rebates?

Brad Mayer bradley.mayer at ebay.sun.com
Thu May 24 15:44:34 PDT 2001


Excerpted, with comments inserted, from todays' NYT article on the tax bill: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leftists would oppose this:

"Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal research institute that has the only computer model in private hands capable of figuring how people at different income levels would be affected, calculated that one-third of the total tax relief would go to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers, those with total income of more than about $375,000. Another one-third would go to the next 19 percent. And the 80 percent of taxpayers with incomes below $72,000 would get one-third of the $1.35 trillion in tax relief." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ while advocating this:

"But families of modest means would get the biggest proportional tax cut." ......

"A couple with two children and an income of $36,000 would owe $1,520 under the current law and nothing under the Senate measure." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sounds pretty good to me. But most leftists are not to be heard advocating elimination of even the inherently regressive sale taxes (including the gasoline tax), much less income taxes, on working class families with paltry $36,000 annual incomes. How shameful.

Thanks to Bill Clinton, such families are driven into increasing debt peonage to the commercial banks, in part, by the US Treasury's accumulation of a revenue surplus. This surplus is a kind of socialized forced savings that relieves commercial banks of the need to maintain the same on their private ledgers. As such, it is a public subsidy underwriting the privatized extension of consumer credit. Most likely, working class families will use their rebate to pay down some (a very small sum of) their private debt.

Most US leftists also support the Democratic Party. A coincidence?

-Brad Mayer Oakland, CA



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