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During this holiday weekend, when so many Americans are relying on our roads and bridges to get us across the country to celebrate with our friends and relatives, Ed Schultz took the Republicans to task for refusing to do something about our crumbling bridges and infrastructure.

As Ed noted, the failure of the I-5 Washington bridge is just a symptom of a much wider problem and one that's only going to continue to get worse if the House Republicans don't finally decide that preventing Americans from being killed while driving on our roads matters more than making President Obama look bad.

As we have discussed here time and again as well, since actually fixing and repairing our infrastructure would put Americans back to work and potentially make President Obama look good, Republicans have been blocking what used to be easily passed bipartisan legislation.

President Obama has repeatedly been calling on Congress to approve more spending on infrastructure and as Schultz and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown discussed in the clip below, if we don't get the GOP to quit obstructing on this matter sometime soon, we may not have much of a country left for the next generation. Their hope is that big business finally gets tired enough of it that they start putting the pressure on the Republicans to do something about it.

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Here's more from David Cay Johnston on how foolish the Republican's refusal to spend money on infrastructure now has been: Pay to Fix America’s Crumbling Infrastructure Now, or Pay More Later:

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I'm not sure what the producers of MSNBC's UP with Steve Kornacki felt that Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform's Mattie Duppler was going to add to the debate on this Sunday's show, but after watching her on there, apparently it was to keep the rest of the guests busy debunking the endless string of lies she told during her time on the panel.

During a discussion ranging from what percentage of GDP is needs to be taxed, to the size and scope of government, to whether Americans even know what the federal government spends money on, or how many people realize that President Obama has lowered their taxes, the conversation got a bit contentious when Duppler trotted out the old "because of Obama, government spending is out of control" canard.

After the Center for American Progress' Neera Tanden made the point that the central thesis of Republicans' economic strategy has been tax cuts, and that it has been proven that tax cuts don't produce economic growth, here's Duppler's response.

DUPPLER: That's not the central thesis of the Republican party. It is one of the tenets of the Republican party. (crosstalk) But you also have explosive government growth. You've got government spending that's out of control and that...

JOHNSTON: It's not out of control. […] The government is rapidly shrinking under Obama.

DUPPLER: After he exploded it. After he increased spending by eighty-four percent. I mean, seriously, this is laughable that you're telling me that are just (crosstalk).

JOHNSTON: This would put us into a depression. You want to put us into a depression. (crosstalk).

NADLER: This is the central lie...

DUPPLER: I'm challenging your assertion that the deficit and the size of government is shrinking after Obama and congressional Democrats took spending and the size of government to all time highs.

NADLER: This is the central lie... this is the central lie of our political debate right now... what you just said.

JOHNSTON: Absolutely.

NADLER: The fact is, what happened to our deficit is, after it was cut... after it went up because of the Bush tax cuts and the wars and everything, since Obama took office, remember, the CBO before Obama took office said the 2009 deficit was going to be $1.4 trillion and it was. Why? And it was hugely increased. Why? Because when you get a recession, you get a depression such as we were in, two things happen.

One, revenues plummet, taxes plummet. People aren't working. They don't pay taxes, number one. And so taxes plummeted. And number two, automatic spending on unemployment insurance and on food stamps goes up because more people don't have money to eat with...

JOHNSTON: And Jerry, if you don't have part two, that you did, that's when you get the great depression.

After Duppler continued to insist that from a "small government perspective" government spending is still too high, David Cay Johnston reminded her of just what that philosophy is going to cost us.

JOHNSTON: We are going to be poorer in the future because we are cutting spending on basic research. The cell phones that we all have have grown from government spending in the past. The jet airplanes we fly come from government spending, the computers we use, the math in them, all come from government spending. [...] We need to be spending money on government research, development and education and Republicans want to cut all that.

After Duppler said she wanted to know how we were supposed to fund these things, Tanden pointed out the obvious... paying taxes. Duppler pretended that cutting taxes was not "the central tenet" of the Republican party, but thanks to her group, that's exactly what it's been.

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From this Wednesday's The Young Turks: On US income inequality: ‘We are redistributing income in this country — up’ :

Cenk and investigative journalist David Cay Johnston dig into ongoing income inequality struggles in the United States. Between 1966 and 2011, the richest 1 percent of Americans saw their average income increase by more than $18 million. Meanwhile the bottom 90 percent have only seen average incomes increase by $59. Cenk asks, “Are we being robbed blind?” Johnston says, “Oh, unbelievably. This is not because American workers have suddenly gotten lazy. It’s because government policies have changed, and what they’re doing is the exact opposite of the myth we’re being sold.”

If anyone would like a change of pace from the typical debates we've seen over this "fiscal cliff" deal and who made out and who didn't, the upcoming debacle over raising the debt ceiling and what's really lead to the lack of upward mobility and record income disparity in the United States, I'd highly recommend you set aside some time to watch at least the first few segments from Up With Chris Hayes from this Saturday.

Unlike most of the brain-draining discussions we're treated to on the majority of our corporate media and despite the presence of guest Veronique de Rugy appearing again in less than a month on Hayes' show, I don't think most of our readers here will be disappointed with the discussions that went on.

As Hayes has been talking about for some time now, if you really want to know who our members of Congress represent, forget the rhetoric and look at how they vote and who they protect when we see them finally act and not just what we hear them saying during their posturing on television. As was pointed out during the discussions here, despite the fact that President Obama talked about protecting the middle class in this deal, most Americans are going to see their taxes go up with the expiration of the payroll tax holiday.

As the panel members discussed during the segments, there was bipartisan agreement on that for some good reasons, like not wanting to undermine the integrity of the Social Security trust fund. But as was also noted, that should have been replaced with a renewal of the Making Work Pay tax credit, which you can read more about here: Making Work Pay vs. the payroll tax cut, in two charts.

Sadly, our Congress is still showing themselves to be more worried about their rich campaign donors and this deal to make it through their last round of Shock Doctrine governance was no exception.

You can read more on all of this from Hayes' blog here and more video below the fold: The fiscal cliff deal: A tax hike for the real middle class:

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Here's one more thing we can thank the House Republicans for. Milk Prices Likely To Soar In January After Republican Obstruction Blocked The Farm Bill In The House:

House Republicans let the five-year farm bill expire at the end of September without a new law to replace the massive measure covering billions of dollars in programs, including food stamps and agriculture subsidies. The Senate passed its own bipartisan, 10-year farm bill in June, and House Democrats and farm state Republicans attempted to force the House to consider a bill to replace it. But the GOP leadership steadfastly refused to vote on it.

As a result, milk prices could jump as high as $6 to $8 per gallon after Jan. 1, when the government will revert to following antiquated 1949 regulations without a farm bill in place: [...]

In the short term, farmers would see a windfall by selling to the government at a higher price, but as the New York Times reports, that would lead to higher prices in stores and less milk available for manufacturing butter and cheese. “I don’t think customers and food processors are going to pay double what they are paying now for dairy products,” said Dean Norton, a dairy farmer and president of the New York Farm Bureau.

These people have absolutely no interest whatsoever in actually governing or any concern for what damage they do to the American public and our economy. As David Cay Johnston noted in the clip above, Boehner doesn't have any control over his caucus and this is what we're going to get to look forward to for the next two years.

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Thank goodness there is at least one of these talking head shows on Sundays where Republican talking points are pushed back and where it's not just a bunch of millionaire pundits talking about how we need to inflict pain on our senior citizens, and raise the Medicare age in order to appease the GOP during these deficit negotiations. That show is Up With Chris Hayes.

While discussing the Republicans' absolute refusal to raise taxes, their dire warnings about the economy collapsing when Bill Clinton raised taxes, guest host Steve Kornacki asked former Romney advisor Avik Roy how he reconciled that with the similar rhetoric we're hearing from Republicans today. Roy argued that things are different now because of the “Obama levels of spending” and that the rich today are somehow shouldering way too much of the tax burden, therefore we're going to have to raise everyone's taxes in order to balance the budget.

Here's some of the response he got from the rest of the panel.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: The average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has fallen back to the level of 1966 when Johnson was president, and the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent have gone in today's dollars from 4 million to 22 million. In 2010, the first year of the recovery, 37 percent of all of the increased income in the entire country went to 15,600 households.

We have created a privatized system to redistribute upwards and the reason people at the top are sharing a larger share of the income taxes because their incomes are growing at this enormous rate, but their burden is falling. And to suggest we don't need to raise more revenue by applying it to people who are a success depends on this government, on living in this society, with its rules that make it possible to make that money is just outrageous. It is arguing that we should burden the poor and help the rich.

[...]

LAURA FLANDERS: No, you're right. we have 50, 5-0 million Americans living in poverty at this point with food stamp help for many of them. We've got 9 million Americans over the age of 50 who are food insecure. One in three of us have no savings whatsoever.

I mean, you talk the Johnson years, in that period, '65 to '73 the war on poverty reduced poverty by 43 percent. We know how to do it. It works. That's what we should be talking about. We are in a crisis where we're going to see stimulus. We're going to see stimulus of poverty and hunger in this country and it's shameful. And again, going back to '63, you had more than 60 percent of Americans, I think even in1983, 60 percent of Americans had private pension plans. Now, it's under 20 percent.

So these elders that you're talking about, young people with greater unemployment than ever before. I mean, this is the stuff that we want to be talking about after the last election, children and poverty are exploding.

JOAN WALSH: And also... we need higher tax rates for the tippy top earners because everybody likes to talk about building the middle class or rebuilding the middle class. Well, the top tax rate that the middle class we in the '40s,' 50s and '60s. The top marginal rate was in the 90's. I'm not saying you should go back to that, but you can't say at 37 percent.

They followed up with more discussion on tax loopholes and deductions, who they favor, what should be done to make sure they're not upside down with whether they benefit the working class. Laura Flanders brought up the issue of a Wall Street transaction tax, which gets mentioned far too rarely. She also discussed that while everyone is pushing for cuts to Medicare and raising the age to receive benefits, none of them want to talk about defense cuts.

If you missed the show, the whole thing was worth watching. It's generally a nice break from the typical Sunday show fare and this week was no exception. Go check it out here.

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Ed Schultz spoke to journalist David Cay Johnston this Friday about what America needs to do to keep adding more jobs to our economy, the importance of continuing the extended unemployment benefits, and the Republicans' refusal to help the problem by passing President Obama's jobs bill.

As Johnston noted, Republicans love to complain about "uncertainty" creating problems with the economy, but par for the course, they're generally the ones causing it.

SCHULTZ: We told you at the top of the show, Republicans are dragging their feet to get a tax cut deal with the American people. Those Republican delays are putting our economic recovery, I think, in some serious neighborhood, dangerous, very dangerous.

But the good news is though, the latest employment numbers came out this morning. The economy added 146,000 jobs in the month of November. The unemployment rate hit a four-year low. It inched down to 7.7 percent.

Here's the bad news. America lost another 7000 manufacturing jobs last month. Overall the job numbers are better than analysts predicted, but republicans refuse to compromise on policies which will bring back even more jobs next year. They are risking our nation's economic recovery. Here's how Speaker John Boehner's explanation today.

BOEHNER: The risk the President wants us to take, increasing tax rates, will hit the many small businesses that produce 60 to 70 percent of the the new jobs in our country. That's the whole issue here.

SCHULTZ: Once again, it's all theory from Boehner. No guarantee on that. But Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi says the problem goes beyond the fiscal cliff debate.

PELOSI: Our economy is moving forward, but it could be growing at a faster rate if the Republican leadership had taken up and passed some of President Obama’s job initiatives including the American Jobs Act and had passed the middle income tax cut.

SCHULTZ: So, let's cut to the chase. One of those Congressional members is lying. Either the Republicans are right on cutting taxes on small businesses will add jobs or the President's stimulus policies are fueling the economic recovery in this country.

Joining me tonight to sort out the facts, David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of "The Fine Print." Let's start with the job growth. Unemployment hit rock bottom near the beginning of the -- under the Bush administration. You can see this right here. This is of course the changing of the color here when President Obama took over in January of '09. Who is responsible for this turn around?

JOHNSTON: Oh, absolutely the President and it would be a better turn around if the Republicans had allowed a bigger stimulus. We would have many, many more jobs if we had had a bigger stimulus.

SCHULTZ: You would make the case we didn't spend enough on the economy?

JOHNSTON: Not only did we not spend enough, but we wasted 40 percent of it on tax cuts for small business, which is inherently savings and not stimulus. It was a real policy mistake.

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I'm not sure if the Romney campaign actually thought continuing to ask questions about his tax returns was going to distract from the dismal news cycle he's had for the last week or two, and is somehow better than talking about his "47 percent" remarks at that fundraiser, but here we go with a Friday news dump and the release of his 2011 returns.

As David Cay Johnston pointed out on Ed Schultz's show this Friday evening, the poorly worded press release just leaves more questions unanswered than answered and the 14.1 percent rate he paid could easily be amended down later if he fails to win his bid for the presidency.

Here's more from Think Progress on the subject -- 10 Questions Romney Should Answer About His Taxes:

On Friday afternoon, the Romney campaign released the candidate’s 2011 tax return, which showed that he paid a tax rate of approximately 14 percent on more than $13 million of reported income. The campaign also disclosed that Romney voluntarily forfeited about $1.8 million in charitable deductions to inflate the tax rate he would have to disclose to the public. The campaign continues to refuse to release returns prior to 2010, flunking an accepted standard of transparency, first established by Mitt’s father George Romney, of releasing multiple years’ returns.

In a blog post, Romney’s lawyer and the trustee of his “blind trust” said, “After you have reviewed all of the newly-posted documents, you may have further questions.” Yes, we do. Lots.

Here are 10 unanswered questions about Romney’s taxes:

1. After the election, when the subject of your tax returns is outside of the public glare, will you file an amended tax return to claim your full deduction of charitable contributions? Was the tax rate you reported for other years similarly manipulated?

2. Why was your 2011 income $7 million lower than you estimated it to be in January? How does someone overestimate their income by $7 million?

3. Financial disclosures show that you have as much as $82 million in your tax-deferred Individual Retirement Account, despite the fact that tax rules limited contributions into such accounts to $30,000 per year. Did you lowball the value of the assets you put into your IRA, as tax experts suspect? And did you do the same with gifts into your sons’ trusts?

4. What was the purpose of your Swiss bank account and the myriad offshore entities shown on your return, based in countries like the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg, if not to avoid taxes?

5. Can you explain what one tax expert has called a “mysterious one-time infusion of foreign tax credits” in 2008?

Follow the link above to read the rest. Rough transcript of Johnston's interview with Schultz, who had some similar questions, below the fold.

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During another typically intelligent panel discussion on Chris Hayes' show on MSNBC this Sunday on the Republicans and Mitt Romney out there demagoguing President Obama asking Congress to pass the "Buffett Rule" so that millionaires and billionaires are not exploiting tax loopholes that allow them to pay far less of a percentage of their income in taxes compared to average working class citizens out there, David Cay Johnston brought up something I apparently missed earlier this year that he had reported on in January -- the fact that Mitt Romney was allowed to give his sons $100 million as a gift tax free, thanks to a tax loophole on "carried interest."

Romney’s gift from Congress:

When the Romney campaign disclosed in December that the couple’s five sons had a $100 million trust fund, I suspected that, in setting up the fund, the Romneys used a tax strategy that allows some very rich people to avoid paying gift taxes. But it was impossible to know if this was the case without seeing their tax returns going back years.

So when Mitt Romney released the family’s 2010 tax return last week, I went looking. I found a hint on pages 132 and 134 of the return. It showed that the value of property placed that year into another family trust, the Ann D. Romney Blind Trust, was, for tax purposes, zero. The Ann Romney trust is not the same trust as the one that holds the Romney sons’ $100 million, but I wondered if the Romneys used the same approach in prior years when it came to valuing property placed into the sons’ trust.

Reuters emailed the Romney campaign spokeswoman to ask how much the Romneys paid in gift taxes on assets put into the sons’ trust over the last 17 years. The spokeswoman, citing Brad Malt, the Romney family tax lawyer, answered: none.

The idea that someone could pay zero gift taxes on contributions to a $100 million trust fund may surprise people who have heard arguments that the wealthy are overburdened by gift and estate taxes. But the Romneys’ gift-tax avoidance strategy is perfectly legal. Read on...

Johnston posted a video explaining the loophole in his post at Reuters which you can watch below the fold.

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Ed Schultz expressed some of the same frustration I have right now with President Obama continuing to put out the olive branches to Republicans and as he said, “have an amiable tone about it” and asked economist David Cay Johnston about the upcoming meetings between Republicans and the White House which is about to take place, and if anything positive for average Americans might come out of it.

Johnston wasn't optimistic and he's not the first person I've seen ask if the GOP is actually crass enough that they might be willing to actually tank our economy because of their rigid political ideology and their absolute unwillingness to raise taxes or do anything else that would get Americans back to work if heaven forbid it might make President Obama look good.

I hope to hell he's wrong and I don't know if it will do an ounce of good or not, but I would hope these members of Congress start having their phones ring and their inboxes filling up from any of their constituents who are following what's going on with this hostage taking telling them they've had enough of it.

JOHNSTON: I don't think so Ed and I think it's getting to be very, very troubling. You know there's an assumption out there that eventually the Republicans will come around and they'll have to settle so we don't default. I think we have to consider the very real possibility that they're willing to submarine the entire history of American economic dominance in the last seventy years or so, in order to achieve a point.

And there's nowhere if you think about it for the Republicans to go. They have made cutting taxes their sole issue. There's no...

SCHULTZ: That's right.

JOHNSTON: ...there's no idea of any other kind, of building the country. I was in China last week and you marvel at the roads they build, at the way that government has seized the future. What the Republicans have done is painted themselves into a corner. And they have nowhere to go but to say more and more tax cuts and even if it means that the country goes into much deeper trouble than it's in now. And that will happen if we don't pay our debts.

Dr. James Peterson followed with one of the better points I've heard made in a while about just what the demands of the Republicans are after Schultz pointed out that they don't seem to listen to anyone that doesn't have money.

PETERSON: That's pretty much the long and the short of it. They want everyone else to tighten their belts. They want school teachers and educators – tighten your belts, poor folk – tighten your belts, immigrants – tighten your belts, every social service to tighten its belt, Medicare – tighten your belts. But they want to insulate the people you're calling job creators, that's very generous Ed.

SCHULTZ: Yeah.

PETERSON: They're not job creators. They're debt shufflers and CEO's of multinational corporations that outsource our labor force. So in the end I have no idea how the Republicans can see how we're going to move forward and progress in this country playing this chicken game with the debt ceiling.

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