Thursday, September 23, 2004

Hard Knock Life

I've said this before, and I'll say it again. Republicans believe that guys making $20,000 a year have life a little too easy and guys making $200,000 a year have life a little too hard. Well they've done something about it.
Congressional negotiators beat back efforts yesterday to expand and preserve tax refunds for poor families, even as they added $13 billion in corporate tax breaks to a package of middle-class tax cuts that could come to a vote in the Senate today.
I particularly liked Salon's analysis of this vote.
The image of Washington politicians (Republican leadership in this case) "beating back" attempts to keep tax refunds for poor families while making sure corporations get their additional billions is too much to take. You can imagine the heated conversations that took place on Capitol Hill. A legislator with a conscience saying, "Well, if we're going to include that $13 bill for the corporations in this legislation that will add to the ballooning deficit and lead to cuts in programs that help poor people, maybe we should keep the refunds for poor people, too." How do you argue with that? Tom DeLay and Trent Lott found a way -- and they won.
Unfortunately, I doubt this particular story will get much play in the "liberal" media, not when we can focus on much more important typographical problems.

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