Jim Hightower

Jon Kyl is a bleeding-heart conservative.

Does he bleed for the downtrodden? Or – as Jesus said – for "the least of these"? No, no, Kyl's heart bleeds for those with the most!

The right-wing Arizona senator practically weeps for the wealthiest two-tenths of one percent of American families that have estates worth from $1 million to $5 million. What causes Kyl's eyes to brim with tears is that these privileged ones will have to pay an estate tax on wealth above a million bucks, unless Congress exempts them from the oppressive burden of helping to shoulder the cost of America's highways, parks, schools, military, water purity, and other public services we all count on. I'm sure that the other 99.8 percent of us share their pain and appreciate the Republican senate leader's deep empathy for multimillionaires.

How deeply is he touched? Earlier this year, Kyl tried to scuttle an extension of benefits for America's rising tide of unemployed workers, demanding that his favored constituency of superrich families first be given hundreds of billions of dollars in estate tax cuts. He failed in this mission of mercy for millionaires, but he recently came right back with an amendment to derail a proposal to help America's hard-hit small businesses get desperately-needed loans. Forget Main Street, wailed the senator from Easy Street, unless and until we exempt estates worth up to $5 million from the tragedy of taxation.

How much would Kyl's tax cut for the elites take from America's public treasury? More than $80 billion a year, which is what the 2009 estate tax on these rich ones brought in. But, hey, says the jovial plutocrat, we can make that up by slashing programs that benefit the middle class and the poor.

See, it’s just a matter of getting your priorities straight. Guys like Kyl profess their love for small business, but they always stay true to the rich.