As mentioned in my previous article, the most monumental irony about the current Tea Party can be found within the movement's misunderstanding of what the original tea party was about. Here are a number of other ironies, laid-out beautifully in David Michael Green's excellent article. Their ignorance and total misunderstanding of economics, the situation-at-hand, and what led us to this point, will certainly prove to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Let me know if you agree.
How Do You Take Your Tea? With Heaping Spoonfuls of Irony, Of Course
It's so great that Americans are finally angry about the state of their country.
But it's beyond awful that all the wrong people are beside themselves for all the wrong reasons.
When I look at the tea party movement in America today, any number of words come to mind, most of which are not fit for print in a family newspaper. But, above all, I cannot help but be struck by the irony of it all.
It's ironic, to begin with, that the ones who are bitching loudest today are precisely the people who created the mess we're in.
We're actually in a whole heaping helping lot of messes, but I'm referring principally to the economic one. I suspect that the rabble ranks of the tea party movement are populated by people who have equally bad politics on social matters and foreign policy issues. But - for different reasons - they don't talk about those questions too much. Instead, they largely confine themselves to economic beefs, especially deficits.
These are conservatives, however - more properly labeled as regressives - and the astonishing irony here is that they've had their way with economic policy in this country for thirty years running. And, excuse me, but now they're pissed off at the results?
Think about it. Economic policy can be divided into a handful of key domains, including taxes, trade, labor relations, regulation, privatization, the budget and the welfare state. In every single one of these areas - with one partial exception - regressive policy choices have entirely predominated over the last generation. Only in the latter case of welfare state spending has that not been true, but even there only partially so.
Taxes today are a mere hint of what they used to be, just as the right has insisted must be the case. For the rich especially, top marginal income taxes have come down from 91 percent to 35 percent. But, of course, even that doesn't include earnings on capital gains, a giant portion of their income, which is now at 15 percent. Nor does it include the estate tax, which has now disappeared entirely. Nor does it include deductions and write-offs. Put this all together and you can see why Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the country, was moved to reveal that he paid a 17.7 percent tax rate on his $46 million of taxable income in 2006, while his employees paid an average of 32.9 percent, and his receptionist's tax rate was 30 percent.
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