The AMT’s “impact is harshest on taxpayers with annual incomes of $100,000 to $500,000,” the Nov. 11 Post story insisted. “The truly rich typically are not affected.” Reading that, it’s easy to wonder exactly how much the paper pays its staff writers. Only 1.5 percent of all households make more than $250,000 a year, so if somebody making $400,000 isn’t “truly rich,” nobody is.
We should eliminate the AMT, while also preserving (and making permanent) the Bush tax cuts that have helped grow our economy. We can do that by doing exactly what the outgoing Republican congress didn’t do: cut spending.
Lawmakers could start by repealing the Medicare prescription-drug plan. That would save some $2 trillion in the years ahead. And if they’d just hold the growth of new spending to 3.3 percent per year, they’d save an additional $4 trillion over the next 10 years. It can be done.
When they insist that conservatism is yesterday’s news, journalists demonstrate they’ve missed the real secret of this election: Democrats took power by running a lot of conservative candidates.
Think of the Senate, where they’ll owe their control to Jim Webb, a former Reagan administration cabinet secretary. He’s pro-Second Amendment. When Sen. Pat Leahy wants to squelch a Bush judicial nominee, will Webb quietly go along, or will he insist the nominee deserves a vote before the full Senate? That’s the sort of question few journalists seem to have asked yet.
The problem is that journalists often write without a sense of history or their own past actions.
For example, on Nov. 3 both the Post and USA Today featured front-page stories about how the oceans will run out of fish by the year 2048. CNN also covered that story. Except, we’re not going to run out of fish.
As CNN reported exactly a week later, fish farming is becoming big business. Already, those raised in captivity cost about half as much as the ones caught in the wild. As the number of fish in the deep blue sea declines, the number of farms will increase, so we’ll never run out.
Clearly, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can’t claim credit for today’s 4.4 percent unemployment. But once Congress is in Democratic hands, we can (finally) expect to see plenty of press coverage of the “booming economy.”
When that happens, remember that the country got here because of conservative policies, and that keeping those policies in place is the only way we’ll remain prosperous. No matter which party’s in power, conservatism is alive and well.