Here’s another screen shot from MSNBC. The US debt ceiling deal ended up containing ONLY cuts. (Note that Pres. Obama wanted 25% revenue and the Republicans at one point was OK with 15% !).
Now check out the individual federal income tax tables I posted (source www.taxfoundation.org). A person earning $100,000 in 1962 had a marginal tax rate of 89% (!), in 1979 it was 68%, in 1985 it was 50%, and in 2011 it is 28%. Corporations? Supposed to pay 35% taxes (granted, one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world). But take General Electric. Reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion in 2010, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States. Its American tax bill? Zero. Google, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and many other companies pay very little if any corporate taxes.
So now a supercomittee of 12 members has 5 months to come up with a proposal that will close the budget gap by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. If they fail, across-the-board cuts kick in automatically (from what I can tell in discretionary spending only, not in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security). But those automatic cuts include education, the environment, food safety, research, infrastructure projects and : the military. So the defense budget already gets cut right now by $350 billion and could get cut by another $500 billion over the next 10 years. (Time to stop making war?). A dispute between House Republicans and Senate Democrats has already forced the Federal Aviation Administration to suspend construction projects at airports around the country, idling 70,000 workers. Does all of this make any sense?
