This column is dead on. We are lacking shame as a nation, and I am sorry to say it, but Republicans have lost every vestige of it. Supporting this budget and tax policies are indefensible, and I think you know it. That is why you focus on abortion and gays. You know that if we talk about the morality of this budget, you will lower your head.
Maybe it is time to actually act on your faith. Call your senator and congressperson. Tell them that you are a Republican voter and you want to see those tax cuts reversed. Tell them that you support this president and this war and you think that a true conservative would not ask the poor and working class to pay for it.
anyway, read below on the shame of a nation...
"Charlie Richardson, co-founder of Military Families Speak Out, is opposed to the war and advocates bringing home the troops. 'It’s disgusting that they are asking families like mine to make enormous sacrifices while they give tax cuts to billionaires,' said Richardson. 'We’re having bake sales to buy Kevlar bulletproof vests to keep our kids alive in a war that never should have begun. Whatever happened to shared sacrifice?'
People on opposite sides of the Iraq war are shocked by the stunning inequality of sacrifice during this military engagement. Never in the history of U.S. warfare has Congress pushed tax cuts, let alone permanent tax cuts for the very wealthy. Historically, the opposite has been true: Wealth has been 'conscripted,' in the form of progressive income and estate taxes, to at least symbolize that everyone is contributing in some way.
THE U.S. HISTORY of progressive taxation is wound together with mobilizations for war. The first federal tax on wealth was levied in 1797, as our country was faced with the escalating costs of responding to French attacks on American shipping.
During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that national domestic unity against Hitler depended on a sense of shared sacrifice by both Rockefeller and Rosie the Riveter. Top income rates were boosted, and the estate tax was increased so that fortunes exceeding $50 million would be taxed at the 70-percent rate. FDR spoke out boldly against war profiteering, saying, 'I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.'
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Congress is now debating a budget that masks the costs of the war, continues massive tax cuts for the rich, and attempts to reduce the deficit with massive budget cuts. 'The cuts in veterans’ services are bad enough,' observed Richardson. 'But they are also cutting higher education spending, which forces poor and middle income kids graduating from high school to look to the military as one of the few options for an affordable education or job with health insurance.'
The current tolerance for this inequality of sacrifice is a moral indictment of America’s ruling and wealthy elites. How can families in the richest 1 percent accept millions of dollars in tax cuts at a time when other families are doing fundraisers to buy bulletproof vests for their children in the line of fire? How can wealthy families advocate for the abolition of the inheritance tax when other people’s children, in Iraq and the United States, are wounded and maimed for life?
With all this talk of budget gaps, the biggest deficit among our nation’s political leaders appears to be in shame."
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