Detailed estimates from the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn’t changed — show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.
Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.
So do the wealthy look to you like the victims of class warfare? ...Paul Krugman
We don't talk much -- we don't talk enough! -- about the issue that lies behind the disgust of the left with the contemporary Republican party. Here it is: Republicans are determined to exploit, violate, and overturn a society based on the "social contract." "Social" is a word now in the dumpster along with, say, "socialism." Having wealth and power is apparently an indicator that you are more "responsible," not about having a stake in your community and its stability whether you have a comfortable income or not. A capitalist is, by definition, someone who exhibits "personal responsibility."
Krugman writes:
On one side, we have the claim that the rising share of taxes paid by the rich shows that their burden is rising, not falling. To point out the obvious, the rich are paying more taxes because they’re much richer than they used to be. When middle-class incomes barely grow while the incomes of the wealthiest rise by a factor of six, how could the tax share of the rich not go up, even if their tax rate is falling?
On the other side, we have the claim that the rich have the right to keep their money — which misses the point that all of us live in and benefit from being part of a larger society.
Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer who is now running for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, recently made some eloquent remarks to this effect that are, rightly, getting a lot of attention. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody,” she declared, pointing out that the rich can only get rich thanks to the “social contract” that provides a decent, functioning society in which they can prosper.
Which brings us back to those cries of “class warfare.”
The clincher lies not in what Paul Ryan (a curiously earnest, befuddled lightweight) sees as "class warfare" but in the actual warfare that's been going on for decades. That warfare was initiated by a very rich group of Americans (American persons including American corporate "personhood") who believe they should, as Krugman rightly points out, be exempt from the burdens the rest of us have.
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Greg Sargent points to some wisdom from Michael Cohen.
Republicans have fundamentally weakened the power of their tax narrative by adopting such an extreme position on taxes. As I wrote over the summer, it’s not some form of political hyperbole to accuse Republicans of keeping tax rates low to be their number one priority — it’s a fact. If you look back at the debt limit debate the one issue on which Republicans absolutely refused to bend was tax cuts – even if it meant sending the country into default. Of course, it wasn’t even a 1-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax hikes that they rejected. By some accounts, more than 80 percent of the cuts would have come in spending and the rest in revenue increases. Yet, that was still unacceptable to Republicans.As a result it has become much easier for the White House and Democrats to portray Republicans as handmaidens of the plutocratic class; because it actually happens to be true!
