on the house floor. to hear sandy levin, congressman levin, ed, talk about this s not the end of potential revenue essentially saying this isn t the end of tax increases and the effort to go after high income earners for more taxes was something that the president seemed to be signaling the other day that campaign style event at the eisenhower executive office building. you re right, bret. the president said it at that event here at the white house basically said more taxes will be going up in the days ahead in order to pay down the debt. and let s not forget there are other taxes going up today january 1 even as we talk about the bush tax cuts that are being extended permanently. number one in order to pay for healthcare reform some people are seeing their dividends tax on dividends go up starting today just over 3 percentage point increase.
faring well. the middle struggling a little bit. kohl s really struggling and the gap, too. the gap counts banana republics and old navy. they run the gam mutt as far as specialty retail is concerned and they are still really struggling with their merchandise. they re not getting the right mix and shoppers really are not buying. you had some pretty surprising numbers about the number of things that go out the doors of stores that are not paid for. this is really interesting. around christmas time, shoplifting gets a little worse than what we see throughout the rest of the year. you have got more shoppers in the store so you have more shoplifting. on average, 11 to $12 billion a year is shoplifted in total from retailers and that does impact the bottom line. they lose on 1.5% of their total potential revenue for the entire