Congress is busy this month quickly passing tax cuts for the rich before Republicans lose control of all three branches of government. According to Weisman, a staff writer for the Washington Post, “The Tax Policy Center, run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, has concluded that the bottom 80 percent of households would receive 15.8 percent of the House tax cuts’ benefit. The top 20 percent would receive 84.2 percent of the benefit. Households earning more than $1 million a year would get 40 percent of the tax cuts, or an average reduction of nearly $51,000.”

They just don’t get it, do they? Not everyone in this country owns stock, has a million dollar savings account, and earns over a million dollars per year. House Republicans claim they are cutting taxes to help the economy, which helps everyone, the poor especially. The poor were never better off than when Clinton balanced the federal budget. The economy soared. Even McDonald’s paid wages above minimum. Bush seems determined to drive the budget deficit beyond the limits of even the grandest imagination. At this rate, the International Monetary Fund will have to declare the United States one of the heavily indebted poor members of the World Bank.

Representative Jim McDermott’s bill, H.R.751, to reauthorize and improve the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Program has been in committee since the first of the year. The same is true of Representative Anthony Weiner’s bill, H.R.1210, to extend energy assistance to low-income households headed by senior citizens. Kirchhoff of USA Today reports, “Home prices rose 78% from 1994 to 2004, not adjusted for inflation, while personal incomes rose 64%, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond’s Region Focus magazine. The number of middle-income families spending more than 30% of their income on housing — a benchmark of affordability — rose from 3.2 million in 1997 to 4.5 million in 2001.” At this rate, even the middle class won’t be able to afford to keep a roof over their heads.

Taxes were invented to provide a stable financial foundation, protect the security of citizens in a country. By cutting taxes in this manner, our government is destroying the financial base upon which this country resides. We are trading terrorism for internal sabotage. While Bush claims to fight terrorism—in a country that never sent terrorists into America—his cronies are slowly eating away at the structure of the democracy he pretends to defend.