Yes - There Is A Class War !

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) says the Democrats are trying to start a class war in America. Ryan, who along with his Republican cohorts, is opposed to the bottom 90% of people in this country getting a tax cut but wants the richest 1-2% to get more tax cuts (even though they are making record-breaking profits and income). He says this because the president's jobs plan would moderately raise some taxes on the richest Americans (although not nearly as much as they should be raised).

This is the same Republican who has proposed abolishing Medicare and cutting benefits for Social Security, while asking for large tax cuts for the rich. He obviously thinks the budget should be balanced on the backs of the elderly, the poor, and working Americans while the rich get off scot-free. Here is what Ryan said yesterday morning:

Class warfare may make for really good politics but it makes for rotten economics. We don’t need to divide people and prey on people’s fear and envy and anxiety. We need to remove the barriers so entrepreneurs can hire people. These tax increases don’t work. [...]

This is a double tax… If we tax investment and tax more you will get less of it. It looks like to me not a very good sign. It looks like the President wants to move down the class warfare path. Class warfare will simply divide this country more, will attack job creators,  divide people, and it doesn’t grow the economy.

Ryan is right about one thing -- there is a class war going on in this country, and it has been happening since about 1979. But it is not a war against the rich. It is a war by the rich and their lackeys, the congressional Republicans, against the rest of America. And the weapon of mass destruction in that war is the Republican policy of "trickle-down" economics. This policy has resulted in a vast redistribution of wealth and income from the bottom 90% of Americans to the richest Americans.

This class war has turned this country into a virtual banana republic, where there are the powerful rich, the powerless poor, and a disappearing middle class. The class war has created a lingering recession (depression?) with massive job losses. With nearly 17 million people unemployed and the real unemployment rate approaching 11%, we are seeing the third world countries in Latin America with smaller unemployment rates than the United States (and the unemployment rate in Mexico only about half of the U.S. rate).

There is a class war, and the rich are winning it. The rest of America needs to fight back -- not out of hatred for the rich, but simply out of self-defense. If we don't, then things will just get worse. The redistribution of income from the poor, the workers, and the dwindling middle class to the rich must be reversed. The easiest way to do this is through fair taxation -- where the rich pay a larger percentage than others do. The alternative is a real war between the rich and poor someday. The rich would do well to remember these words of John Steinbeck in his book The Grapes of Wrath:

"And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed."

"How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him- he has known a fear beyond every other."