A progressive tax system is supposed to already do that but a small
group of obsessive tax cutters have been shifting the tax burden onto
the middle class over the last 30 years.
A progressive tax is a tax that imposes a greater percentual burden on
the rich than on the poor. The opposite is a regressive tax, which
imposes a greater percentual burden on the poor than on the rich.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax
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INTRODUCTION
I have this problem. Whenever I try to explain what's happening in
American
politics—I mean, what's really happening—I wind up sounding a bit like
an
unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I'm not. My politics are
actually
quite moderate. (Most real lefties, in fact, think I'm a Washington
establishment sellout.) So please give let me a chance to explain
myself
when I tell you the following: American politics has been hijacked by
a tiny
coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological
zealots,
others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane. (Stay with me.)
The scope of their triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the
last three decades, they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the
commanding heights of the national agenda. Notions that would have
been
laughed at a generation ago—that cutting taxes for the very rich is
the best
response to any and every economic circumstance, or that it is
perfectly
appropriate to turn the most rapacious and self-interested elements of
the
business lobby into essentially an arm of the federal government—are
now so
pervasive, they barely attract any notice.
The result has been a slow-motion disaster. Income inequality has
approached levels normally associated with Third World oligarchies,
not
healthy Western democracies. The federal government has grown so
encrusted with business lobbyists that it can no longer meet the great
public
challenges of our time. Not even many conservative voters or
intellectuals find
the result congenial. Government is no smaller—it is simply more debt-
ridden
and more beholden to wealthy elites.
And yet the right-wing ascendancy has continued inexorably
despite continual public repudiation. The 2006 elections were only the
latest
electoral setback. The right has suffered deeper setbacks before, and
all of
them have proven temporary. In 1982, after the country had entered
the
deepest recession since the 1930s, Republicans were slaughtered in
the
midterm congressional races, losing twenty-seven seats in the House
of
Representatives. Ronald Reagan, whose election two years earlier had
seemed to augur a new conservative era, trailed his likely 1984
Democratic
challengers by double digits in the polls and seemed destined to be a
lame
duck. "What we are witnessing this January," wrote the esteemed
Washington Post reporter David Broder in the first month of 1983, "is
not the
midpoint in the Reagan presidency, but its phase-out. 'Reaganism,' it
is
becoming increasingly clear, was a one-year phenomenon."1 We know
what
happened the next year.
And the conservative revolution has had its obituary written many
times since. In 1986, Republicans lost the Senate, and shortly
thereafter
Reagan saw his approval ratings sink as he became embroiled in the
Iran-
Contra scandal. In 1992, Democrats won back the White House along
with
both chambers of Congress, and there was widespread talk of "a
conservative
crackup." It happened again after the public turned on the
Republicans
following their 1995 government shutdown, and once more after the
public
rebelled against the Clinton impeachment. By the late 1990s, the
Republican
revolution had again been written off.
And yet the Republican right keeps coming back, and back, and
back. Their fortunes rise and then dip, but each peak is higher than
the last
peak, and each dip is higher than the last dip. Consider the present
situation.
Things have gone about as badly as they could have in George W.
Bush's
second term. A Republican administration started and lost a major war
in
Iraq; presided over an economy that has failed to deliver higher wages
for
most Americans; contributed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to
the near-
wipeout of a major American city; launched a failed assault on Social
Security, the most popular social program in the history of the United
States;
and saw its members suffer an almost unprecedented string of sexual
and
financial scandals. Still, Democrats find themselves holding only the
slimmest of majorities in the House and Senate. Even if they hold
their
majorities in Congress and win the White House in 2008, the
structural
forces in Washington will make it nearly impossible to roll back any
significant chunks of the Bush tax cuts, let alone take on crises like
global
warming or the forty-five million Americans lacking health insurance.
Global warming, come to think of it, may offer the best metaphor
for understanding the conservative ascent. If you look at the
temperature of
the earth from month to month, it bounces up and down as seasons
change
and heat spells or cold snaps come and go. If you look at it over the
course
of many years, however, it is clear that it is moving inexorably in
one
direction. The arrival of winter does not mean the end of global
warming. To
confuse the short term blips with the long-term trend is to mistake
the
weather for the climate. The 2006 elections are one of those blips, a
pause in
the right's three-decade ascent.
Permanent partisan majorities are not possible in American
politics. Power changes hands regularly. Sometimes the other party's
president will preside over an economic boom or win a war. Sometimes
yours
will preside over a recession or sleep with an intern. Short-term
fluctuations, often driven by events beyond the control of the party
in power,
are inevitable. So the way to win is not to win every election but to
control the
terms of the debate. The conservative movement's signal triumph is to
have
done just this, reshaping what is possible in American politics over
the long
term. This is not, therefore, a book about the political weather. It
is a book
about the political climate.
Most people under forty fail to grasp how different American politics
looked
three decades ago. For me, there is no better evidence of the
rightward lurch
than recalling that my father used to be a Republican. A liberal
Republican,
to be sure, but a Republican. By the time I was old enough to
understand
anything about politics, he had long since abandoned the GOP, and at
first
his former affiliation puzzled me. In the political world in which I
came of
age —Ronald Reagan left the White House during my junior year of high
school—it seemed inconceivable that someone like my dad, who today
resides well within the center of the Democratic Party, could identify
in any
way with the Republicans.
But, of course, as someone my age could not have guessed, the
parties of a generation ago bore only a faint resemblance to their
modern
versions. After World War II, the Republicans accepted the new role
of
government in American life ushered in by Franklin Roosevelt. The
decades
after the war saw a great American consensus. Democrats were a bit
looser
with the purse strings, Republicans a bit tighter, but their general
vision of the
country was the same. This vision was expressed by the Republican
president Dwight Eisenhower just before his inauguration when he
declared, "There is, in our affairs at home, a middle way between
untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands for the welfare
of the
whole nation. This way must avoid government by bureaucracy as
carefully
as it avoids neglect of the helpless." This credo was the credo of
the
Republican Party my dad could identify with. He looked up to GOP
moderates like Nelson Rockefeller and William Milliken, the long-time
governor of our home state of Michigan—men born to privilege who used
their
power for the benefit of all, not just their own class.
Eisenhower left the top tax rate at a staggering 91 percent, and he
repeatedly preached the virtues of budget balance. (When a colleague
complained about this confiscatory rate, his treasury secretary, a
wealthy
former steel executive, replied acidly, "I pay 91 percent, and yet I
don't
complain and you do all the time."2 His line reflects a sense of
social
obligation totally alien to today's GOP.) This tradition of moderate
Republicanism remained strong well into the 1970s. A Republican
president,
Gerald Ford, actually vetoed tax cuts proposed by Democrats as
fiscally
irresponsible.
There were, of course, Republicans of a more conservative bent in
those days as well, but conservatism meant something altogether
different
from what it does today. Indeed, the whole face of American politics
has
changed. Opposition to deficits, which once made up the right wing of
the
partisan debate, is now closer to the left wing. ("I hope you're all
aware we're
all Eisenhower Republicans," Bill Clinton once noted wryly in a
Cabinet
meeting. "We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond
market.")
Today's rightwing position—upper-bracket tax cuts wherever and
whenever
possible—was off the right edge of the political spectrum three
decades ago.
The ground has shifted very far under our feet, and its
manifestations are everywhere. In 1979, the highest-earning one-tenth
of 1
percent of all taxpayers—the richest of the rich—took home only 3
percent of
the national income. Today they take home 10 percent. And over that
same
span, their average tax rate has dropped from 32 to 23 percent. The
minimum
wage has lost nearly half its purchasing power. The health care plan
proposed by Richard Nixon in 1974, if introduced in Congress today,
would
be considered radically liberal and probably could not gain the
support of any
but a handful of the most left-wing Democrats.
American politics has been transformed, yet in this change lies
the deeper mystery. The publi...
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