I'll start with The WaPo's "occasional series on inequality" where today they gives us, "The Top Takes Off - That rhetoric about giveaways for multimillionaires? It's accurate.". Some of the language is as follows:
Bu$hCo and The Rubber Stamp Congress has taken care of their masters. They've done this by building off the Southern Strategy of divide and confound. Fake (but not really fight) the false "culture war" and dismiss intellectualism to keep the Red States voting against their economic interests. I've made a promise to confront and talk and write and blog and be somewhat of an activist. Peace ...or War!THE QUEST for ways to reduce inequality begins with taxation. Unlike spending programs, redistribution through taxation is administratively simple; besides, putting money directly into people's pockets allows them to spend it on whatever they need most. But the tax tool has been wielded badly. Rather than using it to offset rising inequality, politicians have contrived to do the opposite. ...
.... the combined effect of the Bush tax cuts. It leaves no doubt that the tax system has become less progressive, even as the need for progressivity has grown. Over the past quarter of a century, the tide of the American economy has failed to lift the bottom half of society, damaging the faith on which capitalism depends. ...
The chart makes a second point. The loss of tax progressivity has not occurred in the middle of society; it's not as though someone a quarter of the way down the income scale is doing better at the expense of someone three-quarters of the way down. Rather, it's the top tenth who have benefited, and the top within the top has done fabulously well. ...
... the risks of raising taxes have to be weighed against the risks of not raising them. Inequality is not only bad in itself; it also will intensify pressure for bad policies that threaten growth more acutely than higher taxes would.
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