Class Warfare
When Republicans support massive tax cut after massive tax cut for the wealthy and corporations, with only small cuts and mostly lip service to the middle class, it’s not “class warfare.”
When Republicans preside over two generations of tremendous increases in the gap between rich and poor, that’s not “class warfare.”
When Republicans spend the better part of a decade killing off middle-class jobs, fostering offshoring, and cultivating a transition to minimum-wage service jobs at home for the benefit of corporate America, that’s not “class warfare.”
When Republicans strive to hold back or even abolish the minimum wage while fighting for deeper and deeper cuts in (or even an abolishment of) taxes on capital gains–a primary source of income for the wealthy–that’s not “class warfare.”
When Republicans, time after time, approve legislation which favors corporations over people, especially poor people (banking/credit laws, bankruptcy laws, copyright laws, forbidding Medicare to use its size to negotiate for better costs for pharmaceuticals, etc. etc.), that’s not “class warfare.”
When Republicans rail against welfare for the poor but fight endlessly for corporate welfare, that’s not “class warfare.”
When Republicans hold crucial middle class tax cuts hostage so that wealthy people can keep their gratuitous tax cuts, that’s not “class warfare.”
When Republicans have no problems with billions or trillions of tax dollars funneled to defense industries but want to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, that’s not “class warfare.”
When Republicans try to argue that poor people are actually well off because they own refrigerators, TVs, and microwave ovens, and claim that people who make $5 million a year are not “wealthy” so as to argue against even modest tax hikes for wealthy people, that’s not “class warfare.”
When Republicans demagogue about poor people paying “no taxes”–ignoring state taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, payroll taxes, and a host of other taxes–but have no problem when huge corporations, making billions in profits, not only pay no income taxes but get gigantic tax rebates, that’s not class warfare.
When Republicans take a pledge against raising any taxes so seriously that they refuse to even limit a tax break on luxury corporate jets, the very pinnacle of excess–but then they turn around and campaign outright to raise taxes on the poorest Americans–even that is not “class warfare.”
BUT–when the president suggests, on the advice of a billionaire, that millionaires and billionaires pay at minimum as much as people in the middle class pay… that, apparently, is “class warfare.”
they won it a long time ago.
they came in and fucked things up in 2001-2003.
Cut taxes, spent trillions on wars, now they don’t want to pay for any of it.
No answer to the $500B+ per year trade deficit. This is a hollowing out as middle class money spent on imports goes overseas and does not come back as paycheck money.
Same thing with the $500B per year we spend on gasoline. Money leaving the middle class never to return (except perhaps as loans).
Then there’s the $7000+ per capita we have to pay for health care. Japan pays 1/3 of that!
But the Dems don’t understand the situation all that well, either. They didn’t cover themselves in glory fighting the Republicans, 1995-2006.
It is all sickening.
Like I say here, I’d like to think moving to Japan would allow me to check out of this insane asylum, but I really don’t know if Japan’s more or less screwed up than the US.
What I do not understand is why the Democrats do not counterattack. You should send this post to Obama. Americans would understand it.