Bush’s Budget Priorities: Fund War, Provide Tax Breaks for the Rich, Deprive the Poor [View All]

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From the Progressive:


Bush’s Budget Priorities: Fund War, Provide Tax Breaks for the Rich, Deprive the Poor
By Matthew Rothschild
February 6, 2007

You can see Bush’s skewed priorities when you examine his proposed budget.

He wants to spend $481 billion on the Pentagon next year, and that doesn’t even include the $145 billion he is requesting for his little adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the objective of the Project for a New American Century to get Pentagon spending up to $500 billion a year. With this budget request, it now will stand at $626 billion. And that doesn’t even include the tens of billions of dollars that the Department of Energy spends on nuclear weapons.

Bush’s budget would give people with incomes of more than $1 million an average tax cut of $162,000 a year by 2012, while those in the middle fifth of the income scale would get a mere $840 a year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Here’s another way of looking at the lopsided distribution of tax benefits: The top 1 percent would enjoy 31 percent of the tax cuts, the bottom 40 percent just 4 percent, the center points out.

That’s redistribution of income, from bottom to top.

Meantime, Bush is proposing cutting aid to low-income people struggling to pay high winter heating bills. Here in the Upper Midwest, as well as New England, we’re in the deep freeze now, and we’re feeling the pinch of high heating bills already. People need relief from these bills, and Bush wants to take it away. .....(more)

The rest of the piece is at: http://www.progressive.org/node/4508