Every other day you either hear a beltway pundit whining about how Obama is raising taxes and soaking the rich or how Obama fails to call for shared sacrifice. Of course, any idiot can recognize that these two complaints are contradictory. Poor people are sacrificing every single day and have been for the past few decades. Minimum wage has remained stagnant, unions are constantly being undermined and destroyed by big business, and public officials from policemen and firefighters and United States soldiers to teachers and government officials are being grossly underpaid.
As far as rich people go, they've had their free ride. Since Ronald Reagan, the top marginal tax rate has dropped about 1% every year. Corporate tax rate and capital gains taxes have also fallen. Mission accomplished. No more free ride. The gravy train is over. Time to pay the piper.
(both articles below are very good, but much longer so I recommend following the links to the full articles)
Matt Taibbi looks to the past
AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.
People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.
Georgia10 looks to the future
Our awakening is now, as we look up and see the hands of these corporate giants who fancied themselves gods. These few mega-corporations who refused to play by the rules hold us over the pit of poverty, abhorring us, looking at us as not worthy of anything but to be cast into the pile of the unemployed.
Now we feel the full force of John Edwards’s two Americas. It is characterized by a soul-crushing sense that no matter how hard you work or how well you work, whether you rise or fall is not necessarily dictated by your merits, but by the line items in your employer’s budget. This leads to an infuriating sense of helplessness, for in this America, recession America, wrong America, our fate is governed not by our actions or by the rugged individualism that breathes life into our national culture. Our fate is in the hands of the arbitrary will of those above us. And while that has perhaps always been the case, the fall below us has never seemed so far down, and the journey there has never seemed so dark.
As we dangle from delicate threads of hope that today we won’t be laid off or that this month, the bills won't be too high, we see below us those who have already become victims of this economic storm. They’re in the red, swept away by currents of change that they cannot control, clinging to 401(k)s to stay afloat and clamoring through life savings to keep their heads above water.
We look to our leaders to navigate these troubled waters, and we hold our collective breath for that moment when we can exhale and welcome the dawn of one America, set right on her course and stronger than ever, ready and able to weather whatever storm comes her way again.