I predict that this latest pronouncement by Pat Robertson is going to go over about as well as his supposed secret messages from God about who was going to win the presidential election, or his more recent remarks about casting demons out of used clothing.

Pat Robertson's Prayers Can Make You A Millionaire:

Televangelist Pat Robertson regularly hosts a segment on the 700 Club in which he cures viewers of ailments that God has revealed to him. This is part of positive confession, where Word-Faith pastors like Robertson claim to speak things into existence. Quite regularly it involves money.

For example, today Robertson announced that God is going to grant a lucky 700 Club viewer one million dollars: “God is going to supply a million dollars, somebody is praying right now, right this second, you’re praying for a million dollars and God said, ‘I have heard your prayer, I know your need, and I’m going to supply the need that you requested,’ it’s done, in Jesus’ name.’”

Can't wait to see who it is!

Go read the whole thing, but I wanted to share at least this portion of Robert Reich's post from this Saturday: Bedford Falls or Pottersville?:

But we are still in danger of the “Pottersville” Capra saw as the consequence of what happens when Americans fail to join together and forget the meaning of the public good.

If Lionel Barrymore’s “Mr. Potter” were alive today he’d call himself a “job creator” and condemn George Bailey as a socialist. He’d be financing a fleet of lobbyists to get lower taxes on multi-millionaires like himself, overturn environmental laws, trample on workers’ rights, and shred social safety nets. He’d fight any form of gun control. He’d want the citizens of Pottersville to be economically insecure – living paycheck to paycheck and worried about losing their jobs – so they’d be dependent on his good graces.

The Mr. Potters are still alive and well in America, threatening our democracy with their money and our common morality with their greed.

Call me old fashioned or overly sentimental but I still believe the George Baileys will win this contest. They know we’re all in it together, and that if we succumb to the Potters we lose America and relinquish the future.

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Bill Kristol decided to double down on his remarks from a couple of weeks ago on Fox News Sunday and the fact that Republicans in Congress and the GOP shouldn't "fall on its sword" to defend tax breaks for millionaires. What Kristol was in favor of though, was the idea that Republicans should be supporting an extension of the payroll tax cuts and that it would give Republicans a "huge opportunity" to be "the champions of the working class and the middle class."

I hate to break it to Kristol, but it's going to take a lot more than supporting one tax cut for that to happen. Personally, I don't like the cut in the payroll taxes, because I don't want to see the fund undermined and that used as an excuse to cut benefits later. If you want to leave it in place and lift the income cap, then I'm all for it. Somehow I don't see Kristol or any of his fellow "champions" ever going along with something like that though. While they're at it, they could lower the retirement age instead of all this talk about increasing it. I guarantee that would make them popular with the working class as well, that Kristol now pretends to be concerned about.

WALLACE: Well, that is an optimistic view. Bill, let me ask you, and you can respond to sister Cheney about this. One idea that was floated this week is for top earners to pay, instead of raising our top marginal rate, that they would pay that top rate, now, 35 percent, on every dollar they make. And let's put up this graphic on the screen, so we can try to explain it. Instead of now you pay ten percent on the top 17,000 from there to 70,000 you pay 15 percent, and the idea is instead of that, you pay 35 percent on all of the income from zero, all the way up to whatever you made if you were making over $250,000. Question: Good idea?

KRISTOL: Not particularly. And, I saw -- I asked someone on the Hill about it yesterday, and they said, well, no, we kind of realize that is not a good idea. The Republicans are going into contortions to try not to raise the top rate, while in fact trying to produce more revenues, which Speaker Boehner said he's for, and to produce them from the wealthy, since they are scared of being accused of attacking the middle class.

I don't really care if they want to find some complicated way to get more revenues, I suppose, I think it is probably easier just to give in a little bit on the top rate. But, they made that a matter of dogma, and I'm not going to break my own sword on telling them not to break their sword on it, but I would point this out. What is the one tax that -- rate that's going up on January 1, that no one is talking about and apparently both parties are not going to collude to let go of? The payroll tax. Remember that? That was cut from 12 percent to 10 percent two years ago. It's been 10 percent last two years, and I gather the Republicans have no problem, I don't know if Grover Norquist has a problem, with letting working class and middle class Americans have a two percent tax increase. That is not currently the Republican position, that the payroll tax cuts should be extended, and the administration I think quietly just happy to let that go, because God forbid they should actually cut entitlements for wealthy seniors or for others who benefit from corporate capitalism of big government. So, we have a collusion among the elites of both parties, that the one tax that gets -- that is going to go up, on January - if there is a deal, on January 1, is the payroll tax, which I think is wrong and Republicans have a huge opportunity here to be champions of the working class and the middle class, instead of screaming and yelling about millionaires.

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Now that it appears Republicans' backs are against the wall on whether taxes are going to go up for the wealthiest among us one way or the other, Bill Kristol decided to double down on his remarks that Republican Party shouldn't "fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires." I don't think he got the Koch brothers' approval for the claim he made this Sunday, which is that there are a lot of "tea party" guys that "don't care that much if a few millionaires pay a couple percent more in taxes."

Tell that to their leaders Bill. That seems to be all they care about. These AstroTurf groups know who they're beholden to and who is funding them. Of course he qualified that by saying they'd accept it because it would lead to the "grand bargain" they're all pining for and tax rates being lowered later as part of that deal. So I don't think he's completely off the reservation as Bob Woodward asserted here. The truth of the matter is, Republicans are not bargaining from a position of strength right now, and Kristol and the rest of them know it, whether they're willing to admit it or not.

Here's the exchange from Fox News Sunday:

WALLACE: And let me explain what came out of the meeting on Friday, is the idea, is a two-step compromise, that there is a down payment and there's talk about $50 billion, perhaps, by the end of the year and, then a promise with triggers they would achieve a grand bargain -- heard that word before -- next year, major tax reform, major entitlement reform.

Bill Kristol, how realistic is that two step approach.

KRISTOL: I think it is pretty realistic. I think -- and I think Republicans are going -- there will be a deal by December 31, and I believe Republicans will yield a bit on top rates. I mean, President Obama ran twice on this platform and he won last I looked, both presidential elections.

He's...

WALLACE: What was the reaction - you made a lot of news last week when you said it wouldn't kill Republicans to raise the top rate. In fact, as you know, you were favorably cited not by name, by the president during his news conference. I'm sure that shot your credibility...

KRISTOL: That was bad. That was a bad moment. But you know you've got to persevere, even when these things happen.

WALLACE: What was the reaction among Republicans?

KRISTOL: The private reaction one Republican congressman was honestly, including very conservative ones, was, I don't know, do we really have to give anything - I guess maybe we do. Maybe it was good that you said that, because we need to cut a deal.

He won two elections. He didn't raise rates correctly in 2009 because we were in the midst of a horrible downturn. Republicans won a huge off year election in 2010 and were able to bargain to a status quo deal. I just don't think Republicans have the leverage, or that it's worth using all their - whatever leverage they have, to maintain rates at 35 percent instead of 37 or 38, especially if you can take it up to millionaires.

I just don't think it's economically as a matter of policy important enough.

Then the big deal has to be big tax reform with lower rates, I think.

WALLACE: 30 seconds left, Bob. And this was the subject of your book. How optimistic are you that they make a deal and avert the fiscal cliff?

WOODWARD: well, let's hope they do. But they are going to burn Bill Kristol's Tea Party card hearing him talk like this. You are off the reservation.

KRISTOL: You know, a lot of the Tea Party guys don't care that much if a few millionaires pay a couple percent more in taxes, honestly.

WALLACE: But are you optimistic.

WOODWARD: Well, you have to - because if this isn't fixed we're going to have a global catastrophe.

WALLACE: On that happy note, thank you. See you next week.

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After first taking a shot at the right-wing "jobs report truthers" and their latest conspiracy theory that the BLS somehow cooked the unemployment statistics - and now that it seems some of those lazy moochers are out there drawing paychecks just to make poor old Willard look bad, Colbert let us know who we should really feel sorry for right now -- those poor persecuted billionaires who think they've had it so rough under President Obama.

You can read more on the topic of Colbert's rant tonight at The New Yorker here -- Super-Rich Irony - Why do billionaires feel victimized by Obama?

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The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur weighs in on Romney's tax plan -- what would happen if we're unfortunate enough actually find ourselves with him as president after the upcoming election. It isn't pretty: Mitt Romney wants the middle class to pay $500 more in taxes so the rich can get richer:

President Obama has claimed that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would give benefits to the rich at the expense of the middle class. “Is it true?” Cenk asks. “Absolutely.” Under Mitt Romney’s plan, US citizens makes less that $200 thousand a year would pay about $500 more in income tax. Cenk says, “This is redistributing the wealth from the bottom to the top.”

Here's more from Think Progress: New Analysis Shows Romney Tax Plan Would Raise Taxes On Middle Class Families By More Than $2,000:

On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney has been promising that he will cut taxes “across the board,” while also instituting tax reform that will not add to the nation’s deficit. But a new report from the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution shows that this is much easier said than done.

In fact, if Romney were to actually implement his plan to reduce tax rates by 20 percent while eliminating tax deductions in order to pay for it, taxpayers with more than $200,000 would certainly see a tax cut. But everyone else — 95 percent of Americans — will see their taxes increase. And this result occurs even assuming that Romney would eliminate tax deductions so as to make the tax as progressive as possible:

To estimate how average household tax burdens among different income groups would change as a result of this shift, we assume that the available tax expenditures are curtailed “from the top down” in order to make the tax plan as progressive as possible…Even after eliminating all available tax expenditures for households earning more than $200,000, this group still faces a net tax break. Americans making over $1 million would see an increase in after-tax income of 4.1 percent (an $87,000 tax cut), those making between $500,000 and $1 million would see an increase of 3.2 percent (a $17,000 tax cut), and those making between $200,000 and $500,000 would see an increase of 0.8 percent (a $1,800 tax cut).

Because taxpayers above $200,000 as a group have received a net tax cut, revenue neutrality requires that taxpayers below $200,000—about 95 percent of the population—experience a tax increase.

[...] Again, this analysis assumes that deductions are eliminated in a way that would make the tax code as progressive as possible, so its likely that, in practice, Romney’s plan would look even worse. To this point, Romney has refused to specify which deductions he would limit or eliminate.

On several occasions, Romney has denied that his tax plan would provide a big tax break to the wealthy. But as this analysis shows, even giving him all of the benefit of the doubt when it comes to eliminating deductions, the plan is still a massive tax break for the rich.

And here's more from TPM on Romney trying to pretend that the study was biased and just ignoring how wonderfully those trickle-down economics he's advocating for are going to work if recent history is any guide: Romney Aide: ‘Biased’ Tax Study Ignores The Coming Romney Boom.

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On this Wednesday evening's The Situation Room, CNN's newest anchor and Wall Street apologist Erin Burnett did her best to do a bit of concern trolling for the ultra-rich in America to try to convince the viewers that it really doesn't matter all that much if we raise taxes on the wealthiest among us, because it won't make a dent towards doing anything to solve our debt and deficit problems.

There are so many things wrong with this segment, it's hard to know where to begin, but I guess I'll start with just who Erin Burnett thinks should be responsible for solving the problems with our deficit. At a time when we've got record income disparity which has been getting worse for the last four decades at least, she doesn't think that we should fix that on the backs of the rich. The people she wants to solve it are our seniors and the middle class and the poor.

And no one is claiming that raising taxes on the rich alone would solve the problem, but it would be a huge step in the right direction to getting America back to a place where we still had a middle class and weren't just becoming a country where you've got nothing left but the ultra-rich and the very poor.

Blitzer asked Burnett about President Obama's statement in the State of the Union Address that millionaires should be paying a minimum 30 percent tax rate and that we should be following "the Buffett rule" where no millionaire or billionaire is taxed at a lower rate than their secretary. Burnett responded by saying that she asked some "experts" for their opinion on this and they claimed it would only "raise about $41 billion a year."

I sent this on to our group here at C&L and Jon Perr who has written so much on this topic sent me these items in rebuttal to Burnett's hackery.

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It seems millionaire Nick Hanauer's recent op-ed on why we need to be taxing the rich in America has, as Steve Benen explained, “caused a stir, and with good reason.”

Political Animal – Raise Nick Hanauer's Taxes:

If Hanauer’s name doesn’t sound familiar, he’s a very successful venture capitalist, playing a role in the creation of companies like Amazon.com. This week, he took on a standard Republican talking point: the notion that job creation suffers if taxes go up on the rich. Hanauer explained very well why the GOP’s approach is backwards.

I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.

It appears that Hanauer, unlike GOP policymakers, understands supply and demand, and that three decades of concentrating wealth at the top doesn’t create an economic base that ensures broad prosperity. Republicans can keep lavishing more and more money on the rich, but they’ll only spend so much. [...]

Hanauer’s advice? Raise his taxes, make public investments, and get some money in the pockets of middle-class consumers.

Digby’s take on this rings true: “This is a person who really doesn’t want to kill the golden goose of capitalism but would like to save it. It doesn’t speak well for the future of capitalism that there are so few entrepreneurs like him.”

Damn straight.

Be sure to go read the entire editorial here -- Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators: Nick Hanauer.

Hanauer was a guest on Neil Cavuto's show on Fox Business this Wednesday and he did a great job knocking down every one of Cavuto's arguments and straw men as Cavuto desperately tried to rebut Hanauer's assertions on why the rich aren't paying enough in taxes.

Here's the shortened version of their conversation with a tiny bit of paraphrasing and which does not reflect Cavuto constantly interrupting and talking over Hanauer.

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said Sunday that millionaires and billionaires pay "all the taxes" in the U.S.

The tea party favorite told CNN's Candy Crowley that he was against repealing the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because the rich are already paying their fair share.

"The top 1 percent, the millionaires in our country, pay on average 29 percent of their income," Paul declared. "The top 50 percent of wage earners pay 96 percent of the income tax. The rich and the middle class are paying their fair share."

"There are anomalies, there are aberrations," he continued. "If you are a millionaire or you are a corporation that's not paying, we're all for eliminating those loopholes and deductions. But on average, the vast majority of millionaires and billionaires are paying all of the taxes. That's who pays the income tax."

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service recently found that 25 percent of millionaires pay a lower tax rate than 10 million middle-income Americans. The IRS found that in 2009, 1,470 millionaires and billionaires actually paid no taxes at all.

While Paul is working to make sure the richest Americans continue to receive a tax cut, he's against extending unemployment benefits or a 2 percent payroll tax cut for the less wealthy.

"If you want to extend unemployment benefits, they have to be paid for," Paul explained. "So the question is, do we want to borrow money from China to pay people not to work? ... I want to get millions of people back to work and the only thing historically that's ever worked in our country is to lower tax rates on the upper income folks."

"Let me ask you about the payroll tax," Crowley said. "That is Social Security taxes, which were cut by about 2 percent for most people and that will also expire so there is Social Security, their payroll tax will go up. Are you willing to extend that?"

"I have a difficult time with saying it's good thing for Social Security to lower the amount of money coming into it right now because it is a system that's $6 trillion short," Paul replied. "We'll have to cross that bridge when we get there, but I have a tough time with figuring out how that helps Social Security."

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As Lawrence O'Donnell noted during his Rewrite segment this Thursday, there is a group of those one percent of Americans who are doing better than the rest of us that actually care about income disparity in the United States and this week they went after Grover Norquist for his lobbying that no one in Congress ever raises taxes on the wealthy, ever, and lobbied the super committee themselves to please do the right thing, and raise their taxes.

O'Donnell invited anyone who would like equal time that disagreed with them that is among the wealthiest one percent that doesn't want to see their taxes raised to come on the air on his show and explain why.

Here's more from The Huffington Post on the Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength and their meeting with Norquist -- Patriotic Millionaires To Grover Norquist: 'Move To Somalia' :

Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, millionaires who want the government to tax them more, met with foremost anti-tax guru Grover Norquist in Washington late Wednesday afternoon. Not surprisingly, they couldn't find common ground -- and ended up debating the state of Somalia.

Patriotic Millionaires, a group of 200-plus people making more than $1 million per year (including actress Edie Falco and economist Nouriel Roubini, among others), believe that America has been good to them and that it is their duty to give back. "[The government] provided a foundation through which we could succeed," writes the group on their website. "Now, we want to do our part to keep that foundation strong so that others can succeed as we have."

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Norquist felt the group only represented liberal interests. [...]

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