This past week, as the financial system teetered on the verge of collapse because of the Republicans' anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-tax laissez-faire ideology, we were offered the spectacle of Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin underlining the irrationality of this Republican ideology by arguing that raising taxes on the wealthy would be both unpatriotic and harmful to the nation.
According to the Republican logic of Palin and McCain, asking the wealthy to pay more taxes (as Joe Biden proposed) "is not patriotism," but is "about killing jobs and hurting small businesses and making things worse." (And McCain said the idea of asking the wealthy to pay more taxes was "dumb.")
It must be nice for those like Palin and McCain to think such things, as the Republicans continue to uphold a policy of protecting the wealthy from taxation while the middle class and poor are burdened with the explosive growth of the national bill for fighting unnecessary wars and providing gigantic trillion-dollar bail-outs....
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