Left Column...
Left Column...
Only the shameless hooligans behind George Bush Jr. could have the effrontery to try to paint Bill Clinton, the moderately right-leaning president who killed welfare, as an environmental "extremist".
In the past thirty years, the average wage of the top executives in the United States has risen by several hundred percent. At the same time, the average wage of people who actually work for a living, has stagnated. Only those same shameless hooligans would foist upon us the idea that those over-paid fat-cat executives need more money, and the average working stiff needs less roads, less education, less health-care, and a poorer quality of life.
What a tax cut does, of course, is remove government services that benefit everyone and reward people who have the least need of financial assistance.
But that's not really what Bush is up to. Do you think Exxon and Bristol-Myers and Dupont would be content with being taxed less? By God, you have no idea. The real goal of this Republican administration is not only to reduce the tax liabilities of the rich, but to get them government subsidies, in the form of additional tax breaks, reduction of liabilities, and tort law reform. You ain't seen nothin' yet. And Mr. Bush is going to be in a big hurry to get this agenda through because conventional wisdom is that the Democrats will retake Congress in the 2002 elections.
One example: there used to be a rule that the government would not contract with companies that were in violation of environmental laws, or work-place health and safety regulations. Well, no more! Why on earth should the government hold these private corporations to such onerous and expensive obligations such as not dumping toxic wastes into your drinking water or cutting back on safety equipment, at the expense of a few mutilations, just so they can get some of that government largesse?
The Republicans seem to believe that allowing corporations to not spend money on cleaning up the toxic wastes that helped them make enormous profits-- which means that you and I, brothers and sisters, get to pay for it-- is what is known as "tax fairness". Anyone who thinks otherwise is, of course, an "extremist".
