Yesterday, I promised to come back to the attack on workers’ wages unleashed by the Administration under the guise of New Orleans recovery. Today, a part of the attack has taken on a new face: the conservative wing of the Republican party is already calling for cuts in spending to offset any of the tens of billions of dollars Congress allocates to the New Orleans recovery effort (the number is now at $62 billion but will likely rise over time).

So, you have Republican Senator Jim DeMint quoted in The New York Times (registration required), saying, “We know we need to help, but throwing more and more money without accountability at this is not going to solve the problem.” Or, as reported by The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), “the party’s conservative wing, led yesterday by Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn in the Senate and Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana in the House, is calling for offsetting ‘sacrifices’ in federal spending.”

Well, you know who will make the sacrifices–the very same people who were hit by the hurricane and millions of other working people because the cuts will not come in the bloated defense budget (also known as Halliburton’s kitty) but from social programs.

But, the fact is there is plenty of money for the recovery–and for other critical needs. It’s sitting right in front of our faces in the form of the Bush tax cuts.

As the good people from Citizens for Tax Justice show in their analysis of the cost of the Bush tax cuts, if the tax cuts for just the top five percent of the income earners were repealed for just the 2006 tax year, the country would have more than $83 billion–that would cover the money just allocated by Congress to relief efforts.

If you carry that out through the year 2010 (when the tax cuts are supposed to expire, though everyone knows that’s unlikely to happen), cancelling the tax cuts for the richest five percent would yield…and I have to shake my head every time I recite this number…$551 billion.

So, there it is.

And where are the voices of the Democrats calling for the repeal of the tax cuts for the richest 5 percent? Absent. Not a single Democratic Senator has made such a proposal.

Shame.