the rich get richer, the country gets poorer

Via Think Progress :

Americans are barraged with news of a massive annual federal deficit of over $400 billion, declining incomes for the middle-class and rising gas prices, all of which are squeezing the incomes of middle-class Americans. What is Congress’s response to these pressing problems? Passing tax cuts for the children of billionaires through full repeal of the estate tax.

Let’s be clear about what happened this week in Washington. The House of Representatives passed full and permanent repeal of the estate tax despite the fact that our debt is now over $7.7 trillion. Despite the fact that full repeal will cost $290 billion in the next decade and $2 trillion over the next 20 years. Despite the fact that this same Congress is likely to make billions of dollars of cuts to health care for those in need through cuts to Medicaid, cuts to education, and cuts to veteran programs. Despite the fact that keeping the estate tax for estates worth over $3.5 million would make up a quarter to half of the Social Security solvency gap. That, by the way, is well below where the estate tax stood when President Bush took office and would exempt more than 99 percent of estates from the tax.

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Wouldn't it be nice if there was someone in this government who represented the rest of us, instead of just the ultra-rich?
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Also from Think Progress :

Conservatives are taking a novel approach in their attempts to justify why the mega-wealthy deserve mega-tax cuts: big tax cuts don’t really matter since rich people are going to cheat on their taxes anyway.

The uber-conservative Wall Street Journal opinion page trotted this excuse out this morning to rationalize its support for repealing the estate tax, writing, “what liberals call the aristocracy of wealth already exists, despite the current [death] tax, because super-rich families like the Hiltons have always found ways to avoid or mitigate it through offshore accounts, tax-sheltered foundations, and so on.”

(They seem to be taking a page from President Bush’s play book. Bush tried out this excuse last summer when he claimed rolling back tax cuts for those earning over $200,000 per year was unnecessary because “the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway.")

Rather than shrugging their shoulders and saying “oh, well, what can you do,” conservatives would be better off suggesting ways to close tax loopholes and beef-up IRS enforcement rather than just accepting a world where tax cheats win.

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How can people be complacent when "our" president (and conservatives in general) condones tax evasion?! Unreal! (I wish it truly was unreal!)