Steve Benen finds Roger Simon whining about Democrats’ engaged in “class warfare”:
The rich are different from you and me. They are swine.
Here’s the thing….I suspect that Simon himself is rich. Most name pundits are.
I have an idea: from now on, whenever a pundit bitches about “class warfare”, he should give an estimate of his own income and assets. That law professor from U of Chicago who said he’d go Galt if his marginal rates when up 2% is an asshole and probably a sociopath, but at least he gave enough information that one could estimate his income.
Simon should do the same if he’s going to carry on like that.
azlib
Given the behavior of our electorate, I think we should just go to a one dollar one vote system.
John O
Right on. Full disclosure and all.
I hope we avoid it, but it wouldn’t kill me to see these people in the middle of some genuine class warfare. Which is where I think we’re headed after the GOP takes the Senate and Obama (Romney, whomever) goes along with their nutty economic proposals.
oondioline
Can you fairly make this argument without such a disclosure yourself, DougJ?
BGinCHI
When is Politico going to get a subheading for their blog web site title:
NEWS FOR ASSHOLES, BY ASSHOLES
dollared
I really do not get why the answer to “Class Warfare!” shouldn’t be “Yes. I am on the side of the American working people, the middle class and the working poor. Which side are you on?”
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
The last time I suggested that a conservative who complained about the way the dirty unwashed treated him go do something inappropriate with himself, said conservative decided to splash my name and website on the front page of his own, much larger site in an attempt to intimidate me. And you know something? It worked, to a certain extent. I work in a semi-precarious world, job-wise, and if my contract isn’t renewed every fall, I’m back in food service at best, homeless at worst.
And yet when I person who makes significantly more than I does cries about class warfare, I see red and I want to lead the mob with the torches and pitchforks and burn his shit down. And I’m not talking metaphorically here–I want to go old-style barbarian on him, just so he can recognize, firsthand, what an actual class war is when the poor and middle classes fight back.
It won’t happen, of course, because I and most in my position are too worried about losing what we have to go all out on these people. And what we have is often significant compared to the rest of the world, and we know that on some level. So instead people like Simon can claim, without a hint of irony, that when Democrats want to take just a little more in taxes from the wealthy that it’s some sort of hatred for the rich, and that class warfare is the wrong idea, and I’ll sit and bitch from behind my little computer screen and no one will get hurt. And that sucks, in some small way.
Buck
For all the money the wealthy throw out to keep politicians under their control and to stay on message… etc., you’d think that it would be a lot cheaper on them just to go ahead and allow the working class a sniff of that sweet apple pie once in a while instead.
beltane
That should go for all those overpaid media assholes. Charlie Gibson comes to mind for some reason. These people live in another world, one where everyone sends there kids to private school and no one worries about making their car insurance payment. That’s why they always get so excited when they talk to cab drivers; to them it’s just like going to New Guinea and having a conversation with a real life head hunter.
Martin
Sounds like a job for Wikileaks.
soonergrunt
OT–
Most of you know that I keep a close eye on the Birther movement. Birthers, for those not in the know, are right-wingers who believe that President Obama is not a Natural Born Citizen, and therefore unable to assume and occupy the office of the Presidency under the US Constitution. They advance all sorts of bizarre legal theories that have little to no basis in the law or legal scholarship.
In short, your typical birther is a fucking whackaloon.
Well, one of the more prominent birthers is Army Lieutenant Colonel Terrence A. Lakin, M.D. What makes LTC Lakin so prominent in the birther movement is that several months ago, he refused orders to proceed on Temporary Change of Station to Fort Campbell, KY in order to join a field hospital that was then pending deployment to Afghanistan. He then refused orders to report to his then-Brigade Commander, COL Gordon R. Roberts, MSW, MOH (Yes, the Medal of Honor).
He subsequently made a few YouTube videos in which he claimed that he was “inviting (his) own court-martial” with the apparent goal of getting discovery with respect to the President’s personal papers and the “vault copy” of the President’s Hawaiian birth certificate.
The Army charged LTC Lakin with four specifications of Article 92, UCMJ: Failure to Obey an Order or Regulation, and two specifications of Article 87, UCMJ: Missing Movement
LTC Lakin has held that if President Obama isn’t the lawful CinC, then no orders can possibly be lawful and therefore he was duty bound to disobey them. In the military, the lawfulness of an order is a matter of law for the military judge to decide. The judge in this case, COL Denise R. Lind, JA, issued her findings last month that the orders to TCS to Kentucky and the orders to report to COL Roberts were lawful, thus barring LTC Lakin from presenting that defense at Court Martial. That ruling also declared the matter of the President’s birth to be irrelevant and therefore off-limits for the court to investigate. Today, LTC Lakin pled guilty to all for specifications of Art. 92. On Defense request, and without objection by the Trial Counsel, Judge Lind dismissed one specification of Article 87, and LTC Lakin pled not guilty to the one remaining specification of Article 87. A members panel of 8 Army O-6 officers was seated, and the trial on that final charge is underway. It should be recessing any moment now, as it is 5:30 PM on the east coast. The Court-Martial is at Fort Meade, MD.
beltane
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): Perhaps Roger Simon should ask the following question: What are wealthy Americans doing that is inspiring so much hatred among their fellow citizens? That is the question which needs to be asked.
Bill Arnold
Most people don’t “hate” the rich, they just believe that the rich should have less money. It is the rich who conflate the two.
gene108
I have an idea for a comedy sketch based on the the wealthy in America being forced to “go Galt”.
It’s a take off of an original Star Trek episode, where some super powerful alien race plucks great figures from history and pits them against each other, in a survival of the fittest battle.
Instead of great historical figures, like Abraham Lincoln or Surak, these aliens are impressed by who really powerful people in the wealthiest nation in the world are and they grab some hedge fund managers, mergers and acquisitions lawyers, and maybe banker or two.
When forced to survive outside of our society these heroes put the aliens in a bad situation. The great people of other societies, who are atop the social ladder in other worlds, are actually leaders, who are in charge because they can do important tasks better than other people, such as make sure food supplies are secure.
Our American heroes on the other hand aren’t good for much of anything, since all they really do is move “bits of paper around” (though right now that’d be more electronic data than paper), to other people, who have decided these “bits of paper” have some actual value.
The aliens are totally baffled, as to why these people have such a high position in our society and don’t know what to do.
There’ll probably be some snappy dialogue, while these Galtian overlords try to negotiate with the aliens, to prove why they are the best, which only leads to more confusion and consternation.
The end result is hilarity ensues.
Joseph Nobles
One way to eliminate class warfare is to eliminate class. One way to eliminate class is to work to reduce income gaps between the lower and the higher incomes. The smaller the gaps, the less likely class warfare becomes. One way to help reduce the income gap is to tax the living snot out of the higher income brackets – say, 70% or so.
So higher taxes on the rich is NOT class warfare. It’s a giant can of CLASS-WARFARE-B-GONE.
cathyx
Most people don’t hate the rich, they just wish they had enough money that if they get their tax cuts eliminated, they have enough money to not even notice the difference.
beltane
@Joseph Nobles: But that’s not what they want. They want to win the class war and have the losing side shower them with love and admiration. Think of the orgasm someone like George Will would have if the plebes were forced to bow and curtsy and say “M’Lord” when passing him in the street.
Lev
It’s projection. Have you ever seen any of those charts showing how growth is distrubuted among the public when a Democrat is president vs. when a Republican is president? When a Democrat is in charge, every group goes up. When a Republican is in charge, it’s just the rich, and everyone else stays put or goes down. But the crazy thing is that rich people earn more when Democrats are in charge vs. when Republicans are in charge. The only reason they vote as they do is the rich person’s ideology of seeing our national wealth as a pie to be shared (hence the “evils of redistribution” crap out there), instead of an organic thing that grows when it’s fed properly.
Looking at how income is distributed, it’s the Republicans who fight a class war every time and it’s Democrats who adhere to the Jacksonian principle of treating all classes equally.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
OT; If you need further reason to detest people, read the comments in this story about a woman who wanted to go on the Hajj, and had to quit her teaching job in order to do it, and has sued for violating her religious freedoms. My favorite comments are those asking why she didn’t just go during the summer.
Catsy
@soonergrunt: The gist of the argument against him, as I understand it, is that Obama’s citizenship and legitimacy as President is irrelevant, because Obama did not issue the orders he disobeyed–superior officers in the chain of command whose legitimacy is unquestioned issued those orders. It’s akin to refusing to pull over for a cop because you think the precinct chief is an alien.
I don’t see how he prevails or does anything other than dishonorably end his career with this.
Zifnab
What? Goodness no! That would be class warfare.
It’s important that pundits and their audiences don’t see who is rich and who is poor. Only who is “for capitalism” and who is “against capitalism”.
We need to maintain a class-blind society in much the same way that we maintain a race-blind society. We don’t talk about the difference in standard-of-living between rich and poor or lily white and overly tan, because that would hurt someone’s feelings.
Do you really think hurting people’s feelings will help address the serious government overspending problem that has crippled our economy? No. The only path forward is the path of austerity and sacrifice. Let’s not bring terrible verbal slurs and angry rhetoric into the debate. That doesn’t solve anything.
harokin
There are at least two things going on: 1) a perception that many rich people do not deserve their wealth (for example, failed CEOs who get unbelievable amounts for … doing nothing, or fund managers who add nothing of value to anything) and 2) a perception that rich people are wasting their money on disgustingly splurgy things when other are in need.
These two things do not make people feel fondly about the rich. Telling them to “get over it” is not likely to help.
PS
No, no, Simon isn’t rich. There are only two rich people in the entire country (Gates ‘n’ Buffett). Everyone else has someone to envy, so obviously they are not rich.
Strangely, the only rich Americans are class traitors. It’s very confusing.
Moonbatman
Epic Stupid whining Faux Noise Wingnut Butthurt defending the undeserving rich.
Megyn Kelly Blames Democrats’ ‘Class Warfare Narrative’ for Arsonist in Cape Cod
Unlike the violence promoted by Glenn Beck, this violence is justified by the economy being in the tank, millions of people out of work, the record profits on Wall Street, the oppression of the Poor by the Rich getting richer and increasing income disparity.
They are lucky they did not get the treatment they deserve. Like what Persecuted Political Prisoner and Social Justice Warrior Steven Hayes did to the rich Fatcat Petit family.
Malron
“If you wanna be rich….you got to be a bitch”
– Laid Back, “White Horse”
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Simon sez: “Only half of the wealthiest people in America inherited their wealth. The rest earned it”
Jon Chait ripostes: “Only half of the wealthiest people in America earned their wealth. The rest inherited it.”
Holy Fucking Venn-diagram FAIL, Batman! Is there nobody in the punditariat who can figure out that there are other ways to acquire undeserved wealth, besides just inheritance??? Here’s a clue – how about systematic looting? We can start with the undeserved and systemically counterproductive bonuses on Wall St.
cleek
@Bill Arnold:
i don’t want them to have less money, per se. i just want them to pay their way and STFU.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@beltane: Isn’t the Simon mentioned the guy who recently, with in the last 2 years or so, had both legs amputated?
CircleSquared
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): Just where I am, also. Thank you for the detailed post.
I got into a snap with some folks who were going on and on about using an auction to raise money, and I remarked that an auction is how rich girls shop, because the poor always have every penny counted. Tactless of me, and I was shocked to realize that people I’d known for years with their own homes, secure food situations, and things like built-in swimming pools sincerely believe that they are poor because others have more houses, options, better vacations.
I’m beginning to wonder if anyone who has home and food security and who claims to be “poor” isn’t simply documenting how greedy he is.
John O
@beltane:
That really made me laugh because I believe it is true.
BGinCHI
Or, as the Wu Tang Clan says:
c.r.e.a.m.
Zifnab
@Lev:
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
Democrats bring a degree of rule of law and social justice with them when they start raising all the boats.
Suddenly, you can’t bang your secretary, knock her up, and fire her without being deluged with sexual harassment claims, child support payments, or a divorce where your wife takes half your stuff. Organized labor starts demanding a bigger cut of company revenue. Clients and employees start demanding safe working conditions, which causes short term headache and pain to the bottom line. Black people start showing up at your country club. Poor people start using your doctor.
Sure, everyone gets more money. But there’s still a hard cap on power. Democrats in government limit the divine rights and absolute freedoms of the American-born rich white elderly male. What good is being a billionaire if you can’t shoot a 78-year-old friend in the face and make him apologize for it?
Sko Hayes
You know, I have no problem with rich people like Bill and Melinda Gates, or the Kennedys or Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. They understand that sharing the wealth to help others up is the best way to enjoy it.
I do have a problem with these greedy scrooges who wouldn’t be so wealthy without the advantages they were given by living in this country but think 2% is too high of a price to pay for the privilege.
I really hate the whiners that make over $250 or 500 thousand, and call themselves “middle class” because they live in a big city like New York. No sir, making 5 times the median wage of the country is definitely not middle class.
gene108
@Joseph Nobles:
Even back when the income tax brackets were that high, the rich didn’t pay the top marginal tax rate. The effective tax rate, i.e. what you actually pay in taxes, was much lower.
This is one reason Congress passed the AMT, back in the late 1960’s, when the top tax brackets were pretty high. The rich had a lot of deductions the could take to reduce their tax liability to a very small amount.
The gap in income is a lot deeper issue than the fact that once upon a time the income gap was lower and now the income gap is higher, since one factor that changed is the tax rates.
Correlation between the trend in tax rates and income inequality doesn’t mean causation.
Whatever is driving the gap between rich and everyone else is deeper than just what the tax rates are. There’s a fundamental shift in how people are getting paid, versus earlier eras. Now the rich make money via stock options and other investment vehicles, rather than income. For whatever reason, they are able to keep pushing these investments to make more money than someone, who is stuck earning a living via their paycheck.
Why did this happen? I don’t know.
How to change it? I don’t know.
jl
The CW beltway pundits and rightwing hacks are different from you and me, they are swine, ALL OF THEM!
Many of the rich however are not swine. They are a mixed bag, with good and bad among ‘only’ the half that inherited their wealth, and the overwhelming majority half that earned it themselves, or benefited from policies that favored those who got to some government trough first.
And I forgot about some of the overwhelming half who stole it themselves. No disrespect intended there, white collar crime, or organizing and enforcing a banking cartel, for example, is a kind of hard work that some say should be rewarded on the sound principle of good government of ‘let the winners win and the losers lose’.
Why heckitall, even that murderous Khmer Rouge thug, Bernie Sanders, from the totalitarian state of Vermont, admitted that many rich are good citizens concerned about the general welfare.
P.S. When will the debauched Bolshevik swine DougJ liberate my comment from moderation in the previous tax the rich post? Too busy doing some commie egghead math, or what?
I do meat and potatoes math, I do stuff like 2 plus 2 equals, something. Not sure my calculator goes that high. But I am a statistician and an economist, so usually I just assume an answer. That, my friends is efficiency in research.
John O
@CircleSquared:
I would put the range of income in my immediate professional circle as somewhere between $75K-$150K (say within 20 people or so, the ones I talk to the most) and you can’t BELIEVE the whining I hear about wealth when the subject comes up.
I keep pointing at graphs and asking since they’re in business shouldn’t they be able to read one of these? and they just rationalize it away by pointing at rich people like Buffet and Gates. I say yeah they’re over here, pointing way out to the right of the graph, and still these people are paid $75K-$150K/year even though I have just demonstrated that they’re fact-illiterate.
“They’re rich. I’m middle class.”
Makes me want to take a nail gun to my own head. Just to get them to reconsider.
Lev
@Zifnab: I agree. Put another way, poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and the king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.
freelancer
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
The Islamic calender is lunar and does change year to year relative to our Gregorian calender. A few years ago, Ramadan was in the middle of February, this year it was in August. So the argument that she delay it for a time where Hajj is in the summer isn’t quite as stupid as it sounds.
As for her reasoning that “based on her religious beliefs, she could not justify delaying performing hajj”, well that’s no better a position than “My religious beliefs won’t allow me to avoid missing the Winter Olympics, so I need 3 weeks off in the middle of 2014”. I’m sorry, but request or not, paid time off or not, my employers have every legal right to tell me to sit on it and spin. Employment is voluntary.
Now, if she was suing because she feels she was specifically discriminated against for being a Muslim, and she can prove it (as opposed to her employers denied a teacher/employee a 3-week chunk of time off during the school year because they felt that to be unreasonable and no one else got an equivalent deal), she has a case.
ETA: and yes, many of the comments on the article are fucking disgusting.
John O
@gene108:
I’ve got an idea: Can we stipulate the Tax Code needs to be trashed and started on all over again? To me that is the #1 place to start.
soonergrunt
@Catsy: Well, he’s already plead guilty to four specifications of Article 92. For each specification, the maximum punishment is six months confinement and dismissal from the service (He’s a commissioned officer so he can’t be ‘discharged’)
Judge Lind has a reputation as a “hanging judge,” which is probably why the Accused elected to be tried for the final charge and for the sentencing phase by a Panel of Members. I can’t see 8 full bird Colonels being happy about being taken away from their normal duties for two to three days, so that could get ugly as well.
For some reason that I don’t understand, the maximum punishment for the specs to which he has plead guilty would be 18 months confinement and dismissal. If he is also convicted of the remaining Art 87 spec, it carries a 2-years confinement and/or dismissal.
His total could be 3.5 years and dismissal.
Given that another doctor had to deploy on short notice and is currently sleeping on a cot in Kandahar, I don’t see Lakin walking away without at least a year of confinement, but I could be wrong.
If his sentence is a year or more of confinement or dismissal from the service, it will trigger an automatic appeal to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals under Article 66, UCMJ.
Martin
@Joseph Nobles: Doesn’t work. You have to actually pay them less. Eliminate the structural elements that cause this kind of wealth accumulation – cap gains, stock transaction fees, eliminate corporate wage deduction over a certain amount, etc.
Or, ultimately tax wealth, rather than income.
Joseph Nobles
@gene108: I don’t mind deductions. If the government needs revenue, that’s one thing, but this isn’t about raising revenue for the government. Deductions for things like investing in your “small business” to create actual jobs is absolutely 100% A-OK with me. It’s the old Reagan phrase, “Trust, but verify.” If you’re paying taxes on upper income brackets, it means you’re putting it in your pocket, not investing it in your business. Put that money back into your business, make some jobs, and have it all deducted from taxable income. That’s how the government can create private sector jobs. Lowering the upper bracket tax margins and hoping income inequality and unemployment will get fixed somehow is the Pony of Ages.
Southern Beale
If you subscribe to Harper’s or can get your hands on the January 2011 copy you really need to read “The Fatal Center,” which talks a bit about this. Democrats live in fear that they will be accused of waging class warfare, while Republicans brazenly do just that.
From the article:
But ya know, IOKIYAR.
fourlegsgood
I could do with a little class warfare. And I believe I have a pitchfork or two lying around here. I’m pretty sure I can rustle up a torch or two as well.
Citizen_X
Of course, this is not one of DougJ’s posts where the title refers to some song.
Pangloss
@PS: You forgot Soros.
Buck
@soonergrunt:
TPMMuckraker has this now:
‘Birther’ Army Doctor Pleads Guilty On One Count At Court Martial
Martin
@John O: I think Obama would agree with you.
Pangloss
@fourlegsgood: I’ll bring the feathers, you heat the tar.
dollared
Mr. Simon, All of your ilfe the rich paid a higher percentage of their income in taxes than they do right now. Ten years ago, in wartime, the rich got the biggest tax cut in history. This tax cut was not funded and my children will have to repay the trillions of dollars that were borrowed to give this gift – there is no other word for it- to the richest Americans.
President Obama and the entire Democratic Party, and the majority of all Americans, want this free giveway, with borrowed money, to stop. Seems pretty responsible. They don’t want their $2Trillion back. That doesn’t seem vindictive at all.
They want the government to be solvent so it can protect us and help us raise and educate our children. They want the rich to pay a bit more than yesterday, but substantially less than they during the Clinton Boom Years and dramatically less than they paid in all the other prosperous, growing times in since WWII.
Mr Simon, why is that bad? What Democrats have called rich people “swine?” It seems that you resentful and angry here – you want to defend the rich, but have no arguments.
John O
@Joseph Nobles:
Deductions are asinine. We’re collecting money here, not doing physics or high-intensity math. Exempt X for everyone; that’s your deduction.
One of the great problems with our system in general is people’s total lack of faith and/or fairness in the Code.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@gene108:
Nicholas Taleb has an answer in The Black Swan: the driving force is the growth of an information economy (what he calls extremistan) with different scalability limits on economic output and income than is the case in the older agricultural and industrial economic sectors (what Taleb calls mediocristan).
This is because fad and fashion (in which network effects dominate) play a much greater role in distributing the rewards of success in the information economy and as a result you can and often do end up with income distributions which are power-law scaled rather than psuedo-Gaussian. For example even mediocre plumbers or dentists or auto mechanics make a non-trivial fraction of the income of the best plumber/dentist/mechanic/etc in their field. For authors on the other hand this is not the case – J.K. Rowling makes as much money as an entire stratum of the less popular writers. The same applies to any field where people shuffle bits around for a living – e.g. Wall St.
21st Cen. governments have to figure out how to tame the worst aspects of this new economy in much the same way that governments starting in the 1880s had to figure out how to deal with the negative effects of industrialization.
soonergrunt
@Buck: As I reported, he plead guilty to four counts. Probably confusion since the Court Martial uses the term “specification” to refer to individual instances of unlawful behavior with respect to an individual article of the UCMJ.
Apparently, Orly Taitz and several of the Birtherati were present in the courtroom and the scheduled protest march that was to block an entrance to the post was canceled due to the blizzard going on outside.
John O
@Martin:
I think so, too, but they’ll F it up after it goes through the special interest sausage grinder. No way it comes out simple, which is essential to the “faith” part of why people hate the current one.
fourlegsgood
@Pangloss: Oh, that’s so messy, and probably causes air pollution.
Let’s just skip straight to the guillotine.
Joseph Nobles
@Martin: I said “one way.” Damming the river is one of the steps. Using the reservoir for irrigation is another equally necessary one.
.@beltane: Some visuals I don’t need, no matter how true they are. Will is the modern personification of such a royal turd. I can see him in the 14th century, everyone bowing and scraping as he passes. But as he leaves, someone will make a flapping motion on the top of their head and everybody laughs.
Bottom line: Soak the rich. Otherwise, we’ll have to burn them later, and that’s an awful lot of fuss.
Martin
@Joseph Nobles: But you could, for example, only allow employers to deduct income below a certain threshold – say 500% of the median or mean income for the company. Anything above that gets taxed. Corporations will have to more heavily weigh the true value of those executives rather than just treating them as tax shelters. Alternatively, they could pay their employees more, which would be okay as well.
DougJ
@BGinCHI:
I should add that as a tag.
Buck
@soonergrunt: @soonergrunt:
I get the feeling we haven’t heard the last from Lt. Col. Lakin.
BGinCHI
@DougJ: Be good for your street cred.
Mnemosyne
@freelancer:
Sorry, I missed the part in the Constitution where attending the Winter Olympics is covered the same way that religion is covered. Can you please find that for me?
Like it or not, religion is covered by federal employment law just like race is. If you don’t like that interpretation of the First Amendment, I invite you to try and change it.
soonergrunt
@Buck: Probably not. As I noted, if he gets confinement for a year or more (highly likely) or a dismissal from service (all but guaranteed) then he gets an automatic appeal to ACCA. He can also appeal the outcome of that to the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF) but CAAF does not have to take the case.
If and ONLY IF CAAF takes the case, then it becomes eligible for writ of certoriari at SCOTUS.
One thing about this is that Lakin is no longer being represented by Birther extraordinaire Paul Rolf Jensen, but rather by professional military bar lawyer Ralph Puckett. Since Puckett came on board for the defense, it’s looked a lot less crazy.
Joseph Nobles
@Martin: I like that.
Here’s another suggestion: Average the lowest 20% yearly incomes in a business, average the highest 20% yearly incomes, and then compare. The higher the gap, the higher the business marginal tax. Sit back and watch income inequality take care of itself.
NobodySpecial
@Joseph Nobles:
But as the man says:
“Build a man a fire, he’s warm for a day. Set a man on fire, he’s warm the rest of his life.”
El Cid
The professional ideological classes (those hired for positions in various institutions controlled by the super-rich — a step in between such as a think tank isn’t different) tend to be more often than not selected for their overall identification with and appreciation of the wants, desires, and general worthiness of the uppermost classes of society.
At the same time, since the most prominent of the punditariat and public intellectuals often are brought to mingle with the real super-rich.
Hence those with a half-million dollar can see that they’re clearly not like those centimillionaires and billionaires and multi-generational super-wealthy, so therefore they aren’t rich and people talking about elites and class warfare are exaggerating fringe elements stuck on outmoded Marxism and who don’t understand how a Free Economy works.
So, you’re dealing with types whom the average person might see as “rich”, but who clearly aren’t among the sorts of truly rich (super-rich) at the absolute pinnacles of societal power — or potential power, granting that perhaps some don’t actively do much about it.
MikeJ
@Martin: Much of what they pay execs isn’t “salary” though. They just hand them wads of stock for free.
I’ve always said that my number one tax reform would be the “income is income act” where tax rates would be based on how much money you made, regardless of how you got it.
Turgid Jacobian
She speak in tiny words but I don’t understand
John O
@Joseph Nobles:
Still too complicated. Give everyone from Bill Gates to Buster McHomeless a $36K exemption from federal taxes up to, say, $100K (X, really) tax up to (Y), $250K? flat, tax up to Z ($1M) flat, and if you can get another rate good for us. Each rate goes up.
Here’s the carrot: The higher brackets get first dibs on any future tax cuts.
You could do the same for business based on say, number of employees or gross revenue or whatever.
Capital gains are X, Y, and Z+1%. We’d rather have people earn money than acquire it.
Buck
@freelancer:
A billion years ago when I was just out of college, I couldn’t find a job right off so ended up working at a new Walmart in my area.
I remember Sunday scheduling was pretty rough because many of the employees demanded being able to attend Church services. Walmart worked with them. Since then, you were pretty much shit-outta-luck if you were scheduled for Sunday.
And what have I read recently? Something about Walmart taking away that extra $1.00/hour pay for working on Sunday?
Violet
@freelancer:
@Mnemosyne:
If my religion is WinterOlypmpicsian and I’m required by its teachings, holy books and leaders to attend the Winter Olympics every four years or the Snow God will condemn me to hell, how is that different from any other religion’s teachings? Is it that WinterOlympicsian isn’t a mainstream religion? Does a religion have to have a certain number of followers to qualify for Constitutional protection?
freelancer
@Mnemosyne:
It’s not in the Constitution, but neither is the Hajj. The wording of the anti-Discrimination clause that you quoted is enough cover to provide equal protection to Muslims or say, Zeus/Apollo-worshipping Olympian enthusiasts:
You also said:
Also, my point made equally clear in the “Reasonable Accomodation” section of the Anti-Discrimination language that you linked to:
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
And just to connect the dots a bit more – this is why our pundits in the news media are so hostile to any govermental efforts to rein in the economic excesses of extremistan – because that is precisely the sector of the emerging info economy which they themselves occupy. Our pundits aren’t just defenders of the rich in general, they are the defenders of extremistan riches and wealth specifically.
tomvox1
I ♥ Steve Benen. I really do. The guy is on point more than just about any other blogger I can think of (yes, yes–Cole, too–I’m posting this here, right?). What the hell would this sorry ol’ world be without Political Animal and his wonderful abundance of quality posts daily? I shudder to think.
FYI, they’re having a little fund-y thing for the deeply in the red Washington Monthly over at his place, so if you feel like I do or are just feeling generous and filled with Holiday spirit, toss some money Steve’s way and show him you love him like a 16-year-old girl loved Paul McCartney in 1963…or the wonky liberal equivalent of that.
WereBear
@gene108: That’s a wicked good idea! If you can manage to make it interesting.
Because what they do is fulla crap.
What we’ve got here is a circle jerk of rich people who have formed a kind of Con Artist Consortium. They have always had a situation where they get to throw money at each other and keep whatever tumbles out of the basket. While that’s great; it’s not enough any more.
They now rig situations where whoopsie! the whole basket turns over periodically, and they get to scramble around and get even more. It sucks to be the person who was depending on most of the basket getting to where it was going, but it’s their own damn fault not being in The Game.
The sick thing is that people with no sense of shame find how easily real people can have their sense of shame triggered. So they, without shame, yank that chain as often as needed.
Class warfare, my patootie.
As though it’s ever been anything else.
Svensker
@Moonbatman:
How long you gonna keep trolling that stupidass comment?
BGinCHI
@tomvox1: Co-sign.
Benen is the shizzle. Give him a few bucks. Wisdom shouldn’t be so free.
Zifnab
@Martin: Back in the day, the company just bought everything. Housing, vehicles, electronics, dinner. That kept the value under the corporate umbrella. You’d have the same thing under your system. CEOs would continue to live like CEOs. They’d just keep everything in the company’s name.
Honestly, I think the entire tax code is wacked. You’ve got a $14.26 trillion GDP, but only $2.1 trillion in federal revenue. So – correct me if my math is wrong – but that would imply we’re only taxing 1/7th or roughly 15% of the economy.
Compare that to France or England, which average in the 30-40% range, and one begins to see a serious problem.
News Reference
Roger Simon: “Hack No. 13: Roger Simon”
heh.
NobodySpecial
@freelancer: One can also argue that she had a reasonable expectation that she’d be working some pilgrimage times, too. She took the job knowing when she took it that the school year covered certain days. That’s no different from someone agreeing to work a job that they know would schedule them Sundays and then demanding every Sunday off for religious services.
freelancer
@NobodySpecial:
You just nutshelled my point brilliantly.
Michael
@Buck:
Every MD I’ve ever known was a goofy fucker. They’re overloaded with nutsorama political theories, and because of our psychotic elimination and training and compensation system, overearn.
While picking the pockets of their patients and society as a whole and being part of a lockout, competition crushing guild, they take their stolen gains and use them to buy political influence and make crappy investments in real estate and business, wasting obscene amounts of money to buy sinecure boutiques to sop up the time of their second wives.
When the revolution comes, I plan to line lots and lots of MDs on the wall. They’re easily replaced…
Mnemosyne
@freelancer:
Given events of the past year, where putting a mosque in a former Burlington Coat Factory location somehow became SPITTING IN THE FACE OF 9/11 VICTIMS! ! !, people building long-planned mosques in Tennessee in communities where they had lived for years received death threats, and voters in Oklahoma passed an initiative banning sharia law, I would be extremely surprised to find out that there was no discrimination at all.
I suppose that anything is possible, though, and this school district just happened to have the bad luck of innocently taking this action at the exact same time as all of the other anti-Muslim action this summer and fall.
News Reference
Roger Simon‘s smears of Dems are balanced by Roger Simon‘s fluffing or Republicans.
Republican funded Politico.com is designed to pimp the right while smearing the left and Roger Simon does that job with a smarmy relish.
Mnemosyne
@NobodySpecial:
In any other year, I might be a little more willing to give the school district more benefit of the doubt. In a year where we saw a huge amount of hatred directed at American Muslims, I am skeptical that this was a completely innocent and non-discriminatory act on the part of the school district that just happened to impact a Muslim teacher.
Mnemosyne
@Mnemosyne:
Argh. I wasn’t able to edit that comment, so:
ETA: Whoops. The suit was filed in 2008. Still, I am skeptical that there was absolutely no discrimination and the teacher was treated exactly like a Catholic who asked to visit Lourdes for three weeks would have been.
Calouste
@Lev:
You assume that people measures wealth in absolutes, but they actually measure it in relatives. It’s not much use for the rich if the whole country gets richer but there is no one poor enough anymore to work as their cleaner.
gene108
@Martin:
Changing the accounting rules for stock options and forcing corporations to show them as an expense on their income statements, would go a long way to curtailing some of the worst practices, with regards to CEO compensation.
Right now there’s all the incentive in the world for CEO’s to not think beyond, when their stock options vest and how much they can get for it.
Corporations don’t care much about CEO stock options, because they don’t technically cost them anything, with regards to profits, unlike other forms of compensation.
PS
@Pangloss: Now, Soros is an interesting case because to the right wing he’s really even more evil than rich, like Goldfinger or Dr No or someone. This causes cognitive dissonance among the center-right commentariat. Actually, it causes cognitive dissonance among the me, too, what with Soros being a currency speculator and all, but at least he taxes himself to some extent.
Now, what is the opposite of “clears that up”? Hope that confuses things for you …
Martin
@MikeJ: Well, I’m also thinking along the lines of the debt commission which would lower the top marginal rate to something just above AMT (which is usually the highest anyone ever pays anyway) but treats all cap gains as income, so no more 15% rate.
Once you dump cap gains and income together, it’s a whole other ballgame.
harlana
I am sick to death of hearing about “class warfare.” I’ve worked for rich people, I worked hard and was thankful for my paycheck. I did not begrudge them their wealth. What bothers me is fiscal waste and rapacious greed of the super-wealthy (a category to which my bosses did *not* belong (most made an average of $175,000/year)), although they think they do and therefore want to maintain the Bush tax cuts) that is destroying our country.
And no, I’m not jealous. I just want a *job* and a *living wage*! I don’t give a shit how many yachts somebody has as long as I can just live a comfortable life where I can afford to pay my bills, buy groceries, a few clothes and afford the health care I need. You can’t imagine how happy I would be right now if I could just regain the modest lifestyle I once lived when I had a job. I could actually have a life, besides being consumed every day with the occupation of finding a job and the fear of losing what I still have.
And I don’t resent paying taxes. Even if I paid zero taxes, the difference would not even cover my health care costs. So it’s just a ridiculous argument to say that even tax cuts for the middle class are even going to help that much.
How, please explain to me how wanting to reign in both the waste, by letting the tax cuts expire, and wanting to put the brakes on the insatiable greed which will destroy what remains of the middle class, how is that class warfare?
The real class warfare that is being waged is the super-rich vs. the middle class and they are winning.
Maybe in the next 2 years, after millions more lose their jobs and enough people are hurting, hurting bad, these dumbass independents will finally figure out that tax cuts for the rich do not create the jobs that they so desperately need and they vote accordingly. I thought things were bad enough last election that these dumb fuck independents would have caught on by now, but apparently it’s going to have to get so bad that they are reduced to feeding their kids bark and dirt from their backyards – oh well, at least it’s Amurkin dirt.
Martin
@Zifnab: I think the debt commission goal of 22% is pretty solid. It’s right around the level we were at when Clinton left office, so it wouldn’t require draconian cuts to services and it’s clearly a sustainable rate. The distribution is important, and the only reason we’re really struggling with that is because of the lack of hiring.
I know the argument is that we shouldn’t tax the job creators, but if they were creating jobs, they wouldn’t have the income to tax. So what’s the problem? Don’t want to be taxed? Then hire. Problem solved!
a1
“Class Warfare”? “Class Warfare”?!
What a joke….there’s no class warfare going on in this country. The very idea there’s class warfare going on is beyond absurd.
Because calling something “warfare” should at the very least imply that there are two groups of people in active conflict, or that more than one of the groups are, oh, I don’t know, aware there’s a conflict going on!
No, there’s no “Class Warfare” going on, folks. It’s “Class Date Rape”. We’ve been spiked by media distractions while the rich rob us blind, and the Tea Party Protests at heart are the American people waking up from a stupor, not knowing exactly what happened last night, but wondering why they can’t walk straight.
gene108
@WereBear:
Thanks for the positive feedback. I don’t think what they do is full of crap, but that it only has value because others have built a society, where what they do has value. Without the government, computers, the internet, phone services, indoor plumbing, etc. what they do really wouldn’t be possible and so wouldn’t have value. They are dependent on society and should realize it and not have such a fucking fit, when asked cock up and pay for the society that allows them to be relevant.
@Joseph Nobles:
What does it mean to invest to create jobs? It just seems like a vague statement to me.
The worst outcome of overhauling the tax code to force businesses to hire people is creating a situation where companies have to hire many people for no other reason than to avoid tax penalties. The people would have no work to do. They still get paid. The businesses aren’t able to remain competitive and lose the drive to actually innovate and provide quality services to people. That is a bad situation for both businesses and the consumer.
In the end, the income inequality that’s effecting this country, won’t be solved via the tax code, in my opinion.
The tax code may play a part, but the issue of income inequality is bigger than a one step solution of tweaking the tax code.
News Reference
Jason Linkins: “Roger Simon Whines About The ‘Class Warfare’ That The Top One Percent Decisively Won Years Ago.”
With graphs.
Alison
@a1: That analogy was fairly unnecessary. Sigh.
Mike M
How can the wealthy invest to create jobs? Well, they can provide equity (i.e. cash for stock) in startups and other small businesses. Yes, venture capital firms do this sort of investing with money from wealthy individuals, but VC money for startups has dried up the last few years and has instead been concentrated on later stage companies and foreign ventures. I have a good friend at a VC firm, for example, that helps US investors put their money in emerging Chinese companies.
Of course, there are already substantial incentives for equity investments, given the low capital gains rates, but rather than encouraging product innovation and job creation in the US, the incentives have instead gone to financial “innovation” or to finance overseas development, and in my view, produced little of real value domestically with rare exceptions.
jwb
@beltane: “They want to win the class war and have the losing side shower them with love and admiration.” Yes, that’s what the aristocracy always want. But George Will, he’ll never be anything more than a courtier.
NobodySpecial
@Mnemosyne: In an era when school districts are being hammered by reduced budgets, I’m not sympathetic to ‘I need to go away for most of a month’.
Corner Stone
DougJ, were you drunk when you posted this?
Not judging, just asking.
jwb
@John O: There are good reasons for a lot of the tax breaks in the code. But with each good reason, the complexity increases, and as the complexity increases the ability to sneak in bad reasons also increases. And the bad reasons undermine the faith in the fairness of the code. On the other hand, given political realities, the likelihood is that any major revision of the tax code will end up screwing the lower and middle income folks even more. On the other hand, Krugman points out that countries with good social safety nets all have fairly significant and regressive VATs. So it’s hard to say how it all plays out.
News Reference
Classic:
The venomous vapidity of “The Politico[‘s Roger Simon]: Exhibit A for our broken political press.”
Smarmy hack.
Michael Bersin
@dollared:
“Which Side Are You On?”
Evolved Deep Southerner
@Sko Hayes: I know I’m late to the thread, but Sko, Jimmy Carter isn’t a rich man, at least not by rich men’s standards. I Googled it the other day (well, actually a few months ago) but at that time, his net worth was said to be something south of a million dollars.
Chris
Scheiss noch mal, I can’t stand Roger Simon. Not so much because of what he does (whatever that is) or what he writes (which I rarely read), but because the website he runs is one of the biggest magnet for racists, economic royalists and what seems like every other form of sociopath on the Internets.
Well, right. Par for the course for PJM. And I really have to laugh at the following paragraph, when he says Simon “ought to know better than to peddle such cliches.” Of course he oughtn’t. Cliches, straw man arguments and ad hominem attacks are the lifeblood of his writers, and the resulting us-vs-themathon is all the audience expects. It is, in fact, almost exactly the behavior he accuses “many congressional Democrats” us.
I can only thumbs-up Charles Johnson for leaving the place. It fucking reeks of the people who in Europe would be goose-stepping to the BNP, FN or BZO’s tune. It’s to the man’s credit that he finally grew a conscience and packed up and left.
HelpThe99ers
That would be Mr. Warren Buffet speaking. The quote comes from a 2006 article in the New York Times written by Ben Stein.
Vixen Strangely
Vixen’s Rule: The wealthy only complain about class war when they start to recognize they are outnumbered.
The Corollary: They heat up the culture war when they think the poor might be able to count, too.
The Raven
Croak!
honus
@freelancer: Or, for example, “My religious beliefs do not allow me to fill prescriptions for birth control pills.” Then, of course, there’s the fully recognized “My beliefs do not allow me to participate in war.” It’s a complicated question.
honus
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I’ve worked all my life, mostly with my hands and head, by the hour. I have a hard time understanding how one man “earns” ten million dollars a year. I understand well how he acquires, that sum, I just don’t see how he ‘earns” it, except if you define earning as by being allowed to acquire it by he rules set down by his peers. In that case I don’t see how changing those rules to get a better outcome for others is any kind of an injustice. However, the right doesn’t see it that way. To them, he only legitimate rules are the rules made and enforced to allow individuals to acquire, retain and protect their wealth. C. f. the nearly total deregulation of the financial industry in recent decades.
honus
@soonergrunt: “(He’s a commissioned officer so he can’t be ‘discharged’)”
Sooner, can you explain that distinction for those of us less militarily literate? Thanks.
Mr. Furious
This. I love this. Especially the “rules set down by his peers” part. This is the distinction that needs to be drawn out. Out society allows that, and it’s not unfair for society to exact a price on that.
After all, those same rules will allow you to “keep up” with the taxes.
khead
Here’s the southern WV version.