Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 24, 2010

Here’s you coat and hat. Come again when you can’t stay so long!

Warren needs to call in for backup his tempting cousin, Hometown Buffet.

Didn’t B2 need a bailout from the Saudis when his oil company went bust?

Yup, the convenient Bin Ladens…

You know why I hate the rich? Cause they had the balls and ambition to do what I was too comfortable to do. bleeep, what made me think I could afford a family and happiness? Those people forgot that for success. Jealous? bleeeped straight! Why should they succeed when I didn’t. Tax everyone who makes more than me.

This message brought by the DNC.

And the Bush bashing continues unabated. The “assisted living” line is really funny, but for the poster children of that way of life, look to the Eastern Elite, particularly anyone that has a last name that rhymes with Kennedy.

SO, does anyone think that the twins will ever run for office? Did that virginian take the bush name when he married into the family? I don’t think Jebs kids will run, except for that Naval Reserve officer. There’s also a third unknown Bush.

There’s way more than enough embarrassing skeletons in any successful politician’s family closet to repopulate Sodom and Gomorrah. This includes the Bushes, the Kennedys, the Roosevelts, Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, and every royal family that ever walked the earth. Shall we just agree that all politicians have things they’d rather keep hidden, and let it go at that?

And yesterday, the pathetic Harry Reid refuses to bring to the Senate floor a vote to end the Bush tax cuts for these freeloaders. Afraid the Republicans might run campaign ads against him. Like they won’t anyway. Disgraceful. I’m starting to agree with the tea-partiers. The Democrats deserve to lose. Gutless bustards.

typing…make…weak….must….drink….more…scotch…………

Trudeau’s message of the week:”If you’re rich, gimme! gimme! gimme!” Just beautiful.

Sheik - everyone knows the Buffet line goes way back…

CluelessReader - yeah, if I tax Warren or Bill just three more percent, they’ll be just like me…riiight!

Iamthelamex - The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is where Warren left most of his fortune, has an endowment of 33 BILLION, of which not a single dollar is attributable to Garry Trudeau. You should talk to the super-rich about convincing other super-rich to donate their richness to the richest rich foundation of the rich…eh, never mind

No one denies that about the Kennedys either, Sandfan, but John Kennedy’s brief presidency was much better than that of either Bush.

Lew, please read what I wrote yesterday. I would hate to have to re-post it here today.

Waiting, I agree that the Senate Democrats have been gutless. Think of how much more they would have accomplished if they had challenged the Teapublicans to hold a REAL filibuster. Senator Reid plays too often for the tie, not the win. At the same time, electing a bunch of ignorant wackos who want to turn America into Greece (“Save the expensive social programs! Just cut my taxes!”) will not solve the problems of the Senate’s lack of backbone.

No, Lorax, Doonesbury’s message is that the extraordinarily wealthy can give much more than they are to help the world in which they have been so materially successful. I know that Lew is so jealous of the wealthy that he wants to guard all their wallets, but does anyone else see a problem with Doonesbury’s point here?

I can’t think of a better argument for the estate tax.

They made it, they can spend it as they please as long as they give their fair share in taxes like the rest of us.

Please don’t depict the rich as all hiring us here and setting up jobs. Most of the really rich companies have moved overseas since the NAFTA fraud was perpetrated by the Clinton and the Republican congress. Real relief would be gov funds to the small guys who hire locally, but the Repubs. have done their best to block that one.

The Really Rich take the tax savings, stuff it in their accounts and live off the interest and provide no real jobs except to illegal immigrant servants. Pelosi gets credit for that, too, by the way.

Separate studies show two things: government funded relief hasn’t yet returned dollar for dollar on the investment and tax cuts have not returned dollar for dollar on the investment. Both have remarkably under performed on their promises. Both parties need to get past the 30’s and 40’s and get something that works: real importation restrictions: real buy American policies by the government and trhe rich that would “trickle down” to us, real stopping at the borders, real enforcement of existing laws.

Lew: I don’t envy the rich or hate them, I wouldn’t want to be them when they have to answer for themselves, here after a revolution over “let them eat cake” stupidity or later before God. I have enough of my own sins let alone the ones I’d like create given too much of anything.

Enjoy your government retirement, you old postal carrier. You might not have it for long.

I swear, he makes me think of ol’ Archie Bunker.

Trudeau is trumpeting Neolib’s mantra that Bush’s presidency was the source of all our woes. Today’s strip even links Bush to the evil institution of inherited wealth.

These railings against the estate tax are much less amusing than Neolib Krugman’s clever satire on the platform just unveiled by the Republicans, whom he compares with a “Latin American party” that promised to cut government fuel costs by building roads that only run downhill. Go to

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/opinion/24krugman.html?_r=1&hp

Brian, the message that the rich can give more is even older than the stories in the Bible, but Doonesbury’s purpose this week is simply to cement class warfare thinking. If the rich won’t give us what we want, we’ll just have to take it from them via not extending their tax cuts. The Bush punchline is just icing on the cake.

GT is perfectly welcome to make these points as he prepares his anti-Tea Party slams for just prior to the elections, but have you ever wondered why there has been such unified backlash about leaving the rich alone from people whom these tax cuts won’t affect? I’m sure it surprises the White House and the Congress. After all, if the rich were forced to kick in more taxes, we could afford at least 3 or 4 new wars over the next decade.

From 1936 to 1981, the highest marginal tax rate never dropped below 70%. During all these years of being the most powerful nation on earth, the wealthy were asked to pay much more than they pay now.

At one time, the top earners paid 90 percent of all income over a million dollars. Don’t you know the Koch’s would have a cow if that rate was revived!!

It is easy to see that there are no dire consequences to high rates for top earners. The majority of those over 250k have no employees (remember all the executives and their huge bonuses?). ANY of the other measures being discussed to encourage hiring would be more effective. Extending the low rate for the wealthy has more effect on the deficit than it will on hiring. Anyone who truly supports fiscally responsible policy should vote against it.

Renaissance authors saw more clearly into society than any of our three political parties has managed to do. Here’s a translation from Thomas More’s Utopia:

“The Utopians are appalled at those people who practically worship a rich man, though they neither owe him anything, nor are obligated to him in any way. What impresses them is simply that the man is rich. Yet all the while they know that he is so mean and grasping that as long as he lives not a single penny out of that great mound of money will ever come their way.”

Compare Joe the Plumber, currently unemployed but adamant in his opposition to Obama’s plan to raise taxes on income above a quarter-million $$ because Joe hoped one day to start his own small business.

There’s only one way to explain the fear of raising taxes voiced by the Teapublicans and their sympathizers. These people, like the pathetic Utopians who worship the rich, claim they are defending “the American Dream” when in fact they are only frightened of losing the dream that they, too, can become wealthy.

Today’s American Dream is to be able to keep enough of your paycheck to live on.

palin, I doubt that the Olde White Guys ™ who are said to comprise 99.9% of the Tea Party are worried about the tax consequences of getting super-rich in the future. Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the point about rights I made yesterday. Maybe, just maybe, that there are some people who are concerned about keeping the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective in balance, so that the rights of a individual to earn something are not automatically superseded by the rights of the collective to take it from them. Perhaps the concern really isn’t for the billionaires at all, but for themselves and their kids as the government’s unlimited appetite to over-spend is being transferred into the government’s unlimited appetite to over-take.

In other words, the line in the sand is real, but the debate is based on philosophical principles. Who woulda thunk it from Tea Partiers, who are simply trying to head off the American Nightmare?

To say nothing of the Kennedys.

Nemesys,

You say “some people … are concerned about keeping the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective in balance.” Please read what I wrote yesterday about “possessive individualism” and your muddled notion of “rights.”

Every right, including the right to property, empowers the holder over against the rest of society. Nobody else can lay claim to his/her property. But these so-called basic rights are not grounded in the Constitution or in God or in common sense or in the natural order of things. They are legislated by society, and society can take them away and redistribute them whenever it collectively wills to do so. The single aim of a just society is to ensure that the common good (or collective wealth) is shared fairly by all.

You characterize the proposed redistribution of rights—-i.e. the changes proposed by society’s elected government—-as “the American Nightmare.” In other words, you fear that any change in the status quo will spoil the American Dream. For you, as for Joe the Plumber and those fools scorned by the Utopians, the rich are defenders of the status quo (i.e. their bank accounts) and any attack on them is an attack on your own rights which, you say, “are not automatically superseded by the rights of the collective to take [the right to earn more money] from them.”

This makes no sense. Since individual rights are a gift from “the collective” (society), then of course they will be “automatically superseded” when the collective votes to take them back and redistribute them in what it judges to be a more equitable manner.

The only restraint on society’s executive choices (conceived by Congress and effected by the government) is society’s judicial process (the courts). In the end, your concerns boil down to a fear of making changes in the troubled society to which you belong. And that puzzles me because you seem fully aware of how completely unsustainable the status quo has become after eight years of Congress sucking up to Wall Street and the preceding administration.

Even Larry Summers now thinks that our greatest social problem is the widening disparity between rich and poor. We need another Thomas More to expose our modern inequity together with the ineffectual remedies put forth by “compassionate conservatism.” (More invented Utopia—-where money is forbidden and nobody is rich enough to provoke envy—-as a satire on England’s status quo and its glaring disparities of wealth.)

So let’s see. The latest right-wing outrage is that there exists a 0% tax bracket for low wage earners. A couple of weeks ago, The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an op-ed piece from a conservative think tank saying the way to lower the unemployment rate was to cut the minimum wage by 25%. So that’s the plan from the Republicans? If you’re a gazillionaire, it’s tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. If you make $7.25 an hour, you get a tax increase and a pay cut. And yet, Republicans say the poor are waging class warfare on the rich?!?! Unbelievable!

Our current prez wants to tax only the top 2% of the economic ladder. And people want to say it is all about class envy. The top 2% is a pretty small group. Also, that commie Eisenhower had taxes up the wazoo when he was in power. Nothing like that in this day and age…

@jrmerm

From what moral standpoint—-other than that assumed by Teapublicans with their self-interested interpretation of Constitutional rights—-do you judge criticisms of our wealth disparity “immoral”?

On Taxing the “Wealthy” you are kind of missing the point folks. Even if you increase the effective tax rate to 39% or 65% or 91%, the current “Tax Code” is just loaded with exceptions that let the rich avoid paying those taxes. They were all inserted by your Congress, both parties, over time to reward the “rich” for all their contributions, support, whatever.

You will never get to fairness unless you scrap the current Tax Code, thousand of pages of special exemptions, deals, etc., with one that is simple, fair and specifically targeted. The Fair Tax, Flat Tax or a National Sales/Consumption Tax will all fix those problems.

But alas, what Politician will touch that electrified rail and bite the hands that feed them?

Please note my intense sarcasm in the following comment.

@palin drome: The moral standpoint of The Golden Rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.

“The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the Bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe.. corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed Abraham Lincoln

jrh, you are mostly correct, though there is still enough income that won’t fit into the many loopholes to increase revenue when the rates rise.

Dems have closed a couple of the more agregious loopholes to help fund recent projects, but there are still too many. Some have long outlived their original purpose, but lobbyists from the industry enjoying the largesse fight to keep them in place.

palin, are you saying that you would have supported George Bush and the Republican Congress had they, as duly elected representatives of the collective, imposed a requirement that any citizen who wished to collect any social benefits (social security, unemployment, healthcare, etc.) would need to serve 3 years in the Armed Forces?

All that Bush would be doing would be to conditionalize the rights granted by the collective for the common good of being able to attack as many Middle Eastern countries as he deemed appropriate. Would you be puzzled by those who would protest such changes to their individual liberties, or would you tell the fools to shut up and lay down?

Prescott place a platinum spoon in his son’s mouth, and the grandson got the same. Neither would have gotten above a job clerking at a 7/11 without the connections. Several “dynastic” families have indeed supported offspring, but many could function on their own. That isn’t the case with the Bush family and it isn’t “bashing” it’s just fact if you read up on their histories.

I liked the “living” line, and it’s understatement. The first time I read it, I thought it said “assisted LYING”, which would also be quite true.

When “birthers”, TEAbaggers, and well, “arch conservatives” throw from their piles of poop at those “on the other side”, they pull from a huge pile accumulated in the reality of their own dudes’ pasts.

I don’t have anything against folks accumulating LEGITIMATE wealth, but they can also kick in the same percentage in ACTUALLY PAID taxes as those beneath them on the ladder to success. This is especially true for those who were BORN near the top rung, and never extended a whit of effort to stay at or near the top.

Why is it that the highest taxes are paid on money you actually earned through creating and delivering some useful goods and services, while the lowest (often no tax at all) are paid on money that just sort of dropped into your lap, like inheritances, capital gains and dividends? Makes you think the politicians have something against good honest WORK…

For such a bright guy, Trudeau is sure dumb about politics and human nature. Can you imagine what a mess it would be if 9/11 had happened months into Obama’s presidency instead of Bush’s? It’s a good thing we had some adult supervision then, and it’s a shame we have this guy now throwing away all Bush’s great work.

How many of you work for a poor company owner?

What was the economy like when Hoover and Roosevelt slammed the rich with taxes? That was when, the 30?

And again I ask BRIAN why he hates the successful? Didn’t live up to mamma’s expectations?

And FREEHOLDER, what makes you think I spent my life so blind as to rely one one pension and the Ponzi scheme Roosevelt called Social security? Didn’t your mother teach you to save 25% of every dollar? Heck, even the God you mentioned (didn’t know a liberal believed in him)Said that to the three stewards. I believe the one who invested got rewarded, not the spender, or hide it under a rock. Both your and my God said to invest. Glad you got a new car instead.

So if you hate the rich, I suspect jealousy or envy. Perhaps a touch of inadequacy. Maybe your wife sees you as less than a success.

Nemesys,

Had Bush’s administration imposed a draft for the Iraq war, of course I would have supported it—-just as I supported the draft in Vietnam to which Bush and I were subject forty years ago.

I was more strongly opposed to Vietnam than to Iraq, but I’ve never disobeyed, nor have I encouraged my children or my students to disobey, the laws of the land. How can they invoke the protection of the law if they flout it themselves?

I like political debate and admire civil dissent, including principled civil disobedience that risks punishment. But I consider it folly to second-guess the laws imposed by the society of which I’m a member, and I think it’s downright asinine to bemoan the actual, historical consequences of decisions made by my society or its elected representatives. Water under the bridge.

If someone really hates their society and is convinced they can never change it, why not just abandon it for another more to their liking—-here or abroad? Someone who wants to escape the evils of war should seek out some peaceloving, inconsequential nation like New Guinea or Switzerland or (so long as they have no draft) Canada.

Several people whom I respected refused, on the grounds of conscientious objection, to serve in Vietnam and were given noncombat roles. Not many of those honest souls are still around these days; probably because, as I protested nine years ago, Bush told us we could fight a war without making real sacrifices. That’s rather like Jimbo Andrews hoping to be admired for his selfish greed.

Ps. Since you seem genuinely curious about my take on war and citizenship, I recommend (and please excuse the professorial jargon!) Machiavelli’s brief Art of War. Machiavelli showed me why a healthy state depends on a citizen army (conscripts and volunteers).

the Haves, and the Have Nots. wealth in its simplicity: make money, only spend it as an investment such as to make more money. folks that have money simply never spent more than they made. those who spend money (i love the “save more/on sale” concept: you can “save” fools into bankruptcy) just don’t get it–people who spend it, don’t have it anymore. duh. Hyundai started out selling the family’s milk cow and investing in “business”, and never changed that focus. poverty is a voluntary effort: spending all you have with no return, guess what? you’re broke!

I’m looking forward to change in November!

Class warfare has gone on for centuries, and it continues in the U.S. The wealthy make war on the middle-class, the working-class, & the disadvantaged. That was one of the fundamental purposes behind the nomination of Bush-Dick over Senator McCain in 2000. Bush-Dick promised to lower the taxes hugely on the wealthy while throwing crumbs to the middle-class, the working-class, & the disadvantaged. In addition, Bush-Dick created an economy in which wages & jobs for the middle-class, the working-class, & the disadvantaged stagnated, while the wealthy’s wealth increased geometrically.

As for your so-called “backlash”, it exists only in the mainstream media, which, we have already established, leans to the right. The vast majority of Americans want to see higher taxes on the wealthy and lower taxes on the middle-class, & the working-class. As you can also see, most of our fellow members here agree with that stance.

If, Nemesys, the Teapublicans cared about individual rights, then they would have rallied against the “Patriot Act”, nine years ago. The Teapublican leaders are all very wealthy. The majority of Teapublicans are upper-middle class. They fear their taxes rising. They want government support to continue w/out paying for it. In surveys, Teapublicans want to see Medicare & Social Security to continue, but they want their tax rates reduced. In other words, they should live in Greece.

Thanks, Drome, for the citation from Utopia, a bk I have meant to read, and do not forget that “Joe the Plumber” admitted, after his staged confrontation w/ Barack Obama, that he would actually benefit from Obama’s tax plan, which he has.

I must disagree with you, Drome, when you state that individual rights are a gift from the collective. Individual rights are fundamental to our society—not a gift FROM it. In the American system, the individual and the community grow together. Neither comes before the other. I agree with you that a just society must practice justice, and fairness is part of justice. I also agree that we—as individuals—live withIN a community, so paying taxes is everyone’s responsibility and everyone should actually look forward to doing so, as long as our government spends the money to help & heal, not—as Bush-Dick chose—to kill & maim.

I would be happy to simplify the tax code, Holden, but a flat tax is less reasonable than a simpler progressive tax, and the national sales tax is the work of an idiot. I live in a state that tries to live off of sales taxes. It is a good way to be poor & backward.

Sclark, that was a very funny statement.

Lew, Roosevelt got us out of the Republican’s Great Depression, caused by unregulated investments. As for how you live now, Lew, I described that last night: You live off of Social Security & your wife’s job, and you have not earned a dime in years. You don’t pay taxes, except on your fast-food fries & your soft drinks.

It’s not about hating the rich, Lew. The 3% hike they will see when their break expires isn’t really going to hurt them to any significant degree. Tax breaks that are in the works will likely see small business employers paying less tax than they would have. If this is class warfare, we are shooting spitballs, not bullets.

Hoover raised the top rate from 25% to 63%, as well as raising estate taxes and adding a tax on bank checks. Yes, that was too much. Still, his bigger mistake was doing nothing to boost the economy soon enough.

Lew: Mom didn’t say a word.

Bible says save 10% but since your lovely Bushites crashed my IRA stocks to a 10th of their former value, I have little enough there.

My point would also be that the crashed economy will mean the end of BOTH your pension and the value of the savings you’ve accumulated. No one but the super rich are close to safe and many of them will sink with the final money crash on the way to a cashless economy. (Sorry,. Bible prophecy. I know truth isn’t really welcome in these forums.)

Speaking of prophetic truth, did any of you posters watch the PBS interview this evening with Greenspan? The man has grown from being a mere economist to the stature of a 21st-century Jeremiah.

He admitted that Bush’s tax cuts had been based on rosy projections of future revenue that were confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office. And he claims to have “learned” from the mistake (which the Republicans have now promised to repeat if elected) two things: (1) that it’s bad policy to borrow money in order to let the wealthy keep more of theirs; and (2) that it’s dangerous to put a policy in place without anticipating what might go wrong should your economic projections fail.

Most intriguing was Greenspan’s judgment about the alternative policies currently proposed by conservatives (mostly Republicans) and liberals (all Democrats). Applying his principle that a sensible policy should allow for the possibility of failure—-and assuming that neither party really has the political will to cut spending—-Greenspan said that the liberal policy of reducing the deficit by raising taxes, bad as it is, can at least be abandoned if the economy fails to recover.

On the other hand, the conservatives’ policy—-reduce taxes and make up for the lost revenue by more borrowing—-will be “catastrophic” should it fail (as it did under Bush II) to stimulate the economy. The public debt, already growing by a $trillion every year, is about to exceed our entire private worth, so that America may go bankrupt.

Greenspan made it soberingly clear that deficits matter, a truth that few credited before 2008 and that Republicans still don’t believe, with their vague promises to cut all spending EXCEPT for the 85% of the budget that comprises Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest payments. (That leaves such unlikely items for elimination as veterans’ benefits, education, the NIH, Medicaid, and maintenance of our national parks and roads.)

Ps. @ Brian

“In the American system, the individual and the community grow together.” Je suis d’accord. I was merely pointing out that no individual “rights” (which by definition exclude the rest of the community from claiming an interest in the individual’s property or actions) are of force unless the community acknowledges them, or is required by the courts to acknowledge them .