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Here are just two of the corporate giveaways hidden in the rushed, must-pass, end-of-year budget bill
Crashing airplanes and starving old people.
Yesterday, Congress finally voted through the must-pass, end-of-year budget bill. As has become routine, this bill was stalled right until the final moment, so that Congressjerks could cram the 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion package with special favors for their donors, at the expense of the rest of the country.
This year’s budget package included a couple of especially egregious doozies, which were reported out for The American Prospect by Lee Harris (who covered a grotesque retirement giveaway for the ultra-rich) and Doraj Facundo (who covered a safety giveaway to Boeing and its lethal fleet of 737 Max airplanes).
Let’s start with the retirement scam. The budget bill includes Rep Richie Neal’s [DINO-MA] SECURE Act 2.0, which gives savers with retirement funds until age 75 to cash out their retirement savings — netting an extra three years of tax-free growth for the lucky, tiny minority with substantial retirement savings. This follows on Neal’s SECURE Act 1.0 of 2019, when the age was raised from 70.5 to 72.
The tax-exempt retirement savings account is a Carter-era bargain that replaced real pensions — ones that guaranteed that…