On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 6:45 AM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: > I think that Charles was referring to a fight taking place in the dominant > classes. The sector of the bourgeoisie that is fully behind Obama > (Goldman-Sachs, etc.) is trying to use the power of the government to > resolve a capitalist crisis that is of its own making, particularly the > banking sector symbolized by Goldman. I am on neither side in this dispute.
It is funny how our enemies don't seem to have any such doubts: http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=D7BFEFEA-A6B3-421B-863B-695FBBCFBF5C ---------------------------------------------------snip >From the moment he launched his presidential campaign, it was clear that Barack Obama had big plans for the country he proposed to lead. Barely a month into his tenure, President Obama has put a price on that transformational vision: $3.5 trillion. That is the projected cost of the 2010 budget that the Obama administration unveiled yesterday in a sprawling, 134-page blueprint. Echoing the soaring rhetoric that is the president’s trademark, the budget heralds “a new era of responsibility,” vows to restore “America’s promise,” and outlines a fulsome list of spending priorities that spans everything from education, health care, infrastructure, and defense to “alternative energy,” while making room for subsidies like, for instance, a “Nurse Home Visitation” program that will pay trained nurses to visit low-income and expecting mothers. All of which compels the question: How to finance the president’s pricey wish list – particularly in the midst of an economic slowdown that shows no immediate sign of reversal? Here is where the administration’s lavish budget becomes something other than the much-needed medicine for the nation’s ills that it affects to be. Although the words “tax increase” appear nowhere in the draft budget, that seems to be the administration’s preferred method of payment. To be exact, the president is proposing to raise taxes on families making over $250,000, who make up approximately 2 percent of the top income earners, in the process repealing two of the tax cuts passed under President Bush. Starting in 2011, the administration would raise the top two income-tax rates from 33 to 36 percent and from 35 to 39.6 percent. Overall, the president’s budget features $1 trillion in tax increases on higher earners over the next decade. According to President Obama, these increases “restore a basic sense of fairness to the tax code.” But there is another, less generous way to describe them: class warfare. Under the administration’s scheme, two percent of income earners will be forced to subsidize what the budget calls “95 percent of working families,” including the 40 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes whatsoever – a redistributionist power grab in all but name. As it applies to politics, one definition of fairness holds that the government should be neutral between its citizens, regardless of the size of their paycheck. Plainly, that is not the definition favored by the Obama administration. And that’s just of one the flaws of the administration’s two-percent solution. -raghu. -- "I have the heart of a child... in a jar on my desk." - Stephen King _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
