Think Progress tells us:
Last year, Gov. Chris Christie vetoed a bill to tax New Jersey's 16,000 millionaires. This year, he's cutting raising taxes on the working poor.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich wants to completely eliminate the estate tax for rich people. He also wants to cut 25 percent of funding for local schools, $427 million for nursing homes and $1 million for food banks.
Wingnut Gov. Paul LePage doesn't want 400 of the state's wealthiest estates to pay any taxes. He's proposing to raise property taxes on middle-class homeowners, cut funding for schools and raise the retirement age for government workers.
A former candidate for Maine governor nails what LePage and his cohorts are up to in a
Huffington Post column today. Rosa Scarcelli writes,
Like the situation in Wisconsin and around the country, this fight with Labor isn't about balancing budgets or reform.
It's about breaking one of the only forces -- unions -- willing to stand up to the special interests and big businesses.
And it's about funding massive tax cuts for multi-national corporations and millionaires on the backs of the middle class, teachers and state workers.
Scarcelli hints at an important distinction: between small businesses like her own, and unpatriotic multinational corporations that set up shop wherever they can find the cheapest labor. Scarcelli writes,
When you help working families, that money goes right back into local businesses, where it does the most good and helps the economy grow... you can't attack working, middle-class families to pay for tax cuts for the millionaires and expect people to just go along with it.
It's not right. And it's not good for the economy.
