EconomicCrisis.US

President-elect Barack Obama’s top advisors said Sunday that they wouldn’t back away from a promise to cut taxes on the middle class and raise them for the wealthiest Americans, as they made the case for a massive new stimulus package geared toward reviving the slumping economy.

Speaking on Sunday talk shows and in a newspaper opinion piece, Obama aides stepped up a drive to build a broad political consensus behind Obama’s core economic proposals: a two-year spending package that could exceed $775 billion, coupled with tax policies weighted in favor of the middle class.
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President-elect Barack Obama has said there will be no wasteful spending in the economic stimulus bill headed to Congress next month. That doesn’t mean anyone is ruling out imported sneakers.

Shoe manufacturers want the new administration and Congress to lift import tariffs on inexpensive footwear as part of the stimulus — a move they say would save consumers billions of dollars that could then be pumped into the economy.

As Washington prepares for debate next month on whether to spend hundreds of billions to revive the economy, congressional leaders and Obama aides are being bombarded by interest groups — from road contractors to shoemakers — looking for help. Wish lists are long and watchdog groups, such as Taxpayers for Common Sense, question how Congress will differentiate between waste, political pet projects and spending that will have an effect on unemployment and wavering markets.
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For most of us, Benjamin Franklin’s words in 1789 still apply: “Nothing is certain but death and taxes.”

However, millionaires, by definition, are not most of us. While they can’t stave off the grim reaper, they can persuade lawmakers to shield them from the taxman and balance budgets on the backs of everyone else.

That’s what’s going on in revenue-starved states right now: governors are preparing to slash middle-class programs and are resisting calls to raise taxes on the wealthy. Nowhere is this class war more pronounced than in New York – the home of the financial thieves who killed the economy. Having halved its top tax rate over the last three decades, New York today faces a $15.4 billion deficit. In response, Gov. David Paterson, a Democrat, might have asked his state’s Gordon Gekkos to pay higher taxes, especially considering the idea’s popularity in polls and the news that Wall Street’s elite are still swimming in money. Indeed, according to CBS News, the allegedly beleaguered financial industry is so flush with cash it plans to dole out $14 billion in executive bonuses this year.
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Arkansas’ natural gas reserves helped keep the state economy afloat in 2008 while huge job losses and budget deficits were recorded elsewhere in the country and the federal government shelled out billions of dollars to prop up banks and car manufacturers.

Houston-based Southwestern Energy Co. (nyse: SWN – news – people ) began exploration in the underground Fayetteville Shale in north-central Arkansas in 2002 and determined the company could retrieve the gas and make a go of it commercially. Since then, drilling companies, service businesses, state and local government officials, and landowners in the Fayetteville Shale have been seeing dollar signs.
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