The state of the American tax system, in 8 charts

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/02/the-state-of-the-american-tax-system-in-8-charts/?utm_term=.f2ff69efa958

Senate Health Care Bill

The CBO estimates the Senate Health Care Bill will reduce the federal deficit by $321 Billion over 10 years.  However,  it would reduce federal tax revenues by $700 billion over the next decade. And a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center finds that nearly 45 percent of the benefit of those tax cuts would go to the highest-income one percent of households, those making $875,000 or more.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/senate-leaderships-health-bill-big-tax-cut-especially-top-one-percent

Documentation of Donald Trump Lies

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html

Income Inequality  (Source-Bernie Sanders)

• Koch brothers are the second wealthiest family in America
• Top 0.1% owns a much wealth as the bottom 90%
• Trump’s proposed tax cut would give an additional $353 billion in tax breaks to the top 0.2% to the most wealthy while he proposes to cut the budget for education, environmental protection, and social services.

Who is buying our government? (data from https://www.opensecrets.org/)

• Pat Toomey spent $30,910,557 in the 2016 senate campaign.  Katie McGinty spent $16,251,111.  In 2016, Toomey received:
  • $6.8 million from finance, insurance & real estate
  • $ from fossil fuel industries
    • Oil & Gas $374,597
    • Coal mining $64,398
    • Electric utilities $150,512
    • Mining $103,698
  • Pat Toomey is a top recipient from the following industries in 2015-2016:
    • Commercial Banks (#1)
    • Coal mining (#2)
    • Correctional facilities constr & mgmt/for-profit (#2)
    • Payday lenders (#2)
    • Anti-Abortion (#3)
    • Business Assns (#3)
    • Chemicals (#3)
    • Food stores (#3)
    • Medical Devices & Supplies (#3)
    • Mining (#3)
    • Misc Finance (#3)
    • Repub/Conservative (#3)
    • Mortgage bankers and brokers (#4)
  • Since 2010, Pat Toomey has received $1, 012,816 from oil, gas and coal.

Who is Funding Climate Change Denial (from http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/12/01/exxonmobil_koch_family_have_powered_climate_change_denial_for_decades.html)

• Justin Farrell, a professor at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has published two sets of results this week from an analysis of “all known organizations and individuals promoting contrarian viewpoints, as well as the entirety of all written and verbal texts about climate change from 1993–2013 from every organization, three major news outlets [the New York Times, the Washington Times, and USA Today], all US presidents, and every occurrence on the floor of the US Congress.”

  By machine-reading this massive amount of information—more than 39 million words—Farrell was able to link a significant amount of the most resonant denialist rhetoric over the last two decades directly to two entities that have derived a significant amount of their wealth from exploiting fossil fuels: ExxonMobil and the Koch family foundations.

  To conduct this research, Farrell constructed a comprehensive social network of the producers of contrarian climate information—some 4,556 individuals and 164 organizations—and tracked the most common phrases shared among them, like “CO2 is good” or “Al Gore.” He then examined the funding ties between companies and compared them with the use of common phrases. After analyzing them all, he found that donations to organizations from ExxonMobil and the Koch foundations were “the most reliable and theoretically important across-time indicators of corporate involvement”—including the ability to influence the mainstream media and the president.