Friday, November 25, 2011

Was Ronald Reagan a champion of "One Percent?"

This is an excerpt taken from a Rolling Stone article written by Tim Dickinson

Dickinson wrote: The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary - and that's crazy. Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less? The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE! The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan. ILLUSTRATION BY MATT MAHURIN Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan - which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits - is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us. Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent - the Party of the Rich. The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility," says David Stockman, who served as budget director under Reagan. They're on an anti-tax jihad - one that benefits the prosperous classes. End of excerpt.
Taken from Dec 3 Stones mag

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So, what's your take on this?