Class Warfare

Class warfare! Class warfare! You'd think the Republican Party would get tired of yelling about it after a while. The fact that there are people that can still yell about it (as the links show, primarily Cain, but not just him) in the face of the Occupy Wall Street protests and the "we are the 99%" movement just shows how little of an understanding they have. That they can manage to blame Obama in the same breath for screwing up the economy is just icing on the cake.

These growing movements have everything to do with class warfare: the class warfare that created the 1% in the first place. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention. Unless you managed somehow to miss policies such as taxation of capital gains at a lower rate than the rest of income, the focus on cutting primarily progressive income taxes while refusing to consider touching the regressive payroll and sales taxes, or cutting back on regulations that cut into the profits of big business?

But those improve everyone's lives, or so the argument goes. Wealth will trickle down and all that. Screw that. After all, that requires that the people getting this money make that happen. Businesses are raising salaries for upper management, but not line workers. Nor are they hiring and expanding with their money either. And the very rich don't go around handing out money to the 99% on any kind of regular basis.

But they deserve that money, because they worked so hard to get it, or so the argument goes. Sure, whatever you say. I'm not a huge fan of the idea that pushing a few buttons on a computer to allocate so much money to this investment banking account really qualifies as work that deserves millions of dollars worth of payout. And management is a hard job, no doubt about that, but really one that deserves hundreds of times the income of many non-management positions? Even if it does, none of that is an argument for policies that favor the very rich, I hasten to add. If you make $4 million, you deserve to get taxed like it, regardless of whether those are capital gains or not.

And where does Obama enter this discussion? Cain calls this a distraction from his failed policies. Those would be the policies that failed to get off the ground thanks to Republican interference? Or the ones that went through with Republican assistance? Help me out here.

Gingrich so helpfully informs us that this is the natural product of Obama's class warfare. Fair enough. You might even be right. That isn't much of a condemnation, considering that if this is class warfare it's a justified counterattack.

Neither of those seem very strong though... oh here we go, apparently in Gingrich's world, this flies in the face of the American tradition of working hard. Apparently in Cain's world, this is playing the victim card, that we want the rich to lose something so that we can have more. You wouldn't happen to have seen this, would you? Go on, tell me they're not working hard. I dare you.

All I can say is, if we really are the 99%, I don't see how any of these people have ever gotten into political office. Not when they have such a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be the 99 percent in this country.