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Props to Bernie Sanders.

If you don’t want to watch the entire 9 hours (and I don’t either) I think the first 12 minutes are worthwhile:

He states towards the end of this segment that the estate tax only applies to the richest .3% of Americans. I did not know that.

Here’s a bit more about the speech at the New York Times. Sanders Rails Against Tax Bill

The Washington Post has a great infographic comparing the Republican and Democratic tax plans.

Remember my last post about unequal distribution of wealth?

Not the clothing manufacturer…

the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

Let’s just get this straight. Who will really benefit from the tax cuts Republicans are pushing? I’ve got a 1 in a 1000 bet that it won’t be you.

The richest 0.1 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut of $61,000 from President Obama. They would get $370,000 from Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

So if the average american worker makes $30,000 / year. That $370,000 tax cut would allow the richest 0.1% percent to hire 12 personal assistants! Talk about an economic stimulus! The average income of the richest 0.1%? Nine-million dollars a year.

if Republicans are worried about long-term budget deficits, a reasonable concern, why are they insistent on two steps that nonpartisan economists say would worsen the deficits by more than $800 billion over a decade — cutting taxes for the most opulent, and repealing health care reform? What other programs would they cut to make up the lost $800 billion in revenue?

The quotes are from this article by Nicholas Kristof: Our Banana Republic

Yeah, I’m thinking about politics again…

“…the biggest problem in this country is…they’re big babies. I mean, people keep saying they don’t want any tax increases, but they don’t want to have their Medicare cut, they don’t want to have their Medicaid [cut] or they don’t want to have their Social Security touched an inch. Well, it’s about time someone tells them, you can’t have it, baby…You have to make a choice. And I fear that—and I always thought, you see, that that was the Conservative position. The Conservative is the Grinch who says no. And, in some ways, I think this in the long run, looking back in history, was Reagan’s greatest bad legacy, which is he tried to tell people you can have it all. We can’t have it all.”

–Andrew Sullivan on Fareed Zakaria

Let me just remind everyone that it was Clinton who last had a balanced budget and made debt payments.

If you really want to scare yourself, check out the Wikipedia entry on the United States Federal Budget

There are different ways to solve these problems. We have limited resources, and we have choices to make.

What are your priorities?