Paul Ryan’s budget plan to cut Medicare so the rich can get another big tax break spells disaster for all of those Republican candidates from districts with heavily populated seniors. The rich have already received huge tax breaks from the Republicans: the highest marginal tax rate is only 33%; and the capital gains rate is only 15%. Recall that under the last Republican President to ever balance a budget, the highest marginal tax rate was 91%. That was under Dwight Eisenhower. Since then evolved the capital gains rate, allowing the rich to only pay tax on all of their stock sales of only 15%! Of course, the idle rich don’t have to work. Consequently, middle class Americans have a higher effective tax rate than the rich.
The Republicans are once again trotting out nonsense that giving the rich even more tax breaks will create jobs. LOL! If you believe that one, I got a great used car that you need to buy! Recall that under Bush’s big tax break for the rich, America lost millions of jobs, and continues to lose more jobs everyday, with the rich investing in multinational corporations which are hiring overseas, because people in China are willing to work for $.25/hour. So as long as you are making more than $.25/hour, don’t believe any jobs will be created here by reducing taxes even further on the rich.
Under Ryan’s plan, the highest marginal tax rate on the rich will decline to 25% from 33%. Wow! And recall that the rich no longer pay an estate tax on wealth of as much as $10 million, and that the estate tax has been reduced from 55% to 35%. The American public, however, continues to be duped by this nonsense, thinking they will benefit, too, from these tax breaks, but don’t believe it. The deficits created by the rich not contributing their fair share has resulted in massive deficits, which are a hidden tax and will be passed onto the middle class.
As Warren Buffett said, “there’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” And they are winning through spreading this nonsense economics propaganda through the news media and through paid political mouthpieces of the rich. Remember trickle down economics? How if you reduced taxes on the rich, the wealth will trickle down to you? Well, income has transferred significantly over the past 30 years, but not to the middle class, but to the rich. And it is because the American public has bought into this rhetorical B.S. for decades.
Now the Republicans want to eliminate your entitlement programs of social security and medicare. But these are entitlement programs, monies that you are entitled to, since you have been paying through payroll taxes over 40 years for your pension and medical care when you will be unable to buy private insurance because you will be too old and sick, and, consequently, too much of a risk for private insurance companies. But the Republicans want to take these monies from you and give them to the rich in the form of another tax cut, screaming that unless you do so, the country will go bankrupt. However, the country won’t go bankrupt if we raise the taxes on the rich and cut military spending.
Why does the U.S. have to contribute 46% of the total world’s cost of military spending, when there are so many other nations in the world? Why? Because defense contractors have been gouging the American public hundreds of billions of dollars every year with needless defense contracts, making the stockholders of these companies even wealthier. Remember that only 5% of our country owns 95% of these stocks. And those funds are going for the protection of these multinational corporations’ assets, owned by the rich. These multinational corporations have invested trillions of dollars overseas in fixed assets, and they require an international police force to protect their fixed assets from expropiation from foreign governments. But the rich do not want to pay for the cost of protecting their own overseas investments; nah, they want you, the middle class, to pick up the tab. They figure you are too stupid not to see through their rhetoric of voodoo economic scare tactics: in the 1980s, the line was if you give huge tax cuts to the rich, it will trickle down to you; now it’s if you want jobs to come back to America, you have to give the rich even bigger tax breaks.
Apparently the Republicans believe that you have already forgotten about the TARP bailout of the Wall Street crooks a couple of years ago, leaving you to pay for their trillion dollar rip off. What was the voodoo economics behind that bailout: oh, they were too big to fail. If we didn’t absorb their losses, our country would go bankrupt. Sound familiar?! Now it’s, if we don’t end medicare and give tax cuts to the rich, we will go bankrupt and jobs will never come back. What’s next? We’ll develop warts on our hands?
So when are you, the average American taxpayer, going to demand change from your government? Are you going to continue to make the rich even richer, buying into the scare tactics of the radical right, representing the rich? Are you buying into, once again, their voodoo economic nonsense?
Wake up, America. It’s your wallet. And never forget, it’s class warfare, and they’re winning!
Accountants CPA Hartford, LLC