Trickle Down – By Any Other Name, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #283 | @MDWorld

July 16, 2012 Mike Gold 8 Comments

Well, you can’t say the Republicans are incapable of learning. For example, they learned the true meaning of “tea bagging.” And they learned the true meaning of “trickle down.”

Last week President Obama offered an extension of the tax cut to the lower and middle classes, cutting off the extension to those families earning more than a quarter million dollars. This caused a bit of consternation among Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer, who believe that “rich” starts at one million dollars.

Democrats often get hung up on trivia. Republicans are absolutists. “No, no,” they shout as they stomp their little feet. “Tax cuts for all! Tax cuts for all!” Yes, the Republican Party is the 21st century voice of egalitarianism. Who’da thunk it?

They claim – like a broken record, for those old enough to remember broken records – that if you don’t give rich people huge tax breaks they won’t hire anybody and our high unemployment will continue. At no time do they use the phrase “trickle down.” That didn’t work before, it won’t work now. Voodoo economics, the more intelligent of the Presidents Bush said.

You might ask, “Well, what does this mean, Mike?” (Usually after “Did you take your meds, Mike?”) I’m glad you asked. It means two things.

1) According to the Republican Party, rich people are fully capable of reducing unemployment levels down to reasonable levels but they refuse to do so unless the middle class pays them an astonishing shitload of bribe money.

2) President Obama’s tax-cut for the non-rich bill is Dead On Arrival. It has a snowball’s chance in hell of passing the Republican Congress. It’s a goner. Kaputski.

Sure, Obama knows that but this but he’s not playing a game of political brinksmanship. It has been clear that he wants the rich to pay their fair share of the tax burden. He’d love to see this pass. And all he wants the rich to do is to resume paying at the tax rate they enjoyed during the economic heydays of Democratic President Bill Clinton. Not, say, Republican Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan. Those were higher. In Eisenhower’s case, the top tax rate was over 90%.

Instead of “trickle down,” the Republicans prefer to say that ending the bribes to the wealthy punishes success. Not so; usually it punishes inheritance. But there are other great benefits to success: you get to keep the rest. It’s just a couple extra points. You still have the millions and millions of dollars you’ve already made, largely by screwing the middle class anyway.

We’ve been through all this before. Many times. We will be through all this again. Many times. Meanwhile, the rich will continue to get richer, the poor will continue to get poorer, and the middle class will continue to disappear off the face of America. In my frustration, I am reminded of a lyric written 44 years ago that truly expresses my feelings:

River of shit, River of shit

Flow on, flow on, river of shit

Right from my toes, on up to my nose

Flow on, flow on, river of shit

I’ve been swimming in this river of shit

More than 20 years and I’m getting tired of it

Don’t like swimming, hope it’ll run dry

Got to go on swimming, ‘cause I don’t want to die

– Wide, Wide River • The Fugs, written by Ken Weaver • © 1968

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com , every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week (check the website above for times) and available On Demand at the same place, so listen to it already! He also joins Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.