Details here:
"This week made it even harder to convince the voters that this country has a genuine, major opposition party. The Congressional Democrats have now completely capitulated to the Republican advocates of supply-side economics -- what the first President Bush once called 'voodoo economics'--by overwhelmingly voting for Dubya's tax cut package. Only one, lone Democratic Senator--retiring octogenarian Fritz Hollings of South Carolina -- had the guts to vote on Thursday against this insane tax cut. And in the House, two-thirds of the Democrats (including a lot of the so-called liberals) voted for the Bush bill, which includes more tax breaks for corporations.
"Kerry -- although he didn't show up for the vote -- issued a statement supporting the tax cuts, even though (as the Washington Post reported), they include 'an array of business tax breaks' worth $13 billion to Corporate America. (On Monday, Public Campaign will issue a study of how the corporate interests bought their tax cuts with campaign cash.)
"The folly of the Democrats' position was underscored by a new study just released by Citizens for Tax Justice, about the effects of previously-passed Bush tax cuts on the top Fortune 500 Companies. Many of these companies made bigger profits after taxes than they did before taxes!
....
"The feckless folly of the Democrats' election-year cowardice in supporting this plan insures that the slashing of the social safety net will speed up to a breakneck pace in the next four years. Why? Because, to quote that WashPost article again, 'With the approval of the legislation, virtually all of Bush's first-term tax agenda -- four tax measures worth nearly $1.9 trillion over 10 years -- would survive a potential second Bush term.' With so much of the federal budget already devoted to mandated spending, and both Bush and Kerry committed to increasing already-bloated military budgets, about the only area of discretionary spending left to cut -- to fight a budget deficit that will soar from $4.3 trillion today to $l8 trillion in the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office study of the just-passed bill -- is, of course, the social safety net. The poor will, once again, pay for keeping the rich in clover, and the gap between the Two Americas that John Edwards likes to talk about inevitably will widen to even more shamefully uncivilized levels."
As a distinguished British legal academic (a political moderate) put it to me over dinner once, "America is not a democracy, it is a plutocracy."
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