Class Warfare With Taxes ... Cut more taxes on the super-rich and the middle class ... who ends up paying for Iraq, .... the poor and near-poor.

TomPaine.com - Class Warfare With Taxes: "Robert Reich | December 08, 2005

Tax bills now wending their way through the House and Senate would cut about $60 billion in taxes next year. But there’s a huge difference between the two. The biggest item in House bill is a two-year extension of the president’s tax cuts on stock dividends and capital gains. The House bill doesn’t touch what’s called the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). By contrast, the biggest item in Senate bill is temporary relief from the AMT. But the Senate bill doesn’t extend the dividend and capital gains tax cuts.

No legislative choice in recent years has so clearly pitted the super-rich against the suburban middle class. Most of benefits of the House’s proposed extension of the dividend and capital gains tax cuts would go to the top one percent of taxpayers, with average annual incomes of more than $1 million. Most of the benefits of the Senate’s cut in the AMT would go to households earning between $75,000 and $100,000 a year, who would otherwise get slammed.
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The underlying question is, who ends up paying for Iraq, the Katrina cleanup, the Medicare drug benefit, homeland security, everything else? ...

That group is the poor and near-poor. Cut more taxes on the super-rich and the middle class, and the only way Congress can say it’s grappling with the soaring budget deficit is to cut more programs for the poor. That means fewer food stamps, less Medicaid and vanishing housing assistance.
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In the end, it will be our kids and grandchildren who get the tab, because they’ll have to pay foreigners back. And our current political leaders? They couldn’t care less—because by then, they’ll be long gone.