As I consider more closely the budget bills proposed, especially the House bill, and the additional $50 - $70 billion of tax cuts planned by this Congress, it strikes me that many of the people in this current Congress are like George H.W. Bush when he was televised in awe at a digital scanner at a supermarket checkout during his last presidential campaign. He never needed to shop for himself, and obviously didn't do so. So this ordinary event in everybody's life was an adventure for him. At the time, I wondered that a President could keep himself so removed from typical Americans that he was unaware of how groceries are bought. And then I thought--how could he possibly identify with the poor, when he could not even identify with daily experiences of ordinary Americans.
This type of distancing of the wealthy from the lives of ordinary folk is getting worse. I remember hearing someone talk recently about the amount by which low-income Americans' cost for government-provided health care might be increased under certain budget provisions, if enacted. The tone was offhand, along the lines of "senior citizens might end up paying, say, $50 or $70 more each month under this plan." Said casually, as though it was no big deal. And apparently actually thought to be no big deal. After all, most of us are affluent and can dig an extra $50 out of the stack of quarters left on the nightstand over a month's time.
Obviously, the speaker had no comprehension of what it is to live on a fixed income and face constantly mounting costs for items that are essential to your well-being, in fact to your very life. For seniors making about $14,000 a year and paying for home, clothing, food, heat, phones and television, an increase in their medical expenses of $50 can be catastrophic and frightening. It can mean cutting pills in half and forgoing half of the medicine that they are supposed to have, or eating even more skimpily to make up.
So it is that the Republican majority in Congress seems hell bent on enacting a budget bill and tax legislation that exploit ordinary Americans in order to provide further tax breaks to corporations and wealthy "investors" that make up the real "ownership society." Yes, the House did trim back some of its most obscene budgetary cuts of programs aimed at lower income Americans, but not enough to make a real difference. This report by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities says it all in its title: CBO Information Says House Budget Bill Passed Last Night Would Hit the Poor Hard. As an example, cuts in Medicare will amount to $30 billion dollars over ten years, representing "savings" achieved by not providing important, much-needed health care to "near-poverty" lower-income Americans. Another report makes clear that the changes made to the initial draconian proposals were de minimis: Cuts in House Budget Bill Aimed at Low-Income Families Reduced by Only 2%.
Another area of pitiless legislation in the House is the planned treatment of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and reduction in enforcement resources for child support. See this report House Budget Reconciliation Bill Includes Highly Flawed TANF Provisions. If one didn't know better, one might think this Congress had bought into the unconscionable approach of the Tax Foundation that wears "Family Values" on its sleeve only to fold them into hiding unless the family at issue fits its own image of the right values (an Ozzie and Harriet family of four image--remember my earlier posting about the Tax Foundation's view of the inappropriateness of income distribution as a measure of the middle class?). The trend seems to be to make invisible all those other families with a female head of household or gay couples with children or grandmom with three or four grandkids.
Two other reports from the Center are worth mentioning. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been busy pushing for making the capital gains and dividends tax cut permanent as an "obvious" engine for economic growth and prosperity. One might ask "for whom?", since the lion's share of those tax benefits go to the very top of the economic income bracket. But one should also ask "is that so?" The Center reports that the Economic Evidence for Extending Capital Gains Tax Cuts is Weak. It provides a number of arguments against the extension, including the high cost of making the cuts permanent and the likelihood that the cuts will harm economic growth over the long term.
The second report uses IRS data on the distribution of the capital gains preferential rate benefit, to show that 80% of the benefit goes to taxpayers with incomes of $200,000 or more. Data Show Benefits Sharply Skewed to High Income Filers. So putting the two reports together, it is clear that extending the capital gains tax cuts would do little to promote economic growth while doing much to increase the income disparity between the haves and the have-nots in America.
I challenge each member of Congress to go home to their districts and states and spend time with ordinary Americans. Really visit workers in their offices, on construction sites, in their homes. Talk to them about the worries they have about the future--the insecurity of pensions when companies can leave them high and dry, the concerns about paying for decent health care, the fears that they will not be able to provide what is necessary to feed and clothe and educate their children. I guarantee that if every member of Congress would turn off their spin machines and really listen to ordinary Americans, the budget and tax bills coming out of Washington would have a very different character.
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