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…
“…on Friday, I signed into law a bill that will do two things for the American people. First, it will keep thousands of construction workers on the job rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure. Second, it will keep interest rates on federal student loans from doubling this year – which would have hit more than seven million students with about a thousand dollars more on their loan payments. Those steps will make a real difference in the lives of millions of Americans. But make no mistake: we’ve got more to do. The construction industry was hit brutally hard when the housing bubble burst. So it’s not enough to just keep construction workers on the job doing projects that were already underway. For months, I’ve been calling on Congress to take half the money we’re no longer spending on war and use it to do some nation-building here at home. There’s work to be done building roads and bridges and wireless networks. And there are hundreds of thousands of construction workers ready to do it…” — The President’s weekly address
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“Conservatives would have you believe that our disappointing economic performance has somehow been caused by excessive government spending, which crowds out private job creation. But the reality is that private-sector job growth has more or less matched the recoveries from the last two recessions; the big difference this time is an unprecedented fall in public employment, which is now about 1.4 million jobs less than it would be if it had grown as fast as it did under President George W. Bush. And, if we had those extra jobs, the unemployment rate would be much lower than it is — something like 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent. It sure looks as if cutting government when the economy is deeply depressed hurts rather than helps the American people.” – Paul Krugman
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1) The fight begins: Obama’s budget going to Congress - WASHINGTON (AP) – The new budget that President Barack Obama is sending to Congress aims to achieve $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade by restraining government spending and raising taxes on the wealthy. To help a weak economy, Obama’s proposal Monday requests increases in transportation, education and other areas. While administration officials on Sunday defended the plan as a balanced approach, Republicans belittled the effort as a repeat of failed policies that did too little to attack soaring costs in such programs as Medicare and threatened growth by raising taxes. The debate is almost certain to go all the way to Election Day in November with gridlock keeping Congress from resolving many pressing issues on expiring tax cuts and across-the-board spending cuts until a lame-duck session at year’s end.
Obama’s election-year budget to target rich - (Reuters) – President Barack Obama will propose an election-year budget on Monday that raises taxes on millionaires and seeks billions of dollars for job-creating infrastructure projects, drawing a populist battle line with his Republican opponents. Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget proposal to Congress will defer significant cuts in the deficit until the economy is securely back on track, a priority as he seeks re-election in November, while outlining measures to shrink that funding gap over time.
2) Long Time Coming: Obama’s Approval Rating Goes Positive - It was a long road back, but President Obama is now back in positive territory in our TPM Poll Average. The shift comes on the heels of a completed Iraq withdrawal, a legislative win on the payroll tax cut before Christmas, and perhaps most importantly, good economic numbers in January and early February. The President’s numbers have jumped in the last few days in both Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls as well as individual national polls.
3) GE to hire 5,000 U.S. veterans, investing in plants- WASHINGTON (Reuters) – General Electric Co plans to hire 5,000 U.S. military veterans over the next five years and to invest $580 million to expand its aviation footprint in the United States this year. The largest U.S. conglomerate unveiled the moves ahead of a four-day meeting it is convening in Washington starting on Monday to focus on boosting the U.S. economy, which has been slow to recover from a brutal 2007-2009 recession.
4) Volcker to Push Back on Banks’ Trading - The former Federal Reserve chairman is expected to file a comment letter on the Volcker rule before a Monday deadline, contending that the U.S. financial system will be safer and healthier with a ban on proprietary trading by banks, according to people familiar with the situation. [...] The former Fed chairman also plans to push back on critics who claim proprietary trading didn’t play a role in the financial crisis, people familiar with his thinking said. Betting with a firm’s own money can cause employees to be more focused on individual profit than the well-being of clients, Mr. Volcker believes.
5) Grassley Asks Holder to Probe Enforcement of Exec Pay in Bankruptcies - Sen. Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who introduced broad bankruptcy legislation that became law in 2005, expressed concern that companies might be skirting the law when issuing bonuses and other compensation to executives during Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. “Corporate directors, executives and managers who were at the helm of a company as it spiraled into bankruptcy should not receive bonuses of any kind, let alone excessive bonuses, during a reorganization or liquidation,” Mr. Grassley wrote in a Feb. 7 letter.
6) CPAC settles for Mitt Romney’s ‘severe conservative’ routine - Romney squeaked through CPAC better than expected. He won the straw poll, and his speech on Friday was not greeted with ice-cold hostility. He avoided any spectacularly embarrassing interactions with the ultra-conservative crowd, which could have swung the race from Rick Santorum’s temporary domination – he’s leading the latest national poll by 15 percentage points over Romney, capitalizing on the momentum from his three state wins last Tuesday night – to his permanent command. Was the crowd taking pity on him? Even this black-hearted reporter felt a twinge of agony for Romney as he delivered a speech of forced proto-emotion featuring 24 mentions or variations on the word “conservative”, as though he was dutifully checking off boxes on a presidential nominee’s permit application that no one had asked him to fill out.
7) Rick Santorum’s Anti-Abortion Politics Would Have Killed His Own Wife - Karen Santorum’s difficult pregnancy and resultant life-saving, induced early delivery is no secret; in a 2004 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, her husband characterized the 1996 procedure as a harrowing but necessary. Karen, in her 19th week of pregnancy, received a risky surgery to save a pregnancy that doctors thought had little chance of survival. After the surgery, she came down with an infection, and doctors told Rick that unless the source of the infection — the fetus — was removed, his wife would die and his already-born children would be motherless. The doctor also told Santorum that his wife’s fetus would not survive outside of the womb. According to Santorum, Karen went into labor as a result of the antibiotics, and then doctors gave her a drug that further induced labor. She delivered, and unfortunately the doctors were right.
8) Fox’s Liz Trotta On Sexual Assault In Military: “What Did They Expect? These People Are In Close Contact” - During a segment about new rules regarding women in the military, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta attacked the Department of Defense for increasing spending on support programs for victims of sexual assault. Trotta also reacted to a Pentagon report showing a 64% increase in violent sexual assaults since 2006 by stating: “Well, what did they expect? These people are in close contact.” Trotta began by claiming “we have women once more, the feminist, going, wanting to be warriors and victims at the same time” and later added that feminists “have also directed them, really, to spend a lot of money. They have sexual counselors all over the place, victims’ advocates, sexual response coordinators. … you have this whole bureaucracy upon bureaucracy being built up with all kinds of levels of people to support women in the military who are now being raped too much.”
9) Republicans undiscover fire- The truth is that the Republicans have nothing to offer. Not even anything that looks like a governing philosophy. Conservatism has moved out of the ranks of political theories and simply become a cult; one that requires that certain phrases be mouthed, that certain hatreds be nourished, and that purity be maintained regardless of cost. That schism with reality is increasingly large and increasingly obvious. They try to paper over that gap by dismissing little things like science, reason, history. Real science fails to support their contentions, so they have to write it off. Reason doesn’t work for them, so any question must be met with red-faced indignity — every question a gotcha question. Real history is full of warts, quirks, and unfortunate truths that don’t fit their ritualized beliefs. So they have to try to rewrite history, giving us rewrite Reagan who never raised a tax or increased a debt, rewrite FDR who created the issues he actually solved, rewrite Lincoln who championed the Confederate cause, rewrite founding fathers who never owned slaves, never supported government regulation of the economy, never wavered in their ardent love for a form of religiosity that didn’t yet exist. Tricorner hats are the new tinfoil.
THE STIMULUS SHOULD HAVE BEEN BIGGER. AND LONGER. There should have been massive debt forgiveness. There should have been policies enacted to save jobs and to create them,. And the Federal Reserve should have been more aggressive. From Ezra Klein:
Let’s begin with the stimulus. It needed to be bigger. But there were two problems with bigger: Congress wouldn’t have gone for it, and the administration probably couldn’t have spent it effectively. Tax cuts, which can be done quickly and at any size, aren’t very stimulative because they get saved rather than spent. And infrastructure investment, which is very stimulative, can’t be ramped up quickly.
But it could have been longer. The stimulus was a two-year shot, and it was too small even before we knew that the recession was larger than it initially appeared. The administration wrongly figured that if it needed more, Congress would be happy to comply. That was a costly miscalculation.
If the White House had better understood the likely length of the recession and designed the stimulus funds to be spent over four years, it could have included a larger and smarter infrastructure component and tied the size and duration of the tax cuts, unemployment benefits and state and local aid to the unemployment rate.
[...] The game changer, however, would have been massive debt forgiveness. This could have been done through a federal program to purchase troubled mortgages and give homeowners better rates, as John McCain proposed late in the 2008 campaign, or by nationalizing the banks and taking the bad debts off their books, or some other option. But the politics of using taxpayer dollars to pay off mortgages were horrible. How do you explain to people who decided against buying homes they couldn’t afford that they’re now paying the mortgages of those who made the opposite decision?
Fundamentally, the stimulus was an attempt to grow our way out of the recession, and our housing policies were an attempt to reduce the debt that was keeping us in the recession. It was what I call “offensive policy.” In retrospect, however, we could have used more “defensive policy.” We were so focused on getting out of the crisis that we ignored some of the policies that would have helped us endure it.
Chief among these were policies to either save jobs or create them directly. In the first case, we could have taken a page out of the German playbook and launched a program to pay employers who cut hours rather than fired workers. In the second case, the government could have provided more help to state and local governments, which have lost more than 500,000 jobs, and tried direct-employment schemes like Christina Romer’s idea to hire 100,000 teacher’s aides.
Finally, the Federal Reserve acted with extraordinary speed and aggressiveness to prevent the crisis from becoming a calamity. The Fed has been more tentative in its efforts to speed the recovery. Read more…
IN OTHER WORDS, DURING THE FINANCIAL CRISIS the one percenters were taken care of with federal tax money while 99 percent were not. Now the one percenters are directing the 99 percent to find their bootstraps — as usual.
Yesterday’s lies are today’s lies. A decade of FAIL, brought to you by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the GOP. From Pat Garofalo | Think Progress — read the whole thing, but here are some highlights on this 10-year anniversary of fail:
10 years ago tomorrow, the first of the Bush tax cuts was enacted. That 2001 tax cut was followed up by a second tax cut in 2003, passed after Vice-President Dick Cheney reportedly asserted that “deficits don’t matter.” The tax cuts were sold as necessary economic stimulus that would boost job creation and a moribund economy. “Tax relief will create new jobs, tax relief will generate new wealth, and tax relief will open new opportunities,” Bush said on April 16, 2001 as he was pushing for the passage of the first tax cut. Two years later he said, “These tax reductions will bring real and immediate benefits to middle-income Americans… …
Following the Bush tax cuts, “Overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.”
“The economy boasted 132 million jobs in June of 2001, the month that the first of the Bush tax cuts was signed into law. Three years later, in June of 2004, there were just 131.4 million jobs.
During a 2001 address to Congress, Bush said, “At the end of those 10 years [in the 2001 budget], we will have paid down all the debt that is available to retire. That is more debt repaid more quickly than has ever been repaid by any nation at any time in history.”
However, thanks in large part to the Bush tax cuts, the debt ballooned under Bush, with debt held by the public increasing from $3.5 trillion to nearly $6 trillion and gross federal debt going from $5.6 trillion to nearly $10 trillion.
Republicans only agreed to last December’s tax deal because it extended the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans.
Now, both the House Republican budget and the House Republican “jobs plan” released last week include further reductions in the top tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.
In fact, the “jobs plan” document calls for tax cuts to “Increase American competitiveness to spur investment and create more American jobs.”
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![When [Pres. Obama] took office, the economy was in recession. He made it worse. And he made it last longer.” -Mitt Romney](http://quickhits.tumblr.com/photo/1280/6218698342/1/tumblr_lmbwg2ywK91qfengn)
