Rolling Stone has published the very interesting article How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich.

In this 8 page article, I got stopped dead in my tracks over this item on page 2.  I felt compelled to post this immediately, before even finishing reading the article.

The paragraph below is just a bit of the setup to what follows.

Clinton repeatedly blocked Republican demands for further cuts. “He vetoed one tax cut after another,” says Robert McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. In 1999, in a triumph for fiscal sanity, Clinton rejected a massive $792 billion cut to inheritance and investment taxes. The mood during the veto ceremony in the Rose Garden was festive. A five-piece band played “Summertime,” and the living was easy. Unemployment stood at 4.2 percent, and stocks were booming. “Our hard-won prosperity gives us the chance to invest our surplus to meet the long-term challenges of America,” Clinton declared. The Republican tax cuts, he warned with eerie prescience, would return America to a period of “deficit upon deficit” that culminated in “the worst recession since the Great Depression.”

Here is the payoff:

Then came the election of George W. Bush, the first president of the Party of the Rich.

Within months of taking office, Bush delivered a tax break to the rich that trumps anything he accomplished through the actual tax code. “The most important thing the Bush administration did in the whole area of taxes,” says Johnston, “was to kill tax harmonization.”

“Tax harmonization” was economic jargon for a joint project by the world’s developed countries to shut down offshore tax havens in places like the Cayman Islands. At the time, such illicit havens were costing U.S. taxpayers $70 billion a year. For Republicans, going after big-time tax evaders should have been as American as apple pie. As Reagan once said of such cheats: “When they do not pay their taxes, someone else does – you and me.”

I have long been cognizant of the problem of the rich just shifting their wealth to tax havens if we were to raise the tax rates high enough to make it worth their while to do this kind of tax evasion.  I have always felt that the only solution to this problem was for the countries of the world to get together to harmonize their tax policies.  I was unaware that such an effort had been started, and that the Bush administration had put a stop to it.

It never ceases to amaze me of the many ways the Republicans have screwed us without our even imagining them.  It should be interesting to now go back to the article and read the remaining six and one half pages.

After reading the rest of the article, I can safely say that if the above excerpt from the article bothers you even slightly, then do not read the rest. Your head might explode.

That bald spot that covered about 90% of the top of my head before is now splattered all over the ceiling of my office.

The tax giveaways in the following table are only a small portion of the money that is being given away instead of being used to fund items this country needs.

Even the above table does not properly frame the task of the special committee. The committee is not charged with cutting the budget. It is charged with cutting the deficit. Cutting a budget implies cutting spending. Cutting a deficit could entail raising revenues more than raising spending (no spending cuts required at all.) So one phrasing implies spending cuts while the other phrasing could encompass spending increases.