More Taibbi

The Boy writing about a Taibbi column?? Wha??? That never happens!

Writing for Alternet, Matt Taibbi alerts me to budget news that I had missed.

[T]he Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

Not only does it make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what's interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

...

Sanders additionally pointed out that the family of former Exxon/Mobil CEO Lee Raymond, who received a $400 million retirement package, would receive about $164 million in tax breaks.

Compare that to the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which Bush proposes be completely eliminated, at a savings of $108 million over ten years. The program sent one bag of groceries per month to 480,000 seniors, mothers and newborn children.

Taibbi knows exactly how to make things sound just as outrageous as they really are. Granted, the longer Bushnev is in office, the more people develop that skill, but he's still the best.

I obviously knew how Bush/Republicans feel about the Estate Tax, but it’s always good to have numbers attached. I mean, damn. There’s no way in hell this should ever pass with a Democratic congress, but that doesn’t mean I have 100% confidence that it will fail. They’re likely overstepping simply to get some kind of awful meet-halfway compromise (anchoring, anyone?), and it’ll probably work.