Distorted National Policy Priorities that Need to be Challenged

Today's front-page article in the New York Times, "Big Gain for Rich Seen in Tax Cuts for Investments" tells much about how terribly askew our national policy priorities have grown.

While the victims of Katrina are suffering from inadequate support and funding, the Bush administration tax cuts, which Congress approved in 2003, "have significantly lowered the tax burden on the richest Americans, reducing taxes on incomes of more than $10 million by an average of about $500,000."

These are the tax cuts that Congress is now considering making permanent, even while our national deficit has reached record levels. The burden of this debt is pressing ever more heavily on middle and lower-income American citizens. Meanwhile, the citizens of New Orleans scattered across the country are not even being assured their basic civil rights to vote for the next mayor of their city.

This is the kind of corruption of policy priorities that will change only if the citizens of this country rise up together to demand the reversal of such unfair policies, by making clear they will refuse to vote in November 2006 for any politician that does not make cancelling the tax giveaways to the wealthy a primary policy priority. We need a nationwide campaign that will mobilize citizens to demand such change from BOTH their Republican and Democratic candidates. This is a basic first step in establishing clear political priorites of principle for the new democratic policy that should govern this nation:

REGRESSIVE TAXATION = UNJUST TAXATION = THE BETRAYAL OF DEMOCRACY

DEMOCRACY CANNOT SURVIVE IN THE US if THE RICH GET RICHER
THROUGH THE DESTRUCTION OF THE MIDDLE CLASS
AND THE OPPRESSION OF THE POOR.

The Bush administration, in the name of promoting "democracy," has dramatically shifted the tax burden of this country onto middle and lower-income people who are simultaneously struggling to survive under the increasing pressure of rising prices for everyday items on which we depend for our survival: gasoline, home fuel, and basic food and groceries. Under the Bush administration, the tax system has become increasingly regressive, so that the same citizens who are fighting the wars launched by this government are having to worry about how their families will survive when they return from their war service.

Meanwhile, thousands of citizens are losing well-paying middle-class jobs, such as those in the car industry, only to find that they are being reduced to the ranks of the working poor.