The man knows his audience.
(Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)
Does it count as a class war yet?
Or is it maybe a class "intervention"? A class police action? A multilateral coalition of the rich against the poor?
I'm not sure what terminology is appropriate in polite company these days, but over and over again, the same scene is played out in both federal and state government. Tax cuts for corporations and the rich; tax increases and reduced services for everyone else. It's not accidental, and it's not isolated. Throughout the country, Republicans and too many Democrats are using "deficit" as a bludgeon against the poor, while any efforts to raise taxes on the rich – a group paying tax rates lower now than in generations – are roundly dismissed as unthinkable. Why unthinkable? Nobody quite knows, but we're nonetheless quite confident that the American economy will come to an end if the wealthy have to pay the same tax rates that they did a mere twenty years ago.
The latest exhibit is Gov. Chris Christie, whose term has been highlighted by a Dickensian-villain-level lack of concern for his state's poor. (This, naturally, makes him a favorite of pundits, which tells you all you need to know about our pundits.) He doesn't want the rich to share the pain, even though everyone else is, and he's not shy about publicizing it (again):
Christie vetoed a bill last May that would have raised taxes on any income over $1 million to 10.75 percent, increasing revenue that was needed to plug the country’s second largest budget gap.
The measure would have affected just 16,000 of the state’s nearly 9 million residents, while Christie’s cuts to education, public safety, and health services have affected millions. Now, state Democrats are re-introducing the surtax, even though it has little hope of passing, as Christie has already said he would veto it.
So Christie is sure that public workers, teachers, the poor, the sick, the old, and everyone else needs to pay for his state's ballooning budget deficit. The only people who aren't expected to pay for it – not even a little, not even a tiny damn bit, heaven forbid – are the wealthy. Them, he's willing to go to the mat for. Them, the Republicans of his state are willing to defend. That is the bridge too far, when talking about raising taxes (on everyone else) and breaking state commitments (for everyone else) and gutting state services (for everyone else).
And it's not a rare story by any means. The federal "debt ceiling" talks are stalled because of the exact same issue. Other Republican governors in other states agree on the exact same approach: screw public workers, screw services – but don't you dare try to tax the rich. Is it a party clinging desperately to a philosophy already roundly disproven? Or are we seeing the first rapid effects of the Citizens United era, in which corporate election-tampering has been given an explicit, "constitutional" seal of approval, and politicians wishing to survive must cater exclusively to whomever can best fund their campaigns?
Once again: I think it's long past time we stopped pretending that any of this has roots in sudden concern for the "deficit." Nobody involved gave a damn about the deficit when they were running it up, during the Bush years: "deficits didn't matter", we were famously told. Republican hand-writing over the debt ceiling then was scarce indeed, during the repeated votes to raise it over and over again. Republican insistence that the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy did not contribute to inflated deficits were and are simply ludicrous, and have always been absolutely false. And even little addle-minded children can recognize that the best single way out of deficits is to get out of the recession, which requires government intervention on behalf of the working class, not against it.
There is only one common factor between actions of the various state governments and the federal government: austerity for everyone, except the rich. Regardless of any deficit, taxes on the rich must not be raised. Period.
As an honest approach for reducing the deficit, it is scattered and nonsensical. As an organized effort to strip money and services from the lower classes on behalf of the wealthy, however, it remains perfectly consistent, month after month, in state after state. "Class war" may not be the term our politicians prefer to use, but as description of the actual policy it is more accurate than any other.