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Subject: Tax cuts for the rich bankrupted America
Dear Senator ,
I have followed with interest your opposition
to President Obama’s plan to restart the economy in this country.
While there are parts of his plan which I question,
there must also be parts that would have some beneficial effect.
For the past 30 years, since the election of Ronald
Reagan, we have been fed the conservative dogma that reducing
taxes on corporations and on the very wealthy
would result in the creation of multitudes of jobs and a vibrant and
healthy economy. The illusion of prosperity has
been fleeting. Rather than creating jobs, there has been created a
huge speculative stock market bubble, which,
having recently burst, has left a few very greedy insiders obscenely
wealthy, and most of the rest of us struggling
to survive financially.
Similarly, the Reagan dogma of unfettered, de-regulated,
unsupervised markets has led to the financial crisis in the
housing and banking industry. Speculators were
allowed to create esoteric financial instruments which were little
more than legalized gambling, and gave banking
executives and hedge fund managers a license to steal. These people
are guilty of economic terrorism. Rather than
rewarding them with retention bonuses and golden parachutes, as the
Bush/Paulson bailout package did, they should
be impoverished, or jailed, or both.
Additionally, there was created a huge speculative
market, trading in energy futures, which drove the price of oil
to $150/bbl and the price of gasoline above $4/gal.
This exorbitant increase in energy prices, accompanied by
price increases across the economy had an adverse
effect on working people all over the country.
Thirty years of Reagan’s supply-side, trickle-down
economics has proven a fraud and a sham and has resulted in
the greatest economic collapse since the Great
Depression. Millions have lost jobs; millions more have lost their
homes. All were deceived by the lie that concentrating
enough wealth in a few hands would result in prosperity
for all. The failure of supply-side economics
is that wealth has been concentrated in the hands of a few, stifling
consumption, which constitutes 70% of the American
economy.
Frankly, I don’t see how President Obama’s economic
stimulus package can be paid for without returning tax rates
on the wealthy and on income made in stock market
and other speculative ventures to the levels that existed in the
decades between 1950 and 1980. Rather than saddling
future generations of taxpayers with more massive amounts
of debt, I urge you to call on those who have
benefitted most from Reagan’s economic policies to turn loose of the
ever-increasing wealth they have been hoarding,
and actually create those middle class jobs which were promised.
****************************************************************
At least they heard it from me!
Bill in Versailles KY
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