Oprah to the Rescue? A few days ago, Oprah Winfrey's TV talk show addressed the issue of "Class in America". It hit hard on the statistics that the top 1% of people in income control 40% of the Nation's private wealth and that that 1% makes more than the lowest 50% of all Americans. That is an obscenity produced by the Plutocratic Revolution of 1986, also known as the Tax Reform Act of 1986 or "Reagan Revolution". Before then, progressive taxation kept the disparity between rich and poor within manageable bounds, consistent with a democracy. But the plutocrats were not content with being much richer than everyone else. They wanted to be not just hugely rich but obscenely rich, so they changed the tax code to shift more of the burdens of society onto the poor and middle class, not just in the form of relatively higher income tax rates for the nonrich but also in the form of property taxes, excise taxes, sales taxes, and all the other charges that constitute a much higher proportion of the costs of the poor and middle class than of the rich.
+
The consequence has been, as Oprah reported, a shrinking middle class and the growth of poverty and desperation in the Nation.
+
We have known this for a long time, and every year that Democrats consent to allow Republicans to shaft the poor and middle class it gets worse. No one in politics has addressed the issue powerfully. Maybe Oprah's voice can shake the Nation awake, from its deepening carbon-monoxide lethargy.
+
Maybe not.
+
If we cannot restore progressive taxation, we will see the success of what CNN's Lou Dobbs calls "The War on the Middle Class", and suffer the horrendous consequences of the impoverishment of the mass to cater to the very few. The end of that road is violent revolution and the mass eradication of the rich. While that would be a good thing for the angry poor and downwardly mobile members of the hard-pressed middle class to see, it would not be good for our civilization. The rich have got to be made to understand that there is only one end to the road they have set us upon: the slaughter of the rich.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,014 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:14 PM