The Progressive Path To Economic Recovery

[Dan Moadus]

Apparently, Dennis didn't watch this video that demonstrates vividly that , instead of raising taxes on the wealthy,you could take all their money, and not even come close to solving our nation's debt crisis.  http://tiny.cc/myqqr

[irishbobcat]

THE PROGRESSIVE PATH:   While conservatives seem intent on blaming the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the middle class for deficits that they did not primarily cause, progressives are promoting plans that tackle the deficit by promoting fair sacrifice and responsibility. The CAP report "The First Step: A Progressive Plan for Meaningful Deficit Reduction" lays out a number of progressive deficit reduction steps that rely equally on raising revenues and cutting spending. It calls for implementing a graduated surtax on adjusted gross income for households making more than $1,000,000 a year, imposing a $5 per barrel fee on imported oil, and other measures that, when combined with spending cuts like wasteful tax expenditures, subsidies for Big Oil, a downsized defense budget more appropriate to our needs, and other measures, would yield single-year deficit reduction of $255 billion. This plan would stabilize the debt situation by 2015. This plan would stabilize the budget situation by 2015. Meanwhile, the Congressional Progress ive Cauc us (CPC) has put out its own budget proposal, called "The People's Budget," which if enacted would reach primary balance in 2014 and result in a budget surplus by 2021. The major proposals within the budget include, but are not limited to, enacting a millionaire's tax, initiating a progressive estate tax, ending corporate welfare for the dirty fuels industry, reining in the defense budget, and enacting a public option in the health care system as well as authorizing Medicare to negotiate with drug companies for lower drug prices. Economist and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs notes that the CPC budget is a "truly centrist initiative," if judged by American public opinion. Progressive economist Dean Baker has proposed allowing Medicare beneficiaries to seek care overseas, taking advantage of cheaper health care systems. Baker estimates that if fifty percent of Medicare beneficiaries opted for this globalized option, then taxpayers would save more than  $40 billion a year by 2020. Additionally, there are numerous proposals for a financial transactions tax -- which would ask that some of the very same banks that caused the global financial crisis would be responsible for helping us pay for it. A Dean Baker analysis of these plans finds that a "0.25 percent tax on trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other Wall Street financial instruments...would easily raise between $50 billion and $150 billion annually," while doing little to actually harm economic productivity. While there is healthy debate among progressives about these ideas, they make one thing clear: there is a way to reduce long -term de ficits that does not have to unduly harm Main Street America and that asks for fair sacrifice that includes the richest among us.