Bush Tax Cuts And The Middle Class: Middle Class? What Middle Class?
Posted by Michelle Moquin on December 6th, 2010
The latest update from this past Saturday on the Bush tax cuts:
Senate Republicans Block Middle Class Tax Cut
Senate Republicans today successfully filibustered two Democratic tax cut bills that would have allowed Bush-era tax cuts benefiting only the wealthiest sliver of the country to expire. The party-line votes were intended by Democratic leaders to put Republicans on the record blocking the extension of tax cuts that would have benefitedall Americans in order to secure additional tax cuts for the highest-income earners in America.
Today’s result was never in doubt. At a press conference yesterday, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who masterminded the votes, characterized today’s exercise as part of a long-running argument between Democrats and Republicans — one that voters will judge on election day in 2012. “This is going to be a winning argument not just for the next one to two weeks, but for the next two years,” he said.
The two bills that failed were similar, but served very different purposes. The first, to preserve the Bush-era tax cuts for income up to $250,000, was passed by the House earlier this week, and would have represented a fulfillment of President Obama’s campaign pledge to allow taxes to increase for income above that level. The second would have raised that threshold to $1,000,000. Its purpose was meant to emphasize the lengths Republicans will go to to protect the interests of millionaires.
Sens. Jim Webb (D-VA), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Russ Feingold (D-WI), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) voted with the Republicans on the former plan. The vote was 53-36. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Tom Harkin (D-IA) Lieberman and Feingold voted with the GOP on the second. That vote was 53-37, and reflected progressives’ unease with redefining the middle class at the $1,000,000 income threshold.
In recent days, the White House has publicly and privately pushed back on Schumer’s plan as they negotiated a compromise with the GOP. The details of that compromise haven’t been finalized. But the White House is thought have offered to allow all the Bush tax cuts to be extended temporarily, if Republicans will agree to a year-long extension of unemployment benefits and to tax breaks in the stimulus bill, to provide much-needed juice to the economy.
Republicans have threatened to block all Democratic legislation until the tax cut issue is resolved, pressing them to cave before time runs out on other key initiatives like the ratification of the START treaty and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
And if you aren’t already fired up about the talk surrounding the Bush tax cuts, watch the passion of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I- Vermont):
Readers: If the Republicans don’t go for extending the Bush tax cuts according to what the Dems have been planning for years, (The Bush tax cuts will be extended for the first quarter million dollars of income – Above that? No. ) I for one say “screw ‘em – let them expire for everyone”, and blame the Repubs for raising taxes on the entire country. Let’s see how people respond to that one if and when it happens. Unless of course, the Dems gather up their balls and do something.
If you have something to say, say it here. Blog me.
Vivian: Congratulations! I wonder how many of my readers are now in relationship with a fellow reader. Too cool. Thanks for sharing your story.
Doug: Heaven is right here waiting for you. :) Looking forward to you coming home today.
Shaun: Hmm…(Sigh) Kinda sucks sometimes doesn’t it? I have reached acceptance on so many levels these past few days. I posted this quote on my computer screen; a quote that is very familiar to many. It has become the thing that I read whenever I am faced with something challenging.
“GOD, GRANT ME THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE, COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN, AND WISDOM TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE.”
Bob: I like it. :)
Henry: Well said. My eyes are looking at the same thing. Many people are choosing not to see the truth.
Hi Anna:…long time! How are you? Nice to see you here. Hmmm…Could there be new possible relationships brewing in the near future? Bai and his friends perhaps? Oops I meant Bai and “her” friends. :) Hafa Adai.
Hi Peter! Hafa Adai.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
December 6th, 2010 at 9:30 am
Michelle:
I’m a girl.
Bai
December 6th, 2010 at 9:33 am
Love the quote Michelle.
December 6th, 2010 at 10:05 am
Henry, Hafa Adai.
Here on Guam we are experiencing some of that white man hypocrisy. They have made it a standard to discriminate against the OTWS they conquer when they take over their lands.
But just let one of those OTWS want to claim a right back and the scream DISCRIMINATION. Oh the poor put upon white boy. It is sickening.
Here in the Marinas, we are trying to return some of the fishing opportunities to the locals so that they can compete with the big white owned conglomerates that fish with huge trawlers off the shores of Guam and the Northern Mariana”s.
The white boy is screaming discrimination because he can’t continue to deplete Guam’s seas with his senseless greed.
Green
December 6th, 2010 at 10:12 am
Talk about white gaul and hypocrisy. How about the US military taking our historial land to make it a firing range?
The gaul of these white bastards to take whatever they wish from the lands of the OTWs while giving the whites on the mainland every consideration before they condemn and take their property.
We don’t want them put a firing range complex on Pagat.
Lupi
December 6th, 2010 at 10:17 am
Hafa adai, Anna:
My group and I are coming to Guam in January. We are from Hangzhou, China. We are also big fans of Michelle and her blog. Is it possible that we could meet with you.
We will be on Guam for 10 days before heading for Seattle Washington for a week. The excitement of meeting one of Michelle’s friends is almost too much to bear. There are 31 of us in our group. Everyone has saved for this trip with meeting you in mine.
Please say yes!
Zhune
December 6th, 2010 at 10:34 am
I met my husband from your blog too Michelle. He is the brother of Glenda. He writes her emails for her because she is blind. She and I are fans of your blog. We email each other our opinions on the posts and your articles.
He said that he had to meet me because he was intrigued by my comments concerning your blog. He thinks the aliens thing is a spoof to get readers, but he loves the other stuff.
He is a gossip freak but he won’t admit it. He also takes the exercises from Zen Lill and post them as if they were gospel at work. He is a lawyer at a law firm in Dorchester, Maryland.
We have been married for about 17 months and I love him very much. I was reluctant to meet him as I do not like blind dates. So he started reading and making his separate comments about you and your readers.
We started our own separate emailing and the rest is history.
Thanks Michelle
Stacy
December 6th, 2010 at 10:36 am
The middle class deserve what they are getting from their white representatives. After all they got their country back.
December 6th, 2010 at 10:44 am
Hafa adau
You want a lesson on the white boy’ gaul and hypocrisy. Then read this story.
______________________________________
HAGATNA, Guam — Rita Santos Cruz is still haunted by the terrifying day when Japanese soldiers burst into her grade school and abruptly ordered all the students to line up outside.
Then the soldiers dragged Cruz’s pregnant mother into the school courtyard.
“They were beating her up,” recalled Cruz, who is now 73. “And here we were, watching her.”
Her mother, who had refused to bow to the Japanese forces occupying Guam during World War II, was beaten so badly she suffered a miscarriage, Cruz said, wiping away tears.
“We were not even Americans,” she said, “and we were punished.”
More than 60 years later, survivors of the Japanese occupation of Guam still harbor painful resentment — toward the United States. That’s because many feel the U.S. abandoned Guam at the outbreak of the war, letting it fall to the Japanese and thus condemning the population to mass executions, forced labor, torture, internment and rape at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army.
Now, as the U.S. military pushes forward with its largest buildup here since World War II, the tiny U.S. island territory is pressing for closure of its wartime suffering and an end to its nearly 30-year quest for compensation from the federal government.
“If you want us to accept what is going on [with the buildup], let’s resolve this,” Guam Sen. Frank Blas said.
The Guam legislature declared in September that war reparations should be paid to survivors like Cruz as a condition of the planned $10 billion U.S. military expansion on the island, which will bring 8,600 Marines from Okinawa, visiting aircraft carriers and possibly a missile defense facility by 2014.
ADVERTISEMENT
Meanwhile, Guam’s congressional delegate, Madeleine Bordallo, has said war reparations are her top priority in Congress and are “important for the military buildup to be successful.”
The total cost of reparations for the island could be as much as $126 million, according to a 2004 report by the Guam War Claims Review Commission.
The territory has been unable to strike an agreement with Congress on the payments — part of a legislative struggle dating back to 1983 — and the Guam legislature’s resolution in September is unlikely to exert any real leverage over the military buildup, which is set to begin within months.
The Joint Guam Program Office, which coordinates the buildup for the military, declined to comment on the war claims and referred all questions to the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
But the island is still pushing ahead doggedly on the reparations.
“It is just about the recognition,” said Blas, who founded the website http://www.guamwarsurvivorstory.com, dedicated to survivors and reparations. “Many were beaten, many were tortured. A lot of it was because of their loyalty to the United States.”
Chris Reyes, 69, who retired after two decades in the U.S. Army, is one of fewer than 1,000 Guamanians who endured the Japanese occupation on Guam and are still alive to tell their stories.
Reyes, who was just 4 months old when Japan invaded, said he remembers living in a dark jungle cave “like a mushroom” during the nearly three-year occupation because his family feared he would be killed.
His father was a slave laborer for the Japanese and fed a starvation diet while he unloaded cargo ships. Reyes said he eventually escaped into the jungle during a mass execution.
The only U.S. compensation his family ever received was $810 paid to his grandmother for land taken by the military immediately after World War II.
“Why did we suffer so much?” asked Reyes, who is now an outreach counselor for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on Guam. “The American government did not provide protection [against a Japanese invasion], and Japan treated us like Americans.”
The United States determined before the war that Guam, then a U.S. possession and military outpost, would fall quickly to Japan, according to a history published by Andersen Air Base.
While Guamanians waited helplessly, all military dependents and U.S. citizens were evacuated from the island ahead of the expected Japanese invasion, which in December 1941 easily punched through a “meager, outdated” U.S. arsenal and about 600 inexperienced servicemembers, the air base history shows.
About 14,700 Guamanians were killed or endured hardship before the U.S. liberated the island from the Japanese in 1944, according to the National Park Service’s War in the Pacific memorial.
“Sisters looked at their brothers being killed with open eyes,” Reyes said. “Kids looked at their fathers being beheaded.”
Guam has always been patriotic — its 170,000 residents produce more military recruits per capita than almost anywhere else in the country — but there is also a strong underlying feeling that the territory was once snubbed by the U.S. government.
“People have very long memories,” said Ron McNinch, a political analyst and professor at the University of Guam. “War reparations are treated as a form of social transgression by these older people who felt they were wronged and their children, or now even their grandchildren, feel they were wronged or mistreated.”
Despite those feelings, the island’s claims of neglect are not so clear.
Guam received at least $8 million in compensation from the U.S. right after World War II, the Guam War Claims Review Commission showed in its 2004 report to Congress.
The claims commission was created by the Department of Interior to investigate the reparations issue and included the chairman of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, which handles U.S. war claims.
It found only about 716 Guamanians were compensated for death or injury from the war, though incomplete records don’t reflect a precise dollar amount for the claims compensation.
The lion’s share of Guam’s reparations went to 6,018 Guamanians who filed claims for lost or damaged property in the late 1940s.
Meanwhile, many Guamanians were not aware of the claims process and were not given enough time to file, according to the report.
Guam Sen. B.J. Cruz, a member of the claims commission and former chief justice of the Guam Supreme Court, said the U.S. has not settled its debt to Guam, despite the early reparations and arguments the U.S. lost 1,438 servicemembers in the liberation.
“There are some who will say the … Marines who died coming on shore are payment,” Cruz said. “We keep saying, ‘You are the ones who put us in the middle of this fire and you’re going to tell us because the firemen died trying to save us that we owe you?’?”
The war claims commission recommended Congress pay an additional $126 million in reparations — $25,000 for each death and $12,000 for instances of rape, malnutrition, slave labor, forced march, internment or hiding to avoid capture.
The recommendation was sent to lawmakers in 2004 but was killed on the Senate floor by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and a “small group of fiscal conservatives,” according to Guam Congresswoman Madeleine Bordallo.
Now, the payments are again being sponsored by Bordallo in the U.S. defense budget for the coming year — the same budget that contains initial construction funding for the $10 billion military buildup on Guam.
But Bordallo says there is still opposition in the Senate, especially the Armed Services Committee, which holds sway over defense spending and is headed by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
Levin and McCain oppose paying the heirs of Guam war survivors and are concerned the payments could lead to more war claims in future versions of the defense budget, Bordallo said in a prepared statement on her website. She refused an interview with Stars and Stripes.
The senators offered Bordallo a compromise in 2009 — they would support the measure “if I agreed to limit claims only to those killed during the war and to those living survivors of the occupation,” she said.
But the compromise failed and the Armed Services Committee cut the reparations from the defense bill.
McCain refused to comment for this story. Levin did not respond to a request for comment.
This year, the Senate did not include the provision in its original version of the bill. The House bill contains the reparations along with a number of other controversial measures, including a repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, and may not pass at all this session.
Guam has been down this congressional path before.
Year after year, Guam congressional delegates, who have no vote, have made reparations a top issue and pressed lawmakers to approve payments.
Year after year, they have failed.
In 1988, Congress approved $12,000 payments to Aleutian islanders who were forced to relocate ahead of the Japanese invasion and occupation of Alaska, which was a U.S. territory at the time of the war.
Guam was nearly included in the reparations but the island legislature backed out of the deal in Congress, saying payments of $5,000 for personal injury and $3,000 for slave labor, forced march or internment were too small.
Few on the island are willing to compromise for less.
“With all this money they are giving away, the money we are asking for war reparations, hell, that is only a drop in the bucket,” said Vincente Taisipic, 74, a war survivor who retired from the U.S. Navy.
Chris Reyes is still waiting to finally get compensation and a formal apology from the U.S. government for the terrified times he and his family spent in a cave nearly seven decades ago.
“Money is not really the issue here,” Reyes said. “We are just confused as to why for so long we have been neglected.”
————————————————–
When will we OTWs gain the respect of just general consideration in the eyes of white America?
Peter
December 6th, 2010 at 10:50 am
Michelle:
I am in one of the Arab republics that is becoming alarmed at the possibility that Iran will get a nuclear weapon. How is America going to prevent this from happening?
December 6th, 2010 at 10:54 am
I am an Iranian living in Denmark. I miss my country but I am afraid to return because of the discrimination against women there.
My cousin wrote to tell me about this blog and Madaline. Is she real or is my cousin deranged?
Shasmeen
December 6th, 2010 at 10:58 am
I am tired of hearing the SWN complain about what we white men are or have done to them.
We allowed you savages to become a part of this great nation. Be satisfied and get over yourselves.
Harris, if you like your meat chocolate, do what white men have done for centuries, fuck it and take care of it if you wish, but don’t marry the animals.
I’m very fond of my dog, but I never consider marriage a possibility.
George
December 6th, 2010 at 11:11 am
Okay, okay, okay!
Stop emailing me. I got the message. Michelle corrected herself.
Thanks Michelle. I am sorry I didn’t give you a chance to re post.
But thanks for mentioning me.
Bai
December 6th, 2010 at 11:14 am
Shasmeen;
I would love to visit Denmark. I have tried to get out of here but the government won’t give me permission to leave because I don’t have a male companion to travel with.
Madaline is very much real. I saw her. She is awesome!
We are hoping that she will help us in our march this week.
Baraheh
December 6th, 2010 at 5:19 pm
Wow, so much on-line lovin’ going on, I love it : ) congratulations and best wishes to all of you.
Vivian, I’ll wedding crash, when and where?
Stacy, I think you’ve got a good man there ; )…I better come up with some new exercises soon, I’m on it and will post asap.
Misch, look at what you created : ) nice job!
Luv, Zen Lill
December 10th, 2010 at 8:39 am
Hello back to you Michelle.
Yes my brother Jeff is a Gem. He has been my everything for most of my life. Now he is a happily married man.
I love Stacy. She is kind and makes me feel like real family.
I was not surprised that he fell for her. He used to read to me all the emails girls wrote to him. He was a little shy about reading hers to me.
I smiled inside and thanked God that She found someone nice for my big brother.
He used to smile whenever he read blog posts from the TAO. I would smile too. He would ask me how I knew he was smiling. I’d say “you’re my brother, I just know.”
I tease him now, that it was actually the TAO that brought him and Stacy together. She and I are avid believers of aliens amongst us.
It was his scoffing that peaked her interest. He does it with wit and tolerance of others’ right to believe what they wish. He is not condescending or judgmental.
Stacy and I want to be GIRLZ. We often talk about what we would do if you sent Madaline for us.
Gosh, I’d just about die with excitement!
Oh, I should mention that Stacy has gotten me a Mac that enables me to type via words.
This is my first communication on my own.
She is also getting me in an experimental program that will enable me to see through sonics. I am 23 and have been blind since I was 9.
Stacy says she is 23 and has been blind to the problems of the middle class since she was born. Jeff and I are that middle class.
He would have been much better had he availed himself of all the opportunities that came his way, but he refused to leave me behind. He is 27 and because of Stacy’s help he has returned to get his MBA from Pitt.
I’m actually writing to say I made a love connection via your blog, too.
I have a new sister, Stacy. And if I may for her say, she has one in me too.
Maybe one day we will be sisters with our other sisters aboard the CLIMAX. Oh, to be a GIRLZ.
Glenda