetamines, barbiturates, cocaine and opiate derived drugs. Sale distribution and profits should definitely NOT be going to greed driven private corporations. This will in effect punish small growers & users who prefer quality over over-availability.
Your other ideas are just overall wacky and hardly worth arguing about. 'Everybody must get out!'. Huh?
"Put in a few calls — to the Crips, the Latin Kings, the last vestiges of the Gotti family, the estate of Bugsy Siegel, whoever — and offer them dibs on state gambling."
What?
I'm fully on board with getting rid of tax-loopholes, and doing something about the use of professional tax evasion experts is a great idea... but as you propose it, and similarly throughout this article, your solutions come across as a big joke.
Sadly, these are serious, not funny matters. And real solutions are what's needed, not more clever quips and faux solutions that only a tiny minority would consider. And for sure what we don't need is *more* corporate control or 'oversight', which amounts to about the same as your absurd notion to hand over casinos to the mob. Weird stuff.
Anyway, that's all. My main message:
LEGALIZE HEMP FOR AMERICAN PROSPERITY!
I agree with you on number 1., but I think on 2. you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Remember that pot can be easily grown by anyone, preventing us from becoming addicted to weed/tobacco corporations.
Also, defeating prop 19 only helped the lucrative pot dispensaries maintain their monopolies without making pot and hemp easily, cheaply and universally accessible (in California anyway).
The rest of his ideas were supposed to come across as a big joke.
re: "Remember that pot can be easily grown by anyone, preventing us from becoming addicted to weed/tobacco corporations. "
Corporate pot will likely be GMO garbage - which carries the inherent danger of damaging and tainting the rest of the world's crops.
Another consideration... How will they be able to make their product profitable without undermining the competition, and over abundance if 'everyone can just grow their own'? It will be strictly regulated 'for safety reasons' (lol), so that only licensed dealers can legally sell. Coffee is profitable because its not possible to grow coffee in your attic. Pot does not fit in with a standard model because its so easy to manufacture. So they would have to introduce some sort of liquor license scenario to grow or distribute more than say a half ounce.
Say bye bye artisan growers is what I suspect could happen.
Say hello to GMO and black market brick from Mexico.
Cheers
Once we built a nation - but not on tax cuts...
Fucking brilliant, Mr Benjamin, as usual. Of course, aside from the fully expecdted fleecing of 14-year-old pregnant girls, it will in fact - IN INCONTROVERTIBLE FACT - be necessary to take the money from the military as well as the corporations, especially the ones who profit from all this weapons and war bonanza.
Alas, that WILL mean that it will be necessary to kick Americans' testosterone-poisoned idea of themselves in the balls, and admittedly, they will kick back. This part of the plan will have to be a multi-generational approach to - *horrors!* - education, you know, that nasty little process which gets right in the way of: (a) creating generation after generation of mind-controlled, patriarchal, 'respect the cock', jar-headed, giant-dorky-pick-up-truck-driving males who are raised by a society that values football and all the rest of the male-oriented distractions and aggressions above everything else, especially peace and The Feminine Principle; and (b) the maintenance of this incredibly-hard-to-remove-stain of money being more important than everything else, including human life and democracy.
So, in a nutshell, those of us foolish and traitorous enough to even contemplate the foregoing will run off and get ourselves psychoanalyzed whilst the 'Real Men', the 'Tea Party' the 'Republicans', and the rest of these fascists get on with the task at hand - destroying the United States so that room can be made on the North American continent for something else worthy of the real estate and that actually works for the people - even if what these imbeciles believe they are doing is destroying it so that they can erect their theocratic corporate concentration camp.
Boy, or Girl, are they in for the shock of their miserable, stinking, useless lives.
Thankyou. If nobody mentioned the military, the elephant in the room, then I was going to do so.
Having said that, it is a great article.
Cut the Pentagon's budget by a third to a half and they will still have the biggest Wehrmacht in the world. Those billion$ could go toward things that the people who paid the taxes in the first place need badly. Rebuilding our infrastructure, making sure old people don't freeze in their homes because they can't afford fuel, actually fund education in this country so a college graduate won't retire before he has his student loan paid back, etc.
The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex is nothing but a huge sponge absorbing everything that might help somebody.
Cutting the Pentagon budget by third to a half (a wonderful idea) would result in a third to a half reduction in campaign contributions that pay for the expensive media that enables our "elected officials" to get elected and re-elected. What might help is something like The Truman Commission that tried to root out corruption-driven waste and fraud during WWII -- what good ol' Ross Perot (is he still alive?) said he wanted to do.
The Military Industrial Complex is a giant rip-off machine that is wasting and stealing billions of dollars. Rid us of some of that and a lot of debt payoff money and infrastructure repair money could be freed up. The mess won't be cleaned up until a financial collapse forces big time "defense" cutbacks, but by then it may be too late.
Legalising and taxing MJ will raise very little money - the only reason it's expensive is that it is illegal. With the illegality removed, everyone who wants to will simply grow a pot plant on the balcony. No fuss.
But once the police stop bawwwing about not being able to throw people in the slammer for an ounce of weed, it will do the various government deficits no end of good. Who opposes it? Easy: liquor manufacturers and provate prison companies.
With respect to tax - America has this curious notion that justice is about doing textual analysis of the laws. Most countries simply have a law that it's a crime to attempt to evade tax - to violate the spirit of the tax laws. That allows judges to, well, judge. Rather than referee. The lawyers hate the idea, of course.
I have no moral dilemma with gambling, but lotteries are a joke - particularly how they were sold. Years ago, to convince the citizens of Illinois to create a state lottery, the state said they would transfer the first $500Million each year in proceeds to education. It looked like a reasonable approach to the state's chronic under-funding for education. What they didn't tell anybody was that they would, at the same time, reduce the general fund funding for state education by $500Million so no net increase for education.