The Budget 'Debate'

These charts have been flying around the internets today.

What these charts clearly show is that we can not afford to raise taxes on the rich under any circumstances, because our wealthy oligarchs are Taxed Enough Already, and our delicate corporations pay among the highest marginal tax rate in the developed world (thirty-five percent! Except that it isn't) that they struggle to compete internationally. If we raise taxes on even the top 1% of income earners or corporations, it will destroy our economic growth and shackle the arms of our plutocrat overlords and inhibit their ability  to trickle down all over us and lift us out of the depths of our third world status.

We are such a stupid fucking country. We have income disparity rivaling that of a banana republic, and all the dipshits in DC and their BFFs in the media focus their sole attention on spending cuts on a sliver of the federal budget and generally refusing to raise revenues from the few people in this country who could actually afford to pay more or do a goddamn thing to solve the problem. It's way easier to fuck the poor and the middle class, because they don't have lobbyists or bottomless corporate coffers that service your re-election campaign year after year. And there's a reason for that - our political and media class all have a vested interest in protecting the status quo, because they benefit immensely from it. This is not a representative democracy. John Cole touched on this issue today:

You would never know it given the standards of debate set by our media shills, third way corporate sell-out blue-dog Democrats, and Republicans, but amazingly, over 60% of the public doesn’t want weaker unions. Close to 60% of the public doesn’t want the EPA gutted and doesn’t want to drink and breathe toxic water and air. Over 60% of the public thinks we should raise taxes on the rich. Large percentages favored regulating Wall Street. Huge majorities supported allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military, 75% of the public is pro-choice to some extent, and over 65% of the country supported a public option.

And you can go on and on and on with this stuff. Consistently, when asked, right wing positions on issues are summarily rejected by large percentages of the population. Yet we are constantly only given choices that range from center right to far right, and anyone who suggests any of the things the public actually want is declared a crazy lefty.

The entire country was howling over Wall Street's excess and complicity in the financial crisis, but it took over two years to get any sort of financial regulation/reform in place, and it was meager and watered down and did absolutely nothing to prevent another crisis from occurring (it did not end Too Big to Fail). An enormous majority thinks the rich ought to pay more in taxes, and Congress literally shelves all other legislation in order to pass tax cuts for the rich. The nation supports repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell, and it takes over two years and a ridiculous amount of hand-wringing to get it passed.


There's a very well written story that goes along with these graphs that focuses on how the decline of unions over the last three decades have contributed to the current fucked up-edness of our income disparity. Here's the money quote:

This didn't all happen thanks to a sinister 30-year plan hatched in a smoke-filled room, and it can't be reined in merely by exposing it to the light. It's a story about power. It's about the loss of a countervailing power robust enough to stand up to the influence of business interests and the rich on equal terms. With that gone, the response to every new crisis and every new change in the economic landscape has inevitably pointed in the same direction. And after three decades, the cumulative effect of all those individual responses is an economy focused almost exclusively on the demands of business and finance. In theory, that's supposed to produce rapid economic growth that serves us all, and 30 years of free-market evangelism have convinced nearly everyone—even middle-class voters who keep getting the short end of the economic stick—that the policy preferences of the business community are good for everyone. But in practice, the benefits have gone almost entirely to the very wealthy.

That's right middle America - corporate power and the super rich are fucking you at every turn and laughing all the way to the bank. But keep working hard and voting Republican and maybe in another 30 years, the free market will grant you the privilege to be one of them. And speaking of 30 years...if it took this long for things to get this bad, just think of how long it will take to even begin to make necessary repairs.