Sometimes you just have to ask “How much money and greed is enough?”

Meijer, Inc. is one of the largest privately-owned companies in the country. When he died, Frederick Meijer, the son of the founder of the company, was worth $5 billion. The stores pioneered the concept of “one-stop shopping”, a shopping center where you could buy everything from car batteries to fresh broccoli.

This past year, Meijer, Inc. has been challenging its tax assessments around the state, saving itself millions and millions of dollars, money that is coming, in large part, directly from the coffers of the municipalities and schools where their stores are located. The Lansing area seems particularly hard hit.

Click through for details.

Um, maybe you guys should get your stories straight before you go on tv…

Michigan State Budget Director John Nixon appeared on Off the Record with Tim Skubick this week. Unfortunately for him, the wheels sort of fell of the car when the conversation turned to the impact of the Republicans nearly $2 billion in business tax cuts on job creation. Nixon first said, unequivocally, that the tax cuts have created jobs. Then he said he can’t prove it. And then he finished by saying, well, they really haven’t kicked in yet so it’s hard to say.

It gets hard to keep up with these guys sometimes.

Now you’re going too far

After the Obama administration bent over backwards to accommodate the Catholic Church’s complaint that having to provide health insurance to their employees that covers birth control, the Church threw it aside claiming it wasn’t good enough. Why? In part because it doesn’t allow any employer that wants to to impose his or her religious views on their employees.

My rant after the jump.

Let’s get some perspective on this, shall we?

One of the most widely prevalent myths being perpetrated on the right is that the federal budget should be seen as just a much larger version of a family budget. “American families are forced to live within their budget every day,” we’re told. “The federal government should do the same.”

Laura Clawson at Daily Kos has a marvelous piece up this morning that shows just how fail that argument is, mainly because it leaves out some very inconvenient truths about what our federal government looks like.

Her piece is titled “You want to compare the U.S. budget to a family budget? Let’s be real about it.” It stems from a piece making the rounds on Facebook that said it’s easier to look at the federal budget if you lop off eight zeros and then look at it like a family budget.

Much more after the Eclectacliff.

Those who benefit most should pay the most

Americans for Tax Fairness has a powerful new video out that spells out this ridiculous argument over the stupidly and incorrectly-named “fiscal cliff”. The video shows just how absurd the Republicans’ position and arguments are. They want a massive tax break for the upper 2% to continue and are holding a $2,200 per family tax break for the rest of us hostage in order to preserve it.

Have a look (after the Eclectablog Cliff.)

Funny how that works, isn’t it?

The state of Michigan’s tax revenues were up in November, beating estimates, according to the Senate Fiscal Agency (pdf). The increase in revenues was driven, in part, by higher taxes on Michiganders. As I wrote in my piece last spring, “The tax timebomb that explodes in Michigan in 2012 is MUCH worse than you thought”, the tax increase passed by the so-called “anti-tax” Republicans disproportionately impacts lower income residents.

Although the state coffers are looking pretty, the same cannot be said about our cities. Many of them are laying off police officers or getting rid of their police departments entirely.

More after the jump.

The rich are getting richer BECAUSE the poor are getting poorer

As we munch popcorn and watch the Republicans in their death match with President Obama over the fiscal speed bump and whether or not our economy will tumble to the ground if we raise taxes on the super-rich by 3.9%, a big part of the rhetoric we hear from the GOP is that this is a tax on business owners. Besides the fact that this is largely untrue and that in the small percentage of businesses affected, it only raises taxes on their income OVER $250,000 year, the fact is that our country’s economy is largely driven by large corporations and the contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by small businesses is shrinking.

Big businesses, as it turns out, are doing just fine. Workers’ wages, on the other hand? Not so much.

Note: This is a repost of a Daily Kos diary I published about a year and a half ago. I was inspired to repost it by the current story about a business owner who’s afraid to earn more than $250,000 because she thinks she’ll lose money by doing so.

When I reposted it last night over at Daily Kos, it hit the Rec list and the poll received over 500 responses. According to those results, 23% of Daily Kos readers didn’t understand how tax brackets worked before reading the diary.

Think about that — this is a pretty highly-educated, policy-savvy, math-and-science-aware, reality-based community overall, and almost a quarter of them weren’t/aren’t aware of one of the most basic tenets of the tax code.

The Full Monty after the jump.