The rich are getting richer. The middle class and poor are getting poorer. What is the Republican solution to the deficit crisis? More tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. Savage cuts in programs that are desperately needed by working families.
There is another approach, which is why I've just introduced legislation imposing a surtax on those households earning a million dollars or more and the elimination of tax loopholes which the big oil companies take advantage of.
Everyone agrees that this country has a major deficit crisis, but few discuss how we got there. When George W. Bush inherited the White House from Bill Clinton we had a significant surplus. Now we have a $1.5 trillion deficit. How did that happen?
First, against my vote, Bush and Congress launched a war in Iraq. By the time we take care of our last veteran that war will end up costing us some $3 trillion. When the war drums were beating do you recall any of our Republican friends wanting to know how that unnecessary war was going to be paid for? I don't.
Second, Republicans for years have pushed for huge tax breaks for the wealthiest people. I didn't hear them ask how that was going to be paid for.
Third, under President Bush and a Republican-run House, Congress passed a $400 billion-plus Medicare prescription drug program. Written by the insurance companies and the drug companies, it barred the government from negotiating better prices. It drove up drug costs, padded pharmaceutical company profits and added to the deficit.
Fourth, again over my objection, Congress voted for a massive bailout of Wall Street. I didn't hear too many people talking about how we would pay for that $700 billion to bail out Wall Street. I didn't hear them worrying that it would drive up the deficit. Wall Street, having destroyed the economy through their reckless and illegal behavior, needed a welfare check and Congress provided it. End of story.
Those are some of the reasons we now have a deficit crisis, reasons Republicans don't talk much about when they provide soaring rhetoric about the dangers of large deficits.
The corporate media have been very lax in describing the devastating and unprecedented pain that the Republican House passed budget bill, HR 1, would bring about for low and moderate income families. Let me briefly mention just a very few of their cuts.
The Republicans want to decimate the Head Start Program. Every working family in America knows how hard it is today to find affordable childcare or early childhood education. At a time when we have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world, the Republican solution is to slash Head Start by 20 percent, throw 218,000 children off the program and lay off 55,000 Head Start instructors.
The cost of college education today is so high that many young people are giving up their dream of going to college, while many others are graduating deeply in debt. The Republican solution? Make a bad situation much worse by slashing Pell grants by $5.7 billion and reducing or eliminating Pell grants for 9.4 million low-income college students.
Social Security is another target. We get calls in my office every week from senior citizens, people with disabilities, widows who are having a hard time getting a timely response to their Social Security claims. It takes much too long to process the paperwork today. What is the Republican solution? They want to slash the Social Security Administration, the people who administer Social Security, by $1.7 billion. That means half a million Americans who are legally entitled to Social Security benefits will have to wait significantly longer to receive them. (Become a citizen member of the Defending Social Security Caucus)
When it comes to health care, we have 50 million Americans with no insurance today, and 45,000 Americans die each year because they don't get to a doctor in time. Last year, as part of health care reform, I worked very hard to expand community health centers so that more and more low-and moderate-income people could walk into a doctor's office, get health care, dental care, low-cost prescription drugs, mental health counseling. What is the Republican response to the health care crisis? They want to drastically cut-back funding for community health centers and deny primary health care to 11 million Americans.
For the poorest of the poor in our country, the Community Services Block Grants provide the infrastructure, the mechanism to get out emergency help for food, heat, housing and other very basic necessities of life. With homelessness and poverty increasing, the Republicans want to slash $405 million from the Community Services Block Grant Program.
In cold weather states like Vermont, where the weather can get to 20 below zero, home heating assistance is critically important. In fact it is a life and death issue. At a time when home heating oil costs are soaring, the Republicans want to cut $400 million from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
After decades of progress cleaning up our air and water, and preventing much illness, the Republicans want to slash the EPA by 30 percent and undercut enforcement of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
Republicans also want to cut the WIC program, which provides supplemental nutrition for women, infants, and children. They want to cut that by $750 million.
Everybody understands we have problems with education right now, including large dropout rates. At a time when states are laying off hundreds of thousands of teachers, Republicans want to cut $5 billion from the Department of Education.
On and on and on it goes.
In my view, we do need to boldly address our deficit crisis, but we need to do it in a way that is fair -- that is not on the backs of the sick, the elderly, the children and the poor. In other words, we need shared sacrifice. The wealthiest people in this country, who are now doing phenomenally well, are also going to have to help us with deficit reduction. That is why I introduced legislation which would place a 5.4 percent emergency surtax on income over $1 million. The revenue would go into an Emergency Deficit Reduction Fund. Just doing that - asking millionaires to pay a little bit more in taxes after all the huge tax breaks they have received -- will bring in up to $50 billion a year.
I think that is a good idea, but it is not just me. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll recently asked the American people about the best ways to go forward on deficit reduction? Eighty-one percent of the American people believe it is totally acceptable or mostly acceptable to impose a surtax on millionaires to reduce the deficit. My legislation also would eliminate tax loopholes that enable the big oil companies from avoiding their fair share of taxes.
The American people get it. They understand that we cannot move toward deficit reduction just by cutting programs that working families, the middle class, and low-income people desperately need. They understand that serious, responsible deficit reduction requires shared sacrifice. They know that at a time when the top 1 percent earn more income than the bottom 50 percent, that when the effective tax rate for the rich is now lower than at any time in recent history, that it is absurd not to ask the wealthiest people in this country to provide additional revenue to help us lower the deficit.
The federal budget is not just a bunch of big numbers. It is the document that speaks to the values of our country, our national priorities and our hopes for the future. At a time when the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider, it is a moral abomination to give more tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires, while cutting programs for the most vulnerable people in our society -- the children, the elderly, the sick and the hungry. The Republican budget proposal must be defeated.
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Perhaps now the rich and business can "man up" and do their half of the sacrificing.
Keep on speaking the truth Bernie!
Florida Senate approves business tax cut that shrinks unemployment ...
May 3, 2011 ... The Florida Senate approved a tax cut for businesses that will shrink unemployment ... “Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered,” Detert said. ...
www.miamiherald.com › News › Legislature
I did not get to vote on this and therefore did not make a poor choice to get us into the mess.
Since our Congress, both the House and the Senate, is mostly bought and paid for by corporate America (courtesy of our corrupt campaign process, endorsed and "improved" by our now partisan Supreme Court) I see no chance of improvement.
Hell, political bribery is not only LEGAL in this country, it's become the only way to survive!
Am I jaded? You bet your ass.
Am I a realist? Be honest... What do YOU think!
Senator? You have my total respect, and I hope you get SOME support and success! I believe you to be the most ethical member of Congress in Washington DC.
But will it be enough?
John Cheney 88
But i have one bone to pick with your comment too.. I don't think one can classify "democrats" and "republicans" as homogeneous groups. Maybe in 1971 one could, but now, it's more complex. You have some "democrats" (ok i know he's an ex-democrat) like Joe Lieberman who are 100% for war and there are some "republicans" who are against it. same with the wall street bailout and most issues.
the "democrats" seem divided as many are becoming disenchanted with obama and some of his not-so-liberal policies such as the war in afgahanistan. "republicans" are absolutely divided between the hard core ex-nixon millitarists and the hard core radical christians and the philisophical classical libertarian views of the Ron Paul clan.
But I also see your point. I'm independendent, but I'm kinda on the big picture right/wrong camp (what you call republican here). but i resent being grouped with other republicans because i was out on the streets protesting both iraq wars and not many other people were out there with me, and i voted for clinton/obama/even ralph nader (lol). heck i spent 5 years of my life following the grateful dead and going to rainbow gatherings....
just saying it's not a black and white world anymore.
I have great Texas friends who are quite liberal. I know what you say is true. It's true of every red state. And every blue state has its ignorant, backward-thinking conservatives. I think we all know that. I'd go so far as to say that there are a lot of conservatives, even a few relatively wacky ones who are nice people, if you don't get into politics or society as topics of conversation.
The problem of Texas is much the same of the problem in other red states. The conservatives vote. They vote against their self interest, and they vote in lockstep. They tend to be closed-minded and often illogical. They want everyone to be just like them, to the point that they are intolerant of those who are not just like them. There are some liberals who are that way, too, with one twist. Instead of voting against their self-interest, they don't vote for their self-interest.
I'd like to think that we can all recognize the others' foibles, but things have become so politically charged that that seems like a pipe dream.
It's sad, and I don't have a clue how to stop the vicious cycle that we seem to be in, other than to ensure that Democrats vote and that states elect Democratic governments. That way the people can see how much better things are under Democrats than under Republicans.
But I wasn't talking so much about divisions within each camp. I was more talking about particularly those Republicans who seem to be unwilling to listen, or pay attention to Democrats, or to change their minds when confronted with facts.
I'm a pretty liberal guy, a pragmatic liberal to be precise, but I've had my mind changed somewhat more favorably toward gun ownership, for example, through dialogue with conservatives. I still wish for more restrictions and enforcement, but I know longer want anything other than a hunting rifle confiscated. There are some Republicans willing to meet Democrats half way, but the Republican party has become so polarized that Republicans vote in lockstep. I don't sense independent thinking. The extreme right appears to me to have the moderate Republicans so cowed that they never speak out for compromise.
Take governor Walker in Wisconsin, who has gotten everything he wants by hook or by crook. Yet he still hammers away against Democratic positions. The Wisconsin public employee unions made pay compromises and offered to discuss more. Walker then guts collective bargaining, with no financial value, because he claims it does have financial value. Where are the moderate Republicans up in arms about this? Maybe I'm deaf and blind, but I don't sense them anywhere.
http://home.snu.edu/~HCULBERT/poor.htm
Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged or Let He Who is Without Sin Cast the First Stone
Who are you to judge whether the poor have or have not helped themselves. Your reasoning is just another way to asuage your guilt for blaming the victims. We are our brothers keeper.
If this is how you feel than why did you undermine Ron Paul's efforts to Audit the Federal Reserve?
Surely you know that the Federal Reserve is a mechanism that takes from the poor (mostly by inducing inflation which everyone knows hurts the poor more than the rich) and gives to the rich. You think that the federal reserve is helping poor people? Please.
May 11, 2010
WASHINGTON, May 11 – In a major victory for transparency at the Federal Reserve, the Senate today passed an amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to audit the Fed and make the central bank reveal which banks received more than $2 trillion in emergency aid during the financial crisis
Do you realize how much money $2 trillion is???
You are not outraged that each bank can recieve 1.9 trillion dollars without the taxpayer knowing about it???
1.9 trillion dollars could eliminate poverty in the usa.
Ron Paul was outraged at Bernie for putting that in at the last minute. The bill was supposed to provide transparency to the taxpayer for all banks recieving government money.
Clearly Bernie feels it's more important for Goldman Sachs traders to recieve million dollar bonus' than to eliminate poverty.
Bernie will not comment on this. Ron Paul has ripped him publically, Bernie wont debate him. Bernie will not comment to me and I have emailed him several times (I live in Vermont).
Trust me, I'm on your side. I find it disgusting how much aid the us government has given wall street and how little it gives the needy; but if you think the Frank/Dodd bill was substinative "reform" than you are mistaken. Me, I want real reform. I want to know which banks recieved money, even if it wasn't 2 trillion dollars. (fyi, the biggest company in the world is not worth 2 trillion dollars!)
Republicans have been shouting from the rooftops about the need for "shared sacrifices" then reading out sacrifice after sacrifice that the poor and middle classes must make. NOT ONCE have they offered a sacrifice from the rich. Sorry but that is NOT what I call SHARED sacrifice. That's what I call sacrificing this nation's least able to fend for ourselves and least able to protect ourselves against the government and the corporations that apparently own it (or at least most of the Representatives & Senators who SHOULD represent the PEOPLE).
If the Republicans want to do more than talk about shared sacrifices, then they need to quit placing all sacrifices on the poor to middle classes and START REQUIRING some sacrifices (major ones) from the rich and corporations. They caused this mess, they should help pay to clean it. They also have failed to produce the long promised economic benefits from "trickle down" - jobs in foreign lands or that involve asking if I want fries with my food or if I need my retail items gift wrapped don't count as adequate employment and they won't sustain an economy even if the rich and corporations are staying afloat. I'm thinking a good start is a return to Eisenhower era taxes for the upper brackets with sharp penalties for off-shoring jobs OR income...
Do your homework.
Care to try again? Also, care to try making a point without any insults whether open or implied?
Let us wipe out the middle class so its all cheap labor! Screw the poor they must fund for them self!!!!
ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME !!!!!
IS THEIR ANY ONE OUT THERE? WAKE UP, WAKE UP, WAKE UP!!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!
HELP YOUR FAMILY!!