Priorities
The Center for American Progress has put together a great infographic putting into context the policy choices at hand in an economic environment where we have a government hell bent on putting taxpayer dollars into the pockets of wealthy people and corporations — at the expense of the people who have been hurt the most by current economic conditions:
The author here makes the case that the budget process needs to be more open and accountable so that Americans can see this kind of thing first hand. I suspect that this data wasn’t all that difficult to find, but with very few exceptions, you won’t find much from the media digging in to nitty gritty of budgets to show the choices being made. But it *should* make people very mad that these kinds of tax breaks for wealthy corporations and people are a much unneeded bailout of folks who aren’t using this money to invest in very many new jobs yet.
Of course, the entire analysis presumes that the government has the right to the money that the so-called “tax breaks” allegedly “cost” the government — a position that I am not willing to concede.
If one starts with the assumption that the government has no right to any part of anyone’s money and then justify the taking of a portion of someone’s money in the form of taxes, it certainly would appear that taxes and spending are both too high.
The difference, of course, is that I believe that the coercive power of government to extract a portion of an individual’s wealth should be used sparingly, while you believe that we are all serfs who should be grateful for the crumbs left to us by our overlords when they decide that they know how to allocate our earnings better than we do.