I’m old enough to remember when the term “class warfare” was thrown around mostly by clueless wannabe student revolutionaries.
Then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it started to catch on among Republicans looking for ways to stigmatize Democrats calling for the wealthiest Americans to pay a larger share of their incomes in taxes. In 2003 Ben Fritz wrote at the Spinsanity website:
To see just how much more frequently this phrase is used in today’s political debates compared to those of the past, consider the number of results from a search on the Nexis news database for “class warfare” plus the word “tax” and the name of the Democratic candidate in each of the past five presidential elections, from June 1 to November 15 of the election year (not all publications are fully archived back to 1984 in Nexis and thus these figures are only a rough illustration of a trend):
1984: 1
1988: 12
1992: 59
1996: 144
2000: 889
I expect similar searches for 2004 and 2008 would blow those figures out of the water.
So I was hardly surprised to read this:
A top House Republican accused President Obama of appealing to Americans’ “fear, envy and anxiety” by pushing a new tax rate on people making more than $1 million annually, saying the “class warfare path” will only hurt the economy.
“Class warfare … may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics,” Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, told “Fox News Sunday.”
The president is planning on proposing the new and higher rate as part of a broader long-term deficit-reduction plan he’s unveiling Monday. It will likely include a mix of entitlement reform and new revenue, and will be aimed at the bipartisan “super committee” trying to find about $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade.
…..
The idea behind the Obama proposal is to make sure those making more than $1 million a year pay at least the same rate as middle-income taxpayers — Obama will call it the “Buffett Rule,” after billionaire Warren Buffett who complained that the wealthy are sometimes effectively taxed at a lower rate than others. That’s because investment income is taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income.
Buffett frequently points out that he pays a lower percentage of his income in federal taxes than his secretary does.
So according to the likes of Paul Ryan, a proposal for people who earn a million-plus dollars a year to pay the same percentage of their incomes in taxes as middle-income taxpayers (not more, heaven forbid, but the same) is class warfare.
Obama replied: “It’s not class warfare. It’s math.”
If you believe people like Ryan, America’s class warfare is strictly a one-sided affair, with envious Democrats, greedy public employee unions, etc., attacking well-meaning people who only want to create jobs and grow the economy.
But to cite Buffett again: “If it’s class warfare, my class is winning.”
Indeed. And former Labor Secretary Robert Reich provides graphic evidence in The New York Times. It’s a truly stunning series of graphs which I urge you to study carefully to grasp who the real winners and losers are in the post-1980 American “class war.”