It’s Not Class Warfare
It was a predictable result of the President’s announced deficit reduction plan, which included higher taxes on wealthier Americas nicknamed the “Buffet Tax” for Warren Buffet, the billionaire who has called for higher taxes on the wealthy. As Fox News played in my mess hall, the term I kept hearing was “class warfare.” What bullshit.
It’s a term that Fox and conservative pundits have thrown around before. And it is a complete denial of basic facts. The fact of the matter is that income inequality in the U.S. has continued to rise, and most of the increase in GDP benefits the richest Americans. To me, that means they can pay more into the system, since they are the ones reaping the benefits of the country’s economy. In fact, in the last 30 years, we have seen that the top 5% of Americans now have 81.7% of the country’s wealth.
Not only can we see that the rich are getting richer, but the poor have seen their share of the nation’s wealth shrink 7.5%. And yet, as Warren Buffet has famously noted, he and others like him pay less in taxes than the staff that they have on their payrolls. This is because much of his, and others’ income come in the form of capital gains and other financial assets that are taxed more lightly than earned income. As soon as anyone suggests that maybe they should at least pay the same percentage of their overall income as the people a bit farther down on the prosperity ladder, shouts of class warfare are heard from around the conservative world.
If the poor start marching through the streets with rifles, we can then start calling it class warfare.
That is a picture of the Russian Revolution, which overthrew the Romanov dynasty of stars and kicked off a Civil War that eventually saw the Red Army triumph and V. I. Lenin return from exile to build the world’s first socialist state. That is class warfare. Class warfare means that the poor launch a violent campaign against the rich, intent on taking all their wealth and making the rich live in abject poverty. That is, when they weren’t outright killing them. THAT is what class warfare is. So I advise anyone tempted to describe a rise in taxes for the people who have over 85% to get a sense of proportion. The Russian Revolution and a tax increase ARE NOT the same thing. They aren’t even on the same scale of ways to treat the rich. This term needs to get the hell out of our political rhetoric because there are plenty of real victims of class warfare who’s poor treatment, suffering, or even death are belittled every time it is used by allies of the rich who don’t think they should have to pay taxes.
