TAX BREAKS FOR THE WEALTHY

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/4/2011)

As reported in the New York Times (July 2), the average annual pay of the executives for the 200 top companies in the United States for 2010 was $10.8 million dollars, an increase from 2009 of 23%. The highest was for Philippe Dauman of Viacom. His annual pay was $84.5 million.

These are the people who our representative in Congress, Paul Gosar, wants to protect, keeping in place their tax breaks. Gosar and his Republican colleagues while keeping tax breaks for the wealthiest are oblivious to the economic deprivation in the rest of the country.

Their plan for some time has been an economic redistribution in the country by which the middle classes are gradually squeezed out of existence, leaving us with a nation of wealthy and poor, much like France before the Revolution of 1789.

While this economic redistribution has been taking place, the Republicans diverted the nation’s attention from the gradual loss of the middle class with issues such as gay marriage, a neglected civil right. In addition to the gradual loss of the middle class, the Republicans by cutting back of social services for the poor and disabled seem hell-bent on grinding the face of the poor in the dust. All this is from Paul Gosar who received much of his education as a dentist from a private institution heavily subsidized by socialistic governmental funding.


Gosar and his Republican cohorts sound very much like the French queen Marie Antoinette a few years before the Revolution. If response to the starvation of her subjects, she is reported to have said, “Let them eat cake.”