The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. "We're going to close the unproductive loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes make it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary -- and that's crazy."
Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. "Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less?"
The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE!"
The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Reagan.
Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan -- which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits -- is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.
____________________________________________________________________________________
[Excerpted from "The Party of the Rich", by Tim Dickinson, in the current issue of Rolling Stone. For the full article, please click the link under Buster's Links.]
No comments:
Post a Comment