Citizens for Tax Justice point out what I was saying just the other day: We only hear all this crying and moaning about the deficit when it's something for regular working people, and not a powerful lobby. And of course, the Republican'ts are right out there in front of the Hypocrisy Parade:
And yet, many of the lawmakers who argue that the health care reform legislation is “too costly” are the same lawmakers who supported the Bush tax cuts.
Their own voting record demonstrates that health care reform is not a matter of costs, but a matter of priorities.
It’s difficult to see how the Bush tax cuts could provide us with two and a half times the benefits of health care reform. In 2010, when all the Bush tax cuts are finally phased in, a staggering 52.5 percent of the benefits will go to the richest 5 percent of taxpayers.
President Bush and his supporters argued that these high-income tax cuts would benefit everybody because they would unleash investment that would spark widespread economic prosperity. There seems to be no evidence of this, particularly given the collapse of the economy at the end of the Bush years.
The tax legislation enacted under President George W. Bush from 2001 through 2006 will cost $2.48
trillion over the 2001-2010 period.
This includes the revenue loss of $2.11 trillion that results directly from the Bush tax cuts as well as the $379 billion in additional interest payments on the national debt that we must make since the tax cuts were deficit-financed.
<...> Over the upcoming decade (2010-2019), the costs of the health care proposals approved by three committees in the U.S. House of Representatives are projected to be around $1 trillion. (One committee trimmed the costs of its health care bill below that amount, but an official estimate of the cost reductions was not available at the time of this writing.)
The chairmen of the three House committees have explicitly stated that their goal is a final bill that
is deficit-neutral in the decade following enactment.
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READ MORE:
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/study-bush-tax-cuts-cost-more-twice-m