In Playboy magazine’s current issue, Sen. Bernie Sanders offers an “Emperor Has No Clothes” view of Washington’s current budget talks.
“Today one out of four major profitable corporations pays zero in federal income taxes,” said the independent from Vermont.
Later he added: “You would think that before you cut health care, education, nutrition or Social Security, you might want to take a hard look at that issue. I mean, am I missing something here?”
The good news as budget talks between Republicans and Democrats speed toward a Dec. 13 deadline is that both sides agree on the need to replace sequestration cuts with a more reasoned plan for deficit reduction.
The bad news is that Republicans refuse to put anything that looks like a tax increase in the deal even if it is in the form of closing tax loopholes for the richest corporations.
And Democrats are under pressure to offer cuts in entitlement spending — Social Security and Medicare are two ripe targets — without any new tax revenues in order to show a willingness to compromise and avoid one more fiscal cliff.
This is where Sanders offers his critique of both parties.
With an eye on Republicans, he notes that ExxonMobil made $19 billion in 2009 yet paid no federal income taxes, and got a $156 million tax refund from the government.
Sanders is also critical of President Obama.
“When you have a President of the United States who is talking about cuts in Social Security and veterans’ programs,” Sanders said, “who was willing earlier on to give continued tax breaks to billionaires and unwilling to go after huge corporate loopholes, people sit there and say, ‘Both parties are working for the big-money interests.’ ”
Sanders’s take on why both parties are afraid to take on big financial institutions, including those bailed out by taxpayers with government aid after the 2008 economic collapse, is that Washington politicians are afraid of the consequences of taking on Wall Street.
Next month marks one year since Obama easily won reelection, in the process becoming the first president to win more than 51 percent of the vote in two elections since President Eisenhower. The president won the 2012 election even as Wall Street’s gold poured into the campaign of the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney.
Romney criticized Obama as an opponent of big business who increased regulation on Wall Street. Romney famously identified 47 percent of Americans as people who are “dependent on government, who believe they are victims … and who pay no income taxes.”
Romney made Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), author of the House GOP budget, his vice presidential nominee. Ryan’s budget proposal called for big cuts to Medicare. His plan included making it a voucher program — a change that would, inevitably, limit its value as a guaranteed social safety net for the elderly. Ryan proposed cuts to other entitlement programs with no added taxes on corporations or the rich.
Romney and Ryan lost the election, but somehow Republicans and Democrats remain on track to cut government spending even at a time of high poverty rates and a fragile economic recovery that thirsts for a steady flow of government investment to inspire investor and consumer confidence.
Now Ryan’s strategy is to once again demand cuts in entitlement spending from the Democrats in a trade for eliminating rigid sequestration cuts that have thoughtlessly damaged spending on national security as well as Head Start programs, slowed federal criminal trials and hampered scientific research funded by the government. Sequestration cuts are on track to chop $100 billion annually from federal spending until 2021.
“It’s more appropriate to the moment we have, to focus on common ground,” Ryan said last week of the bipartisan interest in ending sequestration. “We’ve got automatic spending cuts coming. There are smarter ways of cutting spending — whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat.”
How could the GOP have missed the message of the last election? Somehow they are willing to bet one more time on cutting entitlements as the way to revive their political fortunes. They see the public responding positively to their work to reduce government spending.
“The survival of the automatic spending cuts gives Republicans the upper hand in confronting the White House and congressional Democrats on budget issues and new proposals by Mr. Obama that would involve new outlays, such as his plan for universal pre-K education,” Fred Barnes, my Fox News colleague, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. “For Republicans eager to corral federal spending — and that’s most of them — the sequester is a gift that keeps on giving.”
If the GOP thinks there is political leverage — the upper hand — to be found in going after seniors, people on food stamps and even defense spending with another round of across-the-board cuts, they might want to look at last year’s election results. And they should invite Sanders to give them his thoughts on big, profitable companies that pay no taxes.
