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Tax Cut

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Laverne Chadderdon

Published: January 25, 2008

The Bush administration and the Republican Congress of 2001 buried the economy with the Alternative Minimum Tax. The first thing they did was to ditch pay-as-you-go to make the Medicare private prescription plan seem affordable in 2003. Shortly after massive tax breaks were given to oil and pharmaceutical companies.

According to OMB.org: "Those tax cuts were designed to increase the amount of taxes paid through the A.M.T. The tax policy center, which has written extensively about A.M.T., notes that tax cuts enacted between 200l-2006 have more than doubled the projected share of tax payers who will face the A.M.T. in 2010 (from 16 to 33.6 percent).

In fact the degree to which Bush and his tax cut supporters relied on the concealed tax to make his tax cuts appear more affordable, is betrayed by the fact that, "if current tax law is extended beyond its 2010 sunset date, it will cost the Treasury more to repeal the A.M.T. than it would to repeal the regular income tax."

How do you do that without piling on more debt? It's simple. You raise the ceiling debt again – five times since Bush took office. The Republicans and Bush enacted the Medicare drug benefit in 2003, with no way to pay for it. Massive debt doesn't matter when you can just increase the limit on the national credit card at will and leave a ten trillion dollar national debt for someone else to pay.

The tax deficit isn't legal by congressional standards; it also shows a lack of moral fiber in the American character, leadership and responsibility. More than that, it's not right if we are to be a morally responsible people.

With Congress now running for president I have a question: What can your "new" government do with no money left in the Treasury? The self-serving people in Congress "running" for the presidency should take the time to stop running away from their duty, because if they are elected again, what can a government govern with no money in the till?

Laverne Chadderdon
Sebring

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