class warfare?
The Slate piece "War on the Rich?" by Daniel Gross (h/t: Ron Chusid at Liberal Values) looks at the steaming heaps of elephant dung that are the latest GOP talking points, noting that "It's hard to overstate how absurd these claims are." Republicans' wildly incorrect (one might even say fractally wrong) assumptions about the economic effect of marginal tax rates contradict the facts:
[W]e know from recent experience that marginal tax rates of 36 percent and 39 percent aren't wealth killers. I was around in the 1990s, when tax rates were at that level, and when capital gains and dividend taxes were significantly higher than they are today. And I seem to remember that we had a stock market boom, a broad rise in incomes (with the wealthy benefitting handily), and strong economic growth. [...] The Bush years, which had lower marginal rates and capital gains taxes, were a fiasco. In fact, if you tally up the vast destruction of wealth in the late Bush years--caused by foolish hedge funds, investment banks, and other financial services companies, it seems like the wealthy have in fact been waging war on one another.
Gross has some facts for the complaining Randian overclass:
What would happen if the marginal rate on the portion of your income above $250,000 were to rise from 33 percent to 36 percent? Under the old regime, you'd pay $16,500 in federal taxes on that amount. Under the new one, you'd pay $18,000. The difference is $1,500 per year, or $4.10 per day. Obviously, the numbers rise as you make more. But is $4.10 a day bleeding the rich, a war on the wealthy, a killer of innovation and enterprise? That dentist eager to slash her income from $320,000 to $250,000 would avoid the pain of paying an extra $2,100 in federal taxes. But she'd also deprive herself of an additional $70,000 in income!Can she, or we, really be that stupid?
She certainly can be; I don't know that I've ever seen a group more in need of an Econ 101 refresher course than some of these rabid reactionaries. But no, they're too busy forwarding crap like the swimming-pool analogy and pretending that it represents our economy.