Dennis talks about tax cuts
From a speech on March 18, 2004, in Juneau, Alaska:
The tax cuts that the President gave, that amount to $87 billion dollars, with breaks for people in the top bracket - if you look at the table, you can see the middle class got a small amount of money. People know it's not worth much, but they're not about to turn it down.
The problem is any meaningful tax reform is very difficult now because we are looking at a budget deficit of over $500 billion dollars. This is mind boggling - you know when President Clinton left office, he had about a $226 billion dollar surplus. We went from a $226 billion dollar surplus to a $521 billion dollar deficit in a period of a few years.
How did that happen? The tax cuts that went to the wealthiest Americans, $200 billion dollars for the war in Iraq, and counting - the Pentagon budget expanding rapidly. The treasury of this nation is being wasted and the wealth is accelerating to the top. When we stabilize the budget again, the tax structure ought to be progressive, and there ought to be relief for the people in the middle, whether it's earned income tax credit, increasing that, expanding what can be deducted.
You talk about a strategy, you're right, and I'll tell you what I think the strategy is. I think this is a radical effort to try to destroy government. You take all the resources away, so government can't function. So you can't have veterans' programs, you can't have Medicare, they tried to attack Social Security, it's like the privatization of everything. It's like everything's for sale, and everything's privatize.
This administration wants to privatize Medicare. They want to privatize Social Security. They want to privative the post office. They want to privatize defense finance administration. Through the WTO, they are ready to advance privatization of all municipal services in this country. There has to be a public sphere, there has to be something that you know is the common wealth, but we're losing it. This idea of government of the people implies that there's some commonality of services that we have. They want to privatize education.
How can they do this? Simple, just starve everything, give all the money away. Just give it away for war, and give it away in tax cuts, and people say "Oh my God," states don't have any money for education, college tuition goes up, states don't have any money for education, school districts get consolidated, states don't have any money for education, they go to tax payers for levies.
This is happening all over America, because of this - I think a very radical view - of trying to demolish government, period. So that everything's run by private sector and everything's for profit.
Subscribe to this blog's feed