For those of you who'd missed it on TV today, this is but the mere preamble to Bernie Sanders' second orgasm of outrage of 2011. If you have the time and patience to read his entire speech, you can read it here.
There's not really much that a layman like me can add to this without descending into mere opinionating and commentary but let's break down some of the numbers of Sen. Sanders' proposed 13 part plan for reducing this supposedly runaway deficit.
1) Taking away Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%, which would save us $70 billion a year. It makes no fiscal or moral sense to continue to keep these silk-swaddled ticks on the links while there are still 5 unemployed Americans for every job and 45,000 Americans are dying in the US each year through lack of health insurance.
2) A 5.4% surtax on these same golf club-swinging parasites would put $38.3 billion more into the Treasury each year. As Sen. Sanders points out, 81% are all for the idea. Think about what a 5.4% surtax would be on a billion dollar private ocean liner like the ones these leeches are having built for them.
3) $58.2 billion a year would be slashed from the deficit if we but closed the tax loophole on corporations that outsource jobs overseas and move their HQs outside the jurisdiction of the IRS. Obama made a little noise about this on the campaign trail and a little more after he became the President but nothing about this in a long time. Time to put our money where his big mouth is.
4) We could shave a bit more off the deficit by simply ending tax breaks and subsidies for the petroleum racket, $4 billion annually, to be exact. At a time when much of the country is still paying up to $4 for a gallon of unleaded and blaming the skyrocketing oil prices on the Libyan invasion, it doesn't make sense to not bite into the white, pasty flesh of the fat fucks in places like Exxon's "God Pod" by taking away these incomprehensible tax breaks since they're not putting any real money and effort into R&D for alternative energy sources, their one biggest reason for the continuance of these tax breaks and subsidies.
5) Burning down tax shelters overseas would save taxpayers a whopping $100,000,000,000 a year (not ten years, a year). That fact alone shows how rotten and corrupt the current tax code is.
6) Bringing back the speculation fee on Wall Street, which was first enacted in 1914 and doubled under Hoover and helped help pay for the New Deal, would add another $10 billion a year to the national coffers. Sanders is actually proposing a minor tax of less than 1%, which you could probably find at any one time between the cushions in Goldman Sachs' waiting room.
7) Taxing capital gains and dividends the way they ought to be taxed in a nation not ruled by avaricious psychopaths would trim another $73 billion annually from our deficit. In case you don't know, capital gains tax had withered during the Bush years (2003, to be exact) to a mere 15%. Until Congressional Republicans cut capital gains taxes in 1978, the rate was 35%. Ah, the good old days.
8) Raising the estate tax on 0.3% of the richest estates would add another $7 billion to the Treasury each year. But Republicans would have you believe the Deeeeeaaaaattttthhhhhh Tax would affect everyone, if your definition of "everyone" excludes 99.7% of the population.
9) Waste at the Pentagon costs us about $10 billion a year. For instance, we still have a huge discretionary budget for arms programs to combat a USSR that hasn't existed in 20 years. Lord only knows how much more we can save by simply cutting off war profiteers like Blackwater, Halliburton and Bechtel, to name but a few.
10) Allowing Medicaid to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma would put another $15.7 billion into the budget every year. Plan D was one of the biggest Bag Over the Head con jobs in this nation's history. It's hard to imagine Billy Tauzin's beloved mother actually having to survive on the clusterfuck that is Medicare's Plan D.
11) $6.8 billion more annually could be trimmed from the deficit if we give everyone the option of signing up for the much more streamlined and cost-efficient Medicare, at least Medicare as we now know it and not the joke of a voucher system that cock heads like Paul Ryan want to turn it into.
12) We could make a cool $50 billion a year if we slap a fee on China every time they further imbalance the trade deficit by manipulating their currency. Of course, this will never come to pass since the Reds essentially own half the United States and would take out all their money in this country and call in the note for the trillions we've borrowed to float the deficit largely created by Bush's tax cuts.
13) $20 billion more could be saved if we just get rid of the corruption, waste and outright fraud in all our government agencies. Personally, I think this is a severely low estimate.
All told, Sen Sanders' modest and fair proposals would save the United States $473,000,000,000 each year, or nearly $5 trillion over the next decade.
It would be nice to see the Obama administration tout these numbers and force the Republicans to come up with arguments as to why these measures are unreasonable. It's getting kind of obvious to even hardheaded Republicans that liberals and Tea Baggers alike are finally finding common ground and are opposing the Ryan Spanish Inquisition of a budget and that any Republican or Democrat who supports even part of it will put them on the unemployment line along with 9.1% of us.
But of course, the Obama administration will completely ignore Sen. Sanders' powerful speech, his very real numbers and his commonsensical and very humane 13 Point Plan for deficit reduction because Tom Donohue and Andy Brietbart will say nasty things about him. Then again, it's said that the President, unlike his predecessor, can actually read so please sign Sen. Sanders' petition if you haven't already. 3000 people have already signed the letter since I began this post an hour ago.
