About a week ago I got a tax return back. I wasn't expecting it, figured it was a wash but just like James Evans on Good Times (yep, have to throw in the obscure reference) it seems I miscalculated and got a little back, just under $100. I was so happy and it took me about a week before I found some good things to spend it on. I did some shopping at WalMart and Target, making those companies happy.

Apparently, according to conservatives, I just ruined the economy.

I'm not a corporation. I didn't use the money to hire a worker. I didn't invest the money in research and development. Like fool I spent the money, making me a lazy bum who doesn't deserve the money because I don't know the fiscal responsible thing to do. Almost makes me want to want to give the money back in shame, begging forgiveness for not being born a corporation.

That is what has been happening in state houses all over the country. People who are struggling to make ends meet would have the nerve to spend the money because, well, we need to spend the money on things that keep us going. I didn't go out and buy a Blu-Ray player, I didn't buy the new iPad, I spend the money on shoes, clothes and food. If I had three hundred or even four hundred dollars I would have spent money on the same things. Unlike what the politicians would like us to know when people spend money it helps the economy. While I hate when customers used the phrase when I worked retail, it was the customer who paid our salaries.

Corporations get to work on a different economic model. There was an eye opening article about GE and the tax they paid in the New York Times. GE has a finger in everything; from military, to engines, to power companies (yes they built the nuclear plants in Japan) and entertainment. With a top tier tax rate of around 35% and with profits just in the United States of $5.2 billion ($14.2 billion worldwide) how much in taxes did GE pay? Well they have some of the best tax preparers in the world, apparently, because they got a TAX REFUND of $3.2 billion. Not millions but billions. You have Republicans in state and national legislatures claiming corporations are being taxed too much. They trot out the small Ma and Pa Americans out who talk about how the tax code is hurting their small business, never revealing that Ma and Pa are a front. Think of it this way; think of the WalMart commercials where they show the happy greeters, the smiling service people who represent the cornucopia of America, this is the image they want you to see when they talk about the corporate family. What they don't want you to see are the hundreds of small businesses that have been killed because of the huge box store, that the wages of the workers in the store are suppressed and how to get that big block of land they are sitting on they probably pay no property tax.

Yes we have to scrape and scrounge to pay our taxes yet those in the upper levels don't go to H&R Block or Turbo Tax to do their taxes. They hit so many loopholes, so many breaks that the supposed 30% tax bracket they're supposed to be in is a joke.