Be Like Reagan And Thatcher! Soak The Rich!

[Joanne98]

Possibly because of my immersion in posts about going Galt, I've read altogether too many blog posts and newspaper columns about the horrid, wealth-destroying, class-warfare-waging, socialist nightmare that is Barack Obama's tax policy. So I thought it might be a good idea to get a few basic facts on the table.

Obama is not proposing to raise the personal income tax. He is proposing to allow the Bush tax cuts on families making over $250,000 a year to expire. The Republicans wrote that expiration into law to conceal to hide the costs of their tax cuts. Under the law they wrote, the top marginal tax rate will go up from 35% to 39.6% in 2011.

If a top marginal tax rate of 39.6% is socialism, then there are a lot of socialists in the world. For instance, Japan, South Korea, Australia, along with a lot of the OECD: all have rates higher than Obama is proposing. (Note: I just chose some countries at random. I'm sure I could have found more.) No wonder the world economy is in trouble! There's socialism and class warfare everywhere you look!

But it's even stranger than that. Did you know that Margaret Thatcher (pdf) declared war on the wealthy, a war so extreme it makes Obama's seem meek by comparison? The top tax rate in the UK was 60% for most of her term in office, and 40% for the last year or so. At no point was it lower than what Obama proposes -- and that's without taking into account the VAT.

Likewise, Ronald Reagan was apparently a Class Warrior: for six of the eight years during which Reagan was President, the top tax bracket was 50%. It's a wonder anyone worked at all! In Reagan's defense, though, he was just carrying on a long tradition of wealth expropriation carried out by socialists like Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.

All in all, it seems as though we've been suffering through an awful lot of socialism and class warfare all over the world, much of it at the hands of people conservatives claim to admire. If a top marginal rate of 39.6% is enough to make society's producers and creators go on strike, then Galt's Gulch must be getting pretty crowded.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_03/017198.php

[Jeep789]

1. Yep, war on the rich = Make them pay what Reagan required

they pay. Wasn't Reagan their idol? We really need to rephrase it as a rollback to those rates and not a tax increase. Get that accomplished and then, we can roll it back to where it should be.

I do think that the Feds should start considering state and/or local economics into their tax rates. A person making 80,000 a year in Kansas would have more discretionary income than a person making the same in California.

[droidamus2]

2. Definitely right

You are right that the Democrats/Progressives can't let the conservatives get away with framing the rollback of the Bush tax cuts as 'raising taxes'. It is in actuality a rollback but if the Republicans keep insisting it is a tax raise then we should point out that it was their congress and president that set up the rollback to begin with so if it is a tax raise it is a Republican tax raise not President Obama's.

People should realize that this spin is typical of the way the current Republican party works. They offer what appears to be a compromise, in this case temporary tax cuts with a certain date when they will end, but they never intend to live up to the compromise. Their intent all along was to make these breaks for the wealthy permanent but they lied about the rollback just to get the breaks passed. Using the 'raising taxes' spin is just the way of trying to convince Joe public (or is that plumber) to go along with what they wanted the whole time. Remember ideologues like the neo-cons do not compromise they only move closer to their ultimate goals. They will never be satisfied with just getting part of their ideological 'dream' they want it all.

[Jeep789]

3. Yep, they still don't realize that their own greed

is dooming most of them them. Unfortunately, the rest of us have to suffer as well.