I could only laugh as I read Michael Bowers excoriate Democratic candidates who talk about restoring fiscal sanity to the White House. In his column on Wednesday, he calls it “demagoguery” when the candidates “mention the necessity of reducing the deficit and restoring fiscal responsibility to Washington.”
Bowers’s hypocrisy is truly remarkable. Somehow, he manages to set aside the fact that it’s his guy – the AWOL war criminal – whose economic train wreck the Democrats are now forced to address. Showing a party-line obedience that would please Stalin, Bowers manages to ignore the elephant in the living room – that it’s President Bush who has turned a $200 billion surplus into a $500 billion deficit.
That Bowers then gives Bush credit for a non-existent plan to reverse the skyrocketing deficits punctuates the Orwellian world in which Bowers resides.
To Bowers, the only solution to the out-of-control deficits is to slash funding to government programs. Not all government programs, mind you. Just the ones that proportionally favor the needy.
Disgraceful as it is, it comes as no surprise that with the huge deficit, right-wingers are once again advocating an assault upon those few remnants of the New Deal the they haven’t already liquidated.
Like Newt Gingrich, Bowers attacks social security and Medicare. Since he gave no reason for doing so, I’ll offer my own:
Social Security is a self-sustaining program whose solvency is secure for at least another 30 years. Medicare is a program whose only enemies, thanks to its efficiency, are the inhumane pharmaceutical and insurance industries who are inhibited – because of the program – from plundering the savings of the elderly more than they are already doing.
Both programs work, and both do a better job in providing for the needy than corporations can. Thus, both programs must be destroyed using the kinds of deceit Bowers employs.
Notably absent in his economic analysis is any suggestion that we alter government policies that favor the rich. Bowers doesn’t advocate reversing Bush’s insane tax cuts. These cuts – hilariously called “jobs and growth” packages – have created no jobs.
[Thanks to “free” trade (another linguistic abomination), corporations comb the planet to find cheap labor, while we continue to export our best jobs.]
But they have accelerated wealth upwards – their real purpose.
The Wall Street Journal reported last August that the latest Bush tax cut reduces Bill Gates’s tax burden by $80.3 million.
Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone gets a $40.2 million cut.
Citigroup CEO Sanford Weill will take home an increase of $16.8 million.
The architect of the tax cut, Charles Schwab, will pick up an additional $5.4 million.
All the while, we have the greatest disparity in wealth in this country since 1929. Wages have declined since the early 1970s. 1-in-4 children lives in poverty. 40 million Americans have no access to medical care. Efforts to unionize workers are routinely smashed. Unemployment continues to rise and manufacturing jobs are shipped overseas.
Presumably, this is all acceptable to Bowers.
Lamenting that, “there are no easy ways to reduce the federal deficit,” Bowers cites a number of court economists who assert that increasing income taxes wouldn’t work.
Evidently they don’t read the papers. In a New York Times article from February 2002 we discover that, “the number of Americans with million-dollar incomes more than doubled from 1995 through 1999. . . The percentage of their income that went to federal income taxes, however, fell by 11 percent.”
Neither Bowers nor the economists mention corporate taxes, yet a January 2002 New York Times piece, entitled, “Enron Avoided Income Taxes in 4 of 5 Years,” does.
The article begins, “Enron paid no income taxes in four of the last five years. . . . It was also eligible for $382 million in tax refunds.”
A couple of paragraphs down, we learn that, “Enron is by no means alone in not paying income taxes.” According to a Citizens for Tax Justice study conducted in October 2000, “of half the Fortune 500 companies found that 24 owed no tax in 1998, up from 13 in 1997 and 16 in 1996.”
So upon further examination, perhaps Bowers can find some other ways to balance that budget.
The relentless class war waged by the ruling class in America has continued unabated for 30 years. The time has come to challenge the lying economists, accountants and politicians who continue to attack the poor while ignoring the unjust thievery of those who pay their salaries.