Take Action: Balanced Budget Amendment

Speaker Boehner is considering which Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) to bring to the floor for a vote. There are two versions. Read about them below.

The “Clean” Version

• Does not cap spending as a percentage of GDP
• Does not require a super majority to raise taxes
• Will undoubtedly lead to tax increases & bigger & bigger government

The Strong Versions

• Cap spending as a percentage of GDP
• Some require a super majority to raise taxes, some do not
• Due to the cap, will prioritize cutting spending before ever raising taxes

More details about the variations of the BBA are below this call to action.

The bottom line is this: The clean version will get more votes, making it more “bipartisan.” The strong version will get fewer votes because it takes a more principled, fiscally responsible stand, but we are talking about amending our Constitution! We should never amend our Constitution out of expediency!

There has been some serious concern expressed about amending our Constitution in our discussions of a BBA, but you have overwhelmingly said that that if there is a vote on a BBA, you want Congress to vote for something that is meaningful and is not just a tactical move leading into an election year to get votes.

Congressman Paul Ryan told some of our National Support Team yesterday that he is committed to a strong version; he is on record as only supporting a strong Balanced Budget Amendment. The top 3 in GOP Leadership are not so committed to a strong version.

With all this in mind, here is what you need to do today:

1. If you can only make one call, call Congressman Paul Ryan and thank him for his commitment to principle on the seriousness of amending the Constitution and sticking to a "strong" Balanced Budget Amendment. We must support people who stand strong!
   Paul Ryan: (202) 225-3031
    
2. Call Speaker Boehner, Congressmen Cantor and McCarthy and tell them that if they are bringing a BBA to the floor for a vote, it needs to be the “strong” version with spending caps.
   Speaker Boehner: (202) 225-6205
   Eric Cantor: (202) 225-2815
   Kevin McCarthy: (202) 225-2915

For more information on the Balanced Budget Amendment (Click Here)

Support Transparency in Government

From Open Secrets --

Transparency lovers, take note: now you can fight to make the campaign finance system more  open and publicly accessible right from OpenSecrets.org.

The Center for Responsive Politics has integrated a new, user-friendly tool that allows constituents to write and urge their members of Congress to support the issues and legislation that matter most to them. The tool, called POPVOX, is now available in the Action Center on OpenSecrets.org.

With this feature, you can write to lawmakers in support of three pieces of transparency-oriented legislation:

• S. 219, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act: This bill would require all U.S. senators and candidates for the Upper Chamber to electronically file their fund-raising reports. The Center supports this measure because it would expedite public disclosure of senators' fund-raising records. (Senators are currently the only lawmakers not required by law to file their reports electronically.)
• H.R. 1974, the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act: This legislation would collect all congressionally mandated reports and make them available to the public online. The bill would make available all fact-seeking reports Congress requires federal agencies to produce by putting them all on one publicly accessible website.
• H.R. 2571, the Transparency in Government Act: This broad legislative effort is intended to make the work of Congress and the executive branch more transparent through laws and regulations that would bring information online in a timely manner. H.R. 2571 is an amalgamation of different bills, and it would create historic changes in the way the two of our branches of government provide information to the public.

In the OpenSecrets.org Action Center, you will now be prompted with this feature, which allows you to write to your elected representatives.

 

h

Stimulus Funds Used to Employ Foreign Workers Instead of Unemployed Americans

President Obama is bouncing around the U.S. spouting how we need jobs in this country and that he can no longer wait for the Republicans in Congress to pass his jobs bill.... so he must do it through an Executive Order.

Let's take a look at some of President Obama's previous attempts at putting unemployed Americans back to work...

From ALIPAC --

Rep. Peter DeFazio demanded Tuesday that the federal Department of Labor add muscular - and clear - new provisions to a guest-worker program that was used to hire foreign workers for forest jobs in Oregon intended for unemployed U.S. citizens.

"Over the past year it has come to light that several contractors exploited loopholes in the H-2B visa process to intentionally hire foreign workers, rather than available Americans, for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act-funded jobs on Forest Service lands in Oregon. This is unacceptable," DeFazio said in a letter sent Tuesday to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.

The letter came less than a week after the department's inspector general released a report about the contracts and the fact that 254 foreign workers were hired to perform work that most believed should have been filled by unemployed Americans.

"Taxpayer money was spent to hire foreign workers while unemployed Oregonians were denied these jobs. The Department of Labor owes it to the American taxpayer and the over 13 million unemployed Americans to make sure this can never occur again," the letter says. More...

In light of his continued failures, one must wonder who exactly does President Obama want to create jobs for -- illegal immigrants or unemployed Americans?

U.S. to spend $20 Million on Pakistani Sesame Street

Bert & Ernie, Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird need not apply!

As part of an overall commitment to spend $7.5 Billion over the next 5 years for civilian aid in Pakistan, the U.S. will also fund a new Pakistani version of Sesame Street in attempts to increase tolerance....

From Fox News --

Sesame Street is coming to Pakistan but not as generations of Americans know it.

The U.S. is bankrolling the initiative with $20 million, hoping it will improve education in a country where one-third of primary school-age children are not in class. Washington also hopes the program will increase tolerance at a time when the influence of radical views is growing.

"One of the key goals of the show in Pakistan is to increase tolerance toward groups like women and ethnic minorities," said Larry Dolan, who was the head education officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Pakistan until very recently. More...

So we raised the debt ceiling for a Pakistani Muppet show?!? Any bets on how long this show is declared as blasphemy by the Islamikaze's in Pakistan and Elmo is sentenced to death by stoning?

What do the Top 1% Really Pay in Taxes?

From The Tax Foundation --

The income earned by the top 1% of Americans has declined for the second year in a row while their average tax rate has increased, according to a new Tax Foundation study. The average federal tax rate for those reporting at least $343,927 in income has increased from 22.5% in 2007 to 24.0% in 2009, while the average income for the top 1% has declined from $1.4 million to $1 million over the same period.

The Tax Foundation's analysis is based on new data from the Internal Revenue Service on individual income taxes, reporting on calendar year 2009.  The amount of individual income tax paid steeply declined by $166 billion, twice the decline from 2007 to 2008.  Nationally, average effective income tax rates were at their lowest levels since the IRS began tracking them in 1986. The average tax rate for returns with a positive liability went from 12.2% in 2008 to 11.1% in 2009.

"During a time of economic downturn, we expect to see significant changes in both total income reported and the share of taxes paid by those with the highest incomes," said Logan. "Unlike middle-income wage-earners whose incomes and tax liabilities are fairly steady, high-income people tend to realize significant capital gains that fluctuate wildly with the economy, causing their income tax liabilities to fluctuate as well."

In 2009, the top 1% of tax returns earned 16.9% of adjusted gross income and paid 36.7% of all federal individual income taxes. In 2008 those figures were 20.0% and 38.0%, respectively. Each year from 2005 to 2007, the top 1 percent's constantly growing share of income earned and taxes paid set a record. The 2008 reversal of this trend continued in 2009.

The study also takes a look at the very highest earners, the top 0.1 percent of tax returns, which the IRS only began singling out in recent years. In 2009, those 138,000 tax returns accounted for nearly 7.8% of adjusted gross income earned (down from almost 10% in 2008), and they paid around 17% of the nation's federal individual income taxes (down from 18.5% percent in 2008).

"The very highest income group—the top one-tenth of one percent—actually has a lower average effective income tax rate than the rest of the top 1 percent of returns because these extremely high-income returns are more likely to have income from capital gains and dividends, which are typically taxed at lower rates," said Logan. "It's worth pointing out that in the case of capital gains and dividends, however, income derived from these sources has already been taxed once by the corporate income tax, which is not included in the current study, meaning the average effective tax rate numbers can be somewhat misleading."

Tax Foundation Fiscal Fact No. 285, "Summary of Latest Federal Individual Income Tax Data," by economist David S. Logan is available online..

New Tool to Track the Money in the 2012 Race for the White House

Here is a great new tool from Center for Responsive Politics to track the money for the 2012 White House race....
From Open Secrets --

As the presidential money chase continues to heat up, the Center for Responsive Politics is rolling out several new features to help you keep tabs on the 2012 race for the White House.

Part of the "Banking on Becoming President" database on  OpenSecrets.org, these features aim to help the public better understand the relationships between the men and women currently campaigning to lead the country and the moneyed special interest groups eager to help them raise the massive amounts of money needed to do it.

Among the new features are new graphs and tables that display how much candidates are raising and from whom -- as well as how their war chests stack up against one another. 

Presidential candidates recently reached another milestone in the the 2012 race when they filed their third-quarter fund-raising reports with the Federal Election Commission. 

OpenSecrets.org is now not only tracking the summary information, we also allows users to break down those fund-raising figures over time -- comparing day by day, week by week, month by month or quarter by quarter.

And the New Sanctuary City is.... Washington D.C.!

The Capital of our country - Washington D.C. - ignoring our laws and U.S. Constitution, opens their arms and your wallets by putting out a "Welcome" sign for illegal immigrants...

From ALIPAC --

If there were only one way to sum up the illegal immigration crisis in the United States, the people who run the government in the nation’s Capital may have found it: Washington D.C., where our laws are made, where there the words “Equal Justice Under Law” are displayed over the Supreme Court Building and where the Chief Executive of the Republic resides … is now a sanctuary city for illegal aliens.

The District of Columbia became a sanctuary city on Wednesday after Mayor Vincent Gray signed a new order forbidding D.C. police to ask about an individuals immigration status.

Furthermore, Mayor Gray said District police will not help Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents execute federal warrants unless the individual has committed another crime.

The new order also forbids D.C. police from contacting Immigration and Customs Enforcement to inquire about an individual's immigration status. More...