US President Barack Obama has proposed to raise taxes on the wealthy in his 2013 budget, prompting an election year spending showdown with Republicans.
The proposal includes $1.5 trillion (£950bn) in new taxes, much from allowing Bush-era tax cuts to expire.
He will also call for a Buffett Plan tax hike on millionaires, as well as infrastructure projects.
Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has already gone on record calling this plan an “insult to American taxpayers.” I suppose he is right to some degree. The plan is likely to offend many (if not most) of the 1%; and they are American taxpayers. However, their contribution to tax revenue is so small when compared with the rates sustained by the 99% that it is clear that Romney is looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
The question is whether or not the 99% will rally behind Obama for finally taking such definitive action. After all the Republicans have so much control in the Congress that Obama’s move is tantamount of requesting a vote of confidence over the entire Legislative branch. Recent polls seem to indicate that one would need a microscope to find any such confidence these days, so basically Obama is creating a situation in which the 99% will feel as if they have a significant stake in voting in November. Nevertheless, the 1% have the money to spend on maintaining their current power grip on the country; and we can expect that the propaganda engines of the consciousness industry are already rolling. Will the 99% be fooled by such machinations? I sure as hell hope they won’t!
He may be interested in the 99%, but only the well-off segment of that population. He seems unwilling to do much for the poor; his payroll tax cuts are harming the social security the elderly rely on; his advocacy for manufacturing jobs and growth are at odds with one another: growth is usually growth in productivity, which equates to fewer workers doing the same work. To rationally advocate growth and manufacturing jobs would require legislatively capping GDP and ensuring that any growth in productivity is handed over directly to workers. His health care reform is little more than a corporate handout: still nobody knows what anything costs in the medical industry because, as each patient has a different health insurance plan, everybody -- insurers, patients, pharmacies -- wind up paying something different. You can't control costs -- the real problem -- when you don't know what anything costs. Politicians like Obama are experts at knowing the least they can yield to avoid rebellion, while ensuring that their friends are still getting kickbacks.
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