^{Sponsored by the GOP - If We Let Roemer Into the Debates, What Would Happen to Our uh, uh.....Ooops?}

Good Morning! Rise and Shine! Get that Cup O' Joe...
break out the O.J....hang out with the pooch...time to check out the money funnies.

GOP Candidate Buddy Roemer In SuperPac Ad

Donate to Buddy Roemer's Campaign. The Florida filing fee is $35k, for the state's election motto is only rich people need apply!

The Census Bureau has released their alternative measure for poverty research and boy it's a doozie. The official 2010 poverty measure results in 46.2 people, or 15.1% living in poverty in the United States. The alternative measure gives 49.1 million or 16% of all people living in the United States are in poverty. The population in 2010 was 306.1 million. The actual gross income threshold levels are still low.

There are two studies which show bad news for Americans. The first is one by the Brookings Institute, The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty: Metropolitan Trends in the 2000s, which shows extreme poverty has dramatically increased and has become concentrated.

Happy Bank Transfer Day!

Otherwise known as - you're charging me 22% credit card interest when I have a FICO score above 750 and no missed payments? Seriously?

Today has been declared bank transfer day. A nationwide consumer call to action to pull money from Too Big To Fail, derivative ridden, foreclosure fraud laden, fee crazed, bail out happy, offshore outsourcing our jobs, banks.

Credit Unions are rejoicing and celebrating the event. From a Credit Union National Association, press release:

At least 650,000 consumers across the nation have joined credit unions in the past four weeks

This represents $4.5 billion in deposit transfers to credit unions. The online banks and smaller banks probably have similar amounts in transfers.

The Federal Reserve statistics on money stocks show fed up customers have a long way to go to make a serious dent on commercial banks. Savings deposits at commercial banks are about $5 trillion whereas credit unions, thrifts are about a trillion. Checking accounts and the like are a little more even, with about $237 billion at commercial banks and $177 billion at credit unions, savings and loans. Growing the credit unions, smaller financial institutions that actually give the consumer a good deal, loan, invest in the real U.S. economy and hire Americans ....well, let's just say ya gotta start somewhere.

G.E., yes that G.E. who is in the White House, not only hasn't paid taxes for the last three years, our government actually paid them. From 2008-2010, G.E. received tax rebates of $4.737 billion, while earning a pretax profit of $10.46 billion. This is while they offshore outsource jobs to China and get bail outs for their financial branch, G.E. Capital.

Citizens for Tax Justice have published a new study, Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers, 2008-2010, which is simply a must read for every American. Some of the most notorious multinational corporations, complete with bail outs and offshore outsourcing your job, paid negative taxes for the last three years. In other words, we paid them.

The study covers 280 corporations. Some of what they found:

• Seventy-eight of the 280 companies paid zero or less in federal income taxes in at least one year from 2008 to 2010.
• Thirty corporations paid less than nothing in aggregate federal income taxes over the entire 2008-10 period.
• 2009 was a particularly banner year for non-payment of taxes. In that year, 49 companies paid zero or less in federal income taxes.
• In 2008, 22 companies paid no federal income tax, and got $3.3 billion in tax rebates. In 2010, 37 companies paid no income tax, and got $7.8 billion in rebates.

Below is a table from the report, showing the top worst offenders, their pretax profits, their tax or rebate and their effective tax rate.