Monday, January 09, 2006

Always Looking Out for the Little Guy

It's not just the president, you know. In the weekly updates I get from Sojourners, I spent November and December reading about the protests they were staging about the outside of Congress. They were worried the budget being passed would hurt the poor. They were right. Part of a short update from Mother Jones:

"Republicans intentionally designed the bill so that states would fail and hence be forced to pay fines to the federal government, which would in turn make it look like they were "trimming" the federal deficit. Clever trick, and the only downside is that, as the non-partisan CBO noted, "the number of children in deep poverty is likely to rise." But that's nothing to get too worked up about, no doubt.

"And finally, the Center notes that the budget deficit isn't really going to get any smaller after these cuts, because Congress also allowed two new tax cuts for high-income families to begin taking effect in January 2006. How skewed are these new cuts towards the upper brackets? The chart in the middle of this report is particularly telling: workers making $100,000 to $200,000 will receive an average tax cut of $25. Enough for a movie and popcorn, almost. Workers making $75,000 to $100,000 get a whole buck, on average. On the other hand, those Americans making over $1 million will receive an average tax cut of $19,234, so it's not all bad."

No comments: