Class warfare: Who’s winning?

When anyone asks the wealthy to pay even a tiny bit more in taxes, said David Sarasohn in the Portland Oregonian, their Republican defenders shout: “Class warfare!” Now Elizabeth Warren has exposed that phrase for the lie that it is. Warren, a former consumer advocate in the Obama administration and current Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Massachusetts, was recently filmed debunking the class-warfare charge, and when the video hit the Internet, it promptly went “as viral as a kitten wrestling a turtleneck.” Warren’s main point, said Greg Sargent in WashingtonPost.com, is that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” Businessmen are only able to accumulate vast wealth, she says, because of “an underlying social contract” paid for by everyone. We taxpayers educate the private sector’s workforce in our schools, provide roads and rails on which commercial goods are shipped, and hire cops and firemen to protect the wealthy’s offices and mansions. So is it really “warfare,” Warren asks, to ask the rich to share the sacrifices needed to maintain our nation’s stability?

There’s just one flaw in Warren’s logic, said Jeffrey Anderson in WeeklyStandard.com. The rich already pay “their fair share” in taxes, and then some. The top 10 percent of wage earners now pay nearly 70 percent of all federal income taxes. And those taxes aren’t used to fund just the basic functions of society, said Rich Lowry in National​Review.com. What conservatives object to is raising taxes on the most successful Americans to fund entitlement programs that are bankrupting the country, a burdensome regulatory apparatus, and a vast public sector that serves as a jobs program for the Democratic Party.

“Oh, please,” said Timothy Noah in The​New​Republic.com. Do you know why the top 10 percent of taxpayers pay so much tax? Because they now make such incredibly large sums of money. That 10 percent of earners now haul in 50 percent of the total income, and own two thirds of all the nation’s wealth. In recent decades, the gulf between rich and poor has become wider than at any previous point in our history. Meanwhile, the average percentage tax burden on the wealthy has gone down. Class warfare is real, said Sally Kohn in The Washington Post. But it’s the rich who’ve been waging it, with the help of lobbyists and politicians bought by their contributions. And “right now, they’re winning.”

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