A Call To Action

Here's a small proposal that I'd like to invite you to be part of. First you have to do a little homework (I know you have tons to do - but this is important). Read this article by Matt Taibbi at Alternet. It's full of pesky numbers and information, but it's a quick read, easily understood, and well-written (I have a blog-crush on By Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone.) Add to all this that Taibbi uses the word fuck more than once and you've got a recipe for a real barn burner of an article on the 2008 Federal Budget.

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the 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 If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the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.

Look, do you pay taxes? I do, too. Now read the article because it tells you how the 2008 proposed federal budget would spend your tax dollars. And it ain't pretty. Remeber this - for every subsidy or tax break given to big business or wealthy families, one of three things happen. Other taxes (or fees as they're so lovingly euphemized) are raised so that the middle class pays more, programs (usually those benefiting the poor) are cut or the deficit grows.

After you've read the article, please consider contacting news outlets to tell them that you expect them to cover the budget with the same vigor they have for covering Brittany's bald pussy, I mean head, and Anna Nicole's sperm intake.

More tax background. From the Washington Post.

Mainstream media contact list.

Who's zooming who at OpenSecrets.org. Just for the hell of it.

Another take on the 2008 Bush Budget.

A list of alternative media.

I'm preparing my email to Keith now.

Cross-Posted at PoliTits.