Deficit scare: A Trojan horse loaded with greedy CEOs

As blogger Atrios reminds us,

...no one cares about the deficit. The people who claim to most care about it least. They have an agenda - giving more of your money to rich people - and the deficit is the excuse.

The Institute for Policy Studies explains exactly how the scam works. More than 80 looters and plunderers noble CEOs are proposing a compromise that they say would save the United States from financial ruin. They formed a group called "Fix the Debt" and came up with a "compromise." That compromise includes $134 billion in potential tax windfalls for them. The cost of those windfalls would shift to the poor and elderly.

Some other key findings:

• The CEOs backing Fix the Debt personally received a combined total of $41 million in savings last year thanks to the Bush-era tax cuts. The top CEO beneficiary of the Bush tax cuts in 2011, Leon Black of Apollo Global Management, saved $9.9 million on the Bush tax cuts. The private equity fund leader reaped $215 million in taxable income last year just from vested stock.
• Of the 63 Fix the Debt CEOs at publicly held firms, 24 received more in compensation last year than their corporations paid in federal corporate income taxes. All but six of these firms reported U.S. profits last year.

Report co-author Scott Klinger wrote:

In reality, the campaign is a Trojan horse concealing massive corporate tax breaks that would make our debt situation much worse.

How noble.