(April) Fools!

The Republicans, with much pomp and circumstance, delivered their budget proposal to the American people today. The highlights of their plan include:

• Repealing the entire economic stimulus package.
• Rolling back the recently passed 8% spending boost in the budget for the current fiscal year.
• Transforming Medicare for Americans younger than 55 by allowing them to choose from a series of pre-approved private insurance plans, with premium payments from the federal government to insurers varying according to an individual's age, income and health.
• Extending all of former President Bush's tax cuts permanently.
• Suspending capital gains taxes through 2010.
• Repealing the estate tax.
• Dropping the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%.
• Increasing Department of Defense spending by $5 billion over Obama's budget.
• Creating a two-tiered tax code - 10% on the first $50,000 ($100,000 for joint filers) and 25% for everything above.

Most of this junk was lifted straight from McCain campaign stationery (at least the Republicans are learning to recycle and re-use), but one item from that list really got my attention. The Republicans proposed a tax increase!

That's right. This proposal would raise taxes on all single filers making between $50,001 and $178,001 and all joint filers making between $100,001 and $265,721 (against the 2008 tax brackets). Per the Republican Playbook, everyone above those top amounts either stays the same or gets a tax break.

How fitting that the middle class gets stuck paying the bill again while the wealthy and the corporations skate away with less responsibility under another Republican plan. Of course, the party line is that the wealthy and the corporate world create jobs. However, that is all theory and conjecture and the statistics don't back it up. When looking at national income shares from 2001 to 2006, wages and salaries have decreased from 55% to 51.6% while corporate profit has grown from 8.5% to 13.8%.

The Republicans didn't lose this past election because people want to pay more taxes. They lost because they are completely out of touch with the majority of the people in this country. We want solutions to problems that have been hampering us for decades and the cost of shifting the focus elsewhere right now would be much greater than the debt we will incur trying to find those solutions.