Acerbic Politics

From Robert Reich...

I've finally had a chance to review Jeb Bush’s tax plan in detail. Frankly, I have never seen proposed such a huge transfer of income and wealth to the very top. According to Josh Barro of the Times, the plan would save each member of America's top 0.01 percent an average of $1.5 million a year.

A few details: The plan cuts the top federal income tax rate from today’s nearly 44 percent (including the Obamacare surcharge) to 28 percent, cuts the top tax rate on capital gains and dividends, and abolishes the estate tax, and reduces the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent.

Yes, it expands the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor and raises the standard tax deduction for the middle class -- but these are tiny relative to the huge giveaway for the top.

It would cost would be some $3.4 trillion over 10 years. To pay for this, Bush would cut spending (he doesn’t indicated where the cuts would come from), cut back federal regulations, and allow big corporations to repatriate the hundreds of billions they’ve stashed overseas.

This is a bigger version of the trickle-down voodoo economics his brother unleashed on America (which itself was a bigger version of Reagan’s trickle-down voodoo economics).

That this plan comes from the Republican Party's most establishment candidate – at a time when the wealthiest Americans are raking in a higher share of total national income and wealth in more than a century, when the middle class is shrinking, and when almost 1 out of 5 of America’s children are in poverty – reveals the utter moral bankruptcy of today’s Republican Party (as if we needed more evidence).

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