Obama and the One Percent

Another week, another outburst by a one-percenter comparing progressive taxation to Nazi atrocities. I particularly liked the end:

Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

Because it’s just obvious that San Francisco progressives are the political heirs of fascism, right?

You do wonder why the WSJ published this screed. Do billionaires have the right to get their views aired, regardless? Did the Journal think that it was doing a public service by letting the rest of us see the loose screws in this guy’s head? Or — what I suspect, to be frank — did the relevant editors actually think he was making a useful point?

Anyway, thinking about this sort of thing makes me realize that there’s a danger, especially for progressives, of confusing the proposition that Obama’s billionaire haters are stark raving mad — which is true — with the proposition that Obama has done nothing that hurts the plutocrats’ interests, which is false. Actually, Obama has been tougher on the one percent than most progressives give him credit for.

Start with taxes. The Bush tax cuts haven’t gone completely away, but at the very high end they have been pretty much reversed; plus there are additional high-end taxes associated with Obamacare. The result is that taxes on wealthy Americans have basically been rolled back to pre-Reagan levels:

The Atlatntic

Meanwhile, financial reform looks as if it will have significantly more teeththan expected.

So the one percent does have reason to be upset. No, Obama isn’t Hitler; but he is turning out to be a little bit of FDR, after all.