"or kind of like how during elections they're all populist but the first thing they do when they get elected is feed their rich campaign contributors."
...they're still trying to repeal the health care law.
Another Obamacare repeal vote down the drain
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022551634
McConnell has a 'secret' plan for 'Obamacare'
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022579129
I mean, it's unthinkable to leave a law in place that raised taxes on the rich and helps the poor.
There is a debate about the impact of the recent tax deal, but simple arithmetic shows the reality.
Pre Bush tax cuts: lowest tax bracket 15 percent and top tax bracket 39.6 percent.
Bush tax cuts: lowest tax bracket 10 percent and top tax bracket 35 percent.
President Obama's tax deal, lowest rate 10 percent, top rate 39.6 percent.
Do the math and it will show that the gap between someone earning $50,000 and someone earning $500,000 closed to more than what it was in the 1990s.
Add the health care law tax and the gap closes even more.
<...>
Perhaps the best prism through which to see the Democrats’ gains is inequality. In the 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama said that his top priority as president would be to “create bottom-up economic growth” and reduce inequality...In the 2009 stimulus, he insisted on making tax credits “fully refundable,” so that even people who did not make enough to pay much federal tax would benefit. The 2010 health care law overhaul was probably the biggest attack on inequality since it began rising in the 1970s, increasing taxes on businesses and the rich to pay for health insurance largely for the middle class.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/us/politics/for-obama-fiscal-deal-is-a-victory-that-also-holds-risks.htmlObama and Redistribution
Some notes for myself: how much impact have Obama’s policies actually had on current and prospective inequality?
The main policies to consider are PPACA (the health reform) and ATRA (the fiscal cliff deal with its associated tax rise).
I’m not a fan of the Tax Foundation’s work, but their analysis of the distributional effects of Obamacare looks about right: significant benefits to the bottom half of the income distribution, paid for largely by taxes on the top few percent (the Medicare surcharge and the extra tax on investment income). The Tax Policy Center — whose work I do trust — has the Act reducing the after-tax income of the top 1 percent by 1.8 percent, the top 0.1 percent by 2.5 percent.
Meanwhile, ATRA raises taxes relative to a continuation of the Bush high-end tax cuts: after-tax income down 4.5 percent for the 1-percenters, 6.2 percent for the top 0.1 percent.
Putting this together, we have a roughly 6 percent hit to the 1 percent, around 9 to the superelite. That’s only a partial rollback of these groups’ huge gains since 1980, but it’s not trivial.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/obama-and-redistribution/
HHS finalizes rule guaranteeing 100 percent funding for new Medicaid beneficiaries
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022584523
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