The 1% and you

[Guns Guns Guns]

Republicans played President Obama in the tax deal like mortgage hustlers played homeowners. Focus on the teaser rates, borrow more than you need and trust us to work with you to refinance later when rates jump.

The teaser was the needed extension of unemployment benefits – always extended before with high unemployment – for non-rich Americans.

The President folded on tax cuts for millionaires and doubled down with an estate tax set at the lowest rate since 1931 and a cut in the Social Security payroll tax, which Republicans will use to gut Social Security later.

The tax deal costs most Americans and our economy much more than it gains.

Obama’s tax deal fell for the same trick Republicans have been running since the Reagan administration.

• Cut taxes to reward the wealthy
• Purposely run up the debt to cause cutbacks later in programs Republican lawmakers don’t like (everything except the military and corporate subsidies for Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Ag and other favored big businesses)

Handed a budget surplus by the Clinton administration, President Bush slashed taxes - breaking precedent by asking the wealthy to pay less, not more, during wartime – and chopped away at the public services and infrastructure that underpin creation and long-term economic growth.

Bush left America in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Americans are going backward in wages, living standards, life expectancy, economic mobility, education, infrastructure and global competitiveness.

• The richest 1 percent of Americans had the greatest share of national income since 1928, which was not coincidentally just before Republicans caused the Great Depression.

Today, the too-big-to-fail banks are bigger and Wall Street continues paying big bonuses for playing 'heads I win, tails you lose' with your money.

Big businesses are sitting on a record pile of cash and liquid assets while small businesses still get the cold shoulder from banks.

• Millions of Americans have been foreclosed or are in default.
• One out of ten Americans are unemployed.
• Our infrastructure – much of it built decades ago when the highest-income taxpayers were more productive and less greedy - is rotting.
• The jobs of the future are increasingly jobs in Germany, China, Brazil and other countries investing more in their economies.

The tax deal offered tax cuts that will be paid for years after by pay freezes and big budget cuts for the services and infrastructure most Americans and a healthy economy depend on.

In a twist on the rightwing strategy long known as “starve the beast,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell praised the tax deal as “cutting off the spigot.”

People used to talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Now it’s more like robbing everyone to pay the richest 1 percent.

• In the set-up to the real robbery, the bottom 20 percent of Americans will save $396 on average in 2011 from the tax deal, the middle 20 percent will save $1,521 and the richest 1 percent will take the lion’s share, saving $76,949, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. The tax deal cost $424 billion in 2011, which will be added to the national debt.
  
  Republicans will use the increased debt to set up the ultimate foreclosures: Social Security and Medicare.
  
  Scrapping the cap on earnings subject to Social Security taxes – now just $106,800 – eliminates the future Social Security shortfall projected after 2036.
  
  Cutting the tax while leaving the cap is a gift to those who want to cut, privatize and destroy Social Security under the pretense of 'saving' it.
  
  Like the bait and switch mortgages still wreaking havoc, the tax deal sets up big losses to come.
  
  
  
  Read more: Richmond County Daily Journal - Tax deal like a bait and switch mortgage