Inside the Imperial Budget -- Behind the Rhetoric of the Democrats (Sharon Smith)

   Coupled with whopping military expenditures and permanent tax cuts for the extraordinarily wealthy, Bush's budget shreds what little remains of the tattered social safety net for the most downtrodden members of the world's richest society.

  By SHARON SMITH -- CounterPunch

  Bush's budget proposal for FY 2008 is emblematic of the social crisis unfolding inside the U.S. Empire, its ramifications still largely ignored in mainstream politics. Coupled with whopping military expenditures and permanent tax cuts for the extraordinarily wealthy, Bush's budget shreds what little remains of the tattered social safety net for the most downtrodden members of the world's richest society.

  The Iraq war marks the first major war in the last century fought in the interests of America's ruling elite without even the pretense of "shared sacrifice." During the First World War, the tax rate for top income earners stood at 77 percent; during the Second World War, at 94 percent. Even during Vietnam, the wealthiest taxpayers faced a rate of 70 percent on personal income. Yet, as the bloodletting in Iraq has been proven a war for nothing more than U.S. control over Middle Eastern oil, the corporate class continues to enjoy an income tax rate that has been capped at only 35 percent since 2003 -- the year the United States invaded Iraq.

  Bush's plan to permanently extend these tax cuts, which are set to expire in 2010, would cost an estimated $211 billion in 2012 and $1.6 trillion over the next decade. Added to their profit windfalls and soaring executive salaries, the corporate class has every reason to celebrate.

  Bush's budget makes clear that the growing numbers of economically disadvantaged Americans -- already supplying the cannon fodder to kill and die in Iraq and Afghanistan -- must also continue to shoulder the suffocating financial burden for U.S. imperialism's 21st Century follies. Bush's budget proposal brazenly takes aim at veterans themselves, nearly doubling their out-of-pocket fees from $8 to $15 for prescription medications when they return home from a war zone battered and traumatized, and often looking for work.

  In this war, only the working class is expected to sacrifice. On Jan. 14, the New York Times interviewed the family of Sgt. Andrew DeBlock, a 41-year-old member of the New Jersey National Guard who recently learned that his stay in Iraq was extended by four months due to Bush's troop surge. His wife. Heidi DeBlock, told Times reporters that, due to the her husband's lost income, she "has had to battle her heating-fuel company, which wanted cash up front, and her husband's cellphone provider, which will not let him out of his contract even though he is off fighting a war."

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