Interests of wealthy protected yet again

Vernos Branco, Las Vegas

Thursday, Dec. 9, 2010 | 2:05 a.m.

In this past election cycle, the Republican/Tea Party ran on being fiscally conservative. I have yet to hear what actions they will take to lower our debt and deficit. Even making huge cuts in the Medicare prescription subsidy, entitlement programs, military spending and the two wars we’re in will not help without also increasing revenue by taxing all Americans. What I find ironic and amusing is the Tea Party. If massive cuts are made to entitlement programs, they, the Tea Party members, will also be affected. I wonder if that occurred to them when they were screaming, “I want my country back!”

The right-wing refrain, “Tax cuts will create jobs,” is moot. There is absolutely no evidence that cutting taxes in 2001 and 2003 created jobs. Yet when it comes to raw data, only the wealthy gained over the past 10 years. Money earned by the wealthiest isn’t being used for job creation; it is invested in overseas projects instead.

Economists Peter Orszag (who this year resigned as the Obama administration’s director of Office of Management and Budget) and William Gale, writing in 2005, described the Bush tax cuts as reverse government redistribution of wealth, shifting “the burden of taxation away from upper-income, capital-owning households and toward the wage-earning households of the lower and middle classes.”

Are these politicians in Washington, D.C., ready to do the right thing? So far they’ve done nothing but protect the corporations and the wealthiest of us.