This is another challenge that President Obama should lay on the table. If Republicans want cuts to be extended for two years, the wealthy should agree to put all their windfall into a fund or special bank that would be used to create more jobs primarily through infrastucture repair construction. If they were to agree to this proposal, the wealthy friends of the Republicans would actually create some jobs and demonstrate the "patriotism" they always profess but rarely demonstrate.
[Black Star News Editorial]
The first major battle of the post-midterm election will be over whether to extend or not, the Bush tax cut to the wealthy, due to expire at the end of the year.
Extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will cost the nation $700 billion over the next 10 years, making the deficit even much more worse. The country simply can’t afford it.
But there’s another bigger reason why the nation can’t afford to extend the cuts. The economic collapse that the country faced last year has been averted, and indeed in the last month 150,000 net new jobs were created. The stock market is steady and has occasionally soared. Yet recovery or sustained recovery is not assured and unemployment stands at 9.6%
Here’s why the very wealthy –or as George W. Bush famously put it, “the haves” and the “have mores”– don’t deserve extention of the tax cut, which has already piled billions of dollars on the deficit: The rich don’t create news jobs unlike small businesses– they look for maximum returns on their wealth and that could be in stock markets around the world.
This means that the wealthy actually contribute towards worsening the economy.
President Obama should draw the line in the sand. This is a battle worth fighting. He has challenged the Republicans to show how they would pay for the $700 billion hole that extending the cuts would create. Republicans won’t be able to come up with a solution.
Yet this isn’t the kind of thing that keeps Republicans awake. Republicans plunged the economy into a tailspin and recession through the abuses on Wall Street due to their deregulation and lack of oversight–think Bernard Madoff and the excesses of the major investment and commercial banks. Then they launched two unfunded wars. Yet there is no shame; having driven the economy off a cliff, they now want to adopt the same policies that created the nightmare.
This is another challenge that President Obama should lay on the table. If Republicans want cuts to be extended for two years, the wealthy should agree to put all their windfall into a fund or special bank that would be used to create more jobs primarily through infrastucture repair construction. If they were to agree to this proposal, the wealthy friends of the Republicans would actually create some jobs and demonstrate the “patriotism” they always profess but rarely demonstrate.
“Speaking Truth To Empower.”
