Clay Burell's Library tagged taxes →  View Popular

I'm guessing the latter, because the evidence is so overwhelming.

In the last eight years, we the little people have been forced to provide more and more of the taxes fueling America's redistribution machine. As the Congressional Budget Office reports, the $715 billion in tax breaks that President Bush gave to those making more than $342,000 a year began dramatically shifting the overall tax burden from the rich onto the rest of us. Meanwhile, because of lobbyist-crafted loopholes, most corporations pay zero federal income taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office. The result is what Warren Buffett admits: When counting all taxes (income, payroll, property, etc.), billionaires and Big Business often pay lower effective tax rates than their employees.

The output of the redistribution machine is becoming just as regressive. In the age of Halliburton fraud and ExxonMobil subsidies, our government spends $93 billion a year on corporate welfare. (For comparison, that's roughly three times what it spends on a traditional welfare program such as food stamps.) That doesn't include the recent bailout giving $700 billion to the same banks doling out $70 billion in executive pay and bonuses - a scheme the Financial Times says "amounts to a large transfer of resources from lower to higher income earners."

Thanks to these redistributive policies - policies McCain championed in Congress - the richest 1 percent today owns a larger share of America's wealth than at any time since before the Great Depression.

The Republican standard-bearer likely knows all this, but his fetish is fact-free fairy tales - the kind presenting seven houses, a beer-industry fortune and lockstep conservatism as mavericky Joe-the-Plumber populism. When it comes to economics, McCain is banking on Americans believing similarly inane myths - specifically, those portraying obscene affluence as the commonplace achievement under royalist rule.