F irst Republicans held the extension of Bush tax cuts to 98 percent of Americans hostage to more tax cuts for America’s millionaires and billionaires, at an additional cost of $700 billion cost over the next 10 years – never mind their supposed concern for slashing budget deficits and the nation’s $14 trillion debt. But now that they rammed through the deal for tax cuts that lavishly favor the ultra-rich top one-tenth of 1 percent, they’re back to saying the nation can’t afford anything else.
To show they’re serious again about minding spending, they blocked legislation Thursday that would provide medical care assistance for New York’s first responders and volunteers who remain sickened and dying from the toxic fumes, dust and smoke they inhaled as they worked to pull the victims of the 9/ll terrorist attack from the rubble of ground zero, and as they worked to clean up the site.
Sorry, the rich got it all
Republicans said Thursday the nation just can’t afford to help the heroes of 9/11. They say the bill of $7.4 billion, just over one percent of the cost of their cherished tax cuts for zillionaires, is just not affordable. With 60 of the 100 Senate votes necessary to break their filibuster against it, the legislation failed. Democrats got 57 votes for the 9/11 health assistance bill, but newly budget-conscious Republicans (including Tennessee’s Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander) blocked with it 42 votes.
American voters should have this stunning hypocrisy embedded in their brains when the 2012 elections roll around: Republicans approve $700 billion for tax cuts for their coddled millionaires and billionaires when their promise to cut deficits should have precluded that mind-boggling expenditure. And then they turn-around two days later and reject $7.4 billion – just over 1 percent of what the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans costs – for health care for the 9/11 hero rescuers and clean-up workers.
Forget the hallowed ground
This is, of course, the very site Republicans feverishly claimed, before the November election, as hallowed ground, where America was attacked by Muslim extremists. Its hallowed soil, they billowed, should preclude the construction (two densely urban city blocks away) of the mosque that the City of New York already had approved. But now that people who put their lives at risk to respond to that attack on America are ill, of course, the nation owes them nothing, Republicans say. Sorry. Unaffordable. Got to cut spending somewhere now that we’ve agreed to lavish another $700 billion in tax cuts on zillionaires.
That’s amazing. The 9/11 aid fund is needed far more than tax cuts for the Republicans’ masters. It would provide $3.2 billion over the next eight years to care for first responders and workers who were harmed by toxic dust and debris. New York City would pay 10 percent of the cost. The fund also would set aside $4.2 billion to revive the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund for economic losses, which have amounted to more than original funding anticipated.
Republicans’ rejection of this aid should be reason enough for congressional Democrats to rally to defeat the Obama-Republican tax compromise deal that gives such a huge proportion of its costs to the rich. A new analysis, in fact, shows that fully one-fourth of the tax break savings from the $900 billion tax-cut compromise will go to the richest 1 percent of Americans,
What working families get
The proposed deal Obama brokered with Republicans earlier this week would, of course, help America’s ordinary workers. Workers making $40,000 a year would get around $800 more in their paychecks over the year in 2011 from the continuance of the Bush tax cuts combined with a one-year reduction in payroll taxes for Social Security. Families earning $50,000 a year would get about $1,000 more in net pay in 2011. With a new fix on the alternative minimum tax in the tax-cut package, a family earning $106,800 or more would save $2,136 on its 2011 taxes.
But as in 2001 and 2003, when the Bush-era income and investment tax cuts were enacted to last through 2010, the really big savings will again go to the super-wealthy, the top 1 percent of earners with annual incomes ranging from $599,181 into the billionaire stratosphere.
The top one percent of households would each get an average tax break again of $72,466 or more. The top one-tenth of the top 1 percent would get an average annual tax break, again, of $371,650 per individual household, mainly because the bulk of the value of the tax cuts comes from the reduced taxes on capital gains, which will remain at 15 percent, and the reduced taxes on investment dividends. These investment tax cuts enrich the very wealthiest so disproportionately because they are the only ones with huge wealth to invest. Average Americans approaching retirement age have barely a year’s current income in lifetime retirement savings.
The other perks
The proposed tax compromise deal also would give the wealthy a huge tax break on the revised estate tax, which would fix a 35 percent tax rate on estates of over $5 million. That rate is comparable to the current reduced marginal rate on high incomes under the Bush tax cuts.
Given the slow pace of recovery from the deep 2008-09 recession, ordinary working Americans could well use the extended Bush tax cuts for the next two years. But their needs should not have been held hostage by Republicans for unaffordable tax cuts for multimillionaires and billionaires. If Republicans are so callous now as to deny care to 9/11 rescuers and workers while they lavish new tax cuts on the ultra-rich, the Obama-Republican compromise deserves to be killed by Democrats in the pending vote, the sooner the better.
Why, indeed, should the nation sink further in debt to favor the wealthy so egregiously?