Prosperity to share.

Editor,

This is a response to a comment posted by another reader.

a) 27% of every on-budget dollar goes toward military spending. Another 7% or so goes toward paying the interest on the money borrowed to spend some $700 billion dollars a year on the military (more almost than the entire rest of the world's military spending). [-- The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost somewhere between one and three trillion off-budget dollars so far, every dollar of which was borrowed. --]

b) The top 2% of American earners paid a 50% marginal tax rate under the Republicans' most sacred hero, Ronald Reagan. Today these earners, after the Bush tax cuts, are paying 15 percentage points less, and under Paul Ryan's plan will pay a full 25 percentage points less than they did under Ronald Reagan.

c) All of the non-military discretionary spending Republicans hate on ideological grounds -- Planned Parenthood, Head Start, NPR, NEA, EPA, clean energy, public transportation, high speed rail, etc. -- amount to less than 2% of the 2010 federal budget.

That's 34% on military spending, 2% on everything the Republicans hate, and the richest 2% of Americans pay 15-20 percentage points less under various Republican plans than they did under Ronald Reagan.

d) Social Security is self-funded through deductions from workers' paychecks. It is fully funded today for the next 27 years. There is a cap of $106,000 a year of income beyond which payroll taxes are not deducted. Raising this cap would sustain Social Security indefinitely.

So the choice seems to be:

a) Spend 34% of the federal budget on the military, cut taxes on the highest 2% of earners in America even more than they have been already, and kill Medicare -- which was created precisely because private insurance companies will not insure seniors at rates that anyone can afford -- by privatizing it; or

b) Raise the income tax rate on the top 2% of earners to what it was under Ronald Reagan and cut military spending by at least $200 billion a year.

The problem is that Republicans hate programs that provide health care, housing, education, food subsidies, and the like to the old, the sick, the weak, and children; and they don't want rich people to pay one nickel in taxes.

So do progressives have a plan? Yes. We have a plan. But we have an intransigent, ideologically driven Republican party standing between the American people and the opportunity for us all to share a prosperous and just United States of America.

Re: "G.O.P.-Led House Votes to Cut Trillions Over 10 Years" (4/16/2011)