This is old, but I just stumbled across it on WashingtonMonthly:
In every industrial democracy since the end of World War II, there has been a social contract between the few and the many. In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority.
[….]Globalization has eliminated the first reason for the rich to continue supporting this bargain at the nation-state level, while the privatization of the military threatens the other rationale.
[….] [T]he U.S. could become a kind of giant Aspen for the small population of the super-rich and their non-voting immigrant retainers. Many environmentalists might approve of the depopulation of North America, because sprawling suburbs would soon be reclaimed by the wilderness. And deficit hawks would be pleased as well. The middle-class masses dependent on Social Security and Medicare would have departed the country, leaving only the self-sufficient rich and foreign guest workers without any benefits, other than the charity of their employers.
One of the things I’ve been struck by recently is how increasingly brazen wealthy interests have become about running our government, whether it’s Meg Whitman blowing 8 figure of her own wealth on an election, the increasing prominence of the Chamber of Commerce, the breathless speculation about Michael Bloomberg and so on. Once upon a time, this might have been something that the media criticized, now they’re cheerleading it.
Update. I’m not claiming that the author of this article (Michael Lind) is cheerleading neofeudalism, I mean that Broder et al. are when they root for a Bloomberg presidency.
L. Ron Obama
Maybe that’s what Scooter Libby was referring to.
The Other Chuck
$140 million is nine figures. And she lost. And Bloomberg actually seems to have some aptitude as a mayor and a shred of conscience here and there.
It’s the ones behind the scenes I have a problem with.
Also, Aspen is clean and pretty. Methinks it’ll be more like Brazil, but without the hope of eventually electing an actual socialist.
Omnes Omnibus
Will David Brooks be giving a talk?
MTiffany
This can all be fixed with guns and bullets, right? And to be fair, it was the Republicans that brought it up first…
jl
This analysis omits that fact that our Galtian overlords will produce crises that require massive infusion of money and labor from the masses of lesser people.
So, if it occurs, it will be passing stage, before the next crisis they cook up, or the failure of the few remaining bits of crumbing and increasingly isolated bits of infrastructure, destroys it all up completely, and all is destroyed forever.
So, what then? I suppose the native inhabitants will start spreading out from their reservations and rancheros, and start to rebuild their lives in the ruins of ‘what the white man did’.
Sounds like a good movie scrip.
So will end with a (c).
Edit: I already have the scene in my head where Dimon, Chertoff and a couple of Kochs crash through a huge plate glass window fighting over the last bits of beef jerky (of the finest, smoked with hickory and steeped in old whisky) as the wolves move in, and the Sioux ride over the ridge to their new digs.
This will be a great movie.
cermet
Thank god more countries are getting nukes – they’ll need them once the super rich take over all food, water and health care – Nukes, at least, are easy to make; soon, the NRA will demand the right to own nukes and maybe, this might be a good idea.
jd81
Whitman blew 9 figures.
fourlegsgood
Hell, I stumbled into the comments on a Yahoo story (AP story) about the tax deal and there were several people on there saying how we shouldn’t antagonize the rich because they’re the ones who create jobs.
kindness
What amazes me are all the moderate income regular joes who firmly believe that if they vote Republican they too will find themselves magically in the land of riches. Galt. When I ask some of my friends who are boneheads in this respect they look at me like I’m the one who is ignoring reality.
Self hypnotism is a powerful force.
alwhite
I have encouraged my kids to get out of the country when they finish school. I do not expect the US to go gently into that good night.
The morans will want simpler and faster solutions to all life’s ills. The military will be the only real arrow left in the quiver will be the over-bloated military which will be used in increasingly desperate attempts to remain relevant.
Unless the unthinkable happens & the morans come to their senses & stop demanding their destruction.
Dennis SGMM
There is a website out there somewhere (And I wish that I could find it again) that compared aerial photos of Detroit in the Forties with satellite views of the same areas now. It was downright eerie to see how much of that city has been reclaimed by nature. It can happen here.
The wealthy, aided and abetted by many pols and the conglomerate media really don’t mind causing the rest of us fuck off and die. They can always import menials who “know their place” from elsewhere.
gnomedad
The rich are not “self-sufficient”, they are in control.
JPL
If taxes were lower wouldn’t I be able to keep more of my money? Oh yeah, what money…
Mike B
With regard to the Salon article, I’m ready to emigrate. I just don’t know what other country that would have me. What other country would want to open their borders to a bunch of American cast-offs?
But in all seriousness, I’d be ready to go if I knew where to go and how to make it happen (I don’t have a lot of savings). I agree with alwhite above. I have no more optimism left for this country.
IrishGirl
It’s not just the media cheerleading it. The con pols are doing it out in the open now too. DeMint just said yesterday his big reform idea for UI is turning them into loans. Yes, he said loans!
That sounds great. Howz about we go back to using prisons for debtors. Then we can really have a permanent underclass….oh wait…..we might already be there. No wonder the media and the pols aren’t bothering to hide their support for turning us all into serfs who should be grateful to our Galtian overlords. It’s already happened…..
Jamie
well the good news is you get a tax cut. The bad news is they moved your job to Shanghai.
PeakVT
Meg Whitman blowing 8 figure of her own wealth on an election
The final amount out of her own pocket was in the low nine figures, IIRC.
AhabTRuler
@alwhite: Yeah, but where do ya go? I mean, Canada’s too close, NZ doesn’t need anymore disaffected NorAms, and Rapa Nui, well, we know how that ended last time.
ETA: Hell, the psychotic bastards in the AF will find their way to wherever you are, if they have to, and they tend to ruin everyone’s day.
Dennis SGMM
@IrishGirl:
It’s clear to me that reinstatement of indentured servitude would make America much more business-friendly. That and making jus primae noctis the law of the land would usher in a Golden Age.
trollhattan
Fxd. No shit, the last count I read was somewhere north of $140,000,000 of her money, and over $160M total.
Impossible to fathom, but there it is.
AhabTRuler
How many islands can you buy for $140-160 mil?
Well, for a bigshot, just one, but how does Thailand grab you. You can pick up smaller islands for only $10 mil, so a dozen or so if you’ll settle small.
Violet
@gnomedad:
Heard Limbaugh on the radio today for about five seconds. Noticed that he called the rich the “job-creators.” I figured that had to be the new or current talking point as to why they shouldn’t be taxed. No jobs will be created if we tax the job creators!
I also came in in the middle of some comment Limbaugh was making about the tax compromise Obama made with the GOP. Limbaugh wasn’t discussing the substance of it. Instead he said that even if Obama said it was a good deal, that Obama didn’t really believe it. Apparently what Obama believes is much more important than what he does, at least in Limbaugh’s world.
Dennis SGMM
@Violet:
The job creators? What, have they taken the past two years off?
LongHairedWeirdo
The other side of this is, with a highly progressive tax rate, paying salaries and other expenses becomes easier on the wallet. If your business is bringing in big bucks, and the marginal rate is the pre-Reagan 70%, then spending an extra hundred thousand to give your employees a pay raise cost a sole proprietor $30,000 – if the owner took the $100k home, s/he’d pay 70% in taxes, and only get $30k.
With a top tax rate of 35%, the incentive is reversed and the cost of spending that money on the employees more than doubles. Take the $100k home, and you pay $35k in taxes, and take home $65k.
All other things aside, Reagan’s tax cuts made employees much more expensive in the take-home pay of sole proprietorships and partnerships. (I can’t comment on corporations, I don’t know their rates – but it does mean that if there’s a set cap for payroll, there’s a higher reason to give more to yourself, if you’re one of The Chosen.)
That was also when mass layoffs became newsworthy (and later, became less newsworthy, because they happened so bloody often).
Tax policy is complicated, because salaries are always deductible business expenses, and the profit of a business is the salary for a sole proprietor (or for the partners in a partnership).
News Reference
“Once upon a time, this might have been something that the media criticized, now they’re cheerleading it.”
Vast swathes of the “media” is owned by billionaires who have millionaire
news journalistsspokespeople who serve them.Those powerful megaphones largely drowns out independent, critical voices.
Martin
@Violet: Rush has a $400M contract. I think all the unemployed should show up at his house demanding a job.
As a compromise, they should demand that he produce a list of the 3,800 US median income jobs that he created with half of that $200M.
Failing that, they should loot his house and keep what they find, and leave a note that they’ll be back for their next paycheck in 30 days.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
One thing that strikes me, Doug, is that there is an anti-democratic (small d) theme visible in the nexus between the rich and the hillbilly political base they have bought for themselves.
The commonality is a complete abandonment of the idea of majority rule. In this new GOP land, the few rich and the minority of bigots, stupid, fundamental religious, low information, anti science, anti education … join forces to form an evil axis of Get Whatever The Fuck We Want, whether the majority of Americans actually want these things or not … whether these things are in the interest of the majority or not.
Not only is this a giant Fuck You to the majority, it is a giant Fuck You to anything or anyone that dares to impose upon the narrow views and self interest of the aggressive minority. Who cares if most people want to tax the rich? “Most people” don’t count. In the scheme of Minority Rule, schemes and tricks and legislative land mines and parliamentary gotchas are the new law of the land, and the aggressive minority really doesn’t care that their views and desires are minority views and desires. Fuck us, the majority …
Of course, the whole undertaking rests on our apathy and inability to create a counter political machine that works. We outnumber them, but we can’t outvote or outmaneuver them. We are governed by gremlins, and all we can do is blogbitch and fight with each other over whose fault it is.
Henry
“Once upon a time, this might have been something that the media criticized, now they’re cheerleading it.”
I just want to make sure we’re clear here – this article isn’t cheerleading this by any means. It’s very snarky, and really quite depressed about this trend. It closes with this:
Obviously, those are not the words of a “cheerleader”. Doug, I guess assume you’re referring to others in the media, some of whom certainly do fit the bill. But Michael Lind isn’t one of them.
HyperIon
@AhabTRuler:
Fiji
the university of i-da-ho
Douche Of The Day: Bernie Goldberg
Hawes
I wonder if the media (whatever the fuck they are) are beginning to turn on this issue. For the first time since I can remember, there have been actual reports condemning the increasing gap between the rich and everyone else.
In my perfect sparkle pony world, Obama will spend the next six years proving that government is NOT the problem in people’s lives, that government CAN do things for average Americans that make their lives better.
And then we get a good old fashioned table thumper who comes in and leads a populist revolt against the plutocrats. I realize that’s a long ways down the road from our perspective, but remember how the GOP did it.
First Reagan made you blame everything on the government, then Dubya showed that government really WAS the problem (ask a New Orleanian).
That’s my long term hope. First we need a Teddy Roosevelt. Then we need a Franklin.
Mark S.
@Violet:
Every gooper Senator I’ve seen on TV for the past two weeks has made sure to say “job creators” at least every other sentence. It is definitely the new talking point.
Fuck, I am really sick of politics right now. Is there a game on tonight? I tried watching Indiana Jones 4, but I wince every time an 80-year-old guy gets punched in the face, and I didn’t find Indy’s survival of a nuclear blast to be very plausible.
Suffern ACE
@IrishGirl: No way. I joked about unemployment loans the other week. It is getting damn hard to snark when your snark actually becomes a policy proposal.
WyldPirate
Neofeudalism. It’s the new Coke.
Dennis SGMM
@Suffern ACE:
The usual “unnamed sources” starting floating the idea of unemployment loans about two or three weeks ago. If you couple that with the GOPers’ insistence that the UI extension not add to the deficit then the stage is set for mischief. I would not be surprised to see them roll out a loan program to be run by the banks because, ya’ know, the private sector can do it with lower costs and… For the coup de grace they’ll insist on passage of their plan or they’ll filibuster every last thing in the queue.
Corner Stone
Watching the “riots” in the UK. Kind of makes me sad.
Because over the next 12 months there will be no such movement here in the states.
Corner Stone
Could Austan Goolsbee be any more of a fucking douche?
Ija
Because people who work in the media today are vastly overpaid and belong to the class of the rich. Maybe when newspapers start falling and journalists start earning 30k a year (those who still have jobs anyway) they will rediscover class warfare. When it comes to the media, it’s not political bias we should be worried about, it’s class bias.
evap
My plan was to move to Ireland (my spouse is Irish, so I could get Irish citizenship; our kids already have Irish passports), but that’s not looking so good right now.
DougJ
@Henry:
I don’t think of Lind as part of the media here, I’m referring to Broder et al.’s love of Bloomberg.
El Cid
Well, remember…
…right wingers want the US to be run economically just like their favorite era of the late 19th century super-magnate robber barons (whose wealth put today’s billionaires to shame), particularly the McKinley era.
So we might as well get in the spirit.
beergoggles
If you’re that disaffected, you should seriously consider moving to new england; it’s like a whole different country within the US. Maybe enough of you will move into Maine so we can get new senators.
Other than for the winters, I really don’t understand why the states up here have such a net negative population growth though.
AAA Bonds
I would point out that Michael Lind has lately been in the business of writing scare stories about America’s social safety net (!) designed to convince liberals to support absolutist anti-immigration positions.
Mike in NC
@El Cid:
Recall that Karl Rove was a huge admirer of Mark Hanna, the guy who got McKinley elected, and who set the stage for future Republicans like Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Good times!
PurpleGirl
@IrishGirl: The Club for Growth wants UI to become private insurance which you have to buy.
PurpleGirl
@evap: A week, maybe two weeks back, the NY Times had an article about how some Irish are thinking about immigrating themselves to other countries, i.e., Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the U.S.
Kat
Among 30 developed countries, US students are now number 23 in reading and number 25 in math.
Why do you think our corporate overlords have allowed the teachers’ union to be practically the last one standing — with tenure for life after teaching for only two years?
Nutella
FTFY
Suffern ACE
@Dennis SGMM: I won’t actually believe that the idea has legs, but it does lead one to the conclusion that sections of the public policy thinkin’ establishment have been outsourced to college sophomores who waited until the end of the term to write their term papers.
We don’t need clever policies.
Wile E. Quixote
@IrishGirl:
You know, I used to think that Jim DeMint deserved to be gut-shot and left to die out in the desert. But I’ve changed and progressed. Now I think that Jim DeMint and everyone who voted for Jim DeMint deserves to be gut-shot and left to die out in the desert.