Thanks for calling attention to this. Besides the loss of much needed income to cover war expenses, I see the increased disparity of ultra rich and the lower classes as being bad for domestic security. Of course, there's the moral issue too. Perhaps I'm just naive and hopelessly not-very-rich, but I just don't get what people do with that much money. It's kind of ludicrous at a certain point--how much stuff can you buy before it becomes useless?

Clemons is incredibly naive about the Iran prospects. W is replaying exactly the same drumbeat as occured before the Iraq invasion. The (laughingly-referred-to-as) diplomacy, involving "our European friends" is being sabotaged by the U.S. at every turn, just as they tried to sabotage the weapons inspections in Iraq. Dust off & restock your bomb shelters.

Of Course Bush has already decided to attack Iran. Surely there is no doubt about this.
The only question is whether he can be stopped.

Back to taxation--

Al Gore was telling people that this would happen during the 2000 campaign. He got some traction with it, but not quite enough.

I remember hearing David Brooks (it would be that guy) saying that 17 percent of Americans think they are in the top 1 percent of incomes currently, with another, larger, percentage thinking they'll arrive there one day.

Brooks thought this was dandy, but it leads to perverse tax policies. Repealing the estate tax is another example. Many people think their estates would be taxable when they will be nowhere near that level under pre-Bush law.

What will it take to inject a dose of reality? A serious economic downturn, I'm afraid.

How is it that when the super rich get a tax cut, they invest it and thus create jobs, but when the less fortunate get some green, they spend it and, what, create jobs?

Ah.... Taxation.

Charlie Rangel is the last person I ever want to hear speak on taxes. Hes a tax and spend liberal if I ever saw one.

I love how people think throwing a few hundred billion dollars at Social Security eliminates the problem.

The problem is not in funding, but in formula and structure. This country from federal to state, cannot continue to hand out the excessive pension and health insurance plans it has, they need to end, the formula needs to be reworked, and a large percentage of workers need to contribute more than a fair share of their own earnings towards insurance costs.

We cant solve things by throwing money at them, the tax system, social security, pension, and healthcare systems all need to be revamped significantly and extensively. Otherwise, Id say within the next 15-20 yrs, there will be a major economic stagnation or collapse not seen since the Great Depression.

Funny, JS, your response to the article about the so-called tax cuts going disproportionately to the top 0.1% says nothing on that topic - you instead just change the topic to something else.

I say so-called tax cuts because Bush has never passed a dollar of a tax cut.

A tax cut is when you reduced someone's taxes by a dollar, and cut spending by a dollar to match.

Borrowing a dollar from China, which you then owe back plus interest, to give you a dollar is not a 'tax cut'. It's 'tax borrowing', and it's fiscally bad.

But running up the credit card for 'free' goodies is needed politically to cover his theft.

Well JS,
If Charles Rangel is a "tax and spend liberal." Doesn't that make President Bush a "cut taxes and spend even more conservative?" And since our Congress is also led by "conservatives," doesn't this mean we have a "cut taxes and spend even more" Congress?
And tell me, what exactly is "conservative" about that?
I'm a little fuzzy about what "conservative" really means anymore.

Hopefully the lightweights who voted for Bush will finally believe that there is a class war. And that the rightwingers are in the lead on this redistribution of the wealth, and that there is no such thing as "trickle down."