Progressive Talking Points 9/22/05

• Roll back President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the richest 1 percent. This simple measure will save the government $327 billion – more than enough to cover the estimated costs of the Katrina clean-up and reconstruction. We should also stop any future tax cuts for millionaires set to come into effect next year and forget about repealing the estate tax for the richest Americans. It’s about time conservatives asked for a little sacrifice from America’s economic elites.
  
  
• Cut wasteful pork from the transportation and energy bills and eliminate unnecessary agricultural subsidies. We can save more than $20 billion by cutting out earmarks and pork set asides for congressmen and lobbyists. To start, we suggest eliminating roughly half of the 6,371 special earmarked projects of the 2005 transportation bill and then rolling back the tax breaks, loan guarantees, and other subsidies for the electricity, coal, nuclear, natural gas and oil industries in the 2005 energy bill. We can save another roughly $33 billion by doing away with export subsidies, reducing cotton subsidies, and reducing maximum payment limits on what producers can receive from $360,000 to $250,000.
  
  
• Eliminate $200 billion in unnecessary and counterproductive weapons programs. The largest savings can be found in the bloated defense budget. Without harming any of our military efforts or plans for fighting terrorists, we can eliminate several Defense Department weapons programs that are either unnecessary, such as the F/A 22 Raptor and the DD(X), or are counter to our national security interests, like space weapons and "bunker buster" nuclear bombs.