Thom Hartmann: The Lie of the Free Market; Tax and SpendLiberals; Weapons in the War on the Middle Class

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By Thom Hartmann (about the author) Page 2 of 2 page(s)

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When the cons say, "It's your money," what they really mean is that they don't believe in the social contract. They don't believe in paying for the services we use every day or in taking care of the poor and the sick and the elderly who can't take care of themselves. They are anti-American, anti-democracy, anti-Christian (and anti-Jewish and anti--every other major religion) zealots. They are a danger to our democracy and our country.

Progressive taxation has a long history. Jefferson advocated for progressive taxation in his letters to James Madison back in 1784 and 1785: "Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property," Jefferson wrote, "is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise." In short, Jefferson said, "Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual."

But the cons--who since the days when John Adams called working people "the rabble--fought back. A true middle class represented a threat to America's aristocrats and pseudo-aristocrats because a middle class will always create a democracy. The cons would have to give up some of their power, and some of the higher end of their wealth might even be "redistributed"--horror of horrors--for schools, parks, libraries, and other things that support a healthy middle-class society (but not necessarily the rich, who live in a parallel, but separate, world).

When today's cons make tax a dirty word, they are really saying they don't care if the middle class gets screwed. As president, Reagan cut the top tax rate for billionaires from 70 percent to 28 percent while effectively raising taxes on working people via the payroll tax; he added insult to injury by allowing inflation to increase a whole range of taxes (sales tax, property tax, vehicle license fees, and so on) on working people. Following in that tradition, the Bush Jr. administration gave, in its first four years, tax cuts totaling almost half a trillion dollars to the best-off 1 percent of Americans.

Even as taxes on the rich go down, they've gone up on the middle class (in part because they've gone down for the rich and somebody has to pay the cost of all the commons we use). If you made $75,000 in 2001, you saw only $350 in tax cuts from the federal government. In 2005, 80 percent of Americans got only 32 percent of the total tax-cut pie. That means the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans got 68 percent of the money the government was "giving back to the people." Unless you were making more than $218,000 a year in 2005, you got screwed by Bush's tax cuts.

It's all part of the cons' undeclared war on the middle class.

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. more...)

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