STOP the DEATH tax!
This little poster was put up on Facebook by a relative and good friend who lost her teaching job along with many thousands of others because the crooks on Wall Street crashed the economy, gave themselves huge bonuses and salary increases after begging the government to bail them out, and then stashed the loot safely in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland.
And now she is campaigning to let the corrupt financiers and banksters give all this money tax free to their pampered prodigal progeny when they die!
The government is so broke they are talking about closing all the Post Offices on Saturdays and laying 10,000 postal workers off. Freeway bridges are collapsing and killing people because the government doesn’t have enough people any more to inspect them. They are discussing cutting the number of government inspectors at chicken processing plants to save money. Each inspector will have to inspect three chickens a second! I’m sure glad I went veggie last year.
When the property values plunged, the local tax base shrunk so there was no money to pay teachers, so hundreds of thousands were laid off all over the country, and many schools were closed.
Thousands of millionaires and billionaires are waving the flag, pledging allegiance, and wearing patriotic buttons on their lapels, at the same time they are stiffing their country by dodging taxes, moving their factories out of America, and keeping their kids safe at home while the children of working people have to join the military because there are no jobs.
I keep hoping that someday working people will notice that neither party has done anything for them lately. Barack Obama and George W. Bush used the same source for all their economic advisors--Goldman-Sachs. There was lots of help for banks in trouble, but nearly none for homeowners being foreclosed on by the banks.
Isn’t the Democratic party for the unions? Who signed the NAFTA agreement, the worst kick in the crotch ever for American working people? Who called me and my union brothers “f**king retards”? Who is standing by while state governors defy federal law and ban union negotiating rights and equal pay provisions for women?
Since the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court, billionaires are now wholly funding their own personal candidates for president. The 1% have bought almost all of the rest of the politicians, who have passed laws allowing them to pay much lower taxes then working people do.
Back in the Fifties, when the top marginal tax rate for millionaires was 90%, there were lots of jobs, the economy was booming, we were building millions of miles of new freeways, and had money enough to send men to the moon, beside sending five million GIs to college for free.
Now that millionaires are paying 14% or less, like Mitt Romney does, the country is going broke. That’s not a coincidence--that’s a consequence!
When the DEATH tax, more correctly known as the Federal Inheritance Tax, was passed during the Great Depression, it was designed to prevent a few rich families like the Rockefellers, Astors, Morgans, etc. from sucking all the money up and becoming permanently wealthy for generations, leaving the rest of us destitute. It only applies to millionaires and above, and it doesn’t leave them penniless, either.
They are still plenty rich--rich enough to buy whole TV networks and hire lying loudmouth shills to convince people that it would be a good thing to get rid of all that government regulation so that we can choke on the smog and watch the rivers catch fire like we used to back in the good old days.
Meanwhile, our country is going down the tubes! The government we get is only the government we are willing to pay for.
We have a whole bunch of Tea Party idiots in Congress who are proud they are starving our government. They brag about drowning it in the bathtub. They are too stupid to notice that countries without a government look pretty much like Somalia or Afghanistan.
It pains me to see smart people who should know better--who are earning government paychecks and surviving on government benefits--benefits they paid for with years of paying payroll taxes--cheering these politicians on and voting for them to “cut government spending” and prevent “tax hikes” and “stop the death tax”.
We are destroying our nation here, folks. We are starving it to death!
What will we have when it’s gone?
Where will you live when the banksters forge new mortgage papers and kick you out of your house. They do that, you know! Good government is your only hope, and we’re losing it!
How will you eat when you are laid off your job for being too old or unhealthy? Have you called for reservations at the downtown mission soup kitchen yet? Government regulation is the only thing between you and that reality, and it’s fading fast!
Have you reserved a room in an “old folks home” yet? When the government is gone, Social Security is gone. Medicare is gone. Unemployment compensation is gone.
I just sent in my 1040 yesterday. Yeah, it’s not much fun. But fair and equitable taxes are the key to national prosperity. “To whom much is given, much is required.”
As the country collapses around us, too many people are shirking their patriotic duty and not paying their share of taxes. If all the people who piss and moan about other people not respecting the flag, or not pledging allegiance, or protesting in the streets would instead piss and moan about the lazy, greedy, rich parasites who spend their days concocting new schemes to cheat the rest of us out of our retirement, our savings and our houses, maybe we could effect some change here!
Maybe we could save the good government that millions have worked so hard to preserve and defend for over two hundred years.
But I despair!
Sometimes I just want to jump straight up and and go running down the road quacking like a duck!
