Shine A Light

And they call themselves PATRIOTIC!

<<From The American Prospect: As Mitt Romney comes under withering fire for offshoring his millions to Bermuda and Switzerland—and for refusing to allow light to shine into what the Times calls his “financial black hole”—Senator Lindsey Graham came up with what is surely the year’s most novel line of defense today: “It’s really American to avoid paying taxes, legally.” No doubt, the Romney campaign apparatus was delighted to hear this: Thanks for being so helpful, Lindsey! At least he added that “legally” word. But there was more! “As long as it was legal, I’m OK with it,” Graham said. “I don’t blame anybody for using the tax code to their advantage.” And more still! “It’s a game we play. Every American tries to find the way to get the most deductions they can. I see nothing wrong with playing the game because we set it up to be a game.”>>

A game? A GAME???? They aren’t even charged the percentage of tax that would be fair for their income range, and they’re fighting to maneuver and hide and evade. If I tried to do that, the IRS would swoop in and garnish my wages and throw me in jail.
The truth is, I don’t mind paying MY FAIR SHARE of taxes, because I use the roads and bridges and the post office and the schools and the police and the fire department and the libraries and the public utilities and, because of the Affordable Care Act, I get to take advantage of more preventive care and checkups.

My share of taxes is no doubt a WAY higher percentage of my net worth than their share of taxes is of their net worth. And they’re fighting it all the way, while telling me they’re the job creators (who aren’t creating any jobs) and deserve to be given more tax breaks because they’re the patriotic party. This is disgusting.

One of the reasons we elected Barack Obama — correct me if I’m wrong here — was so that he would get rid of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and return the budget more toward equilibrium. (The budget under Clinton was balanced until Bush gave all the money back to the rich and then started two unpaid wars.) I’m not happy with the Democrats at all for not taking care of this when they were in charge. And I’m not happy that the president is STILL not taking care of this. “Oh, we can’t raise taxes during a recession.”

Who says? The super-rich 1 percent are making out like bandits during the recession. There’s a lot of money to be made when poor people go broke. That money went somewhere. You know perfectly well where it went. And they don’t even want to pay taxes on it. Well, maybe they DON’T use the police and fire departments, or the libraries, or the post office, or the schools, or the roads and bridges, or the public utilities. Maybe that would be fair then.

No wonder there’s an OCCUPY revolution going on.