The Federal income tax forms are confusing and complex - what are we getting for our money? 

First, a far larger share of our tax revenue - more than half -goes to the military than any comparable country. Our military budget now exceeds the defense expenditure of all other nations combined.  Second, because of our reliance on the private market for provision of health care, another large portion of our tax revenue – almost 8% of GDP - goes into health   Eliminating weapons programs we no longer need and reducing our more than 700 foreign military bases would yield $200-300 billion in yearly revenues — restoring 1/7th to 1/5th of our projected $1.4 trillion deficit.

In his 1944 State of the Union address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for a Second Bill of rights "under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed." Sixty-six years later, his vision for a nation in which no member of society went "ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed and insecure" is yet to be realized.

How much poverty is there in the U.S. today?

Defining poverty by income level is tricky and makes comparisons between countries difficult. In 2011, the government reported that 15 of total U.S. population, or 46 million people, live with incomes below the official poverty line of 22,811 for a family with two adults and two children. The income level is adjusted to different household sizes. Almost half of this group in poverty has incomes lower than 50% of the official poverty level. Another way of defining poverty is to consider incomes less than half of the median income as poor. The median is the midpoint. In January 2012, estimated median household income was about 50,000. Using this definition, over 19% of the U.S. population is poor.

Why do we now have such a large federal budget deficit?

1. Ten years of the Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 have accumulatively cost $2.5 trillion dollars in federal revenues.  The tax cuts primarily benefited wealthy individuals and corporations, turned the modest budget surpluses under the Clinton administration into growing deficits, but failed to promote economic growth. Tax revenues remain depressed as even fewer workers are employed at decent wages following the onset of the Great Recession. 

2. The costs of the lengthy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being paid for by borrowed money rather than taxes. 

Why are we talking about corporate taxes?

Corporate taxes are a stark example of the inherent injustice of Capitalism and the war that the rich are waging against the middle class and everyone else.  In 1961, corporate income taxes were over 1/3 of federal income tax revenue; today they are half that share.  It is the income taxes paid by individuals and small businesses that have made up for the declining share of taxes paid by corporations. 

Q. I hear that state and city government budgets are in the red. Is that bad?

A. It’s bad. State and local governments provide the bulk of basic public services. With these governments facing budget shortages of some $200 billion (out of annual expenditures nationwide of $1.7 trillion dollars), essential services are at risk. These include public education and health, police and fire, transportation, parks, libraries and building and repair of most sewers and water mains, not to mention funding half the costs of unemployment insurance and Medicaid. Without more money coming in, most localities will witness significant layoffs of police and fire personnel, while close to 200,000 of the nation’s 3.4 million K-12 teachers may receive pink slips by September 2011.

The governors of Wisconsin, Ohio and other states with Republican majorities in legislatures have introduced legislation to restrict or even eliminate the rights of public employees to bargain collectively for decent benefits.  They claim that eliminating the rights of teachers to have any say in their conditions of employment is essential to balancing their state budgets.  The Wisconsin governor even threatened to call out the National Guard to suppress resistance by public employee unions.