June 7, 2011
by Meteor Blades
As noted Monday in Tenth anniversary of disastrous Bush tax cuts, Americans have seen economic inequality rise sharply because of the tax cuts enacted 10 years ago today. According to an analysis by Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress, those cuts have caused immense amounts of other damage, too, while pouring cash into the hands of those who already had the lion's share.
By the reckoning of Citizens for Tax Justice, the cost of that massive upward transfer of wealth was $2.48 trillion by the end of 2010. And, of course, still climbing since the cuts remain in place as a consequence of a Faustian bargain made last December.
Using a tool provided by the National Priorities Project, Jilani came up with 10 alternatives that could have been paid for with the money those harmful tax cuts made unavailable:
That $2.5 trillion would have gone a long way toward repairing America's crumbling infrastructure, too, providing vast numbers of jobs in the process, an investment in our future.
In place of funding any one of these alternatives, however, millionaires got to lower their taxes by more than twice what the median American household earns in total income every year.
So, what are we hearing on the anniversary of this plutocratic miracle? Calls for still more tax cuts that would further reduce progressivity and hand over another chunk of money to the "job creators" who have done so well at that task with the previous cuts they have obtained.
We can see for ourselves what the cuts plainly have not done. They have, however, done what their promoters wanted them to do. The never-will-be-satisfied, cut-taxes-for-the-wealthy crowd is absolutely determined that the path to prosperity for the few in America will be strewn with economic catastrophe for the many. It's not a bug; it's a feature.