Mark Warner joins the Republican Party

Well, maybe he’s still a card-carrying Democrat (we have no proof of that) but it’s clear that he’s no different from the Republicans when it comes to the “lower taxes creates jobs” crap.

Here’s a transcript from Sunday’s “Face the Nation:”

http://www.washingtonmonthly.c…

WARNER: Bob, I think you’ve got to look at both sides of the ledger. Long before I was in politics, I spent 20 years in business. I built companies. And you’ve got to look at the revenue side. You’ve got to look at the spending side.

We’re looking at a ratio of about $3 in cuts for every additional dollar in revenues. And the revenues we’re talking about literally are coming from lower rates, where we can lower our rates on individual and on corporate rates back to where they’re much more competitive on a worldwide basis. But we’re getting rid of a number of the tax expenditures.

I mean, a fact that I’m not sure most Americans realize — we collect about $1 trillion a year in income taxes, yet we have $1.2 trillion a year in income tax expenditures, deductions, many of them that are popular, charitable deduction, home mortgage deduction. If we would cut back on some of those, we could actually lower rates and still increase revenues.

SCHIEFFER: So that’s where you would get the additional revenues, by eliminating deductions, not necessarily by raising taxes?

WARNER: We’re not talking about raising taxes.

Warner went on to say:  

“What we’re doing is we’re saying everything has to be on the table,” . . .  “Entitlement reform, dramatic spending cuts, looking at tax reform.”

Looks as though ol’ Mark has the Republican talking points down pat.

Republican talking point:  “entitlement reform”

Translation:  “Screw you old folks.  You can eat cat food while sucking at the Social Security tit.”

Republican talking point:  “Everything is on the table.”

Translation:  ” ‘Everything’ does not include raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans back to where they were in the Clinton era.”

Warner and his Republican friends don’t want you reading stuff like this:

http://www.tax.com/taxcom/feat…

And they certainly don’t want you to know that, between 1950 and today, the wealthiest Americans saw their taxes reduced by 67 percent while folks of median income saw their taxes increase by 85 percent:

http://front.moveon.org/wp-con…