Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Thursday, August 12, 2010

Who Ate All The Pie?

By Steve Hynd


I think it's fairly obvious who:



A Republican plan to extend tax cuts for the rich would add more than $36 billion to the federal deficit next year -- and transfer the bulk of that cash into the pockets of the nation's millionaires, according to a congressional analysis released Wednesday.


New data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation show that households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011, for an average tax cut per household of about $100,000.


Would you like that as a graphic?


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According to the WaPo's article, there are 315,000 millionaires in the U.S. so giving that $100k gift to the top 0.1% of the population costs the nation something close to that $36 billion added to the deficit every year.


Derek Thompson at The Atlantic writes:



When you put the Obama and GOP plans side-by-side, the effect on low-income Americans is negligible. The effect on middle-income Americans, negligible. The effect on the lower-upper class up to $500,000, negligible. The one-year impact on our debt, negligible. But the impact on millionaires is a factor of seventeen.


In short, two sorts of people should be getting excited about the tax cut debate. The first is millionaires who can save a hundred thousand dollars every year under the GOP tax plan. The second is deficit hawks (many of whom are, in fact, millionaires) who recognize that over a ten year horizon, the Bush tax cuts add between a quarter and a third of our total debt accumulation.


Michael Tomasky adds:



This is their agenda. If it's for millionaires, it's good. Period. It's never been quite this naked, but there it is. How the idiot Democrats are going to manage to lose to a bunch of people whose only real domestic agenda is to hand out $100,000 bills to millionaires, busting the budget while doing it, makes me sick to my stomach.


The GOP's trick is to make "I'm alright, Jack. Keep your hands off of my stack" their vote winning refrain. Over the decades they've created a culture of selfishness where no one cares if someone else is robbing the nation blind, like asset strippers on crack, as long as they get to keep theirs. The Dems keep trying to play a "kinder, gentler" version of the same thing because they love those big campaign donations from the rich corporate owners - and it simply doesn't work. It's about time from each according to their means, to each according to their needs was resurrected and bugger the rich.



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