The Truth about Taxes-Laura Flanders's Your Call, Thurs. GREAT SHOW!

[AP]

Laura Flanders

http://www.yourcallradio.org/

Although both parties champion cutting middle class taxes, the U.S. tax system is increasingly skewed in favor of corporations and the extremely wealthy. That's the message of New York Times investigative reporter David Cay Johnston in his book "Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else." Johnston analyzes who benefited from the Bush tax cuts, fingers the companies that pay no income tax, and explains why the working poor are seven times as likely to be audited as other taxpayers. Who pays, and why does it matter to democracy? It's Your Call.

Anyone who cares about the shift of wealth up the income ladder should listen to this show. It should be available tomorrow on the archive, but you can get ready by checking out the toolkit: http://www.yourcallradio.org/#toolkit

[AP]

1. You can listen to the show here:

Archive:
http://www.yourcallradio.org/archive/archive.html

Real Audio:
http://www.yourcallradio.org/archive/032504.ram

This guy was also on

[AP]

2. This guy was also on Fresh Air last January.

Listen to him here and compare Fresh Air to Your Call.

Journalist David Cay Johnston

He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his investigative reporting in The New York Times. His new book is Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else. Johnston was hired by the Times to cover taxes and he approached it like an ongoing investigation. In his new book he writes, "I was especially surprised to find that some of the biggest tax breaks for the rich are not even in the tax code, and that the IRS was completely unaware of many widely used tax fraud schemes. But what surprised me more than anything was the realization that our tax system now levies the poor, the middle class and even the upper middle class to subsidize the rich."
http://freshair.npr.org/day_fa.jhtml?displayValue=day&todayDate=01/07/2004

[GOPisEvil]

3. Excellent! Something I tell people all the time.

Tax laws in this country, especially since Bush II, favor the wealthy and corporations.

[AP]

4. a kick because this is the most important issue today.