Repealing the Paris Hilton Tax—A dozen or so protesters gathered outside the Senate in early June, dressed as the grim reaper: black robe, white mask, scythe. “Bury the Death Tax,” their signs read. The invocation of death and taxes, they hoped, would prove particularly lethal. The movement to abolish a long-standing tax on inherited wealth, known as […]

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In case you missed it—and the Bush administration was certainly hoping that you would—the federal government’s operating deficit for 2005 was $760 billion, or a whopping 138 percent higher than the much more widely reported budget deficit of $319 billion. The Bush administration hailed the lesser amount when it was announced last October by the […]

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Money is choking our democracy to death. Our elections are bought out from under us and our public officials are doing the bidding of mercenaries. So powerful is the hold of wealth on politics that we cannot say America is working for all Americans. The majority may support such broad social goals as affordable medical coverage […]

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Monetary Madness—Days before the Bush administration unveiled its 2007 budget, the House of Representatives approved a bill mandating over $40 billion in spending cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, student loans and numerous other social programs. It was a squeaker, passing by 216 to 214, only after Dick Cheney returned from the Middle East to break a […]

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Reading through the text of President Bush’s State of the Union speech the morning after, it occurred to us that to get real information about the state of our union the last source one should look to is this annual address. The State of the Union has become a dis-infomercial, an overstuffed grab bag of […]

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