Sam Pizzigati is editor of Too Much, the online weekly on excess and inequality published by the Institute for Policy Studies. At the Campaign for America's Future, Pizzigati writes A Ghost From A Ghastly Public Policy Past:
You won’t find many photos with smiles on the face of Andrew Mellon, the U.S. treasury secretary back in the 1920s. The exceedingly dour — and fabulously wealthy — Mellon may be smiling someplace now. His spirit lives.
Andrew Mellon
Mellon, a Pittsburgh financier, began his dozen years atop Treasury in 1921. He rated, at the time, as one of the world’s richest men. One of the most determined, too.
Mellon came to Washington as a man on a mission. That mission: to slash federal income tax rates on his fellow rich — and himself, of course, too. He succeeded.
In 1921, America’s richest faced a 73 percent tax rate on income over $1 million. By 1925, Mellon had maneuvered that top rate all the way down to 25 percent.
Last week Rep. Paul Ryan from Wisconsin, the go-to guy on taxes for the GOP House majority, channeled his own personal Andrew Mellon. He introduced, with great fanfare, the official Republican budget for America’s next fiscal year — and decade. His budget's maximum tax rate on top-bracket income: 25 percent.
Andrew Mellon’s 1920s handiwork would eventually pour $72 billion, in today’s dollars, into wealthy pockets and set the table for the wildest speculative bubble Wall Street had ever seen. That bubble would burst into the Great Depression — and impoverish, in the process, tens of millions of Americans.
Mellon opposed, right up until his 1932 exit from Treasury, any efforts to get the federal government to come to the aid of those millions. Hard times, he told President Hoover, didn’t have to be “altogether a bad thing.”
“People will work harder,” Mellon pronounced. “Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people." ...
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:
We know why the US Attorney in Connecticut would want to protect Joe Lieberman by refusing to release the details of their investigation into the alleged "hacking" of Lieberman's site the day of the Democratic primary. The last thing Karl Rove and Monica Goodling wanted was Lieberman embarrassed days before the general election by pointing out the rank incompetence of his campaign and lack of integrity in owning up to his b.s. accusations.
But what about Connecticut's Democratic Attorney General? Why would he carry water for Lieberman and protect the senator? Who knows. But what we do know now is that Blumenthal lied to blogger CT Bob about the case at the time.