Strangely enough, breaks for the wealthy and corporations eat up as much taxes as programs that the GOP wants to cut

Center for American Progress

House leaders are unfortunately restricting their proposed budget cuts for the remainder of fiscal year 2011 to nonsecurity discretionary spending in an attempt to tame a $1.3 trillion deficit. This approach is especially shortsighted since the Federal Treasury loses twice as much revenue due to tax breaks than Congress appropriates on all nonsecurity discretionary spending.

The chart below compares the 10 safety-net programs slated for deep cuts with the cost of the tax breaks that should also be considered for reduction or elimination to bring the budget into balance. The column on the left is a list of safety-net programs that have already been targets of the House leadership’s budget ax. The column on the right is the cost to specified tax breaks (see bottom of page for sources).

Huh. Does that just seem amazing? Remember this when the GOP comes crawling for the middle class vote, trumpeting their commitment to early-childhood education, better teacher training, the unemployed ("putting America back to work") and alternatives to ObamaCare.

This seems fair - inequality of wealth distribution in the U.S.

via Wampeters, Foma, and Pat Falloon



The top-earning 50% of Americans control 97.5% of our country’s wealth. The top 1% own one-third of America’s wealth.

The combined net worth of Forbes’ 400 wealthiest Americans is $1.5 trillion. The combined net worth of the poorest 50% of American households, approximately 150 million people, is $1.6 trillion. Just so we’re clear: the net worth of the 400 richest Americans is almost equal to the net worth of the 150,000,000 poorest Americans.

(chart and data via Institute for Policy Studies)