Please spread far and wide, especially to your Tea party relatives… They deserve it! (And link to the essay where I stole this from, please!)
Via Ellis Henican (and believe it or not, this ran on FoxNews.com as well! How did that happen?)
Forget Warren Buffett. The coddle-the-rich crowd has now discovered “The Jimmy Buffett Rule.”
You know how that works, right? For the folks who own really big sailboats and shelter their wealth on islands with swaying palm trees, it’s always margarita time! Go ahead and squeeze the middle class some more!
Speaking from the Rose Garden on Monday, President Obama offered a more populist approach to cutting $3 trillion from the federal debt. His plan includes whacks in war funding and various programs Democrats are usually loathe to trim. It also advances what at any other time would be considered in a perfectly modest suggestion: That people at the very top should kick in too. The president would do this by letting the Bush tax cuts expire for upper-earners and by adding a special new tax on people who earn $1 million-plus a year.
My gosh, with all the shouts of “class warfare,” you’d have thought he’d asked hedge-fund executives to pay the same tax rates as receptionists and security guards. The uproar from some of the president’s critics was just that loud.
Here’s an important addendum to the Jimmy Buffett Rule: If you ask the bottom 98 to sacrifice, that’s a prudent fiscal policy. If you ask the top 2 percent to sacrifice, that’s class warfare.
And one other thing to remember: The rich-mustn’t-pay argument goes down a whole lot easier if you have the right phrases for the small, privileged group you are trying to protect. Don’t call them “fat cats.” Never use terms like “the super-rich” or “millionaires and billionaires.” Avoid all of that. They are “job creators,” “small business owners” and “people with the entrepreneurial spirit to get us out of this mess.”
Who’d want to raise taxes on someone like that?
Read the rest at Henican.com
Thank you Tara McGinley!
