The super rich pay a lot less taxes than they did a couple of decades ago...The Internal Revenue Service tracks the tax returns with the 400 highest adjusted gross incomes each year. The average income on those returns in 2007, the latest year for IRS data, was nearly $345 million. Their average federal income tax rate was 17 percent, down from 26 percent in 1992.And that's just fine with extremist Republicans. They're trying to give the super-rich even more tax breaks while cutting services and raising taxes for everyone else.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a terrific column about our Reverse Robin Hoods:
Rep. Paul Ryan's proposed budget overhaul called for slashing more than $6 trillion out of Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and other programs in the coming decade. And just to make sure there was no spare cash hanging around to tempt the do-gooders, it also would have cut taxes for the richest individuals and corporations.
So it seems the party's new motto is starve the hungry, dump the aged and screw the sick.
Oh, and abandon poor women, too. Mr. Ryan would have left 17 million of them without life-saving gynecological care by defunding Planned Parenthood, which provides cancer screening, family planning, H.I.V. counseling and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. It also performs abortions -- the GOP's perennial scapegoat -- which make up 3 percent of its services and are not covered by any public money.
Why Republicans would want to come across as preening bullies kicking fellow Americans while they're down, only they can say.
