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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Aug. 7, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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MEGA-THEFT

Clinton-Gingrich budget shifts billions more to rich

By Deirdre Griswold

The Clinton White House and Congressional Republicans can't congratulate themselves enough. But for the working class, the agreement on a five-year federal budget plan is nothing to celebrate.

The politicians will sell it to the people by hyping features like the $500-a-child tax credit and a $24-billion fund to provide health insurance for children--which will cover fewer than 2.5 million of the 10 million uninsured children, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate.

Hold onto your wallet. These programs are nothing but a few teaspoons of sugar syrup to dilute the bitter taste of the massive giveaways to the rich and cutbacks for the poor that make up the major changes in the new budget.

In fact, most of the budget's key provisions were written three years ago--in the Republican Party's "Contract with America" during the 1994 Congressional election campaign. In the July 30 New York Times reporter Adam Clymer called the $500 child tax credit, for instance, "the crown jewel" of the Contract with America. It applies to households with income of up to $100,000--hardly those in desperate need of tax relief.

Meanwhile, the key provisions of the year-old welfare-repeal law remain firmly in place, making the desperate conditions of life for the poorest families even worse. Tax

credits have little meaning for the poor, especially when food stamps and welfare benefits are being taken away.

The day after the budget agreement was announced, President Bill Clinton made yet another bow to the right wing by taking credit for precisely those provisions promoted by the Republicans. The Times' Clymer also noted, "But Vice President Gore topped [that] by adopting the slogan the Republicans used only last fall--"Promises Made, Promises Kept"--as his own watchword for 2000."

Not that the Republicans didn't want to make this budget even worse. But that always happens. Scary proposals are raised--like make the elderly pay more for Medicare, cut taxes on the rich to practically nothing--that go way beyond what they can get away with. That way the Democrats can claim they got the Republicans to "compromise."

And the rich laugh all the way to the bank.

This bill is based on the idea that major cuts still have to be made to "balance the budget"--even though many economists now say there really is no deficit anymore. And those cuts continue to come out of social programs.

Under the new budget, Medicare takes the biggest hit--$115 billion over five years. Medicaid will lose about $15 billion by cutting payments to hospitals that serve the poor.

Interestingly enough, the June issue of Defense Monitor, which analyzes the U.S. military budget from a liberal standpoint, listed 12 ways to cut the Pentagon budget that together would save about $100 billion in the same period.

The Defense Monitor is written by retired military personnel. It doesn't challenge the rule of monopoly finance capital, which needs a monstrously bloated military for world domination. It merely points out ways to reduce the Pentagon budget while maintaining the world status quo.

The Democrats and Republicans had already agreed to spend $1.6 trillion on the military by the year 2002--or over $300 billion a year for five years. The current military budget is $265 billion. So it's easy to see who will get more while the elderly and the poor get less.

Of course, many of the rich have big investments in military stocks. These growing Pentagon budgets will boost their holdings.

And now they'll pay much lower capital-gains taxes when they cash in their stocks. That tax rate, already one of the lowest in the world, is being reduced from 28 percent to 18 percent on stocks held five years or more.

Talk about making money without working! That's what living off stocks is all about. It's where the term "idle rich" came from--making huge fortunes off other people's hard work.

It is already being admitted that this budget will benefit at most the richest 20 percent of the population.

All this is happening at a time of the greatest prosperity in U.S. history--for the rich, that is. They've been raking it in. The stock market has more than quadrupled since 1987. Profits are at an all-time high. But they can never get enough.

Bourgeois liberals preach that workers should honor a "social contract" with the capitalists. But the filthy rich broke that contract long ago. They know what class war is, because they wage it every day.

The sooner our side acknowledges that the war is on--the sooner our side prepares its ranks to go from a half-hearted defense to a militant offense--the sooner there will be a real opposition to these brutal and heartless measures.

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