The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 have reduced the revenues taken in by the treasury by slightly more than the cost of the ten-year war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, if we hadn’t cut taxes early in the last decade, we could have paid for those wars completely. On the other hand, if we hadn’t committed either blunder, we’d have nearly three trillion dollars to pay down the debt or make investments in our country. What’s going on now is an aggressive effort to make middle class people pay for the wars, with interest included. If rich people had paid their taxes over the past decade, we wouldn’t be in this position. What we’re doing today is filling the hole created by Bush’s tax cuts. So, for example, we’re going to cut spending on education and transportation and research to make up for the fact that Steve Forbes didn’t pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes over the last ten years. But, as the White House points out, the Republicans Cut, Cap, and Balance Plan is even worse. The plan would pay for Donald Trump’s decade of tax evasion by doing the following:
The bill would abruptly cut more than $100 billion in spending in the first year alone, a step that Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf stated would “affect our projections for GDP growth over the next two years.”
The House Budget Resolution plan would cut clean energy investments by 70 percent, infrastructure investments by a third, and education and training by 25 percent – cutting 320,000 children from Head Start and reducing aid for families trying to put their kids through college by hundreds, or even thousands of dollars.
It would cut Medicaid by one-third over the decade, and by nearly 50% by 2030. This could, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, result in 36 million people losing Medicaid coverage, including people with disabilities and seniors in nursing homes. And that comes on top of the 17 million who would lose coverage due to repealing subsidies in the Affordable Care Act.
And it would cut programs for the most vulnerable – for example, by food stamp benefits for a family of four by $1,760 per year or cut 8 million households from the program.
Finally, the House Budget Resolution proposed to convert Medicare to a voucher program, increasing costs for Medicare beneficiaries by $6,400 a year beginning in 2021 – with those higher costs increasing over time.
The bill won’t pass in the Senate. But it’s a clear statement about Republican values.
This is what the administration and its supporters should be shouting from the rooftops. If only enough Americans understood that they are middle class (at best) and not the upper tier that benefited from BushCo largesse.
Not just the middle class. The middle class, sure, would be decimated by cuts like these; but for seniors, the disabled, and the poor, a lot of people would die that otherwise wouldn’t. Not Iraqis or Afghans or other brown people that nobody in our political class seems to care about; actual Americans (white ones, even!), which, for some people, if not Tea Partiers, still makes a difference.
The chance that someone now getting by will need that assistance some day are much, much higher than the chance that some day they’ll be fabulously rich. But Democrats don’t dare say that. It’d be, like, a downer, dude.
Bachmann Takes the Lead
Yeah, it’s still early, but I do hope that people who called me crazy are waking up.
is the cut in capital gains taxes. This has created the hedge fund loophole, and is the reason why taxes on the really wealthy have fallen from 35% to 16%.
We need to re-couple the tax on capital gains to the standard tax structure. Possibly there could be a lower income exemption.
Capital gains should be treated as income – there’s no reason why investment income should be privileged over labor income.
If there’s a problem with “one time hits” on the capital gains – where there’s a single year spike in capital gains income – we can have some kind of window where you get one year out of every 10 taxed at the lower rate or something.
But if you’re bringing in a million dollars a year via salary and someone else is bringing in a million dollars a year via investments in NewsCorp there’s no reason why the two tax bills shouldn’t be exactly the same. (And frankly there’s no good reason why we shouldn’t have a marginal tax rate of 90% on income over $500K a year either – but that’s a different argument).
You could be paying tax on “gains” that are really losses because of inflation. The rate should be the full rate, but the basis should be adjusted for inflation. I’ll bet that would keep them from fudging the CPI downward.
Feh. They should be more careful with their investments if they’re making “gains” that are worse than the inflation rate. It really isn’t our fault that they’re bad investors and the tax code shouldn’t be subsidizing bad investors unless there’s a net social benefit to having bad investors hanging around. Which there may be, but I can’t see it myself.