He lists four "super principles" that ought to guide the Super Committee:
FIRST: no cuts before jobs are back – until
unemployment is down to 5 percent. Until then, the economy needs a
boost, not a cut. Consumers – whose spending is 70 percent of the
economy – don’t have the money to boost the economy on their own. Their
pay is dropping and they’re losing jobs.
SECOND: Make the boost big enough. 14 million
Americans are out of work, and 10 million are working part time who
need full-time jobs. The President’s proposed jobs program is a start
but it’s tiny relative to what needs to be done. It would create fewer
than 2 million jobs. We need a big jobs program – rebuilding America’s
crumbling infrastructure, and including a WPA and Civilian Conservation
Corps.
THIRD: To pay for this, raise taxes on the
super-rich. It’s only fair. Never before has so much income and wealth
been concentrated at the very top, and taxes on the top so low. Go back
to the 70 percent marginal tax we had before 1980. And include more tax
brackets at the top. It doesn’t make sense that any income over $375,000
is taxed at the same 35 percent, even if it’s a billion dollars. And
tax all sources of income at the same rate, including capital gains.
FOURTH: Cut the budget where the real bloat
is. Military spending and corporate welfare. End weapons systems that
don’t work and stop wars we shouldn’t be fighting to begin with, and we
save over $300 billion a year. Cut corporate welfare – subsidies and
special tax breaks going to big agribusiness, big oil, big pharma, and
big insurance – and we save another $100 billion.
Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org. His most recent book is Aftershock.
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