The tax cut obsession

The problem with having one party utterly and ridiculously obsessed with tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy is that the spineless other party tries to get into the act. And looks silly trying it in the process, on top of abandoning the historic principles of progressive taxation and losing any pretense of the moral high ground. Republicans cut taxes for the 1% because that is who they are loyal to, having abandoned any sense of responsibility to the nation a long time ago.

It is also a trap. The corporatist gop has successfully erased any understanding of progressive or regressive taxation so any taxes going up automatically means "your" taxes are going up to the average voter. If the Democrats had a coherent narrative on fairness and justice instead of a jumbled mess of arbitrary statements that change with the times, the trap could finally backfire but that would make sense. In spite of overwhelming evidence that the public wants the rich scumbags who tanked the economic lives of the 99% to pay far, far more in taxes to fix things, we get a half-assed milquetoasty proposal barely defended by the president.

Consequently, Drew Westen popped out to shoot spitballs at President Obama and a Democratic Party that just can't win for losing.
"The president and his campaign continue to make unforced errors because they don't have, and never have had since he entered the White House, either an overarching vision that would guide the way they communicate with the American people about the economy or anything else or a competent messaging team that could compensate for their over-reliance on polling where their vision should be." Why polling can be an obstacle and crutch Prof. Westen explains in The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation because polling has a hard time overcoming the ambiguous nature of the feelings voters often have on complex subjects and at best can measure only a limited number of dimensions of their thinking.

I'm going to say something utterly radical here so brace yourself; your taxes are not that high. Amazing right? And neither are the koch bros, mitt romney's, your friend Joe's who owns a auto detailing business, or really anyone else's. It seems like it because so much of our incomes go to crap that would be far more affordable if they actually were the "socialism" we're all trained to abhor.

Imagine, in the 1950s that conservatives idolize the top marginal tax rate was 91%... and somehow we survived. And we didn't have this:



Back then, the public understood that it was business that messed things up and you didn't have this:



Like this asshat:


Isn't it time meatheads like this stopped getting tax cuts and we stopped getting pay cuts and layoffs and decaying schools, roads, bridges, etc?