A number of Republicans, from John Boehner on down, are calling President Obama’s proposal to attack the deficit by increasing the net tax on the super-rich “class warfare.” It’s one of those handy-dandy terms, along with “job-killing taxes” that the party is counting on to buffalo the American middle and working classes into acting against their own better interests.
Although his proposals, this one that he informally has labeled “the Buffett Rule,” as well as the American Jobs Act, seem to be sound and certainly just, the Republicans have rejected them, almost entirely out-of-hand. The party leadership made a cynical pretense of being willing to consider the matter when the President addressed a joint session of Congress, regarding the Jobs Act, on September 8, but, in reality, they have no intention to consider either of these proposals at all. To do so would provide a political win for the black man in the White House. Only hard-core reactionary Mitch McConnell in the Senate has had the nerve to “just come out once and scream it,” as our friend Mr. Dylan would say.
With unemployment so high and job security so low, the American people are sick to death of Washington politics. The President’s approval rating is below 50%, in most polls, but that of the Congress is less than one-third of the President’s. To the hard-core Tea Partiers in the House, that means nothing. They are (or at least so they present themselves) perfectly willing to crash and burn in the 2012 elections, if that’s what it takes to maintain their ideological purity. On the other hand, there are a significant number of Republicans in the Congress who would like to continue in their jobs for a bit longer. They are the ones who need to pause their ideological drivel and take a good, hard squint at what is going on. Otherwise, if it is class warfare they want, it is class warfare they will get.
The plain fact of the matter is that we are already in a state of class warfare, whether anyone cares to declare it or not, and, for now, the bad guys are winning. Note that, when I refer to the “bad guys,” I do not mean all the very wealthy. I am referring to the unconscionably-greedy and their political stooges. The way things stand, at present, the very rich do, for the most part, end up paying taxes at a far lower rate than the people in the middle class.
Is our graduated income tax structure now structured that way? Technically, it is not. A superstar athlete, who made an obscene salary, but did no investing, would pay a higher percentage of income tax than, say, a cop on the beat. At present, though, the income that people earn from investment-including interest, dividends and capital gains-is taxed at a significantly lower rate than the income people earn by the sweat of their brows.
Plutocrat spokesman, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, was quick to point out the obvious fact that taxes on dividends represent a double taxation, inasmuch as the dividends that the recipients must pay income tax on, represent a share of already-taxed corporate profits. Here’s a thought: why not let corporations deduct the amount they pay out in dividends, then tax the dividend recipients’ income at the same rate as the income of people who have to work for their money? As Mr. Obama has said on several occasions, this should be about fairness, not necessarily sticking it to the rich.
Now, let us ask ourselves, what kind of a sacrifice are the very wealthy in our nation being asked to make? Were they reduced to states of destitution during the Reagan and Clinton administrations? They most certainly were not. In fact, they prospered quite well, thank you, due in large part to the fact that they could peddle their wares to a confident, comfortable population eager to partake of the goods and services their wealth represented. Yet today, the super-greedy among the super-rich still cling desperately to those filthy goodies they garnered from the cynical policies of the recent Bush administration, including, but not limited to, that undeserved and unnecessary tax cut.
More than one person has pointed out that the extreme upper classes have already been waging war on the rest of us. To characterize the administration’s attempt to balance the scales as class warfare is a bit like the Japanese Empire accusing our nation of warmongering, after we declared war on them on December 8, 1941.
Still, why on Earth would the people who have the goodies want to share some them with the rest of us if they don’t have to? Because, there are two possible outcomes from this present state of affairs, if it is allowed to continue unchecked, and neither of them are good.
In the best-case scenario (for the rich) the Republicans get their way, then, after a while, the economy comes crashing down to an even more catastrophic effect than it did in the Bush administration. Mind you, that is the best case. A number of the people at the top will have found ways to preserve and shelter a good deal of their wealth from the consequences of the collapse, but they will find that their markets have shrunk even more drastically, once the rest of us have become truly impoverished.
In the worst-case scenario, from their standpoint, the victims of their greed finally catch on to what has been done to them and seek to right the wrongs in a truly radical way. No, I am not talking about heads on pikes (But don’t rule that out altogether.); rather, I am talking about a figure like Hughie Long coming upon the scene.
Hughie Long, a Democratic Senator from Louisiana, was unmistakably a demagogue, and a very corrupt one at that. He was also a man who spoke to the enormous number of desperately poor people we had in our nation in 1933, at the depths of the Great Depression. His agenda was just this side of outright socialism. His “Share Our Wealth” program would have confiscated untold billions from the richest Americans who had managed to survive the economic collapse, to put money, goods and services into the hands of the downtrodden. Long would not allow himself to be stifled or controlled at all by the Democratic Party leadership. He sought no committee memberships in the Senate, but, instead, concentrated on carrying his message to “the people.” He did represent class warfare in its plainest most naked reality.
To President Roosevelt, Long may have represented a greater threat to his own plans than all the Republican senators combined. Still, largely because he had a commanding majority in both houses of Congress, Roosevelt managed to get his programs passed over the far more radical programs that Hughie Long wanted to enact.
I think it may prove useful for those Republican politicians who imagine they may want to keep their jobs to think of Mr. Obama in those terms. The agenda he has proposed is not radical, nor is it confiscatory. True, the next Hughie Long may not be on the scene, but he may very well be right around the corner.
Sources
http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/20/news/economy/buffett_rule_milllonaires/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/obama-isnt-trying-to-star_b_971617.html
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/18/rep-ryan-accuses-obama-waging-class-warfare-with-millionaire-tax-plan/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/jobsact#overview
Wikipedia