Sorry this is so long, but I had to share.
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Maybe We Deserve to Be Ripped Off By Bush's Billionaires
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com.
February 20, 2007.
While America obsessed about Brittany's shaved head, Bush offered a
budget that offers $32.7 billion in tax cuts to the Wal-Mart family
alone, while cutting $28 billion from Medicaid.
"Now, after she shaved her head in a bizarre episode that culminates
a months-long saga of controversial behavior, it's the question being
asked by her fans, her foes and the general public: What was she
thinking?"-- Bald and Broken: Inside Britney's Shaved Head, Sheila
Marikar, ABC.com, Feb. 19
What was she thinking? How about nothing? How about who gives a sh *
t? How's that for an answer, Sheila Marikar of ABC news, you pinhead?
I'm not one of those curmudgeons who freaks out every time that
Bradgelina moves the war off the front page of the Post, or Katie
Couric decides to usher in a whole new era of network news with
photos of the imbecile demon-spawn of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. I
understand that we live in a demand-based economy and that there is
far more demand for brainless celebrity bullsh * t than there is,
say, for the fine print of the Health and Human Services budget.
But that was before this week. I awoke this morning in New York City
to find Britney Spears plastered all over the cover of two gigantic
daily newspapers, simply because she cut her hair off over the
weekend. To me, this crosses a line. My definition of a news story
involves something happening. If nothing happens, then you can't
have "news," because nothing has changed since the day before.
Britney Spears was an idiot last Thursday, an idiot on Friday, and an
idiot on both Saturday and Sunday. She was, shockingly, also an idiot
on Monday. It will be news when she stops being an idiot, and we'll
know when that happens, because she'll have shot herself for the good
of the planet. Britney Spears cutting her hair off is the least-
worthy front page news story in the history of humanity.
Apparently, from now on, every time a jackass sticks a pencil in his
own eye, we'll have to wait an extra ten minutes to hear what
happened on the battlefield or in Congress or any other place that
actually matters.
On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who
works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He
was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some
research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008
budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively
little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war
resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It
would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the
priorities of our current political elite.
Not only does it make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it
envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects
only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of
the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the
cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly
less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war
expenses). But what's interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans
to pay for them.
Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the
Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to
just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart
fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten
years.
The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28
billion.
Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars
candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags,
incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for
trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote
D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about
$11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount
Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same
time period.
Some other notable estimate estate tax breaks, versus corresponding
cuts:
Cox family (Cox cable TV) receives $9.7 billion tax break
while education would get $1.5 billion in cuts.
Nordstrom family (Nordstrom dept. stores) receives $826.5
million tax break while Community Service Block Grants would be
eliminated, a $630 million cut.
Ernest Gallo family (sh * tty wines) receives a $468.4
million cut while LIHEAP (heating oil to poor) would get a $420
million cut.
And so on and so on. Sanders additionally pointed out that the family
of former Exxon/Mobil CEO Lee Raymond, who received a $400 million
retirement package, would receive about $164 million in tax breaks.
Compare that to the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which Bush
proposes be completely eliminated, at a savings of $108 million over
ten years. The program sent one bag of groceries per month to 480,000
seniors, mothers and newborn children.
Somehow, to me, that's the worst one on the list. Here you have the
former CEO of a company that scored record profits even as it gouged
consumers, with gas prices rising more than 70 percent since January
of 2001. There is a direct correlation between the avarice of oil
company executives and the increased demand for federal aid for
heating oil programs like LIHEAP, and yet the federal government
wants to reward these same executives for raising prices on the backs
of consumers.
Even if you're a traditional, Barry Goldwater conservative, the kinds
of budgets that Bush has sent to the hill not only this year but this
whole century are the worst-case scenario; they increase spending
generally while cutting taxes and social programming. They commit
taxpayers to giant subsidies of already Croseus-rich energy
corporations, pharmaceutical companies and defense manufacturers
while simultaneously cutting taxes on those who most directly benefit
from those subsidies. Thus you're not cutting spending -- you're just
cutting spending on people who actually need the money. (According to
the Washington Times, which in a supremely ironic twist of fate did
one of the better analyses of the budget, spending will be 1.6
percent of GDP higher in the 2008 budget than in was in 2000, while
revenues will be 2.6 percent of GDP lower).
This is something different from traditional conservatism and
something different from big-government liberalism; this is a new
kind of politics that transforms the state into a huge, ever-
expanding instrument for converting private savings into corporate
profit.
That's not only bad government, it's bad capitalism. It makes
legalized bribery and political connections more important factors
than performance and competition in the corporate marketplace. Beyond
that, it's just plain f * cking offensive to ordinary people. It's
one thing to complain about paying taxes when those taxes are buying
a bag of groceries once a month for some struggling single mom in
eastern Kentucky. But when your taxes are buying a yacht for some a
** hole who hires African eight year-olds to pick cocoa beans for two
cents an hour ... I sure don't remember reading an excuse for that
anywhere in the Federalist Papers.
I also don't remember reading much about this year's budget. It was a
story for about half a minute when it came out two weeks ago. It
barely made TV newscasts, and even when it did, only the broad
strokes made it on air. There was some fuss about the Alternative
Minimum Tax and a mild uproar over the fact that the 2008 budget
failed to account for estimates of the costs for wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. But overall, the budget was a non-starter as a news
story. As it does every year, it takes a back seat to hot-button
issues like gay marriage, the latest election scandal, etc. Already,
the 2008 election presidential campaign has gotten far more ink than
the 2008 budget. As entertainment, bullsh * t politics always
triumphs over real politics.
Here's the thing about the system of news coverage we have today. If
the Walton family, or Lee Raymond, or the heirs to the Mars fortune
actually needed the news media to work better than it does now,
believe me, it would work better. But they have no such need, because
the system is working just fine for them as is. The people it's
failing are the rest of us, and most of the rest of us, apparently,
would rather sniff Anna Nicole Smith's corpse or watch Britney Spears
hump a fire hydrant than find out what our tax dollars are actually
paying for.
Sh * t, when you think about it that way, why not steal from us?
People that dumb don't deserve to have money.
