Frontline of the Class War: Tax Cuts, Rebuilding, and Drug Tests

The Republicans are right, there is a class war going on in this country.  And they're the ones waging it against the middle and working class:

• Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), Chair of the House Republican Policy Committee, called President Obama's call to extend the payroll tax cut, which gives a $1,000 a year to working families, class warfare.  Instead House Republicans want to cut the corporate tax rate, with Presidential Candidate Michele Bachman going so far as to say we should eliminate the corporate income tax all together.

• Michigan Republicans are proposing privatizing the hiring of public school teachers as an end run around actually paying the compensation packages negotiated by the teachers' unions.  This comes after they slashed the states education budget by half a billion dollars.

• In the coming months you're going to be hearing a lot about the Post Office being broke.  When you do, just remember that it's only because Republicans have required it to pre-fund the next 75 years worth of pension benefits in the next 10 years.  If you ignore that unique requirement that no other government or private enterprise has to follow, the Post Office has run a $611 million surplus over the last 4 years.  Republicans quest to bankrupt the Post Office certainly couldn't have anything to do with eliminating hundreds of thousands of government union jobs while benefitting the Post Office's private sector competitors could it?

• Just a quick note that while Republicans are demanding that disaster relief funds to rebuild homes and businesses here in America be offset by spending cuts elsewhere, the felt no such compulsion when they were voting to pay for the War in Iraq.  And those spending cuts?  They want them to come out of funds meant for first responders.  Because we're not going to need them the next time disaster strikes.

• The working poor now make up 60% of those living in poverty, while CEO pay rises to 325x the average workers pay.

• In Missouri, State College students will now be forced to take drug tests or be denied admittance.  In South Carolina, Governor Nikki Haley wants to start drug testing all unemployment insurance applicants even though Florida has shown it costs more than is saved, and current estimates put drug use among recipients at 0.3%.  She wants to humiliate them so badly she's willing to lie.  In the meantime, people in this country continue to die because they can't afford to go to the dentist.

That's it for now, but remember: Never give up.  Never surrender.