Salon.com > Class warfare

Let’s stop subsidizing mansions!

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:58:00 +0000

With Congress finally starting to have a serious conversation about our revenue crisis, there are obvious reasons to limit the amount of mortgage interest that Americans can deduct from their taxable income.

First and foremost, current law -- which allows homeowners to deduct interest on mortgages up to $1 million -- is extremely expensive for the country. As federal data show, it costs roughly $100 billion a year, making it the third largest expenditure woven into the tax code.

That huge outlay might be justified if the deduction was a widely distributed, middle-class program. But with only about a third of all taxpayers earning enough to make it worthwhile to itemize their tax returns, just a quarter of all tax filers ever actually utilize the deduction. Add to this the fact that the deduction can be used for second homes, and the result is a write-off that mostly benefits the wealthy. In dollar-figure terms, it is a deduction that, according to the Tax Policy Center, saves $5,460 for someone making more than $250,000 a year and only $91 for those making less than $40,000 a year.

Victory for strangers, heathens, wastrels!

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Before we get to the persistence of class warfare in our politics, let’s talk about Skinch Painter. In 1900, when the San Francisco Examiner tracked him down, he was 78, “hale, hearty, and contented.” He hadn’t inherited a penny, but neither had he worked a day in his life. “He has never borrowed a dollar, nor stolen one,” the column read. “He has never been a tramp nor a beggar. He has never done a day’s work in exchange for money ... Yet he has lived.”

One day, when he was in his teens, he said to himself, “Look here, Skinch Painter, this old world owes you a living, and all you’ve got to do is collect it.” Wandering the Ozarks of Missouri, he inhabited a cave and relied on nature for his food and clothing. He hunted, fished and gathered nuts and berries, wearing only animal skins and going barefoot.

“Labor is a useless sin,” said Skinch. “The time a man spends working is just so much time lost from living.”

We can just about see Fox News sending a camera crew out to interview Skinch, and one of its handsomely paid straight men wrapping up the piece with an offhand, “See, you don’t need government handouts. If you don’t want to work, you can do what this guy does. At least he’s not a taker. The rest of us in this country, we’ll continue to work for a living.”

Ten filthy rich, tax-dodging hypocrites

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 19:53:00 +0000

Brace yourself for one of the most aggressive corporate lobbying campaigns of all time. And one of the most hypocritical.

“Fix the Debt ” is a coalition of more than 80 CEOs who claim they know best how to deal with our nation’s fiscal challenges. The group boasts a $60 million budget just for the initial phase of a massive media and lobbying campaign.

The irony is that CEOs in the coalition’s leadership have been major contributors to the national debt they now claim to know how to fix. These are guys who’ve mastered every tax-dodging trick in the book. And now that they’ve boosted their corporate profits by draining the public treasury, how do they propose we put our fiscal house back in order? By squeezing programs for the poor and elderly, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Kevin Hassett: Mitt’s dumbest economist

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 11:45:00 +0000

Income inequality? Don’t get worked up about it, wrote two American Enterprise Institute scholars in the Wall Street Journal this week. The gap between the rich and everybody else in the United States is not getting bigger, they argue, and those who are telling you that it is (like President Obama) are "seeking political gain by inflaming class hatreds with misleading statistics."

One of the Op-Ed's co-authors is Kevin Hassett, a man who has been much mocked for making the worst economic prediction since Irving Fisher declared stocks to be at a "permanently high plateau" ... in 1929. A Hassett-bylined column on the WSJ opinion page is not where most economists tend to look for solid, peer-reviewed analysis, so we'll leave the painstakingly researched disembowelment of his argument to others. But the mere appearance of such an argument with less than two weeks to go before Election Day is still worth appraising. Kevin Hassett is an adviser to Mitt Romney -- he's someone who will have real influence on economic policy if Romney wins. So the real question here is not how wrong his argument might be, but why he is making the argument at all. Why does Kevin Hassett want us to believe that income inequality is not getting worse?

The billionaire Obama hate club

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 19:35:00 +0000

So Obama, defending his plan to raise taxes on the rich, says this:

“If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge-fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been. They are lower than they have been since the nineteen-fifties,” the President said. “You can still ride on your corporate jet. You’re just going to have to pay a little more.”

And billionaire hedge-fund manager Leon Cooperman, a former Obama supporter, responds with this:

"You know, the largest and greatest country in the free world put a forty-seven-year-old guy that never worked a day in his life and made him in charge of the free world ... Not totally different from taking Adolf Hitler in Germany and making him in charge of Germany because people were economically dissatisfied."

Cooperman, like so many of his fellow super-rich, is upset at Obama's class-warfare "tone." But in response, as Chrystia Freeland documents in her definitive New Yorker treatment of billionaire Obama hate, Cooperman raises the level of divisive rhetoric light-years beyond Obama's, straight into a galaxy of ludicrous imbecility. It is beyond irrational to compare Obama with Hitler, or to argue that in any meaningful way his administration has waged class warfare against the rich. If we've said it once, we've said it a million times, Obama has been great for the rich!