Finally, a Federal Budget that Targets Inequality

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



Finally, a Federal Budget
that Targets Inequality

For the first time since America’s rich started getting phenomenally richer, a White House budget is linking the concentration of wealth at the top of America’s economic ladder to pain at the middle.

March 2, 2009

By Sam Pizzigati


The budget President Barack Obama presented to Congress last week, if adopted in anything close to what the President has proposed, will cut taxes for the typical American family by $800 a year and raise them for families in the top 1 percent by an average $100,000.

In an America accustomed to tax breaks — and oodles of them — for the nation’s richest, this tax increase on the privileged is striking many observers as something quite extraordinary. But even more extraordinary may be the rationale the Obama budget narrative makes for that increase.

The Obama budget does not position higher taxes on the wealthy, as President Clinton did in his first budget, as a distasteful but unavoidably necessary step to balance the budget.

The Obama budget, instead, rips “those at the commanding heights of our economy” for reckless behaviors that have “proven to be dangerous not only for their individual firms but for the economy as a whole.”

In strikingly stark terms, the new White House budget, entitled “A New Era of Responsibility,” goes on to hold the rich and their power responsible for making the “ladder into the middle class and beyond” ever “harder and harder to climb.” .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/march2a.html