Yet in his newly proposed budget, now-governor Walker appears to have already broken this pledge. While the budget would lower taxes overall — it includes $83.3 million in tax cuts “primarily for businesses and investors” — it would make up for lost revenue by eliminating tax credits and exemptions that primarily benefit the poor and even some in the middle class.
Wisconsin’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau — the state’s equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office — finds that this would amount to a $49.9 million tax increase on people who receive these credits over the next two years:
Does this sound familiar? Well it should. This type of plan is basically what got past last week in the House, a plan authored by another Wisconsinite – Paul Ryan. Ryan’s plan calls for lowering the tax rate on the rich, while maintaining the current income levels of the federal government. He wants to do all that by also eliminating tax deductions for the poor and middle class.
If was really founded on the idea of the Boston Tea Party, then these plans should be the primary focus of their protest given the fact that it reminds us so much of the actual reason for the Boston Tea Party – the Tea Act. Sadly that isn’t the case though. The Tea Partiers, like so many Americans, have been sold this GOP pyramid scheme. They got people like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly talking about how great this is for America. But consider the fact that each of these people make more in a year than most people see in a lifetime. They are the beneficiaries of these plans. Of course they will do what they can to sell the plans. The savings alone makes it worth it!
Then we have the GOP looking at ways to save the big corporations even more money. They sell it to the American people with a totally false notion that the more money a business has, the more people they will hire. Of course those of us that can think on our own, without the help of some talking head, knows that isn’t the case. Corporations made record profits in 2010, yet they aren’t hiring. Their demand is still low, because a majority of this country doesn’t have the money to spend on good. No demand means no need for supply. No need for supply means no need to higher workers to make their product. It’s economics 101.
And the GOP plan doesn’t stop there. They want to reduce the tax burden on corporate America. That’s rather ironic when you have companies like GE making billions in profits and paying $0 in taxes, yet a small business owner, like me, has to scrape and save to pay taxes.
But raising or lowering the tax brackets won’t fix the problem. Our tax code is an absolute nightmare. Take someone struggling to make ends meet. Paying for an accountant can be a burden they can’t afford, so they end up doing their taxes on their own. They don’t know about all the hidden deductions in the tax code. They don’t have top educated tax lawyers working for them like G.E. Our tax code is a legislative way to keep 98% of this country where they are at and letting the top 2% thrive. It should be criminal, as it goes against everything this country was founded on.
We need a tax code that makes sense and one that can be understood by all citizens. This shouldn’t be an issue of right versus left, but rather right versus wrong. If you think that a single mother of two, earning less than $30,000 a year, paying more in taxes than a corporation making $14 billion in a year is right, then you are WRONG! That’s not the America any of us should want.