From Pine View Farm

Misdirection Play 0

Richard Wolff, writing at the Guardian, considers Republican claims that expecting those who can most afford shoulder some of the cost of governance is somehow “class war.” That’s another misdirection play designed to distract the discourse from economic fact.

Here’s a nugget:

Neither logic nor evidence supports either claim. The charge of class war is particularly obtuse. Consider simply these two facts. First, at the end of the second world war, for every dollar Washington raised in taxes on individuals, it raised $1.50 in taxes on business profits. Today, that ratio is very different: for every dollar Washington gets in taxes on individuals, it takes 25 cents in taxes on business. In short, the last half century has seen a massive shift of the burden of federal taxation off business and onto individuals.

Dick Polman comments. A snippet:

How tiresomely predictable. While President Obama was readying his tax-the-rich deficit-reduction plan for a Monday rollout, the GOP were already howling on the Sunday shows about the dreaded CW. In the words of budget maven and aspiring Medicare-killer Paul Ryan, “Class warfare will simply divide this country more.” He was duly echoed by Republican brethren like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who remarked, “When you pick one area of the economy and you say, ‘we’re going to tax those (rich) people because most people are not those people, that’s class warfare.”

This has been the GOP’s conditioned response to tax-burden issues since around 1992, when party wordsmiths began to own the phrase via frequent repetition. What’s amazing, of course, is that the Republicans have been allowed to get away with it – given the fact that the GOP’s rich clientele has been incrementally getting richer at the expense of everyone else. If there has indeed been “class warfare” in this country during the past three decades, the rich have already won. They have already staged their victory parade, brandishing a surrender document signed by most of their fellow citizens.

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