The 51 Deficit Hawks Who Want to Hand $442 Billion to Rich People

It's bad enough that Senate repugs and the Bayh-partisan DINOs oppose a plan to save the economy with job-producing government spending on the ground that it increases the deficit. They're just exposing their inability to grasp basic macroeconomics and the lessons of the Great Depression.

But when those same supposed hawks who clutch their pearls and faint at the idea of $775 billion in stimulus turn right around and vote to hand more than half that amount in non-productive tax breaks to people inheriting more than $5 million, you know this has nothing to do with hating deficits.

Spending money on things we need tends to be a better stimulus than tax cuts. Tax cuts for the poor and middle class tend to be better stimuli than tax cuts for the rich. But if, for some unfathomable reason, we want to give tax cuts to the rich right now, why on earth do it by cutting the estate tax?

There's a reasonable argument for cutting taxes on capital gains and income: namely, that they increase incentives to work and invest. I think this argument is outweighed by other considerations, but it does exist. But what, exactly, is the argument for cutting the estate tax? People who inherit money have not earned it. They are not doing something that we want to reward, like working; they just happened to be the heirs of rich people.

No surprise that every single Senate repug, including Kentucky's own men of the people Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell, voted to bust the budget to hand $446 billion of your tax dollars over to people with too much money already.

But they were jointed by ten DINOs - the same members of Evan Bayh's anti-Obama group of traitors so determined to slash the president's pro-growth budget.

Read the list of "aye" votes carefully and memorize the "Democrats" who love obscenely rich people, love deficits that arise from handing the tax dollars of working people over to obscenely rich people, and hate you and all your working-class friends who work two jobs at subhuman wages with no benefits in order to pay the taxes that these DINOs are handing over to their real friends, the obscenely wealthy.

Note that one of these Democratic traitors is Montana's Jon Tester, who won his seat by a hair in 2006 only because real progressives all over the country sent him their hard-earned money. We supported Tester because although he was a classic Western conservative, he claimed to be an economic populist. He lied.

Remember Tester, and Bayh, and former progressive darling Patty Murray of Washington, and all the rest the next time some mealy-mouthed Broderist starts bleating about how repug-fellating DINOs are still Democrats and it's so very, very tacky to attack them.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....