One may legitimately ask, why does Romney hate the middle class?
For Romney’s tax plan to work, with its promise to be “revenue neutral,” he has to find big money somewhere to make up for the rate cuts. The mortgage interest deduction is big money, and today there is a tea leaf for us to read. Bloomberg:Republican Platform Won’t Protect Mortgage Tax Deduction,
Republican platform drafters refused to put their party on record for preserving the mortgage- interest deduction, giving Mitt Romney more flexibility to promote his plan to lower tax rates paid by corporations and the wealthiest Americans without increasing the federal debt.
… Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has proposed lowering corporate and individual income-tax rates and eliminating some tax breaks, without specifying which ones. A Romney campaign adviser, former Senator Jim Talent of Missouri, urged delegates to reject the mortgage-interest plank to avoid muddying the call for a simpler tax system.
Somehow, firing people with jobs became the Republican strategy for job creation. People who taught our children; policed our streets; picked up our garbage; put out our fires; built and maintained our parks, libraries, and roads for a living wage became the scapegoat for the impoverishment the private sector imposed on workers. Instead of organizing to win back their own living wages and lost benefits, people were convinced that taking away those of government workers would somehow make them better off. Divide and conquer politics. The politics of fear, hate, greed, envy and spite. The race to the bottom. Orchestrated by plutocrats, executed by conservatives, allowed by Democrats.
I’m not sure they were allowed to keep all of the hostages. In understanding what happened, some of us escaped.
robertreich:
With the hostage crisis behind him, the President is now ready to talk about the nation’s real problem.
Nine paragraphs into his remarks today announcing the nation has paid most of the ransom the radical right demanded as a condition for maintaining the full faith and credit of the United States…
America is not broke. Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe, so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.
Right now, this afternoon, just 400 Americans—400—have more wealth than half of all Americans combined. Let me say that again. And please, someone in the mainstream media, just repeat this fact once. We’re not greedy; we’ll be happy to hear it just once. Four hundred obscenely wealthy individuals, 400 little Mubaraks, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of 2008, now have more cash, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined.
…That fraction of one percent of Americans who now earn as much as the bottom 120 million Americans includes the top executives of giant corporations and those Wall Street hedge funds and private equity managers who constitute Citigroup’s “plutonomy” are buying our democracy and they’re doing it in secret.
That’s because early this year the five reactionary members of the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are “persons” with the right to speak during elections by funding ads like those now flooding the airwaves. It was the work of legal fabulists. Corporations are not people; they are legal fictions, creatures of the state, born not of the womb, not of flesh and blood. They’re not permitted to vote. They don’t bear arms (except for the nuclear bombs they can now drop on a congressional race without anyone knowing where it came from.) Yet thanks to five activist conservative judges they have the privilege of “personhood” to “speak” – and not in their own voice, mind you, but as ventriloquists, through hired puppets.
