|
|---|
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
A day late and a dollar short, but the great majority of voters has begun to have buyer’s remorse.
There are some key indicators that this is happening…and it is not just in the polls, which could be biased or manipulated. We are seeing the results of special elections in New York, Wisconsin and California where the Republican-Teahadist candidates have been shellacked.
Notwithstanding some major anomaly and cheating, the next elections will prove to be historical. Never mind that the Republican governors and state legislators are trying to suppress the vote…it will do the GOP not much good simply because of the sheer number of voters who are opposed to their agenda.
I also think that this stink about the debt ceiling the Republicans have created, holding the economy hostage and jeopardizing the credit of our country in order to save those precious tax cuts for the wealthy…has backfired. It has backfired because the Republicans have been forced to explain how they intend to do it and it is not pretty. Cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, elimination of Social Security are goals that now have become common knowledge to the general public. No use pretending, no sugar coating, no more double talk…this is what they want to do and they want to give the wealthy even more cuts.
This whole bad acted play on not raising the debt ceiling is a farce; if the Republicans were so interested in reducing the debt (they never had before) quickly, it would be very simple: Get the hell out of Afghanistan, Iraq, close some military bases, use technology instead of troops to maintain our military superiority and most of all, get rid of the FUCKING BUSH TAX CUTS! If we were to do these things the deficit would all but disappear.
And I am not just blowing some hot air here in a misguided liberal rant…the figures and facts are there to substantiate this. The sad truth for these Republicans is that unequivocally these tax cuts have not brought prosperity for our citizens, have not created jobs and most of all, have contributed to increasing the debt…it is not a spending problem but a REVENUE PROBLEM, and we have to, we must rectify this at once if we want to survive as a nation.
Why are these Bush Tax Cuts so egregious and repugnant?
1 The Bush tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy.
The Bush-era tax cuts conferred disproportionate benefits on those at the top of the earnings distribution, exacerbating a trend of widening income inequality.
• In 2010, the top 1% of earners (i.e., tax filers making over $645,000) received 38% of the breaks in the 2001-08 tax changes; 55% of the tax breaks went to the top 10% of earners (those making over $170,000).
• The top 0.1% of earners (i.e., making over $3 million) received an average tax cut of roughly $520,000, more than 450 times larger than the share received by an average middle-income family.
• A multitude of tax cuts overwhelmingly benefited the wealthiest Americans. These cuts included lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends, elimination of both the personal exemption phase-out and the limitation on itemized deductions, lower marginal rates for the top two tax brackets, and lower estate tax rates and an increase in the estate tax exemption. For instance, individuals in or below the 25% tax bracket (single-filers making less than $83,000 and joint-filers making less than $138,000) received only 16% of the benefit from reducing rates on long-term capital
gains and qualifying dividends in 2005.4 Similarly, the top 5% of earners received 100% of the benefit from partially repealing the personal exemption phase-out and the limitation on itemized deductions in 2006.
2 The Bush tax cuts did little for low-income families. ..
3 The Bush tax cuts never trickled down. ...
4 The Bush tax cuts were a poorly designed economic stimulus. ...
5 The Bush tax cuts failed to create strong long-run growth. ...
6 In the end, the Bush tax cuts cost a huge amount of money and significantly increased debt levels. ...
7 The Bush tax cuts were much more expensive than advertised. ...
8 The Bush tax cuts continue to be expensive. ...
9 The Bush tax cuts eliminated the most progressive federal tax:
taxes on large estates. ...
10 A decade of Bush tax cuts are increasing interest spending today. ...
Quite the wonderful decade if you were in the top 20 percent economically. Even better if you were in the top 10 percent. If you were in the top 1 percent, you needed a new vault. For the rest of Americans: Screw job. And one that we'll be paying the tax-cut piper for over the next several decades even if we cannot pressure our political leaders into reversing this massively destructive upward transfer of wealth. You can be certain they won't be doing it on their own.
SOURCE: http://critterscrap.blogspot.com/
