November 27, 2005

Makes me chuckle to pick up the paper and read a headline “Republicans Are Deeply Split Over How to Apportion New Tax Cuts” in the New York Times. They're not split, they're scared to death of the mid-term election axe.

A year ago they were not only not split, they weren’t even mildly splintered. The Bush Tax Abatement Machine was more popular than a Humvee with 50 cent gasoline.

House Republicans are still of that mind, but then the House has always been more of a zoo than a legislative body. They even let Dick Cheney be a member at one time. Anyway, these tax-slashing neocons are dead-set to earmark $63 billion in cuts, more than half of which would go to households with more than $1 million in yearly income. Not one million, more than one million and most often a lot more.

Well, if you can’t help the down-and-out million-a-year crowd, what kind of neocon are you, anyway?

"We're not going to be left out in the cold," said Representative Tom Reynolds, whose affluent district is packed with families who could be battered (his words) by the alternative minimum tax. Battered. The Alternative Minimum Tax would batter these near-destitute families who are so lost in the forest of loopholes that they pay no other tax at all.

You thought all those poor folks in New Orleans were battered. Forget it. Tom Reynolds and his buddies know battered and it’s not losing your home and all your belongings, it’s not being able to have a third winter home to accompany the second summer home. Without two or three homes, Tom's constituents will be left out in the cold . . . battered.

According to the Times, Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican on the tax-writing committee said, concerning the Thanksgiving postponement of vote, "What we decided to do is let people go back and think. We said, let's wait and make sure all the members are comfortable." Comfortable is politico-speak for finding out how angry the voters are back home.

They’re angry. Angry because this used to be a country that prided itself on fairness, even though fairness got bent a lot in the legislative process. But fairness is broken now and Americans don’t like to see fairness swept up like a broken beer glass and pitched out the door.

Katrina and the New Orleans aftermath shook this country far more than those isolated legislators in Washington seem to realize.

In two months we’ve gone from watching bodies float by under bridges swarming with the New Orleans abandoned poor, to our president as he stood in front of Andrew Jackson with teary promises ofhelp, to a Congress that’s slashed food stamps, child support and Medicare.

All of them programs essential to those very New Orleans survivors, in order to make possible an unconscionable giveaway of tax relief to the already rich. If he could, Bush would give $1.4 trillion over ten years. $140 billion a year according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That’s fourteen times the total annual budget for the United Nations given away each year to the already rich.

And yes, that is unfair in the face of massive unemployment, an auto industry on its knees, college education beyond the reach of all but (you guessed it) the super-wealthy, our Gulf Coast in tatters and Congress feeding off the lobby industry.

So yes, Devin Nunes is right to let his fellow Representatives go home and think.

Thanksgiving is a particularly appropriate time to think about these issues because it’s a time we give thanks for our diversity and the common welfare of our neighbors; thanks for opportunity and the helping-hand to those without it; thanks for the soundness of our sleep and completeness of our charity.

A time also to remember that the axe is not for the turkey alone.

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today