The Bush/Obama tax cuts
According to signals from his top advisers, President Obama is preparing now to cave in and extend the Bush tax cuts, with the major benefit going to the unfathomably rich (26.8% of the total tax benefit alone going to the top 1% of earners). When he does, it will be the moral equivalent of the moment Tommy Carcetti turned down the school bailout funds from Annapolis.Simply doing nothing--that is, letting the tax cuts expire-- would eliminate $3.7 trillion from the federal budget deficit over 10 years, says the Tax Policy Center. But it doesn't sound like that's what's going to happen.
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What many progressives seem to be saying: This is not the "change" I was voting for when I voted for Barack Obama. The president has not moved aggressively enough, or been forceful enough, on the issues that are important to me. A clean-break from the disastrous financial policies of the Bush administration shouldn't have meant a national economic system led by Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner. I was disappointed that the single-payer option, which Obama used to support, was never considered during the national debate over health care. He opposed the Truth Commission regarding the alleged crimes of the Bush presidency. He has acted to entrench our armed forces in the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. He has not acted to limit the privatization of the military, to reduce the vast bureaucratic and large contractor waste, fraud, and abuse in the military, to close Guantanamo Bay, to have his Justice Department execute the nation's and the global community's laws against torture, to end warrantless spying on Americans, to end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," to address the challenge of climate change in any meaningful way despite the federal government holding a majority stake in one of the world's largest automakers (General Motors), to bolster the laws against corporate crime, or to force more accountability upon Wall Street. I'm frustrated that nothing has been done to reduce the crippling budget deficit, bewildered that even the nation's billionaires have not been asked to pay more in taxes to help protect the public safety net for average Americans, and not least of all, furious that the right wing and the Republicans have been allowed to define-- and distort-- what it is we stand for.
What surprisingly-few progressives seem to be saying: Nader was right.
posted by CM @ 2:49 PM
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