This morning’s New York Times includes an editorial about the 2006 budget. Not surprisingly, it includes a number of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the top .2% of wage earners. Interestingly, the Washington Post article on the same topic doesn’t really mention the tax cuts, but focuses on the cuts to spending, mostly to Medicaid, student loans and environmental programs.

It’s actually hard to find anything about this story. I realize that the budget doesn’t go to the house for a couple of weeks and until something actually happens, no one wants to write about it. Thing is, this is when you need to write about it. Once the budget is passed, there’s not much you can do. And I know, all these big numbers make your eyes glaze over. They do mine too. But, actually, if it realy is money that makes the world go round, we should be paying attention to this. We should be asking questions like, why do tax cuts only apply to the wealthiest? Why are we even talking about tax cuts when we have such a huge deficit and we’re trying to come up with ways to make programs like Social Security and Medicaid solvent.

Here are a few people writing about it:

Echidne
Kathy at Liberty Street–especially good at looking at some of the specific proposed spending cuts
BlondeSense–who notes that the Alaska drilling provision is tied into the budget bill

I want you to note that the three links above are female bloggers, writing about the budget. And I just did a search through technorati.

You know what everyone’s talking about? Terry Schiavo. Fine, the whole thing could have implications for right-to-life/right-to-die reasons. But you know, this money stuff is going to matter more. If medicaid gets cut and with the new bankruptcy laws, we won’t be arguing over her right to live or die because there won’t be money to sustain her.