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Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, and Tea Party candidate for Senator of Kentucky won the primary.  He beat Trey Grayson in the Republican primary.

“I have a message,” Mr. Paul said, delivering a victory speech in Bowling Green. “A message from the Tea Party.  A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We have come to take our government back.”

Back from who?  The black man in the White House?  The bankers on Wall Street?  The super rich people that horde all the money?  The poor brown people who mow their lawns, pick their fruit, scrub their tubs, and burp their babies?  Who?

I’ve read a few articles about the Tea Party over the last few days, and I think that Michael Kinsley summed them up best in his article “My Country Tis of Me” for The Atlantic:

Not only do TPPs not have one big issue like Vietnam—they disagree about many of their smaller issues. What unites them is a more abstract resentment, an intensity of feeling rather than any concrete complaint or goal.

…

If the Tea Party Patriots ever developed a coherent platform or agenda, they would lose half their supporters.

The Seattle Times ran a feature piece on a Tea Party leader in last Sunday’s Pacific Magazine.

IF THE TEA Party movement is about the rage of the pitch-fork-wielding masses toward a government run amok, then Keli Carender is its most unlikely heroine.

She’s 30, fresh-faced, Oxford educated and about as Seattle as you can get in her slacker wardrobe of plaid duds and Converse All Stars.

Like the brainy girl in the front row of civics class who rolls her eyes every time the teacher gets a date wrong, there’s a little snarkiness in her disposition, perhaps a tick learned on her night job as an improv comedian.

But as a leader in a movement full of people who only see dark clouds over America’s horizon, Carender manages to be pleasantly partly-sunny, her hopes set firmly on shaking up the November midterm Congressional elections.

The article quotes a 69-year-old Tea Party supporter, Betty Donovan:

“I’m tired of them taking money from people that earn it and giving it to people that don’t earn it,” Donovan says, referring to health-care reform.

She doesn’t specify who these non-earners are.  The populism of the Tea Party movement makes targets of strange bedfellows, from welfare recipients to Wall Street titans.  The one universal enemy, however, is Big Brother.

Yes Big Brother.  The Federal Government.  The same organization that sends her a Social Security check every month and provides her with medical insurance.  What she and her gang of angry old white people object to is that Big Brother is running a deficit.  I would bet that she voted for George Bush twice, and I am certain that she hasn’t thought about how, if the Bush Administration and the brownshirt Republicans in congress had not given away trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the super rich and had not started two unfunded wars that cost trillions of dollars, Big Brother would have been in pretty good shape going into this recession.

One more observation about this quote from Keli Carender in the Seattle Times feature:

“The difference between maybe a leftist group and our group is we are very much individualist,” she says.  “It is a little bit harder to get a unified message.”

It’s probably harder because their “unified” message is about hate.  It’s hard to just come out and say that because, well… it would sound hateful.  Hard to rally around that.

You may have read a story last week about how nearly half of the 2009 tax filers will pay no federal income tax.  That of course got Fox News and all their ignorant viewers in a huff.  They cried foul because they think the temporary stimulus tax breaks benefited low income families to too great of a degree.  Funny… you never hear them complaining about the Bush tax cuts that lowered taxes for the richest 5% in the country by trillions of dollars.  Those tax cuts will expire this year, and Republicans want to see them extended or even lowered.

But, not all extremely rich people are lobbying to make the budget-busting Bush tax cuts permanent.  Many of them have organized to send a message to congress that asks for higher taxes.  The Seattle Times reports:

Judy Pigott, a Seattle author, philanthropist and an heir to the Paccar fortune, is among the group of wealthy individuals calling on Congress to end tax breaks that have enriched people like her.

They have signed a Tax Fairness Pledge to take the money they saved as part of tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush and donate it to groups working to overturn those policies.

The tax cuts were “based on the erroneous assumption that the trickle-down effect would somehow benefit everyone,” Pigott said. “What we have now is the greatest wealth disparity since the Great Depression.”

She is part of a group called Responsible Wealth Network, a project of the nonprofit United for a Fair Economy. The network of 700 people who are among the wealthiest 5 percent in the U.S. includes Jeffrey Hollender, the co-founder of Seventh Generation natural products, and Eric Schoenberg, an economist at Columbia University and former investment banker.

…

They want Congress to restore the 39.6 percent and 36 percent rates on the highest income earners and end special treatment of dividends and capital gains.

People in the top 5 percent received almost half of the Bush tax cuts, Pigott said, a figure that amounts to more than half of the current $1.5 billion deficit.

That’s right, the federal government is running huge deficits right now, and Fox News and their Tea Party audience are blaming it on the Democrats for the bank bailout (that was Bush not Obama) and Obama’s stimulus spending package. 

This chart tells the real story.

The real budget busters are Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, two wars that were put on our national credit card, and an economic recession brought to you by Bush, Inc.  The temporary stimulus package designed to put money in people’s pockets to help jump start the economy has a negligible effect.

Of course the rich can choose to donate their trillions in tax savings to worthy causes, so why would they want to pay more taxes rather than direct their money to whomever they see fit?  Pigott explains: 

“I think it is the national government that can deal with clean air, water, national transportation systems, education,” she said. “I see those things are in trouble on a state level and on a national level because we don’t have the money. Yes, we can do a lot, but we can’t do what the federal government can do.”

And then there’s the guilt factor:

[Arul] Menezes said he has stepped up his charitable giving. But that won’t have the same effect as reworking the tax system, he said.

“It embarrasses me to go into a grocery store and know that the person at the checkout stand is paying a higher tax rate than I am,” he said.

So like I’ve said before, the super rich have benefited for way too long.  It’s time to raise their taxes.

The New York Times reports the top five as:

$4,000,000,000  David Tepper, Appaloosa Management

$3,300,000,000  George Soros, Soros Fund Management 

$2,500,000,000  James Simons, Renaissance Technologies 

$2,300,000,000  John Paulson, Paulson and Company

$1,400,000,000  Steve Cohen, SAC Capital Advisors 

How did David Tepper win the contest for Greediest Person of the Year?

“We bet on the country’s revival,” Mr. Tepper, who describes his trading technique as a mix of deep analysis and common sense, said Wednesday in an interview. “Those who keep their heads while others are panicking usually do well.”

…

Undaunted by that drop — and by the bankruptcy and liquidation of Lehman Brothers — Mr. Tepper loaded up on the preferred shares and bonds of the big banks in late 2008 and early 2009, correctly assuming that the government would not permit bigger institutions to fail.

It did not hurt that the Treasury Department was a fellow investor, buying preferred stock and warrants to help steady the faltering balance sheets of the banks. The government has since sold many of its bank stakes at a considerable profit.

Mr. Tepper, who manages about $12 billion for investors, also benefited from a successful investment in bonds of American International Group, the giant insurance company that was also rescued by the government.

He made a bet that the government would rescue the financial institutions that were too big to fail.  He won big.  Your average middle class, tax paying citizen is left with the bailout bill.

Okay, these guys pay taxes too.  They make obscene amounts of money, so they should be subject to the highest tax rates, right?

Wrong:

If there is one tax loophole that looks dead in the water, it’s the law that lets hedge fund and private equity managers pay a 15-percent capital-gains rate on the multimillion-dollar fees they collect — substantially less than the top income tax rates paid by their secretaries, chauffeurs, and the pilots of their private jets.

On the surface, the stars are aligned. There is a newly elected Democrat in the White House who is desperate to raise revenues. His budget calls for killing this tax break to raise $14.75 billion over five years and $23.89 billion over ten years. In addition, there are Democratic House and Senate majorities – representing the party of working people – and what could be more unfair than letting billionaires pay taxes at a fraction of the rate of the guy with the lunch pail? (Huffington Post, 02-26-2009)

Good question.  And why haven’t the Democrats closed the loophole that allows multi-billionaires to pay a lesser tax rate than I do?  It might have something to do with Democratic congressmen being in the pockets of the hedge fund managers.  That’s right, if you read that Huffington Post article you’ll find a chart that shows the hedge funds donated at about a 2-1 ratio in favor of Democrats. 

2009 was record year for these greedy bastards.  Maybe this time they scraped a little too much money off the top of our depressed economy, and maybe it was enough to draw the ire of of a populace that feels like it’s bearing too much of the tax load.  Will there be any gatherings in Washington D.C. to protest the special budget-busting tax treatment given to these billionaires?  We’ll have to wait and see what happens.

Hello readers.  Do you all remember this post from March of last year about how the richest of the rich in our country were taking the lion’s share of all the country’s income?  That post includes charts that shows just how much of the country’s growth in incomes from 2002 through 2006 the top earners kept for themselves.  You might want to go back and take a look at those charts, but be warned – they’re not pretty.

And 2007 wasn’t any prettier.  Some new IRS data was released this week for 2007, and guess what?  The rich got even richer!  From BusinessWeek:

Feb. 17 (Bloomberg) — The average income reported by the 400 highest-earning U.S. households grew to almost $345 million in 2007, up 31 percent from a year earlier, Internal Revenue Service statistics show.

The figures for 2007, the last year of an economic expansion, show that average income reported by the top 400 earners more than doubled from $131.1 million in 2001. That year, Congress adopted tax cuts urged by then-President George W. Bush that Democrats say disproportionately benefits the wealthy.

Each household in the top 400 of earners paid an average tax rate of 16.6 percent, the lowest since the agency began tracking the data in 1992, the statistics show. Their average effective tax rate was about half the 29.4 percent in 1993, the first year of President Bill Clinton’s administration, when taxes were increased.

The statistics underscore “two long-term trends: that income at the very top has exploded and their taxes have been cut dramatically,” said Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research group that supports increasing taxes on high-income individuals.

So next time you hear a Teabagger going all crazy about huge deficits and high taxes, you might want to recite a few facts from this article and some more from last year’s post about how the wealthy are grossly undertaxed.  Had they not received trillions in tax cuts from the Bush Republicans, we might even have collected enough to pay for the two wars that are still going on. 

For more about how today’s deficit problems are the result of the tax-law changes enacted under the Bush Administration, read this article on the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities website:

Some of President Obama’s critics and political opponents have launched a line of argument that Obama is mostly to blame for the large federal budget deficits projected for the coming decade and that his Administration’s role in swelling deficits and debt dwarfs that of the previous administration. [1] The critics cite what they present as proof: the fact that the deficit this year and in the years ahead will be much larger than the average deficits under President George W. Bush and that the increase in the national debt thus will be much larger under Obama than Bush.

But asserting that the deficits that lie ahead are primarily the result of policies enacted since President Obama took office is Orwellian. It stands truth on its head.

Republicans have never had any regard for the truth.  They’ve always twisted things upside down, inside out, and backwards; and they’ve almost always gotten away with it.  They get away with it because they own all the mainstream media outlets, or because the American people are uninformed and very gullible.  Or both.  This time, don’t let them get away with it. Spread some truth around.

Paul Krugman writes about the politicizing of federal budget deficits in today’s column:

To me — and I’m not alone in this — the sudden outbreak of deficit hysteria brings back memories of the groupthink that took hold during the run-up to the Iraq war.  Now, as then, dubious allegations, not backed by hard evidence, are being reported as if they have been established beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Now, as then, much of the political and media establishments have bought into the notion that we must take drastic action quickly, even though there hasn’t been any new information to justify this sudden urgency.  Now, as then, those who challenge the prevailing narrative, no matter how strong their case and no matter how solid their background, are being marginalized.

And fear-mongering on the deficit may end up doing as much harm as the fear-mongering on weapons of mass destruction.

This is the year that the Bush tax cuts expire, so the Republicans will use their scare tactics to convince people that raising taxes on the rich is the wrong thing to do, and they’ll probably even argue that we should lower the tax rates to stimulate economic growth, because everybody knows that more money in the pockets of billionaires creates jobs, right?  WRONG!

Obama has been making a point of placing blame for the deficit spending where it belongs – with the Republicans – and he has been pretty vocal about how their tax-cutting schemes have not worked in the past.  He has pointed out that they are the party that reduced federal revenue by trillions of dollars by cutting taxes for the super rich, and they are the party that handed a blank check to Bush for the funding two very long wars.  Obama should keep hammering on the Republicans about the deficit they created and he should be very firm with Reid and Pelosi about not extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

The Democrats in Congress should not be pressured by the deficit hysteria Krugman writes about.  Now is not the time to cut funding for government programs that are essential to stimulating the economy and getting us out of this recession.

President Obama must have read Paul Krugman’s January 18th column in which he wrote about how “Reagan spent his first few years in office continuing to run against Jimmy Carter,” which led into:

Mr. Obama could have done the same — with, I’d argue, considerably more justice. He could have pointed out, repeatedly, that the continuing troubles of America’s economy are the result of a financial crisis that developed under the Bush administration, and was at least in part the result of the Bush administration’s refusal to regulate the banks.

But he didn’t. Maybe he still dreams of bridging the partisan divide; maybe he fears the ire of pundits who consider blaming your predecessor for current problems uncouth — if you’re a Democrat. (It’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.) Whatever the reason, Mr. Obama has allowed the public to forget, with remarkable speed, that the economy’s troubles didn’t start on his watch.

Obama got the message:

Now, even as health care reform would reduce our deficit, it’s not enough to dig us out of a massive fiscal hole in which we find ourselves. It’s a challenge that makes all others that much harder to solve, and one that’s been subject to a lot of political posturing. So let me start the discussion of government spending by setting the record straight.

At the beginning of the last decade, the year 2000, America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts and an expensive prescription drug program. On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget. All this was before I walked in the door.

Now — just stating the facts. Now, if we had taken office in ordinary times, I would have liked nothing more than to start bringing down the deficit. But we took office amid a crisis. And our efforts to prevent a second depression have added another $1 trillion to our national debt. That, too, is a fact.

That’s a fact he needs to wield as a hammer far more often than he did during his first year in office.

I’ve been thinking about an article I read yesterday morning while skimming through the newspaper.  The story was about how the House voted to extend popular tax breaks like mortgage interest and sales-tax deductions.  It also mentioned how it was going increase the tax rate on income earned by hedge-fund managers from 15% to 35%. 

I’ve heard that hedge-fund managers made hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars every year, but I wasn’t sure how much, so I searched the internet and found this list.  The highest paid hedge fund manager in 2008 was James Harris Simon, who runs Renaissance Technologies Corporation.  He “earned” $2,500,000,000.  He paid a lesser income tax rate than I did and what I presume is much lesser than many of you readers did.  The next three highest paid managers on the list all earned over a billion dollars. 

Who is this guy and what does he do to make so much money?  He’s a mathematician.  He used to teach at MIT and Harvard, and he also did communicatioins research for the Defense Department.  He probably was compensated fairly well for those services, and his work was what we might call “productive.”  He educated people and he developed new mathematical theorems to improve science, and he probably helped the DOD in some way.

Over twenty years ago he figured out how to use his mathematical genius to develop “computer-based models to predict price changes in easily-traded financial instruments.”  Those models run on computers that buy and sell stocks and commodities all over the world.  His models must work extremely well if he can earn high profits for his investors and pay himself 2.5 billion dollars in one year. 

But what he’s doing is not “productive.”  It’s more like rape.  Instead of using his brilliant mind as a rocket scientist or an engineer of some sort, he’s basically using it to satisfy his lust for money by skimming billions of dollars off assets all around the world. 

And thanks to George W. Bush and his loyal cabal of Republican brown shirts, he has paid a lower tax rate than me since 2001.

What are the Republican congressmen saying about the House Bill?

Republicans called it a tax on investment.

“It is nothing short of a new tax on the various investments needed to start the new business and create economic growth,” said Rep. Dave Camp, the top Republican on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.

Republicans hate taxes.  They love cutting them, and because they had been in power so long since Reagan was elected, they’d cut taxes on obscenely rich people from 90% during the Eisenhower era to just 15% for Mr. Simons and company. 

This whole idea that it’s wrong for the top 1% of earners in our country to be taxed at very high rates is one of the many reasons are country is so far in the hole.  These people are taking all the money and paying much less income tax than if all that money was spread amongst people who paid normal income taxes.

What if Mr. Simons was taxed at a rate of 90% like he would have been during the Eisenhower era?  How much would he have left to live on each year?  $250,000,000.  Oh… that’s too bad.  And could our government use the $2,250,000,000 that it would have collected every year?  I think so.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  IT’S NOT WRONG TO TAX THE RICH!  Increasing the rate on hedge-fund managers from 15% to 35% is a step in the right direction, but they really ought to be paying well over 50%.

Ben Stein wrote a column about how it’s just not right to deny people health care but he’ll do it anyway to stop the uninsured people from mooching unearned luxuries from the rich.

A short while ago, I said in a public forum that while I did not doubt that in a society as rich as ours, no one should be denied health care, and that health care was a right, I still had some questions about the administration’s plan. This had been my feeling for all of my life, i.e., that health care was a right, and that if necessary, it must be paid for by the taxpayers if some people could not afford it.

Then, a letter showed up in my email from a man with the pen name of a famous Roman writer and thinker. The correspondent asked a few simple questions: Why should everyone be guaranteed free health care? And if we guaranteed to people goods and services they could not afford, where would it ever end? Where would it end short of assuming that everyone has a right to everyone else’s property and labor?

…

But do I want to have patients seeing masseuses? Do I want them to be able to see the same psychiatrists that billionaires see? What about a nose job? A plastic surgeon could make up a medical need for a nose job or even a face lift. Where does it end?

And that’s just the thin edge of the wedge. If a poor person deserves to have the same good things in life that a rich person has, does the poor person have a “right” to belong to a health club and spa? After all, a spa can make a person feel really good and stay toned. Why shouldn’t the taxpayers pay for a poor person to join a health club?

It’s a stupid argument built around fear:  If we give them basic health care, they won’t be happy!  They’ll come back asking for free massages, nose jobs, and an air conditioner in every room!  How dare they think they can get away with that.  Do rich people really want to take a turn down that path?   Certainly Not!  So it’s better to deny them explicit health care and tend to them in the Emergency Room, but only when things get really bad.

You see, Ben Stein feels awfully bad about them not having access to the care they need,  and he knows it’s the right thing to do to provide everyone with basic healthcare coverage, but he’s afraid that it won’t remain basic.

I can see where he’s coming from, I mean give everyone equal access to the basic services provided by the Police and Fire Departments, and the next thing you know they’re demanding their own Secret Service and armored vehicle convoys.   Give them food stamps so they can eat a little something while they are unemployed, and before you know it, there they are next to you at your favorite exclusive restaurant dining in their dirty denim. 

Ben Stein has seen where compassion leads, so when he arrives at the Universal Health Care fork in the road, he chooses the path that with the sign that reads “Status Quo,” because that path leads to where the rich stay healthy and get richer, and the rest of us get screwed.

I understand the theory of The Republican Road to Recovery (see below) and I know how it “works” in practice, because it’s been the economic doctrine of choice for most of the last thirty years.  The theory, also known as “supply side” and “trickle down,” is supposed to provide extra cash and capital to entrepreneurs who will in turn use their wealth to create jobs.  The people who get those jobs spend the money they earn on goods and services.  Their spending creates more demand for those goods and services, which in turn creates even more jobs.  The theory works great… on paper.  Kind of like last year’s Mariner team looked good… on paper.

The problem with the theory is that the very wealthy people at the top don’t practice what their party preaches.  They don’t “trickle” their new found wealth down onto the rest of us.  The rich have kept almost all of their tax savings for themselves.  And the jobs they have created over the past six to eight years have not raised the average American’s standard of living.  Average workers lost ground while those at the top saw their incomes nearly double.  The jobs that have been created are generating more and more wealth for owners of the companies, but most of the people they employ aren’t getting paid enough to keep up with the increased cost of living.

So the Republicans’ plan to give the super rich hundreds of billions of dollars in more tax cuts every year is about the worst thing we could do right now.  Historical data shows that their plan does not stimulate the economy.  All their recovery plan would do is provide billions of dollars to the already super-rich people who would use their tax savings to replenish their depleted investment portfolios.  Very little of “stimulus dollars” from tax cuts would go back into the economy. 

To reiterate what is in the post below, the average CEOs of Americas largest 800 companies would see a tax cut of $1,500,000 every year if the tax cuts outlined in The Republican Road to Recovery were implemented and Paul Ryan’s plan to eliminate the capital gains tax was enacted.  Now that’s what I call “redistribution of wealth,” but the redistributed dollars would be going to people who are already obscenely rich.

Here’s a chart I found a couple days ago on Open Left that shows how much bang for the buck different types of stimulus plans provide:

You can see from the chart that tax rebates work on about a one-to-one ratio.  People spend their lump sum payments, and it provides the economy with a quick shot in the arm.

The chart shows that permanent tax cuts are very ineffective at stimulating the economy and creating jobs.

You can see that government spending is very effective at stimulating the economy.  Why?  Because it creates both jobs and demand for things that people going through rough times, like many Americans are right now, would otherwise choose not to spend their money on.  It’s no surprise that the biggest bang for the buck comes from extending income support to people who lost their jobs for the obvious reason that they will spend every penny they get.  Infrastructure spending is also very effective because it creates employment and it improves productivity by rebuilding roads, bridges, schools, dams, water systems, electrical systems, etc. that must operate efficiently for our economy to prosper.

So my solution for stimulating the economy would be to extend unemployment benefits, and provide tax rebates for single payers making under $80,000 and joint filers making under $160,000.  To help pay for the government spending, I would immediately raise the top tax rate to 50% and then increase it again later if needed.  (That’s still a pretty good deal when you compare it to what the top rates were between 1932 and 1980.)   I would leave other tax rates as they are for now, but in two years I would raise the 28% bracket to 30% and the 33% bracket to 35%.

I would then dole out some money to the states for the next two years to help them with the demand for health and human services due to recession-caused unemployment.  I would also let them know they can’t rely on federal funds once things turn around in two years, so they better find a solution to their revenue problems between now and then. 

I would spend heavily on infrastructure repair, and I’d start right here Seattle!  I’d order up a construction crew to start boring the tunnel to replace the viaduct right away and another crew to reinforce weak points on the viaduct that will have to remain in place for the five or more years that it will take to complete the tunnel.  Then I’d hire a demo crew to tear the viaduct down.  And then I’d throw a huge party for the people of Seattle to celebrate the destruction of their city’s ugliest and noisiest road ever built.

There are projects like this all over the country.  There are old levees, old bridges, flooded roads, dilapidated schools…  We should spend the money to fix these things now.  The spending will create jobs and it will improve our productivity in the long run.

And that’s the HariKari stimulus recovery plan – Guaranteed to work.

Seriously, that’s what it says in the new GOP pamphlet released last week.

I scanned through it today and found the same tired old theories about how they are the party of low taxes and controlled spending.  It was really quite hilarious.  On page two I found how their plan:

CURBS SPENDING

•  
  • Limits the Federal Budget from Growing Faster than Family Budgets Instead of spending money on wasteful programs under the guise of “stimulus” and investments,” Republicans seek to ensure that the federal budget cannot grow faster than families’ ability to pay the bill.

And on page nine I found that the government would be collecting way less revenue because, you guessed it – they want more huge tax cuts for the rich!

Republicans propose a simple and fair tax code with a marginal tax rate for income up to $100,000 of 10 percent and 25 percent for any income thereafter, with a generous standard deduction and personal exemption.  Republicans would allow any individual or family satisfied with their current tax structure to continue to pay those rates, while dropping the two lowest rates by 5 percent to provide every taxpayer with a tax cut.  Republicans would also permanently fix the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) so that millions would no longer have to fear the possible imposition of a huge, new tax each year.

Yes, they want to CUT the top tax rates that are currently set at 35%, 33%, and 28% down to 25%.  That would give the super rich who currently pay 35% a 10% reduction on their income-tax bill, unless they fell into the category of those who are “satisfied with their current tax structure” who will choose “to continue to pay those rates.”  I wonder how many millionaires and billionaires would willingly pay more taxes than their greedhead associates.  Not many I bet…  

And as if the income-tax reduction isn’t enough, I’ve read they would also like to completely do away with the capital gains tax.  If they had their way, the very richest CEO’s among them would save an average of $1,500,000 every year, while the working class would see little to no reductions in their taxes. 

How much tax revenue would be lost under the Republican plan?  Citizens for Tax Justice says: 

The income tax proposals in the House GOP plan, which is presented as a fiscally responsible alternative to the President’s plan, would cost over $300 billion more than the Obama income tax cuts in 2011 alone.

So the Republican tax plan would reduce federal revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars a year that would be funneled into the pockets of their super-rich base and, you guessed it, the government wouldn’t be able to spend money on “wasteful” programs like schools, bridges, roads, alternative energy development, and health care to stimulate the economy.

Obama shouldn’t waste a nanosecond trying to reach out to these greedy vulgarians and their pissed-on tax plan.  He should do what he was elected to do:   Start changing things.  If I were him I’d start by telling everybody that the right thing to do at this time is to take back the hundreds of billions of dollars that the super rich pretty much stole from everybody else by RAISING their tax rate to at least 50% and using the extra revenue to rebuild our country.