QOTD
by digby
Cliff Schecter:
We're now forced to confront a band of enormously wealthy people who've benefitted from - or bestowed upon others - large financial bailouts and ill-considered taxcuts who like lecturing Americans living on earned benefits about "shared sacrifice". As in, you give up a meal each day, and I'll give up a pair of yacht shoes! Deal?
Exactly. And this is not confined to Republicans, by any means. Regular readers know that I've been writing about "Fix the Debt" and Ed Rendell for months. But it and he are garnering attention elsewhere these days:
In addition to his current duties as professional-liberal-even-Joe-Sixpack-can-love on MSNBC, Ballard Spahr court jester, and corporate consigliere at Greenhill & Co investment bank, Rendell is currently co-chairing the steering committee of something called The CEO Campaign to Fix the Debt—a blue-chip cabal of 130-plus plutocrats who have anted up a $43 million kitty to fund a multimedia stealth campaign/public relations offensive to convince the turkeys to vote for Thanksgiving.
Fix the Debt is pushing for radical alterations to the tax code to legalize a hundred-plus billion dollar corporate tax dodge and pass the buck onto the middle/working/underclass in the form of deep cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, all the while masquerading as a selfless crusade to save the nation from going over the [cue thunder and lightning] financial cliff. Bless their blackened hearts.
One of the Fix the Debt campaign’s main proposals for deficit reduction is creating a “territorial tax system” that would enable corporations to evade taxation on offshore earnings—which amounts to a combined $418 billion from the Fix the Debt member corporations—when they bring that money home, and giving themselves a $134 billion tax break, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies titled “The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks.”
Just to be clear, they are talking about paying off the national debt by pocketing $134 billion in taxes annually.
Indeed. And yet somehow, we've been talked into believing that the wealthy will be making a serious sacrifice if some of their taxes are raised --- a sacrifice equal to the sacrifice of millions of Americans who will see their already meager incomes and health security reduced.
.