Let's Be Fair

Did you know that last year was very lucrative for the biggest hedge funds’ chiefs?

Wealth was so concentrated that a mere 25 people pocketed a total of $22.07 billion. At $50,000 a year, it would take the salaries of 441,400 Americans to match that sum.

Even though the pay is performance-based compensation, hedge fund managers receive a tax break on that income. This results in hedge fund managers paying less in taxes on their income than middle-class workers, who are subject to a 25 percent top marginal tax rate.

Why do Republicans only want to make the working middle class pay for deficit reduction?

I truly do not understand it — but that is what is happening in our Nation's Capital, and already happened in Columbia with our South Carolina budget.

Instead of closing $2 billion in loopholes for the rich and corporations, our Republican-dominated legislature decided to reduce Medicaid and school funding!

Everyone understands that over the long-term we have got to reduce the deficit — a deficit that was caused mainly by Wall Street greed, tax breaks for the rich, two wars, and a prescription drug program rammed through by the Republicans and written by the drug and insurance companies. Yet the Republican approach demands savage cuts in desperately-needed programs for working families, the elderly, the sick, our children and the poor, while not asking the wealthiest among us to contribute one penny.

We all agree we need to balance the budget, just like the one done by a Democratic president and Republican legislature in 1998 through 2000. But Democrats plan to make sure that it is done fairly, and not soley on the backs of working families.