What Do Conservatives Conserve?

[Demeter]

http://horse-you-rode-in-on.com/2008/01/02/what-do-conservatives-conserve/


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If you’re one of the three million highest-income Americans, congratulations. You’re assured of three square meals a day and money left over to do something significant.

How about adopting 50 children?

Your household will still have more income per person than the bottom 20% of the population lives on, so your expanded family can have its 156 square meals a day and still have money to burn at Wal-Mart.

It’s nice to be rich because, among other things, wealth gives you power. The affluent are also the people who make the rules. So you not only have most of the money, you also have the power to take the rest of it. (“If those people haven’t been smart enough or industrious enough to get rich, well, to hell with them. Let that be a lesson.”)

Might Makes Right

If a mugger approaches you with a knife or a gun, he has the power to take your money. He was smart enough to come armed, and you weren’t – so tough apples; fork over. If there are people standing around who criticize his morals, he can shoot them, too. What good is power if you don’t use it?

You don’t like Mugger Economics? Watch it. You’ll sound like a liberal.

In 2003, George Bush and a gleeful Republican congress gave major tax cuts to the nation’s multi-millionaires and modest tax cuts to the rest of us – all of it from borrowed money, which you now owe. In the next two years, individual incomes for the top 1% rose an average of $465,000 a year (nice raise!). In the bottom 20%, incomes were up $200.

Mugged again.

What a spectacle. With great fanfare, the richest people in America cut taxes for the richest people in America and congratulated each other as network television crews dutifully celebrated the presidential signing as if it were a tax cut for one and all. Thus we got the answer to a question the news media never ask:

What Do Conservatives Conserve?

Not the environment, certainly. Not the constitution. Not peace in the world or America’s standing among nations. Not traditional American values, which include fairness, honesty, truthfulness, and faithfulness to one’s sacred oath of office. No, what conservatives have been working to conserve are their own money, their power, and their presumptive right to control the lives of the less lavishly endowed. That’s why they bought the government.

So let’s not hang around waiting for fairness from the federal government. What about our public officials closer to home — in city, county, and state jurisdictions? Prof. Susan Pace Hamill at the University of Alabama Law School addresses that question in her new book, As Certain as Death. In her home state, she found that the poorest fifth of Alabama families – with incomes under $13,000 – pay state and local taxes that take almost 11 cents out of every dollar. The richest 1 percent, who make $229,000 or more, pay less than 4 cents out of each dollar they earn.

The Sinful Six

This is not coming from some firebrand liberal activist. In addition to her law degree, Dr. Hamill holds a degree in divinity from a conservative evangelical seminary. “The bible commands that the law promote justice,” she points out. Surveying all 50 states, she calls Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, South Dakota, and Texas “the sinful six” (that’s something like an axis of evil) because they soak the poor with heavy taxes and spend very little public money to help them.

Nationwide, thanks to the Bush tax cuts, the top 1 percent of incomes saw their tax rates drop from 20.4% to 19.2% between 2003 and 2005. Meanwhile, their incomes rose 42.6%, adjusted for inflation. Incomes for the middle fifth of all taxpayers rose 4.3% and for the bottom fifth 1.3%

That’s Mugger Economics

Result: by 2005 (latest year for which we have figures) the top 10 percent and top 1 percent were raking in their greatest share of total U.S. incomes since 1928 and 1929.

And we all know what happened after 1929.
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Data sources: the Congressional Budget Office; the Internal Revenue Service

[baldguy]

1. The status quo & the power to maintain it.

[mwb970]

2. Conservative policies threaten the United States. Every day.

I am much more concerned about the expicitly anti-American acts of our own right-wing crazies than I am about terrorist attacks.

bin Laden attacked us once. bush and cheney attack us every day. bin Laden can knock over a couple of buildings. bush, cheney, and their right-wing enablers are bringing down an entire nation.