No Billionaire Left Behind

Although the debt ceiling "crisis" is as phony as a three dollar bill, the underlying philosophical differences are as vital and thorny as you get. The ongoing budget battles have exposed the Republicans' vision for the country.

Their age-old delusion that democracy and capitalism is the same thing has evolved into a kind of gonzo corporate mindset that enshrines entitlement, greed and ruthlessness with the same inviolability as free speech and suffrage.

The Republicans' Ryan budget plan expects us to cower under a form of corporate oligarchy in which all policy and budgetary decisions are solely determined by what's good for the Business Roundtable and the Club for Growth.

You mustn't punish the "job creators" by taxing the wealthy, they say. You will "disincentivize" lenders if banking laws protect consumers. You can't insist corporations comply with environmental proscriptions or they will export jobs.

Nonsense. There has never been and never will be a tax or regulation that the wealthy and corporations don't detest. Even if you drove the corporate tax rate to ten percent and all manufacturing jobs paid only minimum wage and workplace, consumer and environmental protections were scuttled, corporations would still seek out even more "opportune business climates" offshore.

One example out of hundreds: General Electric. In 2010, it paid no U.S. corporate taxes yet in the last decade it has closed 29 U.S. plants and shipped 25,000 jobs overseas. So what do we bribe it with now? Our first born children.

At a time of record corporate profits, the lowest top marginal tax rates in 80 years and the widest wealth and income gaps between business elites and the middleclass since the 1920s, Republicans want us to believe America can't afford universal health care, Medicare and a social safety net comparable to every other developed nation in the world. That America can't find the money to fix its infrastructure and send its kids to college because we have to give tax breaks to millionaires. That America can't reduce greenhouse gases because corporate profits might shrink by one percent.

Fact is, up to a point '" and we're nowhere even close '" the higher the taxes on profits the more "job creators" will pour back into the business in order to lower their net taxable income. When taxes are too low, the wealthy have no incentive to reinvest revenue, hire more workers or expand production, instead using "found money" to create market bubbles, invest in Latin American factories or buy yachts.

Our choices are clear. We can fix our deficits and entitlements and still retain our basic democratic values in which peoples' wellbeing is paramount and profits are ancillary to the common good.

Or we can choose to live like serfs, groveling before our corporate overlords.