Liberals and Conservatives (Again)

For those conservatives who complain about liberals: If you appreciate having clean air to breathe and clean water to drink, thank the liberals. If you appreciate having food and medicine that are safe, thank liberals. It's conservatives who want to gut the government's (the FDA's and EPA's) ability to ensure the safety of our food, medicines, water, and air. But public health is one of the major government success stories.

Ronald Reagan convinced much of the country that the government is the problem. But, if you think it through: Who do you want to provide you with police and fire protection? To build and repair highways? To put up traffic signals, or control air traffic? Are you going to get together with your neighbors to create organizations to provide these things? Then you've created a government!

Conservatives have also persuaded people that the government takes too much from them in the form of taxes, usually with the further thought that their taxes go to support no-good people who don't want to work--actually an appeal to racial prejudice and racial stereotypes.

But really, those who say these things are the wealthy whose motivation is to avoid paying tax themselves. If you are not also one of the 1%, they don't care what you pay. If you look at the facts (which seem to get overlooked in these arguments): the top income tax bracket under Eisenhower it was 91%. Under Nixon it was 70%. Under Ronald Reagan it was 50%. So it's been steadily going down for decades. It's currently 35%. (And since the top tax rate on capital gains is only 15%, the rich get a real break, and that is why billionaire Warren Buffet has told us that his secretary pays more tax than he does!)

Yet the super-rich are still not satisfied. Some conservatives go so far as to claim that if they've earned their money, they have the right to keep it. But court decisions have repeatedly upheld the government's right to tax its citizens, and anyone who rejects that is not just a conservative but an anarchist.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Richard Stein