Do Democrats need to cave on extending Bushs tax cuts?
The populist sentiment made sense: The first President Bush’s term, marked by a deepening recession and falling wages, was just coming to an end. But Tritt’s song didn’t say anything about rising income inequality or corporations shipping record numbers of jobs overseas [pdf]to boost profits. Kostas and Tritt instead directed their anger at the government and taxes, a theme played out in the song’s video and lyrics: Uncle Sam’s got his hands in my pockets And he helps himself each time he needs a dimeTritt’s country ditty crystallizes perfectly the thinking behind conservatives’ anti-tax crusade, now playing out in the debate over whether to extend President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy: Forget about greedy Wall Street; your problems are in tax-and-spend Washington (even though government spending accounts for less than 20% of our Gross Domestic Product, one of the smallest shares in the world). What’s more, they claim, tax cuts aren’t about helping the rich (even though the wealthy
