The Class War is On: Are You Going to Surrender or Fight?

Enough.

I am sick and fucking tired of supposed "progressives" proposing tax "reform" that allows the obscenely wealthy to continue to strip working people of every last dime.

Here's the fact, the reality and the truth about taxes and economic prosperity: any system that allows the filthy rich to keep more than half of their ill-gotten gains (and yes, wealth amassed by the top one percent is by definition ill-gotten) is economically destructive.

Here's proof:



Yeah. In those fabulous Fifties John Boehner is always crying over, the rich paid 91 percent income tax. And the working and middle classes were better off than they had been before or since. One middle-class income easily supported a family of five with a decent house in the suburbs, a late-model car, a nice vacation, college education for the kids and retirement early enough to enjoy.

In the Sixties, 70 percent top tax rates drove a thriving economy and paid for both war and the Great Society.

Even in the Reagan years the rich paid 50 percent.

But what happened when Smirky/Darth slashed top rates to 35 percent? Yep, the economy tanked. For seven years, obscenely wealthy individuals and corporations raked in the dough while working people watched their savings disappear, their incomes shrink, their jobs go overseas.

It's obvious: soaking the rich = broad prosperity, tax cuts for the rich = economic catastrophe.

Obvious, that is, to everyone except the teabagging rethuglicans like Paul Ryan about to take over Congress.

Steve Benen:

It prompted Jon Chait to flag a piece he wrote in March about Ryan and his borderline-creepy devotion to the philosophy of Rand.

Ryan would retain some bare-bones subsidies for the poorest, but the overwhelming thrust in every way is to liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens. This is the core of Ryan's moral philosophy:

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." ...

At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand's writings when he told his audience that, "Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill ... is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict -- individualism versus collectivism."

The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers.

"burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens."

There it is. Right there is the problem. For more than 30 years, liberals have allowed conservatives to define taxes as a "burden" to support the "welfare of their fellow citizens."

So now everybody now sees taxes as a horrible thing to be eliminated at any cost.

But back when the top tax rate was 91 percent, under republican Dwight Eisenhower, Democrats and rational republicans alike viewed taxes as the reasonable cost of building and maintaining public services like highways.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization."

The rich paid a much higher rate of taxes because the rich receive a much greater benefit from public services. Doubt it? Who gets more benefit from government-run air traffic control - the working stiff who take one vacation a year or the hedge fund manager who flies his private jet coast-to-coast twice a week?

The truth about the "burden of responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens" is that since 1980 it is the middle and working classes who have been supporting the parasites of the upper class. Over the past 30 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth FROM the middle and working classes TO the obscenely rich.

Long past time for that transfer to operate in reverse.

New rule: anyone who accepts a top tax rate less than 50 percent is a tool of the plutocracy and no friend of working people, economic prosperity or liberal democracy.

And that goes for President Obama and every congressional "Democrat" who voted to extend the economy-killing, middle-class-eliminating tax cuts for the rich.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic....