The Rich are Different from Us

The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne says, “The American ruling class is failing us.” It used to advocate “social decency out of self-interest (reasonably fair societies are more stable),” but now cares only about money.

What can Dionne be talking about? As the American Enterprise Institute’s John Glassman has found, and as we have repeated somewhat endlessly here, the American elite—its ruling class—is almost entirely Democratic, dominating the media, government, academe, arts and entertainment, and the non-profit sector, while grabbing a good share of big business and religion, leaving only small business and the military to Republicans. And Democrats, party of the ruling class, are committed to big government and caring via government for the less fortunate. So how can Dionne say the ruling class that runs our country cares only about money?

Turns out Dionne’s “ruling class” is the “top 400 taxpayers,” as identified by David Cay Johnson, whom Dionne fails to tell us is an ex-New York Times investigative reporter now writing for the progressive Nation. Johnson has found that “the 400’s” effective rate of taxation has gone from 30 cents on the dollar in 1993 to 22 cents at the end of the Clinton years to 16.6 cents under Bush, meaning their effective rate has dropped more than 40%. Johnson proclaims (does he have a transcript from their secret meetings?) “the 400’s” current objective is to “push the burden of government, of taxes, down the income ladder."

Also writing in the Nation, well-known progressive Robert Scheer identifies our “upper class” as much larger than 400. To Scheer, it’s the top 1% of our population, as described by “Nobel Prize winner” Joseph E. Stiglitz. Like Dionne in discussing Johnson (of “the 400”), Scheer shields us from any true description of Stiglitz, who has spent a career debunking Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” quit the World Bank because he distrusts “globalization,” and regularly attacks from the left “market socialism,” the European left’s dominant philosophy. Stiglitz has found our “top 1%” controls 40% of American wealth, and says, “in our own democracy, 1% of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.”

So that’s what's supposed to concern us. That’s how our ruling class, our national elite, our Democrats with power and wealth aplenty in their hands, can launch a presidential campaign targeting (in Obama’s words) “millionaires and billionaires.” No matter how rich you are, there’s someone richer you can use to make yourself appear relatively poor.

Now I understand how progressives keep class warfare alive after they have become the ruling class. While the top 1% annually made over $1 million a year in 2007, Obama's tax increase is also aimed at households making over $250,000 ($200,000 for individuals)--a much larger, less affluent group that includes small business folks who are the Republican Party's backbone, and who must pay income tax on their business earnings. Democrats talk about billionaires, and tax small business.

I’m now prepared to translate the recent New York Times editorial praising Obama’s speech last week on deficit reduction (what the New York Times says, and what it really means):

President Obama. . . used his budget speech to clearly distance himself from Republican plans to heap tax benefits on the rich (that is: small business) while casting adrift the nation’s poor, elderly and unemployed (that is: salaried government and nonprofit employees paid to help the poor, elderly, and unemployed). Instead of adapting the themes of the right (that is: Republicans) to his own uses, he set out a very different vision of an America that keeps its promises to the weak (that is: salaried government and nonprofit workers) and asks for sacrifice from the strong (that is: small business).

The super rich don't care about these attacks in the New York Times, which is, for most of them anyway, their newspaper. Such stuff concerns others, the less privileged Democrats and Republicans. The top 1% are too rich to mind serving as a foil for Democratic grabs at small business profits.