by Robyn Blumner

Why do you think John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are so intent on renewing the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans? Especially when they know it will bust another $700-billion hole in our national treasury over 10 years and prove their hypocrisy on fiscal responsibility?

It's because cutting taxes for the richest Americans is the GOP's Number One job. Despite all the rhetoric from these leading Republicans, nothing else comes close to being that important. Not reducing the deficit, not supporting the troops, not cutting taxes for the middle class, not outlawing abortion, not even, dare I say it, protecting gun rights. Boehner and McConnell are the four-star mercenary generals in a war launched by America's corporate interests and superrich. This is what they were hired to do.

A new, amazing book explains.

In "Winner-Take-All Politics, How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class," political scientists Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson at the University of California at Berkeley detail the operational battle plan that the superrich have been implementing for the last 30 years. With piles of cash, they've built an army of beholden politicians, Republicans as well as Democrats, and an array of conservative think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, that seed their ideas and feed their arguments to the public.

Their agenda is simple: reduce taxes for the superrich, while watering down or defeating regulation that might make the economy operate more fairly. This involves methodically stripping labor and the middle class of their political power.

You didn't know you were in a war? Well, look at your war wounds. We have gone from the 1960s, when the bottom 90 percent of America's households shared most of the nation's income gains, to today's world in which more than half of those gains goes to the richest 1 percent. Those at the tippy-top, the richest 0.01 percent, saw their average after-tax annual income more than quintuple between 1979 and 2005 from just over $4 million to nearly $24.3 million (in inflation adjusted dollars).

Florida's Governor-elect Rick Scott, a man worth hundreds of millions of dollars, brought in $7.87 million in 2009 and paid a federal tax rate of just 13 percent -- less than most bus drivers and teachers. That doesn't happen by accident.

For the rest of us, the picture is one of working much harder just to inch ahead. Without women entering the workforce, middle-income households would have seen almost no gains between 1979 and 2000. And even during the period of economic growth from 2001 to 2007, the median income of non-elderly households actually fell.

Hacker and Pierson demonstrate that the American government facilitated this, not globalization, advancing technology or a lack of worker education. Europe and Canada experienced these same challenges but didn't see an American-style spike in unequal income distribution.

Today, workers in other Western democracies work fewer hours while enjoying guarantees of generous vacation time, health care and pensions. That's the kind of financial security and work/life balance that shared prosperity is supposed to buy average people. In the U.S., we gave all that up. Or, to be more precise, our political leaders gave it up on our behalf.

A key part of the superrich's strategy was the destruction of the labor movement. Without this strong champion for the economic interests of the middle class in the halls of Congress, politicians were hearing from just one group: highly organized and monied interests, who also happened to be bankrolling their campaigns.

Just to give us an idea of how outgunned the lobbyists for the middle class have become, Hacker and Pierson note that when the 2001 Bush tax cuts were being debated -- cuts under which taxpayers in the bottom 80 percent would receive breaks amounting to little more than $600 annually while the richest 1 percent would receive a whopping $38,000 -- the AFL-CIO had only one lobbyist working quarter-time to fight this. The other side -- the Daddy Warbucks side -- literally had swarms of lobbyists in its corner.

The book's most tragic element is how so many Democrats, looking for some way to stay competitive in the race for campaign cash, have been co-opted or neutralized by the superrich. The go-to party for America's plutocrats is still the Republican Party, but the Democrats are no longer the full-throated opposition that we the people desperately need.

 

Available at Amazon.com:

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

The Feminine Mystique

The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

Winner-Take-All Politics, How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

 

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Bush Tax Cuts: How Washington is Making the Rich Richer | Politics

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