W21st NYC's List: Bush speeches

• Despite the frantic  efforts of some Republicans to pretend otherwise, most people realize that  today’s G.O.P. favors the interests of the rich over those of ordinary families.  I suspect, however, that fewer people realize the extent to which the party  favors returns on wealth over wages and salaries. And the dominance of income  from capital, which can be inherited, over wages — the dominance of wealth over  work — is what patrimonial capitalism is all about.
• True, the top tax bracket on earned income fell from 39.6 to 35 percent. But the  top rate on dividends  fell from 39.6 percent (because they were taxed as ordinary income) to 15  percent — and the estate  tax was completely eliminated.
• Some of these cuts were reversed under President Obama, but the point is that  the great tax-cut push of the Bush years was mainly about reducing taxes on  unearned income. And when Republicans retook one house of Congress, they  promptly came up with a plan — Representative Paul Ryan’s “road  map” — calling for the elimination of taxes on interest, dividends, capital  gains and estates. Under this plan, someone living solely off inherited wealth  would have owed no federal taxes at all.
• In fact, not only don’t most Americans own businesses, but business  income, and income from capital in general, is increasingly concentrated in  the hands of a few people. In 1979 the top 1 percent of households accounted for  17 percent of business income; by 2007 the same group was getting 43 percent of  business income, and 75 percent of capital gains. Yet this small elite gets all  of the G.O.P.’s love, and most of its policy attention.

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• What do I mean? Well, one of the truly awful things about the Bush years was the  deliberate conflation of the person sitting in the White House with the nation.  If you criticized Bush, you were anti-American; if you denounced the Iraq war,  you were attacking the troops.
• Of course all that changed as soon as a Democrat was in the White House. But it  was an object lesson in the wrongness of confusing respect for the institution  with unthinking support of the people currently running the institution.