An elderly couple in Texas gets $740 per month in Social Security benefits. Anti-seizure medications cost them more than $500 per month. Medicare doesn’t cover prescription drugs. Medicaid, the joint federal and state program for the poor, won’t pay for them either. Under Texas Medicaid rules, the couple makes too much money to qualify.
In last year’s campaign, George W. Bush promised three things: a prescription drug benefit, a Social Security fix and a tax cut. He squandered so much revenue fulfilling the third pledge that the first two are now out of reach. Last January, the Congressional Budget Office predicted a $5 trillion surplus for the coming decade.
In one year, $3 trillion of that has fully evaporated, and CBO figures show that more than half of the lost surplus will result from the long-term effects of Bush’s tax cut package.
Now he wants more. Bush has pounded Democrats for refusing to pass his economic stimulus bill. They refuse for good reason: The only thing Bush’s plan is meant to stimulate is the check-writing fingers of rich donors, like the Enron officials who kicked in $100,000 apiece to join his “Pioneers.”
The details of Bush’s stimulus package expose their real purpose. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, 55 percent of the tax benefits from the accelerated cuts Bush proposes would go to the top 1 percent of tax filers – those with incomes over $384,000. More than 80 percent would go to the top 10 percent of filers, but a married couple with two children and an income under $66,550 would get no tax cut whatsoever.
Not only is Bush’s stimulus plan unjust, it’s bad policy. Three-quarters of his proposed tax cuts come after fiscal 2002 – an odd way to fight a downturn that is expected to end this year. And under Bush’s plan, the money goes to people who have disposable cash as it is.
After adjusting for inflation, after-tax incomes of the richest 1 percent of Americans grew by $414,000 between 1979 and 1997, while after-tax income for the poorest ten percent actually fell.
We have the widest gap between rich and poor since WWII, and federal tax policy has made things worse. In 1979, the richest 1 percent paid 37 percent of their incomes in federal taxes. By 1997, that rate had fallen to 32.7 percent. Bush has now eased millionaires’ burdens with cuts that will average $46,000 apiece for the top 1 percent, compared to $600 for the middle fifth of taxpayers and $70 for the bottom fifth.
In that same time span, the poor got poorer. Measuring poverty by a standard that includes subsidies and benefits, the average poor person fell $2,059 below the poverty line in 1979 and $2,527 below the poverty line in 2000. More than half of all African-American children live in poverty. And despite all the hoopla about welfare reform, a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that even during the 1995-99 boom years, the poverty rate among single mothers didn’t budge.
For those who say the rich deserve every billion they can get, I beg to differ. Bill Gates sells software. He delivers his software on interstate highways that taxpayers spent hundreds of billions to build and maintain. He sells his software in 50 states where taxpayer-supported legal systems assure that he can collect payment. Talent and initiative deserve their due, but without society’s help, Gates would be trading abacus beads for blueberries.
In 1996, the Republican Congress sent Bill Clinton a welfare reform bill that attacked a complicated social problem with a meat-ax. They sent the bill three times, and the third time, he signed it. When I saw 5-year-old kids with nowhere to go, I remembered that Newt Gingrich had decided to teach the little bastards a sense of responsibility.
John Kennedy once spoke of America facing a “long twilight struggle.” He was right. We do. But the struggle that concerns me isn’t a struggle with communism, or even terrorism – one collapsed, and the other we may rein in. I am not confident that we can defeat the more insidious threat that leaders like Bush, Tom DeLay and Trent Lott personify – the corrosive power of ignorance and greed.
David Scott is a graduate student in English. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
