Catfood Commission Recs: Tax cuts & other evil shit in the blueprint for future cuts

SO HOW does the commission propose to actually achieve deficit reduction?

It puts forward a grab bag of policies, from cutting agricultural subsidies to raising the federal gasoline tax.

- proposals for "tax reform" that would cut the corporate income tax rate and lower the top marginal tax rate paid on the high incomes of the wealthiest Americans from the current 35 percent to 23 percent.

- tax "reform" proposals would even exempt corporations from paying taxes on profits made outside the U.S.--an open invitation to outsourcing if there ever was one.

- non-military federal workers would have their pay frozen for three years (making Obama's two-year pay freeze declared last week seem like a "lesser evil"),

- students with federal loans would lose the federal subsidy on interest charged while they're still in school.

Overall, the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the commission's proposals would amount to a cut of about 22 percent from "discretionary" programs, affecting everything from child nutrition to medical research.

Still, the big news regards the commission's plans for Social Security and Medicare.

- increasing the retirement age for retirees in 2050 and 2075

- using a different (and less generous) formula to calculate cost-of-living increases for benefits

The commission's own figures show that Social Security benefits would decline for all but the poorest people in the country if the changes were enacted.

Bowles, Simpson and Co. also took the ax to Medicare and veterans' health benefits...

- pushing up out-of-pocket expenditures for seniors and veterans

- creating a voucher system for federal workers' health care benefits.


So around $3 trillion in cuts. Ironically, in the same week that the commission released its report, the Federal Reserve divulged that it had provided $3.3 trillion in aid to all of the major banks and to many major corporations within a matter of weeks at the height of the financial meltdown of late 2008 and early 2009.

This form of corporate welfare came with no strings attached.

In fact... much of this almost no-interest money was spent on huge purchases of...Treasury notes!

In other words, the federal government essentially gave money to Wall Street so it could loan the money back to the federal government at a nice return--and thereby pad its balance sheets with taxpayer money.

Now the same forces that benefited from this federal largess are coming after the measly benefits that the federal government provides to ordinary people. They want to make sure...that the government will tighten its belt while it makes sure that interest on the federal debt continues to be paid...to them.

In everyday terms, that arrangement might be called larceny. In Washington, it's called deficit reduction.

http://socialistworker.org/2010/12/07/blueprint-for-cuts-to-come


Obama's already more or less done one of the recs: freezing federal pay.

The latest deal increases the pressure on social security.

I don't think we've seen the last of the catfood commission recs.