Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote an excellent article regarding Congress’ responsibility to address two issues very soon: 1) reversing the decline of the middle class and creating jobs WITH LIVING WAGES, and 2) addressing the $1 trillion deficit and $16 trillion national debt in a way that doesn’t cause austerity cuts on the backs of the most vulnerable: seniors, veterans, students, children, the poor and the working poor (i.e. Mitt’s 47 percent).
Today, the top 1 percent earns more income than the bottom 50 percent of Americans. In 2010, 93 percent of all new income went to just the top 1 percent. In terms of wealth, the top 1 percent owns 42 percent of the wealth in America while the bottom 60 percent owns just 2.3 percent.
“[In] America today we have the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of any major country on earth and …the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider.”
In my view, we will not make progress in addressing either the jobs or deficit crisis unless we are prepared to take on the greed of Wall Street and big-money interests who want more and more for themselves at the expense of all Americans. Let’s be clear. Class warfare is being waged in this country. It is being waged by the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adeslon, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and all the others who want to decimate working families in order to make the wealthiest people even wealthier. In this class war that we didn’t start, let’s make sure it is the middle class and working families who win, not the millionaires and billionaires.
In terms of deficit reduction, let us remember that when Bill Clinton left office in January of 2001, this country enjoyed a healthy $236 billion SURPLUS and we were on track to eliminate the entire national debt by the year 2010.
What happened? How did we go from significant federal budget surpluses to massive deficits? Frankly, it is not that complicated.
President George W. Bush and the so-called “deficit hawks” chose to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, but “forgot” to pay for those wars … provided huge tax breaks to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans … established a Medicare prescription drug program written by the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, but they “forgot” to pay for it… Further, as a result of the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street, this country was driven into the worst recession since the Great Depression which resulted in a massive reduction in federal revenue. And now … these very same Republican “deficit hawks” want to fix the mess they created by cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and education, while lowering income tax rates for the wealthy and large corporations…
What can we do?
- First, at a time when the effective tax rate for the rich is the lowest in decades, we must repeal the Bush tax breaks for the top 2 percent which will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion over the next 10 years.
- Second, we must recognize that Wall Street caused the economic crisis, and that it has a responsibility to reduce the deficit…
- Third, we have got to prohibit offshore tax shelters. Each and every year, the United States loses an estimated $100 billion in tax revenues due to offshore tax abuses by the wealthy and large corporations…
- Fourth, at a time when we have almost tripled military spending since 1997 and spend nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world combined, we must reduce unnecessary and wasteful spending at the Pentagon…
- Fifth, we have got to eliminate tax breaks for companies shipping American jobs overseas…
What else? Continue reading…
This is exactly what Joe Biden was saying the other night:
