taxpayers

Rick Perry just loves spending taxpayer dollars:

Gov. Rick Perry was near the height of his popularity when he barnstormed California in September to raise money for his presidential bid and to participate in his first nationally televised debate.

His state-provided security guards were flying pretty high, too, spending more than $32,000 in taxpayer money for travel and lodging in San Francisco, $4,400 to dine near the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley, and another $6,400 for plane tickets to San Diego, records show.

In the ensuing weeks, Perry would see his political fortunes plummet, falling to as low as 6 percent in public opinion polls from a high of 32 percent. But the bills for his omnipresent security detail continue, costing taxpayers as much as $400,000 a month.

So the people of Texas are paying out $400,000 a month for something that isn't even really Texas business. What about all that cash Perry has had on hand? It seems like campaign money should be used for things like security, not money from Texas.

But Texans are apparently used to this:

Perry is not the only Texas governor to run up big bills — and receive criticism — for security provided on out-of-state trips. When former Gov. George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, the state spent at least $400,000 a month in the first quarter of that year — more than four times the amount spent in all of 1999, the public safety department revealed at the time.

All told, taxpayers were on the hook for $3.9 million in security costs for Bush and his family from January 1999 to March 2000, when the Secret Service took over the job, the public safety department said.

John Cole points out the ending of the CBS article:

The trip Columbus probably cost taxpayers between $500,000 and $1 million.

Air Force One alone bills out at $100,000 per hour, and the round trip is nearly two hours. Adding to the cost are military aircraft to carry limos and secret service vehicles, Marine One on standby, Secret Service, local police and other factors.

I don't seem to remember CBS talking about the costs of George Bush flying around the country to push his failed Social Security reform. Do you?

I guess only Democratic Presidents get this scrutiny. Show your agenda much CBS?

This is another sign of the times:

Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions, but for nearly half of U.S. households it's simply somebody else's problem.

About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That's according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization.

Most people still are required to file returns by the April 15 deadline. The penalty for skipping it is limited to the amount of taxes owed, but it's still almost always better to file: That's the only way to get a refund of all the income taxes withheld by employers.

In recent years, credits for low- and middle-income families have grown so much that a family of four making as much as $50,000 will owe no federal income tax for 2009, as long as there are two children younger than 17, according to a separate analysis by the consulting firm Deloitte Tax.

I’m sure part of the increase in the number not having to pay taxes is because of the economic times. People have lost their jobs and had to settle for new jobs not paying as much, or maybe one of the parents lost their full-time job and had to settle with something part time.

There’s also another reason for this larger number:

Tax cuts enacted in the past decade have been generous to wealthy taxpayers, too, making them a target for President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress. Less noticed were tax cuts for low- and middle-income families, which were expanded when Obama signed the massive economic recovery package last year.

Ben Stein decided today to declare that more Republicans pay taxes than Democrats and that is the reason they are against the healthcare bill:

You asked one of the most brilliant questions I have ever heard anyone ask on TV, which is why are so many Republicans against more government interference in the health care system, and so many Democrats in favor of it? And the answer is much higher percentage of Republicans are taxpayers than Democrats and the Republicans are the people paying for it, and the Democrats are the people receiving it. So that has a lot to explain there.

There are a tremendous number of wealthy Democrats and wealthy Republicans, but as a general matter, Republicans as a group pay income tax at a much higher rate than Democrats, and I think that has a lot to do with everything. They also have a much higher rate, and are paying members of the insurance pools, and they realize that the insurance premiums are going up so that people who otherwise would not get insurance are going to get insurance and it has a lot to do with the fact that Republicans are a different group of people than Democrats.

I have heard some pretty ridiculous claims come from the right wings brain trust before, but this one has to take the cake.

Following up on yesterday’s news of the White House now using the open source content management software Drupal to power their site I decided I needed to expand on it a bit more for my less tech savvy readers.

First an explanation of open source software is in order before an understanding of what it means to the citizens and taxpayers of our country.

The open source model is very powerful and starting to dominate the computing world. Approximately 75% of the websites on the internet are powered by software developed as open source. Apache is the most popular web server software and is open source. Linux is the most popular operating system for servers and is open source. Even MySQL, the database which powers most sites including Google is open source.

Open source software can be freely obtained. Any of the examples I gave above you can go and download right now and even download the underlying code that makes the software run. You are free to modify it however you like, given you follow the very lenient licensing requirements, and run those changes openly.

Making this software free doesn’t mean there isn’t money to be made. Drupal is a perfect example of this. The software is so powerful and robust that it ends up with a very steep learning curve. That’s not by design, but rather because of what the software has to offer.

It’s no wonder why the hard core conservatives love this chick. It seems like every time she opens her mouth nothing comes out but lies. Take this latest example. One of her reasons for resigning was that it was costing the taxpayers too much money to fight the ethics complaints. Well it turns out that is flatly wrong:

But there's new evidence to suggest the argument is just factually wrong. Greg Sargent reported that the governor's own office conceded yesterday that money used to respond to the ethics charges are part of fixed costs that would have gone to the same lawyers, whether the charges were filed or not. The funds wouldn't have to go schools, police, or transportation, as Palin claimed. The $1.9 million "was arrived at by adding up attorney hours spent on fending off complaints -- based on the fixed salaries of lawyers in the governor's office and the Department of Law. The money would have gone to the lawyers no matter what they were doing."

(h/t Cesca)

Palin’s biggest problem is that she can’t keep her mouth shut. People talk about Biden’s mouth. His is nothing compared to hers. And the right thinks this lady is presidential material? Now that is down right laughable.

Something we aren’t used to seeing; oversight of an administration, being conducted by the administration’s own party:

A congressional oversight committee opened an investigation yesterday into whether the Obama administration is circumventing a law that limits lavish pay for executives at firms benefiting from the $700 billion federal bailout.

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner asking for records on any special entities that the government believes it can use to funnel bailout money without requiring firms to abide by congressional restrictions.

"It would be unconscionable and irresponsible for the Treasury Department to permit excessive pay practices to continue at companies that have been rescued by the taxpayers," Towns wrote in the letter. "I will strongly oppose any attempt to weaken or bypass these restrictions, or to violate the spirit, if not the intent, of these laws."

To the Republicans, this would be called “treason”. How dare a party not hold true to “party loyalty”, and instead go on the side of democracy. And if someone in the administration is found to be guilty of trying to balk the regulations put into the stimulus, well they better be shown the door quickly, if not frog marched out.

The TARP was passed as an emergency life line to troubled banks, but read this:

A small but growing number of community banks are backing out of the government's bailout, which they see as fraught with hidden strings and government interference.

About 20 banks so far that applied for or had been approved to receive about $1 billion combined in taxpayer money have reversed course in the past month and refused to take the money. That's just a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars the government already has spent, but it shows that taxpayers aren't the only ones anxious about the financial bailout.

So they needed this money to stay in business, as the TARP was supposed to be used for, but they decided they didn’t want the money since it wasn’t just given to them. Sounds like these banks didn’t really need the money, but rather wanted it. In other words, the greed that got us into this huge mess is just being amplified with the TARP. Perhaps the feds should go in and check the ledgers of these banks to make sure they really aren’t getting ready to fail.