Ten Years Ago Today: Sacrifice is for the little people

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 22, 2010.]

“Anger is sweeping America,” wrote Paul Krugman in “The Angry Rich” on September 19 in The New York Times. “I’m talking about the rich,” he said.

The rage of the rich has been building ever since Mr. Obama took office.
    For one thing, craziness has gone mainstream. It’s one thing when a billionaire rants at a dinner event. It’s another when Forbes magazine runs a cover story alleging that the president of the United States is deliberately trying to bring America down as part of his Kenyan, “anticolonialist” agenda, that “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.” When it comes to defending the interests of the rich, it seems, the normal rules of civilized (and rational) discourse no longer apply.
    And among the undeniably rich, a belligerent sense of entitlement has taken hold: it’s their money, and they have the right to keep it.
    The spectacle of high-income Americans, the world’s luckiest people, wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness would be funny, except for one thing: they may well get their way. Never mind the $700 billion price tag for extending the high-end tax breaks: virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are rushing to the aid of the oppressed affluent.
    You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. [emphasis mine] It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes.
    And when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.
    But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

Please pay Mr. Krugman and The New York Times for my long excerpt by taking the link to his article and reading it in its entirety. It provides more examples of attempted manipulation by the rich, as if they didn’t practically run everything already anyway.
    And read the letters to The Times in response to the article. For example, Steven Berkowitz wrote the next day:

G. K. Chesterton identified a source deeper than the sense of entitlement to explain the anger of the rich at paying taxes: “The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”

Simply let money [continue to] govern?

Copyright © 2010, 2020 by Moristotle