Brown County Democrats -- Brown County, Ohio
Welcome to Brown County, OhioOhio Democrat Party National Democrat Party April's Events - Dist. 2 Democrat Caucus Meeting 4/12/12 and Democrat Club Spring Dinner 4/20/12 April 13 Post-primary election campaign finance reports must be filed. |
|
Brown County Central Committee
|
September
19, 2010 The Angry Rich as
printed in the NY Times By
PAUL KRUGMAN Anger
is sweeping No,
I’m not talking about the Tea Partiers. I’m talking about the rich. These
are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute
poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions
of people have lost their homes. Young people can’t find jobs; laid-off
50-somethings fear that they’ll never work again. Yet
if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people
compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find
it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very
privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their
homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought
of paying modestly higher taxes. The
rage of the rich has been building ever since Mr. Obama took office. At first,
however, it was largely confined to Wall Street. Thus when Now,
however, as decision time looms for the fate of the Bush tax cuts — will top
tax rates go back to Clinton-era levels? — the rage of the rich has broadened,
and also in some ways changed its character. For
one thing, craziness has gone mainstream. It’s one thing when a billionaire
rants at a dinner event. It’s another when Forbes magazine runs a cover story alleging that
the president of the United States is deliberately trying to bring America down
as part of his Kenyan, “anticolonialist” agenda, that “the U.S. is being
ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.” When it comes
to defending the interests of the rich, it seems, the normal rules of civilized
(and rational) discourse no longer apply. At
the same time, self-pity among the privileged has become acceptable, even
fashionable. Tax-cut
advocates used to pretend that they were mainly concerned about helping typical
American families. Even tax breaks for the rich were justified in terms of
trickle-down economics, the claim that lower taxes at the top would make the
economy stronger for everyone. These
days, however, tax-cutters are hardly even trying to make the trickle-down case.
Yes, Republicans are pushing the line that raising taxes at the top would hurt
small businesses, but their hearts don’t really seem in it. Instead, it has
become common to hear vehement denials that people making $400,000 or $500,000 a
year are rich. I mean, look at the expenses of people in that income class —
the property taxes they have to pay on their expensive houses, the cost of
sending their kids to elite private schools, and so on. Why, they can barely
make ends meet. And
among the undeniably rich, a belligerent sense of entitlement has taken hold:
it’s their money, and they have the right to keep it. “Taxes are what we pay
for civilized society,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes — but that was a long
time ago. The
spectacle of high-income Americans, the world’s luckiest people, wallowing in
self-pity and self-righteousness would be funny, except for one thing: they may
well get their way. Never mind the $700 billion price tag for extending the
high-end tax breaks: virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are rushing to
the aid of the oppressed affluent. You
see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It’s
partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social
pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So
when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their
income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely,
it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs,
their houses, and their hopes. And
when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people
currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in
Social Security and aid to the unemployed. But
when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.
|
Send mail to Webmaster@BrownCountyDems.org with questions or comments about this web site.
Paid for by Brown County Democrat Central Committee, PO Box 596,
Georgetown, OH 45121--John Carroll, Treasurer
|
