And the Misinformation Begins

Paul Ryan is on the Sunday shows today, vomiting up the entirely predictable GOP tax cut talking point dreck that I alluded to yesterday:

RYAN: It adds further instability to our system — more uncertainty — and it punishes job creation and those people who create jobs. Class warfare, Chris, may make for really good politics but it makes for rotten economics. We don’t need to divide people and prey on people’s fear and envy and anxiety. We need to remove the barriers so entrepreneurs can hire people. These tax increases don’t work.  

[...] 

This is a double tax… If we tax investment and tax more you will get less of it. It looks like to me not a very good sign. It looks like the President wants to move down the class warfare path. Class warfare will simply divide this country more, will attack job creators, divide people, and it doesn’t grow the economy.

He hits them all - the dreaded uncertainty canard, the delicate sensibilities and fee-fees of our "job creators," the reverse class warfare, and suppressing the investment that hasn't materialized despite more than a decade of record low taxes on the rich. Also, where are the jobs we were promised from the Bush tax cuts, Mr. Ryan?

As ThinkProgress notes, Ryan is also in favor of letting the current payroll tax cut expire. Ryan and his cronies in the GOP love this idea because it is overwhelmingly punitive to the poor and middle class. The payroll tax is only levied against the first $100K or so of gross incomes. In other words, it is levied against pretty much the entirety of poor or middle class incomes, while affecting a very small portion of the incomes of the affluent. But this is a feature, not a bug, of the Republican platform. Remember, the problem with America is that the poor don't have any skin in the game, or in most cases, still have some skin left at all. 

The way the GOP wields the 'class warfare' cudgel as a talking point is so inept and bereft of any facts or merit that it really behooves the Democrats to seize on this and use it to their advantage. Sure, pitting one economic strata against the other is by definition class warfare, but that is why context is everything. If we were talking a 50/50 split or even a 60/40 split, then Ryan's vapid statements might make some sense. But we are literally talking against the top 2-10% versus the lower 90-98% of the country. When Democratic politicians and the lower 90-98% ask that a fraction of the country as small as 2-10% (the very same group, mind you, that claims to love America and its freedoms more than anything, except when it comes to actually giving back to the nation that has afforded them such lavish wealth) pay more in taxes during a period of the lowest taxation since the 1950s, its laughably stupid to term that as class warfare. It's simply economic and social justice, both of which are abhorrent and repellent to the modern GOP.