Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [123]
Instead of giving $60 billion a year6 to our country’s heirs and heiresses, we could be paying for things like after-school programs, schools on military bases, child vaccinations in Third World countries, prosecution of polluters, health care for veterans—all things which Bush has cut.
Take your pick. Which is more important? Making sure that Ivanka Trump will be able to live in the style to which she’s grown accustomed even after The Donald has left our world? Or making sure that little Ivanka Average can go to a school that has toilet paper in the bathrooms?
Funny thing happened at the end of the Senate debate on this issue. Republicans, who knew they had the votes to win, kept spouting off about family farms and small businesses. So the Democrats gave them a chance to prove their sincerity. Instead of abolishing the estate tax altogether, how about exempting the first $4 million per couple? Nope. How ’bout the first $8 million? Sorry.
Okay. Then how about this? Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, offered an amendment that would exempt the first one hundred million dollars of a couple’s net worth before a penny of estate taxes were paid. This would exempt all “family farms” and “small businesses” worth less than $100 million.
The amendment went down 48–51.7
In all this talk, one thing that gets lost is that there are forty-two million working Americans who have not gotten one cent in tax cuts. The Wall Street Journal refers to them as “lucky duckies” because they earn so little that they don’t pay any income taxes. Many lucky duckies are deeply in debt to predatory lenders. Many of these lucky duckies couldn’t afford college and cannot afford health insurance. Some of these lucky duckies, working Americans, will be homeless sometime during the year. Their children, the lucky ducklings, are far more likely than my kids, or Paul Gigot’s, to be killed violently or die of a preventable disease.
Apparently, the Wall Street Journal thinks that the unluckiest thing in the world is paying taxes.
That’s why they have been such vociferous supporters of the Bush tax cuts, more than half of which will eventually go to the top 1 percent of families.
* * *
Are You in the Top 1% of Earners?
19% of Americans say “yes!”
* * *
In the last thirty years, those families saw their after-tax incomes rise 157 percent. The top one percent have incomes starting at $230,000. Their share of the national income has doubled, and is now as large as the combined income of the bottom 40 percent. The thirteen thousand families at the very top have almost as much income as the poorest twenty million households in America, which is like the population of Bemidji, Minnesota, (home of Paul Bunyan) having more income than the country’s six largest cities—New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Phoenix—combined.
You know who I think the real lucky duckies are? The residents of Bemidji, Minnesota. I mean the ones in my analogy. So why are they the ones getting the sweetest deal from the tax cuts?
Anytime a liberal points out that the wealthy are disproportionately benefiting from Bush’s tax policies, Republicans shout, “class warfare!”
In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her husband and then killed her.
That is class warfare.
Arguing over the