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Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Class Wars in the Budget
The Bush budget proposal assumed the repeal of the estate tax. Sen. Bernie Sanders's office juxtaposed what certain families would get from a repealed estate tax with assorted proposed cuts to social programs. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone summed up the comparisons thusly:
Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.
The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.
Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.
What's more, spending reductions are intended to pay for tax cuts like the repeal of the estate tax. Recall that the Congressional Budget Office projected surpluses by 2012, as the Bush budget did. Except that CBO did not get to surpluses by assuming massive spending cuts. The Bush budget did because it also had his tax cuts to pay for.
Tax cuts for the wealthy would make it necessary to slash Medicare and Medicaid. If that's not stealing from the poor and middle class to give to the rich, I don't know what is.
The President's budget has more than just perverse priorities. It redistributes wealth upwards, with real losses for most people and real gains for the people who need and deserve them least.
Posted by Matt Lewis
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