Economy

Bailing Out the Super Rich

The Republicans are deficit hawks. This, for example:

A Republican plan to extend tax cuts for the rich would add more than $36 billion to the federal deficit next year -- and transfer the bulk of that cash into the pockets of the nation's millionaires, according to a congressional analysis released Wednesday.

New data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation show that households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011, for an average tax cut per household of about $100,000.

$31 billion out of $36 billion. A bailout for millionaires -- added to the deficit and, subsequently, the national debt. And that's next year alone. $3.5 trillion over the next ten years. Yet making sure teachers, firefighters and police officers get to keep their jobs is somehow a "bailout" (the jobs bill, by the way, reduces the deficit, according to the CBO).

I don't know what's more shocking, the upside-down Republican logic and priorities or the naive idiots who buy it.