By Joel Thurtell
Aren’t there some nice Republicans?
Are they all jerks?
Have you ever seen a group of people more bent on helping themselves and screwing everyone else?
This whole brou-ha-ha about Mitt Romney not releasing his tax returns brings Republican selfishness into focus.
Why is anyone surprised that The Mittster doesn’t want us to know how much money he hauls in and how little taxes he pays?
The Mittster and all his Republican rivals are living proof that the more people have, the more they want.
With his tax proposal, though, The Mittster could claim to be altruistic. He plans to cut the maximum tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent affecting top earners. But since he pays only 15 percent, the giveaway would not affect him.
How generous.
He’s already got his.
Just wants to help his rich Republican pals get more of theirs.
As for the poor folk making less than $40,000, well, too bad.
They’ll have to pay more, since The Mittster wants to cut tax credits that now benefit low earners.
But really, what it’s all about is not earning at all.
The Mittster is not an earner.
He’s a taker.
His income, so he tells us, is taxed at the low rate of 15 percent because his money comes from investments.
Somehow, Republicans and plenty of Democrats have bought into the fantasy that people who clip coupons and ride on investments are more valuable to society than people who earn wages for working.
In the USA, it’s better to sit on your butt and live off unearned money than to punch a clock and do the things that might actually benefit society.
It’s called “working.”
What’s truly amazing about the Republicans, though, is their trust in our lack of memory about the recent past.
Remember last summer, when Republicans in the House of Representatives made a huge deal of increasing the national debt limit?
They played real brinkmanship, causing a downgrade of our national credit rating.
They thought it was cool to screw up our national credit rating to make a point.
Yet once they made their point, they forgot all about it.
And they hope we will forget, too.
The point for them was that the federal deficit, in their estimation, was too big.
Okay, got it.
There was even a compromise calling for huge cuts in spending to reduce the deficit.
That agreement won, the Republicans allowed the debt ceiling to be raised.
Now look at them.
Not only do they suck, but they are total amnesiacs.
They have forgotten, or more accurately, they pretend to have forgotten, that they held the entire welfare of our economy for ransom last summer because, so they claimed then, they did not like deficits.
Today, the GOP candidates have economic plans predicated on huge tax cuts.
What does The Mittster think it will do to the debt ceiling if he is elected and cuts more taxes on the rich?
The taxes he picks up from gouging the under-$40,000 wage earners won’t make up the difference.
According to The New York Times, The Mittster’s plan would add $1.2 trillion to the deficit in two years.
The Times, quoting a study by the Tax Policy Center, calculates that plans put out by candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum would add more than $1.2 trillion to the deficit in one year. (No calculations were made for projected results of Ron Paul’s plan to end the federal income tax.)
According to The Times:
By reducing the amount the federal government collects in taxes each year — at a time when federal tax collections are already a smaller share of the economy than they have been in more than half a century — the Republican tax plans will make it harder to balance the budget, said Robert L. Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonprofit group that advocates fiscal responsibility.
This is the party that held us hostage last summer because they were so dead set against deficits.
Now, in their enthusiasm for giving their rich buddies and themselves huge new tax breaks and extending breaks that already sap federal revenues, you would think Republicans had totally forgotten the principles they trumpeted less than half a year ago.
It is that hypocrisy, that crass opportunism and pandering to the rich at the expense of the financial security of the country that makes me say the GOP sucks.
