I’m shocked — shocked! — to learn that [tag]Republicans[/tag] on the Hill would emphasize [tag]tax cuts[/tag] for the richest Americans over benefits for the middle class.
Republican lawmakers, facing the prospect that their power to cut taxes may soon be curbed, plan to extend breaks that mostly benefit the wealthy and Wall Street at the expense of reductions for [tag]middle[/tag]-income households.
Six months before elections that may return a Democratic majority in at least one house of Congress, Senate Majority Leader [tag]Bill Frist[/tag] of Tennessee and House Speaker [tag]Dennis Hastert[/tag] of Illinois are focusing on extending the 15 percent rate on investments and repealing the estate tax. They won’t push extensions of lower rates for all taxpayers and expanded breaks for married couples and families with children, which expire after 2010.
Sean Kevelighan, a Treasury Department spokesman who focuses on tax and economic issues, said, “You can’t do everything at once. But what we are doing right now directly correlates to U.S. economic strength.”
In other words, they’ll take care of the top, and once the money trickles down, everyone else will be happy. It’s the same Republican message of the last 30 years.
Of course, if we’re willing to tolerate a reality-based perspective on this issue…
That’s been the story of the last few years, a rising tide that lifts only yachts. It used to be that economic growth ensured wide benefits across society. But the last four years of economic expansion have been historic for the steadily increasing poverty rate — a depressing sign that inequality has so split the poor from the rich that the two hardly inhabit the same economy.
And it’s not just the poor who’ve suffered. Research released last week by Tom Hertz of American University raised the troubling notion that inequality and economic insecurity have advanced so rapidly that the economic expansion of 2003 and 2004 was, in a variety of important ways, no better for the median American than the recession of 1990-91.
I foolishly thought that congressional Republicans, in an election year in which the winds are blowing against them, would focus on tax cuts for the middle class since that’s where voters actually are. But when push comes to shove, they just can’t help themselves.